Paid to Play - What's next?

ErdrickDragonsbane
Well, I'm gonna go ahead and complain. Don't bring something like this back if it's only going to upset everyone, which is exactly what it's doing.

8. Users will receive 5 Razer Silver for every minute of gameplay, with a maximum of 50 Razer Silver each day. This excludes bonus campaigns such as double multiplier campaigns or more.
9. Awarding more Razer Silver per game activity and/or other Cortex PC campaigns will be subjected to Razer’s sole decisions and changes.
10. Every Razer Silver awarded in Paid to Play and Cortex PC will have 12 months validity period from date of earned/claimed.

Literally impossible for people to get anything more than tiny discounts on stuff. This comes across as a giant 'go fuck yourself', even more so when I read your posts in this thread. I've always supported Razer, because it's always seemed like you guys care about your gamers; you made left handed mice, and I even seem to recall some of your stuff being used by a guy who played games with his feet because he didn't have arms.

Then you introduced paid to play, with the zsilver, and it was amazing. It seemed like you finally cared about your poor gamers, and not just middle class or higher. People who had extremely limited budgets - and let's be real here, with soaring rates of college tuition, soaring housing costs, massively bloated student loan debt, a growing wealth and income divide between the top 1% and everyone else, rising medical costs in the US, and stagnant wages, there are a lot of those people - finally had a way to get some Razer gear. People who otherwise wouldn't be using your software wanted to download Cortex so they could earn points. It got people into Razer, supporting Razer, and using Razer.

And then you removed it. Because some people were complaining, or sending death threats. I've received death threats for being a progressive. I've received death threats for being an atheist, for being Jewish, for being alive. And I'm not famous, I don't own a large company, I don't even own a small company, I'm just someone barely making $8k/year and struggling to get by.

You're going to get death threats. You're going to get people complaining. You're going to have people who hate you, for no valid reason whatsoever. If you can't deal with that in 2018, you may as well hole yourself up somewhere without internet, because you can't escape it.

And now it's back, but in a format that is essentially a gigantic 'go fuck yourself' to everyone who loved the program in the first place, to everyone who has been clamoring for it to come back, to everyone who doesn't have the money to spend on the peripherals in the first place. It feels like a giant slap in the face. I wanted the program to come back, but would have been OK if it didn't--I understand that it was something you were doing to help your fellow gamers, and that it wasn't necessarily profitable [I don't have the data to see how much the program increased the use of your software, to see if you saw increased revenue, or decreased, or any other details], and was possibly even costing you money.

So, if my post here makes you decide to remove it. Fine. That's good. As it stands right now, it's a blighted abomination. It's an insult--a scam, even. There are plenty of people who will use it, think they can save up for a year and a half to get the cheapest mouse option, who will then feel deeply betrayed when they realize their silver is decaying after a year and they can never reach their goal.

Just something I would like to add. With such a low Razer silver coming back in Paid to play, this will probably make more people just buy Used Razer products. Similar to me and my friends, I was grinding for Razer silver last year. Then it got discontinued. However, I love razer products so what did my friends and I do who didn't want to pay full price? We just bought used ones which were sometimes less than 50% of what it cost brand new or heavily discounted on amazon. However, getting people to enter the ecosystem and getting their first razer product, this would probably make them want to get the newest and greatest, and eventually buying brand new products.

LOVE THIS- this was the main reason I started with Razer and itll get new people into the brand

mltan
The focus on Razer Gold won't change - and if you don't like the system, you really shouldn't participate and complaining about it (or worse for some other making threats) will just shut it down for the people who enjoy the system. So if you don't agree with it - I suggest you go find some other system that meets what you want.

zGold-MOLPoints still haven't change to RazerGold for RazerPay though

J.O.Z.Y
I think the first step for now is to remove the zSilver expiry completely. The curent rate of earning zSilver aside from the lucky few in Mogul is abysmal. Razer fans can only redeem small items even with a whole year of grinding P2P.

Agreed, As I called it out on day one, no one is going to be interested in getting razer silver. None of my friends use it anymore cause whats the point lmao? Deleted cortex a month ago as its basically useless now. 1st gen of this p2p was fine, and now its just worse.

I think it's a little unfair for people like myself who can't really afford razer gear and want to get it for free
I started gathering some zSilver in the beggining of the year with Paid to Play and when it got suspended i only could win zSilver with the daily reward and couldn't reach my goal to have razer gear, i'm waiting so much time to paid to play to return but you're saying it will not be as free as it was..

I'm looking forward to what you come up with. My only suggestion would be to consider people with slow rural internet so if a paid to play thing was some 80GB game (destiny 2/forsaken expansion on the game store) that we'd at least have some time/days to prepare for it. I'm getting upgraded in about 6-8 months but other Razer fans may not be so fortunate.

To reward Razer customers, if you're able to see if Razer products are hooked up and being used via Cortex, then you could consider bonuses for how many peripherals you're using. Like 1 zSilver per hour of gaming is given to someone using a Razer mouse. That is doubled if a keyboard is attached. Tripled if a headset is linked up as well. It'd be incentive to have a Razer peripheral collection then. Pretty happy with my Deathadder Elite. I have two! One at home and one at work

H00dy
We all know that the problem is not AFK but multi accounts, as P2P as Mogul are "overexploited" that way.

