Thormented

  • Sep 11, 2019
  • Joined Nov 15, 2017
  • KingBiBiK

    Whoops wasn't paying attention and tagged you for something else I guess.

    Price is negotiable I guess, but when it's already cheaper than Patreon by a long shot. shrugs

    It's probably much more expensive than the CN Qidian, but i'd wait for the stuff coming out in English to really judge that (no translator/editor cost to account for)

    • checkm8

      For the finished novels part. I stand corrected. It's a very tiny amount but what I wanted to do was to equate premium novels to finished ones and say that all finished novels require you to pay. I'll rescind that point and give it up, although from my point of view, the % is tiny and if you're running the equivalent as Premium -> VIP it still makes sense-ish. ... It's a weak argument though so I won't pursue it and leave it alone.

      As for putting two drug dealers next to each other... Uh.... It's an interesting way to put that out, although I'll argue it's easy to get into and out of webnovels. The real question isn't answered though, which is one I asked for from the very beginning. Why should Qidian care and/or follow what other translators are doing?

      I also have a problem with the idea of "Qidian MUST be in the wrong because WW is saying so" which is what the rest of this topic has devolved to (yet again i might add), I've mentioned I don't discuss things which are based on subjective "facts". This is one of those. In my eyes, Qidian might have a damaged reputation, but when you trace ALL of the arguments to one little white lotus yelling out that she is innocent, despite not daring to actually legally sue her ML for trying to have his way with her.... .... I'm sorry. You might win the accolades of the people, but I don't care until there's an actual legal document stating it happened OR that there's proof that it didn't happen. The way things are going WW just wants to play on the sidelines, drum up the love of the populace which results in more patreon money because fuck Qidian. shrugs

      If people want to overpay for patreon and get less value for it, it's up to them. I've yet to see any real reason why Qidian's premium is objectively worse than Patreon.

      KingBiBiK

      ... Good bye? don't let the door hit you on the way out? I'm only actively trying to discuss the price of Qidian's Premium versus patreon and I've yet to see anyone counter my argument of patreon being more expensive at all. shrugs if you want to white knight for WW, please do so by all means. I'm uninvolved with that mess and do not care whatsoever about the alleged problems between WW and Qidian. shrugs Go to court if you have a case, don't whine all over the place as if you're in the right otherwise.

      Mowuji_immortal

      Logic of why they should provide more other than other people are doing it. I still don't see anything just more whining of entitled people because they think they received a free product in the past and that means that companies MUST endure losses to continue providing said product for nothing. I'm perfectly willing to debate logical arguments, but not ones that are based on the idea of entitlement.

      • Mowuji_immortal

        Yes, it's a false equivalency.

        Just because you THINK you're entitled to free chapters does not mean it's actually true. Give me one tangible reason that isn't "everyone else does it" as to why Qidian should care about how other translators handle their release rate.

        • Mowuji_immortal

          shrugs the topic's logic implies that Qidian will raise the cost of Patreon. I'm talking strictly about that.

          If you want to overpay for Patreon and then complain that Qidian is expensive go ahead, but do NOT try to convince others without understanding the math or providing a logical argument.

          • checkm8

            Qidian CN works off a completely different model from QI if you've ever visited it before. There's no such thing as reading without paying(... or at least very little of it, you're shown a set number of characters as free chapters, usually amounting to around 10% of the novel?), i believe there's a monthly rotation of free novels, but no control over that, not are you able to maintain access (at least through the website) after they leave rotation.

            Unless I see evidence of QI moving towards that model shown by Qidian CN, I chose to believe in current model until Qidian changes it. I have no reason to speculate otherwise except for existing models, which may or may not even be legal (hey look, I can throw baseless accusations around too!).

            Mowuji_immortal

            So now let's talk about the value of the advance chapters on patreon itself.

            This means that intrinsically patrons are using their money in order to read ahead and that proves true so long as the chapter isn't released to the public.

            This means that the value of chapters on Patron can be set as Patronage % of days the chapter remains premium. (it works better after being expressed. X Y/Z where X = patronage, Y= premium days, Z = total number of days in premium.)

            In practice that means on the day you pay your patronage, you're paying $5 for the month and the value of that patronage drops on a daily basis.After the first week, assuming you attach equal preference to each chapter, you're losing approximately 25% of the value of your patronage because hey, that chapter is now free. *

            On the other hand, if you're going through Qidian's premium program, that value of the one chapter that you unlocked can be held for as long as 14 weeks in extreme examples.* Going by a very dumb comparison You're losing around 7% of the value in the same time frame.

            *you COULD do a whole bunch of math with the expression I gave above and figure this out in a manner that makes better sense, but honestly it's not worth it. The logic doesn't change which is simply that the value of patron money also depends on the time that they are "kept premium". Which is the only tangible benefit that can be given to patrons. The longer your "bought" chapter is kept premium, the less value you lose as time goes on.

