Voice lines, sprays, skins, emotes, dances, etc.
Not every game mind you, but perhaps every few matches and the chances increases with each match completed.
Instead of punishing people for leaving unfun stomps, give incentives for players to stay in game that will encourage them to stick it out for the chance of an item dropping.
This seems to work relatively well for TF2. Why not implement something like this as well?
Sounds almost like…lootboxes we had in past.
What? Give things away for free? What will the shareholders say?
It is, but lootboxes added that incentive, even if people didn’t think about it
Its just a little something to go along the ways.
I was thinking this as well, but I think it would work if they kept store stuff in the store exclusively
That would make more sense, but that also isn’t really what Microsoft/ABK cares about.
They don’t really care if free to play players stop playing. As long as they have enough people to fill lobbies, they’ll loosen matchmaking restrictions to keep queue times acceptable. The switch to free to play (especially after being a paid product for over half a decade) is the decision you make when you think you’re more likely to get enough people paying some amount than a much smaller group paying a larger amount. If there’s 100 people able to buy your game but only 10 of them would buy it at $40, you’ll make more money if you can get 41 or more of them to pay $10 for a battlepass in it. Or if you can just get the same 10 people that would have bought it to buy 4 battlepasses each, not to mention any of the standalone skins. Plus, with a free-to-play game there’s usually no real limit to the amount of money people can spend on a game, so getting even one whale willing to spend $400 means they’ve already made as much money as they would have from selling the game ten times from just one person.
Instead of rewarding players for sticking out a one-sided game, they’re better off punishing people that want to leave. People that don’t pay but get rewarded might not stick around for any number of reasons (the game gets patched in a way they don’t like, a different game comes out that they want to play, etc.,) but people that have already given them money in the form of buying a battlepass or skins? They’re stuck in a sunk cost situation: if they leave a game and get suspended, that’s less time they have to finish the battlepass they already paid for. If they can’t play or aren’t playing, what’s the point of the $20 skins they bought?
While rewarding players would be better for players overall, punishing everyone is more likely to keep the people that have already paid over those that haven’t paid anything while trying to address the issue of people wanting to leave imbalanced matches. And if they had to make the decision to lose 10% of their paying playerbase or 90% of the free to play playerbase, I can tell you right now they’d cut that 90% loose right then and there. Even if it was someone that just bought one thing, they’ll want to keep them around since once someone buys just one thing in a game like this, the odds are very good that they’ll buy something else later.