Overview
You can get by just fine in Hawken without spending a penny, using your time as payment to get additional content. If you love the game and have some disposable income, then you might as well know the true value of however much you’re willing to pay for the digital goodies available. This is what I’ve discovered using a simple calculator, a few minutes of my time, and the numbers provided.
Intro
**Disclaimer: this guide is probably part fact / part opinion, as I think all my opinions are fact. Also, info is accurate at time of writing, depending on when I last checked and updated this stuff.**
Hawken is a free-to-play game, but it is not a “pay to win”, as far as I can tell. All the mechs and weapons are constantly, meticulously balanced and any half-decent ‘skilled’ or knowledgeable player can fair well in any game situation with any combination of mech / weapon / Items / Internals, especially if a player has invested a ton of time in mastering the game. Even if you stick with the free newbie Mech they give you, you can play like a champ. For the most part, paying real cash gets you a shortcut to everything that is normally locked until you’ve played enough, or costs a heavy amount of what I call “time currency” earned through play.
There are two currencies in Hawken, like in every free-to-play:
- Meteor Credits – the real world paid ‘cash currency’
- Hawken Credits – the earned ‘time currency’
Credits and YOU
There are only a handful of features available exclusively as cash currency purchases, but they are mostly cosmetic and none of them affect gameplay itself. It is my opinion that the time required to earn enough time currency for gameplay purchases is not exhorbitant, so the game is not necessarily “grind to win” either. As long as you don’t get caught up on buying every single thing for every single mech, you can get the mech loadout you want in a reasonable amount of time playing. Besides, you’re having fun along the way!
On par with the FTP business model, you will start the game with a modest amount of currencies to fritter away on bad newb decisions. Don’t bother buying anything other than a couple Items and Internals for the CR-T Recruit to sample and make your learning experience a bit more comfortable. Know that you can’t use two of the same Item / Internal even of different Marks, and Mk II is the most effective use of money / space.
This advice applies for any free-to-play game:
DON’T SPEND YOUR STARTER CREDITS DAMN IT!
Not until you have a damn good feel for the game and can make an educated choice. Save up for a Mech that you genuinely think will work with your primary playstyle (soldier, sniper, medic, tank, support, carry, and range roles are all available).
Most things in the game can be bought with either type of Credits, but almost everything in game can be bought with Meteor Credits. After all, you just forked over money that could be used on things like food to sustain your real world bodily survival. Might as well make everything available to you for that kind of commitment! The only thing that can’t be directly bought is XP, still gotta play the game a little bit to level up your Pilot / Mech, but with an XP Boost that’s made 50% faster.
- Hawken Credit / XP Boost
- Emblems (the cooler half available)
- XP Transfer (overflow to other Mechs)
- Early Unlocking / Buying Weapons, Items, Internals, and G2 Mechs
- All Cosmetics: Paint, Chassis, Mech Emotes, Thrusters, and Repair Drones
- Cockpit Decorations (Goofy items to eat up even more space on your UI)
Everything else can be bought with Hawken Credits. The only product which is bought exclusively with Hawken Credits is a selection of profile Emblems.
- Paint (camos (camouflage))
- Thrusters
- Repair Drones
- HUD Colors
- Recticles
Meaning you buy once and any mech can use them. There are some free HUD colors you can choose from and a variety of things you can unlock through Pilot / Mech levels, some are Universal and some aren’t. I know, it’s kinda crappy that you can’t pay once for Items, Internals, and most Cosmetics for use on all your mechs, but hey…. they need to pay the bills and make a profit somehow!
With 144 Meteors being valued at a Dollar, you are effectively given $3.50 after playing for one hour (it’s an in-game achievement reward). The average digital item in most FTPs goes from $0.50 to $1.50 anyway. In Hawken, you would need $5 to get a single mech completely customized to a different chassis, without paint job or anything else. Nice tease, guys.
