AggroChat #223 – Freemium Monetization

Featuring:  Ashgar, Belghast and Kodra

aggrochat223

This week we are down half of our show, but weirdly enough ended up very close to our original line up from the first few AggroChat shows…  only missing Rae. We were concerned we might not have enough material for a show, but wound up only about 10 minutes short of our average which seems pretty good.  Tonight we talk about Monetization in Free to Play games and in part why some games it feels good to spend money on, and others it feels exploitative. This explores mobile games and mmorpgs as well.  From there Bel talks a bit about his experiences restarting with Monster Hunter World PC and how weirdly most of the progress was raising his skill and not necessarily his gearing. Kodra talks about his experiences with Mega Man 11 which leads to a discussion of this golden age of modern 2D side scrollers.  Finally we wrap things up with some discussion about Guilds of Ravnica and how it feels in a constructed and sealed environment on MTG Arena.

Topics Discussed

  • Free to Play Monetization
    • Mobile Games
    • Dragalia Lost
    • MMORPGs
    • Elder Scrolls Online
    • Star Wars the Old Republic
    • Neverwinter
  • Monster Hunter World
    • Skill Acquisition vs Gear Acquisition
    • Small but awesome PC community
  • Mega Man 11
    • Hollow Knight
    • Shovel Knight
    • Celeste
    • Bloodstained: Circle of the Moon
    • Retro Feeling Modern Games
  • Guilds of Ravnica
    • MTG Arena
    • Sealed Play
    • Constructed Play

Autumn Harvest Festival

Autumn Harvest Festival

The Harvest Festival event is now live in Monster Hunter World on PC and last night I spent for the most part the entire evening doing event quests.  The PC community appears to be significantly smaller than the Playstation 4 one, I am assuming in part because there are likely fewer Japanese players available to group with.  I know a lot of my SOS Roulette nonsense was done with Japanese players…  which seem to have a culture of opening up their events to other players as a matter of course.  There have been many times when I tried to find an SOS for a specific monster and came up completely empty, so instead I have started filtering my session by specific types of quests.  So for example I am filtering for groups specifically doing Event quests during the Harvest Festival, and that seems to give me a session with a bunch of players participating in the sort of events I have been trying to.

Autumn Harvest Festival

I am still not nearly as progressed as I am on the console, but I did manage to get far enough to do the “Every Hunter’s Dream” quest which rewards the crafting bits needed to make Wyvern Ignition…  aka the Greatsword you can see in the above image.  I decided to spend all of my harvest tickets on making the Palico Armor, because not only is it awesome looking…  but it was actually a pretty reasonable upgrade to the Zorah set mine had been wearing.  My goal in coming back and playing a lot is to also get me ready for the inevitable release of the Kulve Taroth siege event.  For whatever reason I was expecting the Greatsword quest to be High Rank… which is why I was pushing lately to get there…  however it is only a 5 star so that last tier before you actually transition into High Rank.

Autumn Harvest Festival

This event also allowed me to catch up on a bunch of the other quests that I had apparently missed…  namely the Wiggler Head, Kulu Head, Eye Patch and Shades.  I need to run through everything available and make sure I have crafted everything, but for now I think my focus is going to be doing the daily bounties so I can gather up enough tickets to craft some of the harvest gear… or at the very least get the layered armor set.  I probably fall in the Fashion Hunter territory in that I tend to be way more interested in Layered Armor sets than pretty much anything else because I can equip them over top of whatever gear I happen to be wearing.

Autumn Harvest Festival

I am still very much digging the Zorah hammer, but also now branching out into Switch Axe and Great Sword.  I need to do a bit of farming because I want to craft a Gunlance and a Lance to play with those as well.  On the PS4 I was pretty much laser focused on only caring about Longsword.  This time around however I am trying to branch out and try new weapons, because it is very clear that certain encounters just work better with certain weapons.  Lance/Gunlance seem rediculously powerful so I want to try my best to figure out how to play each of those.  For whatever reason swapping weapons seems to be easier for me when I am already playing using the much more comfortable keyboard and mouse sort of interface.  So much of my time on the PS4 was me eating up brain cycles trying to remember how to use a controller, since that is not a mode I play in regularly.  Whereas with the Keyboard and Mouse I am in my comfort zone and can sort of dedicate those brain cycles to other things.

