I think there should be two different monthly subscribes one for standard exilebuddy that can bot only on standard league and one for upgraded exilebuddy that can bot on temporary leagues aswell. Standard monthly subscribe should be 5$. why only 5$? Because people are also paying for VPN that costs around 10$-15$ per month, also exalted orbs in standard are cheap, which is why profiting on standard league is way harder then on the temporary leagues. People are saying they can clear instances pretty fast and get lots of exalts but for that you would need to have some good gear and not everyones skill setup can clear it so fast. On the other hand, on temporary leagues monthly subscribe should be around 20$-30$. It is much easier to make more profit on the temporary leagues, because prices of exalted orbs or orbs in general is more valuable, but the cost of running the bot is the same 10$-15$. Cost of running VPN doesn't scale the same as profit scales on temporary leagues. These way increasing monthly subscribe scale for upgraded exilebuddy would be major financier of the exilebuddy bot. Now the question is how many people play on temporary leagues because botting is much more harder there without the quest plugin. But if there's many people playing on temporary leagues as much as there's activity going on as i see it, i think then that temporary leagues should be the ones that will primarily finance exilebuddy bot.
Problem with the subscription part of all the buddy bots is the "lifetime keys" when you have paid your fee, then you are not going to pay again and in a financial aspect thats not very smart - high initial income but no re-occuring, which is what bossland have found out now. Currently the 1month session is €9 which in my opinion is spot on if the entire userbase commits to the monthly fee (I have no experience with other bots out there or the cost of them), to compare this WoW Gametime is roughly €10/month if you buy your stuff the right places and i my honest opinion botting PoE should cost more than gametime for World of Warcraft. But paying monthly for exilebuddy would also raise expections from the users I know i would expect less downtime and more functionality out of the box - I have some time behind this bot but I would rather just click start and it runs of rather than I need to setup lootfilter, gems and shit like that downloading various plugins to make it work and do the basic stuff it was supposed to do - like demonbuddy, I botted a lot of diablo and you really didn't have to do much before it just ran like a crazy. EB should be the same. All respect to PushedX and the rest of the team. I doubt most people would pay more than €10/month at this time. That being said I haven't made a single € botting PoE because I only bot for my own selfish self and I don't have the balls to RMT J.
at the current state of the bot... (pre recent patch) I would not be prepared to pay anything per month.. if the bot improved I would consider it...
so am i, if we pay monthly for the bot, it should be cover by 2 dev, so it will be improved and update patch available sooner.
ExileBuddy has to take responsibility for some important plug-ins, if our users(respect to them) will be dropped support for their plugins, the bot will be useless. The bot can be updated very quickly, but generate income, he can only with the plugins!
There'll be a post soon about some changes to the project and whatnot and more detailed information, but please understand things take time to move in a new direction. It's not possible to just add a second person and all of a sudden ggg's massive changes don't affect us anymore. We still have some recovery to do after this past expansion!
well we understand. But you should also understand that what excactly we DO NOT have is: TIME. We're waiting since 8 weeks for a release. Got promised this and that, and got nothing in the end. People HAVE TO move on to other projects to secure their monthly income in some way. I'm not even speaking about the "competitor" bot. Generally speaking that everyone here is right now in a re-orienting phase. Just keep in mind, that people are now spending time and effort in different projects. The more time now passes - the more time people will have spent in other projects and the smaller the chance that they come back to EB. (Example myself: I run a small powerleveling company. with the buddy downtime i increased the number of employees and expendand in 2 more games. HELLA work. Now im at the point where we're settled in the new games. This week i will have to decide what i do with my time now again. If i dont hear something from EB VERY soon, ill just expand more in my other projects and WILL NOT HAVE TIME for EB.) Keep in mind, that probably most users here are facing similiar situations. We understand that you guys "need time". but we don't have time. I don't want to demand things, but the reality here is: "Deliver fast or sink!"
The plugins are there, no worries. You want to add built-in support for everything and faster updates, you can't have everything..
Honestly, I'm not one of the people like DBF who run an ungodly number at once, but I'd most likely go with the monthly fee for the bot. I really liked the potential of the bot, and pushed had only made it better since the last time I was even in POE, but I'll say my biggest limiting factor would be the reliability. If it's going to be more, and only monthly, that's fine, but only if it's on par with the other buddy bot's uptime.
As someone who bots solely for fun, I have no problem paying a monthly fee. To me, it is cheap entertainment. That being said would I pay more for it than I would a game subscription, ie Wow? Probably not. Also, as a Canadian, I get killed on the euro so ~10 euros is about what I'd consider. Although, I don't know, buddy and I gots problems as well so there's that. My take on it.
This... This is the type of work I expect from the buddy team. You guys are awesome for listening to the community, and I really hope you push through to monthly payments This bot has plenty of potential if you market it the right way. I just hope some of the people who said their farewells decide to come back after the way they were treated, or have some way of knowing it is being reworked so they come back
Imo, the price point should be around what you would expect to pay for a regular gaming subscription which is roughly $9.99 to $19.99 per month. I think the large majority of users would be just fine with this. As for bringing in new business, i really think there should be less "API improvements" and more "actual features" added to the bot. We all know how much time Drew has put into the API to allow other devs to create amazing plugins, but at the same time many of these plugins that utilize this API, are kept private. This is great for a select few, but its terrible for EB as a product. This is one of the few bots that does actually have a direct competitor unlike Demonbuddy / Honorbuddy etc. Features need to be included into the base bot, to sway those currently using the other bot over to this side. I really dont think it would take much to bring those guys over. For those that did try the other bot when EB closed, its like stepping into a time machine and using a 1990s pixel bot with 0 control over your PC. Its complete shit. but it does work... kinda. Anyways. Subscription based and more base features added to the bot i believe will keep this project running for a long while. I know a buddy store for EB is pretty much out of the question, just wish there was a way to help the devs that do provide a lot of plugins for us some compensation outside of donations (because no one donates, or rarely), but thats another issue completely. I see Pushedx has released a new beta for us! Time to give it a whirl! Welcome back Pushedx!
I would be willing to pay 10-15 usd a month or like a 60usd a year type thing. However, downtime kills this bot, and yes I get major changes have to be made to keep up with the game itself and improvements are made to the api. Until the recently released bot, the majority of users never saw the benefit of the api changes, only the developers did. I also get the the api changes = better plugins but when only a small handful of the plugins are public and the vast majority are private, even if the other bot is 5x slower and may have issues, if it has features the average user wants and has an active community because of it, your product will fail IMO. The average user wants to buy a bot to make a tad bit of profit either in game or by RMT but be able to do other things with their time, not learning how to code just to have stuff be ran properly or run more efficiently. Just my two cents
