Hey all! Really big Grim Dawn fan here, and I think I’ve got a really good idea to pitch.
So first off, I love the idea of loyalty packs in general. The developers get some extra cash, the players get some neat bennies and everyone walks away happy. It’s pretty amazing to see a game be so good and popular with its fans that they practically clamor for more opportunities to throw money at it. The problem, though, is that the current loyalty packs are pretty small-scale and this limits both what they can offer and how much they can bring in.
So I started thinking: what if we upped the scale a bit?
I’m envisioning a system where future loyalty packs, instead of being a one-time purchase, take the form of ongoing in-game transactions. To be clear, this isn’t some sort of “pay to win” scheme I’m suggesting; it’s a way for people of varying financial and time constraints to play the game on an equal footing. Let me give a few examples of what I mean:
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Potions. Health potions are the primary way of keeping a character alive, and they have a cooldown to ensure you can’t just chug them nonstop and never die. Suppose for a moment that the potion button instead had no cooldown and instead charged $0.01 to a linked credit card or bank account every time you pressed it. By shifting the cost from a mechanical one to a literal, financial one, you’ve created an asymmetric design that allows for far greater power levels while still limiting their use. Build diversity would explode as health became a near non-issue.
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Modifier rolls. We’ve all found a killer double-rare or epic that was ruined by subpar roles. This can be bypassed somewhat by farming new copies of the item, but that takes time that not everyone has, and some builds literally can’t function without perfect rolls. It would be a simple thing to expand the blacksmith’s functionality to let you directly adjust modifiers or even assign them altogether - with an increasing monetary cost for better gear, of course - and I think it would be a lot more fair to people who don’t want to feel forced to “play the game” to get what they want out of it.
These ideas and others like them would generate a lot of revenue for Crate and enable them to keep producing great games, and will also generate a lot of goodwill in the community as the game gets more and more accessible. As long as they don’t get greedy with it, my plan is bulletproof, scalable, and should satisfy just about everyone.
By the way, I feel like there’s a word for this kind of thing, but I can’t place it. I don’t THINK it’s been tried before, but…