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分析《Clash of Clans》所存在的玩法局限性

发布时间:2013-09-11 15:42:41 Tags:,,,,,

作者:Jon Jordan

生活中的一切事物都存在始终。

一些事物会带给我们惊喜,也有些事物是计划好的。

这是我从最初玩Supercell的《Clash of Clans》以来一直在思考的一个问题。

那时候我并不是很了解这款游戏,即在2012年8月只在加拿大进行游戏测试期间,甚至没人相信它会创造出巨大的商业和文化影响,并成为史上最受欢迎且最赚钱的游戏之一。

从个人来看,我从未花过如此长的时间和金钱去玩一款游戏。

急剧下滑

让我们通过这种方法去赚钱。

与许多玩家一样,我最初在《Clash of Clans》中消费是因为游戏要求使用3000个宝石去购买额外的施工人员:一个针对于早期游戏阶段(游戏邦注:那时候你拥有较多资源,但却缺少施工人员)的硬门设计。

我共花了70多美元去购买货币加快建造速度,并购买了具有新功能的防御工具。

作为这样一款基于资源的游戏,在出现新单位或建筑更新时,我们只能感受到一次满足的高峰。

我们可以从市政厅(控制着玩家主要资源,如金币和矿藏升级的核心建筑)的更新周期中清楚地看到这点。

Clash of Clans(from pocketgamer)

Clash of Clans(from pocketgamer)

这是最昂贵的升级建筑,但是当你完成这一建筑的升级后,你便打开了一层更加昂贵的升级,即能够快速覆盖你所打开的更高能力的资源生产。

基础设施成本

当然了,《Clash of Clans》的城市建造元素并不是游戏的全部。

这只是你创建军队的基础,不管是玩单人玩家模式,还是为了资源和排名而攻击其他玩家;这是我们能在游戏的部落模式中所体验到的。

说实话,我从未觉得这些内容非常有趣,我更愿意作为部落中其他玩家的军队提供者。

base(from pocketgamer)

base(from pocketgamer)

我并不是在高度赞美这款游戏。在《Clash of Clans》中最让我“激动”的时候是一些淌着鼻涕的小屁孩因为还没玩够而将我踢出部落。

计划好的作品

所以尽管我在后来加入了另外一个部落,但是我对于游戏的热情却也开始淡灭。

在有规律(至少是每隔几天玩一次)地玩了一年的游戏后,我来到了一个新的阶段,即需要花几天的时间才能完成任何升级。

同样地,现在我几乎不能收集到足够的资源去升级建筑,同时其他玩家还将不断地攻击我的基地,并偷走各种资源;因此我的唯一升级选择便是购买宝石。

treasure(from pocketgamer)

treasure(from pocketgamer)

最终通过分析,我计算出了在基地中升级所有内容需要花费多少成本。

基于游戏内部货币,最终答案便是我需要花1.037亿金币,4565万的万能药和1万黑油。

基于硬货币,这便等于要购买49225个宝石,也就是351.57美元,尽管这能帮助我在游戏中更上一层,但对于我来说却仍是一笔数目较大的费用。

学习

然而,时间和金钱还没被浪费掉。

作为一名新闻记者,我越来越清楚为了在一款免费游戏中做出明智的选择,你就需要投入时间和金钱。

的确,我从花钱玩《Clash of Clans》中得出的最重要的一大结论便是,任何称职的新闻记者都不能从开发者手中收取免费货币,这将破坏他们对于虚拟商品价值的认知——这是F2P业务模式的关键元素。

花更长时间去玩这些游戏并观察你们的游戏动机以及付费指标是否随着时间的变化而变化非常重要。当然了,体验开发者如何使用新内容和时间进行游戏更新从而留住玩家的心也非常重要。

所以在这种情形下,我是否应该将《Clash of Clans》从iPad中删除?