A dollar is worth about 1296 Hawken Credits. Therefore, depending on how long you play in a game, you can earn up to 20 cents or so of digital content currency each time you play. I like the game, so I do recommend playing it a good bit, and if you want to give some cash to the deserving developers you’ll probably want to spend just enough to deck out your favorite mech(s) in some fancy customized Cosmetics. So here’s my recommendation.
A full makeover for a single mech will run you $8 to $24 depending on how fancy you want it to be.
I think the Chassis is probably the most effective use of a cash purchase. Like I stated before, you can’t really pay-to-win in this game, luckily. All you can do is pay-to-skip a ton of time earning a new mech and loadout for a different playstyle. Everything else is either not really worth getting or can be gotten through steady gameplay. If you just know that you’re going crazy for this game and play it even just once every couple days for a month, then the 30 day Boosts will more than pay for themselves. You’ll be able to buy and upgrade a handful of Mechs with that amount of extra digital cabbage.
Purchase Examples
Finding the USD value of a Meteor Credit purchase is easy! You just multiply the MC by 0.7! Unless you bit the big, Bullet Bill Benjamin ($100), then you can use 0.6. The in-game discounts on MC purchases are the real money savers actually, but you’re really only getting the weapon for free in the Deals. The percentage they show is deceptive, that’s what you’re saving with the free weapon! So if you’re not thrilled by the pre-set items / internals in the Deal, it probably isn’t worth it.
The most popular amount for small items is a gross of Meteor credits which happens to equal $1.01, rounding up to the nearest cent, which anyone would do, but I’ll leave it out for aesthetics. So the cash values for most aesthetic items that are cash-only purchases (along with unlocking equipment early, or just buying them):
I didn’t bother calculating the Consumables (charges for coop and Holo taunts). I really don’t think they’re worth buying at all…. but hey, if you’re a rich kid you might as well throw your parents credit card at the screen while you’re eating your gourmet gamer snacks. These can be bought with HC anyway.
FuN fAcT: the ridiculously expensive 24k Gold Emblem, which only acts as an avatar for your player profile is a whopping $20.00!!! Really showing your love for the game by buying a square inch icon for that price. You could deck out a nice Mech chassis for that.
Credits vs. Dollars
The ratio between the two types of currency are 8.9 Hawken Credits for every 1 Meteor Credit. I checked only a handful of items to confirm this, but I’m pretty sure it’s the same across the board.
The ratio between Meteor Credits and United States Dollars is a bit hazy at first glance though, because the more you buy the more “discount” you get.
At time of writing here are the values:
- $5 – 720 MC
- $10 – 1483 MC
- $25 – 3780 MC
- $30 – 4752 MC
- $50 – 8280 MC
- $100 – 17280 MC
In respective order, rounding up to a tenth of a cent, and a hundreth of a Meteor Credit.
- $0.007 per MC / 1.44 MC per cent
- $0.007 per MC / 1.48 MC per cent
- $0.007 per MC / 1.51 MC per cent
- $0.007 per MC / 1.58 MC per cent
- $0.007 per MC / 1.66 MC per cent
- $0.006 per MC / 1.73 MC per cent
There are two conclusions we can make from these numbers:
(assuming I didn’t just totally screw up my basic division, a possibility as I’m a bit out of practice)
1. Meteor Credits are very cheap. Sold at barely more than two-thirds of a penny each.
2. There is really NO WORTHY DISCOUNT unless you fork over $100 in one transaction. Even then, you’re only effectively saving sixteen cents on the dollar!
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*Personal note:
I haven’t spent more than $60 on a digital game (excluding gross totaled monthly fees on some old MMOs, which I quit long ago), because I have never convinced myself to get a collector’s edition of anything. I don’t even look twice at any Steam sale if it isn’t at least 50% and even then I’m pretty reserved until the 75-80% range. So, dropping a Benjamin[upload.wikimedia.org] on a free-to-play is something from way way out there past left field and in the dark forest, just through the sparkling caves of the magical generosity waterfall. Haven’t played enough yet to know if this game is true love for me, I’m a romantic.
