The weekly allowance and lifetime benefits need to change | Star Stable Forums (2024)

For star riders...or if sso wants to put incentive into lifetime.

Why? Let's talk about star coins first. It's evident and blatantly obvious that star stable is set on releasing horses faster than anyone can save star coins for. It never used to be like this. We have two to three reveals a month of new or special horses. What they hope this is doing would be to get people to buy star coins, but what this is probably doing in actuality is creating a very miffed playerbase due to the 'money grabbing' tactics. Now, I don't have the quarter results of how much money sso has made. I can only inference based off of social media replies, which may not be reliable, sure. But we know for a fact that we can't save for a new horse anymore by normal means (game allowance). Not to mention all these level 9 new clothes that want to be over 100 star coins.

This didn't start with the horses. This started with a cut of "free" redeem codes and a strong increase of 'promotional' star rider and lifetime packages. If they really want people to buy such items, why not up the incentive. All star riders have is access to the general game and 100 star coins a week. You can buy one month of star rider at your leisure, which is not what these packages are aiming at obviously. But why should I buy more? Why should I consider lifetime when I can just buy a month at a time and take a break? (hypothetical Q, I'm lifetime). Businesses are always asking this question to drive sales. Incentives for being lifetime in itself are lacking- a store that offers no stat clothing and not too often (it seems to have had additions though in the past few weeks). Perhaps allowance can be upped to a mere 150 or 200 star coins. This may make some people more likely to buy star rider/lifetime. How about a better lifetime store, perhaps with a color exclusive pet?How about some lifetime exclusive polls on a new addition to the game once in a while (nothing big)?

Lifetime is very much like company loyalty - which shouldn't be reprimanded. These are your players most likely to stick around and be invested into the game. Even multi-bundle buyers should have some recognition-- star stable likes to keep track of your purchases. Heck- even amazon rewards repeat buyers. People don't buy because they want to anymore- people buy because they seemingly have to (new horses every dang month, overpriced low level items) nobody wants to feel like they're being nickled and dimed. What you'll get with that is a disgruntled base. Don't become the next activision, star stable. You've see what that's done to the biggest mmo in gaming.

At this rate you'll run out of real life breeds before Harvest county gets updated. If we set aside the horses I wonder how far along we would actually be.

Horses aren't the issue to me, because I only collect the black ones, buying them every now and then, but I also understand people who want to have one horse from every breed or something similar. What personally bothers me is that there usually isn't anything to do in the game, and they still expect me to throw tons of money at them.

And the lifetime store. I'd happily use the items from the store if they had decent stats. Some of the designs are really cute.

I have been saying this for a while now and I'm so glad that someone else sees what many others choose not to see.

The developers are greedy, plain and simple. There was an article from 2017 that listed SSO's yearly revenue in 2016 at $15 million. Not only that, Nordisk Film invested $18 million into Star Stable Entertainment last year. So yeah, they definitely aren't hurting for money but you'll see players still try to use money as an excuse for the game not seeing a major content update since December 2017. I'm not saying that SSO doesn't have some positive points, but seriously people, take off the rose-colored glasses and see what's really going on!

The people who keep throwing their money at the game are only contributing to this problem we have of horse overdose. More players need to start talking with their wallets and stop investing in game that's (at the moment) only interested in taking your money and giving you nothing in return except more horses to do the exact same content over and over. And you're exactly right - at the rate that horses are being released and with the low amount of SC we get a month, nobody can keep up so they feel like they have to buy SC or they're just going to be left behind. And don't even get me started on the fact that they market this game to an age group that can't even contribute financially. Even as a working adult, I find the prices exorbitant and would rather spend that money on a whole new game or two.

I used to be surprised when reading the comments on their social media and seeing how many people have all these glowing reviews and love for the game - until I realized that the team deletes anything they deem as negative feedback, which I find deceptive.People are spending money on a product and they have every right to voice their criticisms and concerns - as long as it's not in a hateful manner by doing things like using foul language and name calling. If you only want the public to see all the posts from fanboys who can do nothing but praise a company despite it's legitimate flaws, then that's not an honest representation of the product and quite frankly, not a company I'd want to do business with.

SSO already said they can't and won't increase the weekly SC allowance as they need the money people use to buy SC to keep the game running. Be thankful that you get any SC allowance at all. Most MMOs don't even do that much.

I think that if anything needs a change, it's the way that they program the game. It's a mess, with graphical and texture errors left and right. I mean, look at this! It happens all the dang time! They aren't greedy, they are just inexperienced in handling a rapidly growing MMO is what it is.

You're right, most MMO's don't provide a weekly allowance and that's because they don't need to - you can buy everything with in-game currency which is mega easy to earn. SSO's only content at the moment, horses, are bought with cash. And no, if you have lifetime you don't have to buy SC, but as mentioned above - if you don't, you'll always be behind because of the frequency horses are being released.

