Playeone I gave up on collecting SS nowadays. Too busy with life and can always read in other sites. Worst come to worst i will squeeze every ounce of my brain with mtl.
1000 Chapters at 12 spirit Stones is 280$
Hmmm
Gamblejay that 20 seats for $200 dollars is an interesting example but here’s what you’re forgetting; can you even get those 20 seats? To be able to sell something for 10x the price or more it would have to be desired much more. Baseball is amazingly popular, the american pastime, people value it enough to pay that jacked up price but webnovels are a completely new thing to the west. The closest thing is web fiction which is not very popular and most of it’s free or a couple dollars for an ebook. Almost no one understands webnovels and if they did they’d think that giving up quality for quantity doesn’t justify increasing the price. Higher price means higher quality not the opposite. If forced to choose I believe most people would pick the cheaper one with higher quality over the expensive one with lower quality from the company with terrible reputation. If I paid a subscription for multiple novels for a justifiable price like $10 or $15 a month I’d consider it but no one would pay hundred of dollars for a single book filled with filler.
UnderTaker26 Again without seeing the numbers and data I can only speculate based on the companies actions.
Which 2 months and no change to premium, more premium releases and posts by Qidian and TL saying the numbers look good and are increasing. They could be blowing smoke up everyone's asses, it's impossible to tell.
But my train of thought is, if it was failing they would have dropped the price long ago rather then let it settle in.
That's not at all what I was asking about. I was asking about the pricing for buying spirit stones from the store. I spent $10 for 1500 SS a few months ago. Now, if I spend $10 I only get 600 SS. That is a massive devaluation of money spent for SS.
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I think people forget that with the old system where it's not paid, people then cared about the translator and the team because they were part of a community. But now with the new premium system it's not really a community it's a vendor and a customer type of deal so yes at this point I don't really care for translator/editor's income status because now it's about is this worth $$$.
Contributing more $$$ to someone because they're doing me a favor is different from I need to pay $$$ for X commodity. Is premium very expensive? No but is it worth it? At the moment I don't really see much worth in it. Once my free SS runs out i'll probably just start dropping the content and move on, if there was a subscription for all you can read like some of the japanese light novels in some places then I'd be up for that.
For translators doing free work and that have patreon I'll continue contributing to them.
ZeroAspect Bonus SS was lowered, it was a trial period and always labeled as one.
Sugestions:
• Creation of a new charged stone, the Lightning Stone
Purpose: Will be a stone to decide which WN will get a mass release weekly, the top 10 will get new chapters according to their rank.
1 rank - 15 mass release
2 rank - 10 mass release
So on forth
The price could be 1$ each
Result: To instigate real competition between Authors, forming a real sense to the reader that he is contributing to the work, compelling the authors to write better story, therefore increasing the popularity of the site.
Other Idea would be the creation of a general goal for novels that increase their release rate through donations.
Take by an example INEBM, one of the top 20 novels which have only 1 release a day. Setting up a goal of 2~5k in donation to rise it up to 2 releases a day.
Playeone
Well it s common sense everyone knows that Occidental are milk cow for the Chinese. While in China you got premium monthly membership to gain access to unlimited chapter you can dream on to get that for the English version. And while a Chinese translator cost less then an author (payed with a small salary and by the words)
All the Oney they get here is indeed because of greed.
But hey it s not like we have a choice, is there such site who provides novel for free?
Oh yeah there is, well when more people leave and stop reading there maybe they will know that we aren't only milk cow.
And stop the shitty let's support the translator I know some of them but come do we really need to support them that much so they win more then 5k usd a month for two chapters a day ?
Better take professionnal Chinese translator for 2-3000 rmb a month (well who knows if it s not the case right now)
Gamblejay Good one, cash cow t(- -t). I could see someone selling you the full Naruto anime by episode and you'd be ecstatic to hand over your parent's money.
Millman97 I give 2 thumbs up on the quality you guys produce for LoHP. Many of the novels make me cringe at the number of glaring errors (hint: 2 books with MMORPG in their titles) but your work is almost always perfect. Well done.
manapotion Thanks, your support means a lot :D TBH the quality is mostly due to Starve, I'm pretty much a glorified proofreader :sweat_smile:
So going from 1000 bonus SS to 100 bonus SS sounds fair to you?
ZeroAspect Its not like they hid anything, they straight up said it was a % Bonus limited time promotional deal. So the reducing doesn't part doesn't really bother me either way.
Though I don't think anyone would be against the lowering of prices I just don't foresee it happening.
Just looking at the price makes me cry.
untalentedgoblin Not sure if you know this, but the authors wrote these chapters years/months ago. There's no getting rid of the filler from our side. The only ones you might be able to influence with your proposed system are translators and editors.
Gamblejay You assume that the profit maximizing price is known. So far, they can't tell how the pricing has affected demand. Two months really isn't enough time to analyse if premium is optimally priced, especially since they started with a small subset to experiment with. SS revenue may have increased since early adopters may have been testing the waters. Readers may have bought first, calculate spending later. Those who later found the prices extortionary (possibly due to more novels later going premium) certainly won't support the system again. Relying on such first time buyers and whales is not sustainable. Viewership "increased" since many new accounts were made to farm SS.
You say that the accounts are sitting idle waiting for pay out. I highly doubt that. The revenue has probably been 70% invested. They probably expect that the average account will have a non zero balances due to the inability to spend fewer than 3 SS per transaction. There's also the threshold for SS spending on each chapter before bonus payouts are made, so the costs per chapter are almost fixed and the release rate is predictable as well, thus that cost is pretty much known. The share that qi get from variable contacts has probably already been 90% claimed since a minimum publishing share likely exists. What remains are reserve amounts in case they need to make a pay out. If this calculated amount is too low, then they can get the cash from their parent company. They may also limit pay outs to monthly periods with a several day calculation lag in order to cash out liquid assets quickly.
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Beware the expensive lure in front of you. It looks shiny and tasty, but it really isn't. Fishermen can only catch the fish that bite.
People seem to forget that if you buy premium chapters and run out, you're gonna have to wait a LONG time to let the free chapters catch up to the shit you bought. So unless you're patient, you're gonna have to buy more SS to be up to date lol
Gamblejay Qidian collects some of the data, but opportunity cost is next to impossible to measure.
How many people would have joined if it weren't for this scenario? Can you tell? Maybe you could guess, but who knows if some Youtuber will run across Qidian in the next year and boost its publicity tenfold.
If opportunity cost were that easy to measure, the stock market would be solved, and speculation would be worthless.