GUARDIANS Cash

SEGA introduced this feature into the game two weeks ago. There has been a lot of talk on the subject with varying opinions. My opinion, like the most of us, is that paying more after you already pay so much monthly is a bad idea. Also, it’s expensive. But my opinion doesn’t count here, so let’s take a look at the Japanese community.

Overall the response was negative. One of the most prominent blog called it a turning point. He predicted that people will just quit in droves after they add the infamous cash feature. Why, may you ask? Because it’s awfully expensive.

To solo the first mission in S, you have to pay 250 yen. That’s about 2 dollars. For one unique run that will last about 10 minutes. You can also play with other people and share the cost of course, but for a 4 people party each would have to pay 100 yen. That particular mission, Legacy of the Holy Light, also contains LV175 enemies. Those enemies happen to drop new items… that aren’t available in free missions. The only way to get a [B] Apocalypse, for example, is to play a GC mission or to buy it in a player shop. Or to wait until LV175 enemies appear in free missions.

That mission also comes with special boxes that contain GC-only PSP items. Those items come with a very high % and random element. So far, so good. Problem is, you can’t drop them, you can’t trade them, they’re completely tied to your account. If you’re a fighter picking up a Motav Prophecy, and you’re playing with a friend techer, you can’t give it to them. So to help your friend get it you have to play on finder. Of course if two fighters do that they have no way of knowing the % until they pick items, at which point it’s too late to give to the friend.

The other mission is an EXP boost mission. It gives 300% EXP boost. Problem is, there’s only Polties, Kakwane and Koltova, the former’s population making up half the enemies. There’s only one block, with 100 enemies total. 300% EXP of a Polty is 210% of a normal enemy, so you basically get a total EXP equal to 50x(210%) + 50x(300%), which is approximately 136170 EXP for S rank. That’s about the same you can get in a normal mission. The thing is, normal missions have good drops, this one doesn’t. There’s also an alleged PA EXP boost, but we couldn’t confirm it. If there’s one, it’s so small it doesn’t matter. All this for 150 yen solo!

Now I have nothing against giving SEGA more money. But I’d like to be able to run more the missions I like. Getting 10 runs for 1$ is the maximum I would pay. But 1 run for 2$? No way.

You can also get photon drops and crystals for trade in the Photon Crystal Exchange mission. I won’t be commenting on those, that’s just another incentive to make you run more those missions.

So why would they make the prices so high, you may ask? Well, to make more money in the short term. You probably noticed that SEGA only has a short term vision of the game. It released in a pre-alpha state, was developed by code monkeys, released primarily for a dying platform (the PS2), yada, yada. Now they want to get some more cash with GC. They want that money right now. A few people will use a lot of money just after the update and then stop playing it. It doesn’t matter that they could make more in the long term with a different strategy, they choose once again to go short term. That’s pretty much the reason everything turns bad every single time.

That’s pretty much what happened. Let’s take a look at the population stats. People who play GC usually go to universe 13. The day after the maintenance we could see those figures:

And then, one week later:

Didn’t last long, uh? Well let’s compare with the last day of the third Parum GBR, the day before the GC maintenance:

Pretty much everyone was still doing GBR.

GC could work, paying a little extra for special missions isn’t a problem, but not at that price. At the moment it’s just another money sink deployed by the cash-hungry SEGA. Thanks, but no thanks.

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