            Alternatively, on a per chapter basis, Even the most generous patreon I can think of charges >$1 per chapter, which is tantamount to 50 SS that you can use on multiple chapters. Again, this is helpful towards patrons.

            All this is just a fancy ay of saying that the value of patronage to Qidian is both cheaper by a per chapter basis as well as depreciates slower.

            The only drawback is free chapters, of which you're still given 7/week which is for a premium product that you should be spending money on perfectly fine from my point of view.

            Edit: also, tldr i'm bad at using spreadsheets today apparently, decided to just cheat and throw in the cost from the messages here ~_~; Sorry.

            • checkm8

              No worries, your lack of tangible arguments is duly noted.

              ... No, I'm actually being serious. Bring up a tangible argument that doesn't rely on subjective opinions and is based on something that Qidian is actually doing rather than just hearsay or thoughts on what they "MUST" be doing despite having no backing beyond "Qidian is a business and will definitely hurt us".

              • checkm8

                A is nothing more than pure speculation. I refuse to talk about it because I could argue WW will definitely introduce some form of premium currency as well and there's no way to prove I'm wrong aside from their track record, which to me adds an element of subjective opinion into this. I will only speak about facts. Sorry.

                B is absolutely the same thing as patreon. If you stop subscribing to patreon, You have to wait till they catch up, in the mean time you've already "reaped" the benefits of what you paid for, unless the implication is that paying for advance chapters isn't the actual logic of Patreon is being challenged. Which is 100% stupid, because the counter argument is what am I paying even $1/month for? There has to be tangible benefit, and the benefit lowers in value over time because that chapter that you paid for will literally become free in one month. Arguably there's the problem of needing to wait longer for Qidian to catch up with free chapters but you misunderstand something greatly, this does not lower the value of the chapters you paid for, in fact it increases the value because you're allowed to read an advance chapter... in your example, over 14 weeks in advance In other words, you are ahead of other people BY 14 weeks.

                C is the same as A, speculation.

                D is ALSO speculation.

                Back to what I'm ACTUALLY here though though. I double checked the spreadsheet and it looks accurate unless there's some other way of getting SS that isn't mentioned. I did have some errors on the free SS stuff because I wanted to calculate free $/day but dropped the idea in the end, shrugs Serves me right for doing this and not paying full attention to it. The numbers should be accurate now though unless someone can source me lower prices for SS somehow. Although I'll say that remember I have put in the stipulation of following their chapter/week, which is woefully wrong for a lot of novels due to mass releases. (i.e expect the actual cost a reader to be paying to be less than what I overstated here on purpose.)

                • CKtalon

                  Ah that was what looked weird to me. I forgot I was working in cents rather than dollars, so everything is actually about 1/100th of what I posted I believe. Probably need to double check some parts of the table too if I made that error....

                  Edit: Also, I was working directly off the lowest and highest in the get more section i.e

                  50/0.99= 50.50505051
                  (2500+750)/49.99=65.0130026

                  Edit2: hm... no that actually seems accurate now that i'm looking at it more. @_@; whatever. I'll come back and double check the numbers and everything in a little bit.

                  • Alright, let's do some numbers again to play with the logic.

                    Cost of the SS is derived from buying ss at the current rates with the current bonus, find out which is the cheapest option yourself (... the option might surprise most.)

                    Let's talk about the value/month. I've done up the table below to show what the average cost is/month based on what is shown on the screen. Note that some of these estimates are higher than normal (Trial Marriage Husband is 2/day rather than 16 or 2.3 chapters a day for example) so this is actually in favor of making QI look as bad as possible.

                    The values look absolutely horrendous correct? Until you realize that I have a little something extra at the bottom. The free SS that makes everything significantly more palatable.

                    Effectively it ensures that unless you are consistently unlucky over a whole month, you should be able to afford to read basically any one premium novel completely for free.

                    Does any patreon afford this same level of "helpfulness"?

                    More importantly, Patreon in general signifies the idea of "reading ahead". Remember that QI has reduced the number of "free" chapters, but NOT the absolute release rate, which means that I can do some very silly things with the numbers that are left over.

                    For example, the distance between Immortal Mortal's last free chapter (760) to the current premium chapter is (955) is nearly 200 chapters. I don't have access to IM's rate, but let's assume that it's a pretty normal rate of say $5 for 1 extra chapter and the highest one is say... $100 for 40 chapters (which I think is a pretty big discount in it's own way....), if you're keeping up to date to the current stuff, effectively, you're reading ahead by a total of about 5 months in advance by this going rate and the distance between free and premium will grow until the novel ends.

                    Is there a way to assign value to this "even further ahead" chapters?

                    ... not my place to say. I was just curious and wanted to play with some numbers.

                    tldr; at absolute minimum, Qidian allows you to read one Premium novel entirely for free and be up to date on that. Please inform me where Patreon allows that to happen

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