Autumn Harvest Festival

If you are around and doing stuff ping me and say hey.  I will warn you though that I don’t regularly play with the chat overlay on through Steam because it has caused graphical issues in the past, and as a result it might take awhile for me to actually respond.

Charm Maintenance

Charm Maintenance

Last night I had to do some World of Warcraft maintenance, in that I had allowed my Emissary quest to stack up for three days and was about to start losing them.  I fairly joylessly burned through those, then decided to take a chance at a 370 piece of loot from the Warfront that is now open to Horde players.  I still find those pretty fun but ultimately wound up with disappointment in that I got a 370 item in a slot I already had one.  You would think they could factor in the gear that the player has when they give those extremely limited time rewards like that…  because since it is ultimately a shot at loot every three weeks…  please give us something we can use.

From there I popped into Monster Hunter World where I largely did some maintenance there as well.  I spent most of the night farming up zenny so that I could buy the Power Charm, which is an item that takes up a bag slot but gives you a pretty potent damage boost.  I had already purchased the Armor Charm which does the same thing, but for your defense stat.  These apparently open up once you have fought the Zorah Magdaros final form and cost 24,000 zenny for the Armor Charm and 36,000 zenny for the Power Charm.  Later through the magic of crafting you will be able to turn these into Talons…  and then re-buy the Charms again…  but for now I should be set for the early High Rank content.  I’m up to the Tickled Pink quest which is to hunt a High Rank Anjanath, which I simply was not ready to deal with mentally last night and wound up wandering off to do other things.

Charm Maintenance

Instead I popped over to burn through some quests in MTG Arena, where I seemed to have a ton that wanted me to cast White spells.  I had picked up the Eternal Thirst deck as one of my freebies, and I decided to start playing around with it.  I have to say… for a weird Cats and Vampires concept I am really digging it.  Unless you are also playing against a deck with stupid life gain powers…  you can do some come from behind nonsense with this one.  I feel like I need to tune it a bit and swap some cards, and could ultimately make a super powerful deck out of it.  For the purpose of questing though… it had plenty of white cards so it allowed me to whittle that down in a few turns.  This morning I noticed I had another freebie deck available and unlocked the Blue/Green Merfolk deck…  which included a single copy of one of my favorite cards…  Jadelight Ranger.  I am hoping that one of the decks they end up throwing my way is the Explore matters deck that we originally had in Alpha.  Mostly I don’t want to spend the proxies on rebuilding it if they are going to give me like 90% of the cards in a few weeks as we keep rotating through unlocking free decks.

October 2018 Gaming Goals

It’s another month and time for another round of gaming goals. September started out optimistic but I got pretty derailed from what I intended to accomplish. Luckily it’s a fresh month which means a fresh start with new goals.

September Goals in Review:

WoW: Level an alliance-side character to 120. Nope. I barely touched my alliance characters at all this month.

Run each available dungeon on mythic difficulty at least once. Nope.

Run available LFR. Nope. I did the first wing but still haven’t run the wing that released last week yet.

Complete “Raiding with leashes IV”. Nope. I am beginning to hate ICC at this point. It needs to give up that last pet.

D3: Unlock adventure mode on a HC character. Yes! The only goal I actually met this month. I’m not a total failure!


October Goals:

WoW: Run available LFR. The rest of Uldir LFR should be out this month and I do want to see the whole thing.

Complete “Raiding with leashes IV”. Someday this pet will finally drop. Someday.

D3: Help Belghast get a stash tab. I don’t know if I will want to push much farther into the season for myself, but if I’m helping out a friend I’ll be way more motivated.

Dragalia Lost: Finish the story. I’ve become a bit addicted to this mobile game, I really enjoy it. It seems like most of my friends are playing it right now too. I want to see the whole story before I get distracted by something new.


I scaled back my WoW goals this month because honestly I’m not really feeling into WoW at all right now. Likewise D3, where I got super invested in the season for about a week and then my interest faded again. I’ve been easily distracted by mobile games, that let me chill on the couch with the spouse instead of hiding away up in my office. I’ll be losing more than a week out of October for work travel, so there’s no sense setting ambitious goals this month.