I agree, multi accounts are problem on both platforms, even though on PtP multi accounts = AFK (since you can't play on multiple PCs).

Undefin3dLaptop
To reward Razer customers, if you're able to see if Razer products are hooked up and being used via Cortex, then you could consider bonuses for how many peripherals you're using. Like 1 zSilver per hour of gaming is given to someone using a Razer mouse. That is doubled if a keyboard is attached. Tripled if a headset is linked up as well. It'd be incentive to have a Razer peripheral collection then. Pretty happy with my Deathadder Elite. I have two! One at home and one at work ;)

So what about the headsets that aren't USB, and that the system won't be able to see? What about things that are used constantly but don't ever get to be recognised unless you have a photo with all of your Razer gear together - like a Razer Mouse Bungee, or the myriad of Razer Mouse Pouches or bags that some people would have (I have a Razer Mouse Pouch for most of my individual Razer mice), or non-Chroma Razer mousemats?

mltan
It's been a while since we decided to suspend Paid to Play - and each time I wanted to review it, I would go back to the forum thread - read the posts, and decide that maybe it's not worth doing it.

We started Paid to Play as a way to see how we could get community members who loved Razer, but couldn't afford to buy our gear, a way to grind and earn Razer products and other awesome giveaways. However, while we had good intentions for it, we started getting a lot of complaints, demands and worst of all - death threats to our team and I decided to put a stop to it.

I've thought about how we might bring it back sometime and here are my thoughts:

1. It will be focused more for users of Razer products and services - i.e. it's more to reward our existing customers as opposed to someone looking for a free hand-out.
2. We will probably want to focus on users of Razer zGold - and that will be the MAIN way of earning zSilver - for those who spend on games etc with zGold and earn zSilver.
3. We will still have multiple SECONDARY different ways of earning zSilver - it could be Paid to Play on PC, or on Mobile, or maybe through our partners like Esports Mogul and much more. It will still be possible to grind but there will be multiple different ways instead of just one way.
4. This will no longer be for those who aren't already Razer customers - and using Razer services is going to be the main way to earn zSilver - the other free ways of doing so will be secondary ways.
5. Anytime it gets negative, people demanding stuff, complaining or death threats we'll suspend it again.

Just some thoughts about this - it may or may not come back - but just some of my thoughts on how we might evolve Paid to Play.

1) This IMO is a necessity. Opening free accounts to grind for a chance at physical goods is dumb, especially in a salty community like gaming. People get angry when they play a game that they have no chance on winning. You need some way of limiting the amount of people taking place as well as the amount of points going out. This allows people who actually put time into the program to have a fair shot at a reward. You said that about month of grinding points could get you as firefly when you announced zSilver. That isn't a good thing when you are only handing out a couple hundred of them and you have a couple million people grinding for them. You need to be able to control people playing and points being earned, especially in a global promotion.

2) I'm not a fan of zGold for reason's I won't get into here. That said, you are probably right with this one. Collecting zSilver by users of zGold should be the main way of earning zSilver. Using zGold would directly hand back Razer something for getting zSilver. It should be expected that zSilver being handed out as a promotion would supply a collector a greater amount. But that doesn't mean Razer shouldn't look into other promotional issuing of zSilver, such as sponsored paid to play events. But again, these have to be thought about in terms of geographic locations. It seems that zGold as well as other promotions favor SEA. Other aspects favor the states. You can't have everyone competing in the same game for the limited prizes and offering better rules for some vs. others and not expect a table to be flipped over. It seems the zVault revamp is looking to fix some of this. So I believe you guys are on a much better track.

3) Secondary ways have to exist. It's also better to allow some passive collection. You have to make make zSilver collectible for people on the regular in order to keep people interested, especially with the expiry date. It's pointless to have people collect these points if they can never collect enough to use. Paid to Play originally did this. One could play and not even realize they were collecting points until they could get something. I feel the goal should be to create a system where people grind without knowing they are grinding. The original Paid to Play was much too generous. It's was worth it to grind. Don't do that. Mogul's current setup of zSilver as prizes is nice and all, but it's too stingy to keep people's attention. You need to find a balance. That balance also has to make sure the redemptions are feasible. Mid to high-mid tier prizes should be available to most people who save every non-zGold point within the year expiry limit.

4) You have to limit things. Period. You have to limit as many sock puppet accounts as possible.Free points for everyone sounds great, but when it becomes free points for my 50 imaginary friends to get me free stuff, you make the whole program not work. You have to have some sort of account verification.

5) How long have to been on the internet? You can't threaten trolls. The more you threaten them, the more powerful they become. Seriously, people complain just to shut things down. This is why you need some way of verifying accounts. So you can single out the problem makers instead of punishing everyone for the idiots who call in bomb threats. It seems most of the anger idiots had with Paid to Play is that it benefited people who started collecting earlier and it took too long to collect the needed points to get what they wanted. That isn't/can't going to change. They are still going to complain and rage. Maybe more so because they might not be included anymore. It's the some problem when a service transitions from free to a paid. If you feel this is too much of a problem, you should just do away with zSilver because you can't stop trolls on the internet, you can only ignore them or counter-troll.

I dont know where is a problem, just replace the paid-to-play system with the same system as faceit where you get points for playing matches. Mogul arena has it. Unfortunately with the "Region Restriction" system.