不要吧。或许我可以将其放到一个名为“我过去常常玩的游戏”的文件夹中,并不时打开玩下,尽管那时我的主要注意力是在其它地方。

而名为“游戏吧”的文件夹则包含了当下最有吸引力的游戏。

本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译,拒绝任何不保留版权的转载,如需转载请联系:游戏邦

Opinion: I’ve played Clash of Clans more than any other game, but now it’s time to log off

by Jon Jordan

As with everything in life, there are beginnings and there are endings.

Some can be excited and unexpected, while others are best when planned and measured.

That’s what I’m thinking a year on from when I first started playing Supercell’s Clash of Clans.

At the time, I didn’t know much about the game, and certainly during the Canada-only beta in August 2012, no one expected it to have the commercial and cultural impact it’s since generated as one of the most played and profitable games in history.

Equally, on a personal level, I’ve never spent so long playing a game, or indeed, spent so much money in a game.

Slippery slope

So let’s get the money bit out of the way.

As with many players, my first purchase in Clash of Clans was the 3,000 gems required to buy an additional builder: a hard gate designed into the game during the early stages (around one month in for me) when you have a relative large amount of resources but are restricted by your lack of builders in terms of how quickly you can spend them.

In total, though, I’ve spent over $70, buying currency to speed up buildings and buy defences that provided significant new features.

Yet, as must be the case with such resource-based games, there’s only ever a brief plateau of satisfaction before another new unit or building update makes itself known to our envious brain.

This is most clearly seen in the update cycle surrounding your town hall, which is the core building that controls the levelling up process for your key resources – notably gold and elixir mining.

It’s the most expensive building to level up, but once you’ve completed this, all that’s happened is you’ve opened another layer of increasingly expensive upgrades, which quickly overwhelm the higher capacity resource production you’ve also unlocked.

Infrastructure costs

Of course, the city-building aspect of Clash of Clans is not the game itself.

It’s merely the foundation on which you build your armies, either to play the single-player (effectively the practice) mode, or attack other players for resources and ranking; an element most fully experienced in the game’s Clans mode.

To be honest, though, this was something I never found very exciting; preferring instead to act as a supplier of troops for the other players in my clan.

My base – not too good, not too bad

Not that I got much praise for it. The most ‘exciting’ thing that happened in terms of my clan-play in Clash of Clans was when some (no doubt) snotty-nosed imp kicked me out of the clan for not playing enough.

The very cheek of it!

Calculated swansong

So, even though I joined another clan, from that point on, my enthusiasm for the game was waning.

After a year of fairly regular play (at least once every couple of days), I was at the stage when any upgrade took days to complete.

Also, it was now almost impossible to organically collect enough resources to upgrade a building as, in the meantime, someone would attack my base and steal most of them; hence the only upgrade option available being to buy gems.

So, being of the analytic persuasion, I worked out how much it would ‘cost’ to upgrade everything in my base to its next level.

In in-game currency terms, the answers was 103.7 million gold, 45.65 million elixir and 10,000 dark elixir.

In hard currency terms that’s 49,225 gems, which converts to $351.57; despite my relatively advanced in-game level, for me that was a surprisingly large number.

Learnings

Yet, time and money has not been wasted.

As a journalist, it’s become clear to me that in order to have an informed opinion on free-to-play games, you have to spend time and money actually playing them.

Indeed, one of my most important conclusions from p(l)aying Clash of Clans is that any journalist worth their salt should not be expensing back their in-app purchases (or receiving free currency from the developer) as it totally destroys your perception of the value of virtual goods – the key aspect of the F2P business model.

It’s also important to play some of these games for long periods of time to see how your motivations to play and pay rise and fall over the months. And, of course, to experience how developers update their games with new content and time-dependent offers to keep their long term audience interested.

So, in that context, will I be deleting Clash of Clans from my iPad?

Not quite. It’s going into a new folder called ‘Games I Used to Play’. I might dip back into it every so often, but my attention is demanded elsewhere.

The folder marked ‘To Play’ is now filled to bursting. (source:pocketgamer)


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