And other MMO's also don't let their games go for more than a year and half with no real content updates, other than ones that require you to hand over your wallet just to do the exact same thing you've been doing for the past year and a half. Also, it's not that SSO can't increase the weekly allowance, they're just choosing not to.

The way I see it based on all these years I spent with the game, the allowance won't be changing anytime soon.
It has always been 100 SC on Saturdays, and from my recollection horse prices have gotten somewhat cheaper on the newer releases. It is true that if you don't spend way too much real life money you won't be able to keep up with the insane rate they're releasing cookie cutter horses at, but I'd bet my dedicated photobook of my favourite band on it that there are many older (20+) players like myself who have absolutely given up on keeping up and don't even touch the game sometimes for weeks. There's barely anything to do, I have ~30 maxed out horses so I'm absolutely tired of training and don't even want to buy a new horse just so I don't feel the pressure to go through that painful process.

However. For newcomers the game still offers a lot and I'd say it lasts somewhere from 6 months to a year to do all story quests, get stars/achievements and generally get bored. Hell, even a second account can be interesting, like trying a different playthrough style. During this time at least 4 new breeds get released, you bought lifetime and a couple horses from earlier releases and told at least one friend about the game. Most of these new players are kids, and I see the company is trying to appeal to them with many of the magic-fairy-rainbow-unicorn updates. Obviously parents are paying, and they're maybe a bit more generous than a teen/young adult who just earned their first allowance and doesn't necessarily want to spend it on an old horse model that now has leaves in its mane.

So after all what I'm trying to say is the game is focused on getting kids to play, parents to pay and that's fine but the content they're releasing is lacking, that's not fine. I don't know if they're just greedy or they absolutely need this much money, I doubt it seeing the latest( annoyingly stiff and unimproved) horses and lack of anything else. I took a 2 year break once and when I logged in after that they added South Hoof Peninsula, Dino Valley and Epona...

Yeah to echo others, I'm not expecting to see a big change soon concerning money and costs. I personally haven't bought anything in this game for two years now. Nothing is very tempting nowadays.

On game updates-
Not to say star stable hasn't done some great stuff with that (the story quests have been amazing so far), but I can count more "special offer"/"new horse" post than I can "teaser for a future update" post on my hand. It should be the other way around, especially now that they are updating all aspects of the game. Silverglade village is still not updated despite being a part of the first area updated. Why is that. Hollow woods is literally the same few repeating trees which can be updated together like with the rest of the trees..but hasn't been. But the ground textures has been updated so what we're essentially waiting on is trees. Unless there's some grand change with those areas, there's no reason for it.

Even smaller updates we expected to come sooner (soulrider tack...as in Lisa's bitless bridle, Tin can's bareback pad) models that are already in the game, models that just need color options to be sold. Why would that take weeks? I understand the jump saddle taking a while, but hey forget minor pieces of tack, we have five newly modeled horses to release in 2.5 months. Talk about a disconnect.

Lol @ the be thankful part, Greenleaf. Anyone who says that is just a part of the problem. It's such a passive aggressive thing- would you say 'be thankful' if someone is living in their car (be grateful you have a car). Morals and poorly worded statements aside,

You and I both know these are excuses. It's been several years, I'm not taking 'inexperience' as an excuse. You hire people who know how to handle your business. You're acting like sso is gaining a huge fan base all of a sudden- that would've been true a few years ago.

As Seryth said, they're choosing not to increase the allowance. It's virtual money. A mere 50sc or 100sc isn't going to tank their business as you predict, Green.

When it comes down to it, the weekly allowance amount really isn't the issue. The issue is weekly updates and the releasing of horses way too often. Their excuse for not doing a major content update last year is because they spent the time fixing bugs. I'm guessing it was a lot of stuff behind the scenes because the bugs aren't any less prevalent than before they went on this supposed bug fixing spree. With every weekly patch, more things get broken before the old stuff can get fixed and because of that, we're just stuck with a buggy game.

If we only got new horses/gear every 2-3 months or so, that 400 weekly allowance would go a lot further. And yeah, I'm sure a lot of people would be unhappy with no weekly updates, but again, that's because the developers are choosing to fixate solely on making a profit instead of trying to balance between that and actually developing their game. If the game had content that we could do between updates, waiting for the next one wouldn't be so bad.

I actually really like this. Honestly, at this point, I do want new horses, but if I was given a choice between content and horses, the content would overrule. I understand that SSO needs income, but I think that it is crazy as to how much simple clothing items in the game cost. Either (as an example) 78 Star Coins, or 6687 Jorvik Shillings. Me, personally, would not want to spend 64 SC on a little shirt, so I would go for the Jorvik Shillings option. However, a lot of jorvik shillings are usually obtained through quests. Yes, you can do dailes, but I feel that quests do give more shillings while making it entertaining.