What's a good pricing system for buying nukes in my game?

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#1

In my game, users can purchase controllable nuclear missiles that have an explosion with a blast radius of 100 studs, and a kill radius of 500 studs.

To prevent people from spamming these missiles (raising the price to purchase with in-game cash wasn’t enough), I have a cool down of 4:30 minutes.

I’m thinking of adding a feature where users can skip the 4:30 cooldown (and half the regen price) by purchasing a developer product to do so, however, I cannot figure out a decent price.

I’m trying to figure out a price, or prices depending on the amount of times you skip the cooldown, where the average user could skip the cooldown once or twice, and richer users could go spend more if they wanted to.

Currently, I’m thinking of a system that starts at 200 robux, increments at 100 for each cooldown skip, before capping at a total of 1,000 robux (a total of 9 cooldowns before).

Should I make it cheaper or more expensive, and should I have increments at all? Before adding this cooldown, nuke spamming was an issue; however, I want to add a monetization scheme that would add more robux revenue without being too p2w. I’ve asked my player base about this, and a lot of them were okay with the original pricing (starting at 250, increments of 250, capped at 1,250), while a lot of them also wanted it to be less (10-300 robux start, no increments.)

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#2

When it comes to pricing on products in your game you have to thing of a couple things:

  1. Does it affect other player’s experience in a negative way
  2. Does it make the player over-powered and make the game less fun for other people

If the product has a negative impact on players it should cost a high amount of robux but since the product is not permanent it can’t cost too much or the player will not feel like he/she got his money worth. It that respect I would stick to 500-600 for launching the nuke. I would only make it a developer product only so people that play a lot can’t spam it with in-game cash. You can also lower the blast radius and kill radius to help balance the product. The ultimate goal is to keep it worth something while making it just enough so people don’t spam.

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#3

To skip the cooldown, I think it should start around 50, and go up 100-200 each time. Cap at 1500 or so.
Then, you could reset the price every day, but then you should make the starting price higher.

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#4

It would automatically reset to the lowest price for users who played in a different server or hijacked the missile system of other players (meaning more combat opportunities)

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#5

So you’d do a higher, flat rate, instead of doing a lower rate that gets higher over time?

#6

It depends what this ‘nuke’ does. if it’s going to destroy only part of the map, which will regenerate afterwards, players wouldn’t be happy with a high price, but if it’s going to kill multiple/all players, and destroy most of the map, it should be more expensive.

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#7

It doesn’t really destroy a part of the map, it destroys any vehicles and players within 100 studs, and kills at another 400 studs beyond that (500 stud total radius).

I’m thinking a 125, 275, 425, 575, 725, 875, 1000 scheme would work. What do you think @TUS_2?

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#8

In that case, I think you’ve got your pricing just right.

#9

Seems right.

I don’t think that’s such a good idea. Couldn’t they just keep server hopping and get the lowest price over and over again?

#10

They could, but it takes a great deal of in-game cash to be able to buy a nuke in the first place (you gotta buy some items before even being able to buy it, and then you gotta buy the nuke itself and its launcher, which is pretty pricey)

The loophole wouldn’t be explicitly told to players, I doubt many players would really find out about this “loophole,” and if they did, I don’t think it would be too much of an issue.