Showing My Work
Originally posted by Brb House On Fire:I’m not sure where you got your calculations from…but the difference between the $5 level and the $100 level is a difference of an additional 28.8 meteor credits per dollar. Purchasing $100 worth in bulk saves you 20% over the base $5 price.
The difference between the $50 and $100 value is 14.4 meteor credits per dollar. Which is exactly a 5% additional discount for that step up.
So a quick breakdown:$5 – Base price.
$50 – Saves 15% compared to the base level
$100 – Saves 20% compared to the base level.So yes, you messed up your basic division somewhere along the line. Unless you’re doing something totally non-arithmetic with your whole “rounding”.
I divided both ways, either the dollars by MC to find the cents per MC, or MC by dollars to find the MC per cent. The conclusion is that the increase of cents per MC, even rounding up generously, is a nigh negligible discount. The increase of MC per cent is irrelevant because MC is digital currency sold at less than a penny to begin with, and it only effectively dropped by ONE TENTH OF A CENT for a value discount on top of that.
Those percentages are Meteor Credits ADDED FREE. They are not, in fact, a total percentage discount that one might assume from an “honest sales pitch”. It is a basic sales number illusion used to trick anyone that doesn’t realize the difference between adding and subtracting percentages. The $100 is not saving you 20% off the base retail price of MC, it is selling you the base retail price plus an additional 20% of MC “free”. It is not the same thing.
Here’s my work:
The base retail price without “discounts” of any kind:
$5 – 720 MC
$50 – 7,200 MC
$100 – 14,400 MC
With “discounts”:
$5 – 720 MC
$50 – 8280 MC (15% added)
$100 – 17,280 MC (20% added)
If the discounts were off the PRICE instead of the MC added:
$5 – 720MC – 0% discount
$42.50 – 7,200MC – 15% discount
$80 – 14,400MC – 20% discount
Price per dollar without any kind of discount is 1 Dollar per 144 MC.
Price per dollar with added percentage ‘discount’:
$50 – 165.6 MC per dollar, or 1.656 MC per cent
$100 – 172.8 MC per dollar, or 1.728 MC per cent
Price per dollar with theoretical percentage subtraction from base retail price:
$42.50 – 169.4 MC per dollar, or 1.694 MC per cent
$80 – 180 MC per dollar, or 1.80 MC per cent
How much MC you would get from the base retail prices they give, if the discount perceived was on the actual price itself:
$50 – 8,470 MC (1,270 MC added, or 17.6%)
$100 – 18,000 MC (3,600 MC added, or 25%)
How much you’re actually saving with their bogus “discount”:
$50 for 8280 MC, you’re actually saving $7.50, or 13%
$100 for 17,280 MC, you’re actually saving $20, or 16.666%
Notice how the percentage discount increase of the $100 over the $50 is only 3.666% (repeating) and yet it has a percentage of a percentage discount increase of 33.333% (repeating, $20 compared to the previous discount of $15)?
That’s because the value of one MC per cent just dropped below a rounded up 0.7 of a cent to a rounded up 0.6 of a cent. That, is my point. The guy with a basic calculator and knowledge of division, who priced their premium credits like any other F2P game economy, used this fact to tell the big wigs what kind of “discount” they could offer for the players willing to fork over cash for game-exclusive digital currency.
To be fair, all currency in all of existence is meant to be worthless, that is the whole idea: to replace trade of valuable property and services with something that has no direct utility. It is only what the base unit of the currency is valued to be traded for that gives the whole system any power to those who accept the exchange. That’s economics for ya, another artificial game. Read the book How an Economy Grows and Why it Crashes by the Schiff brothers. It’s essentially a storybook explaining everything anyone needs to know about the concept of money. It also explains why the USA economy implodes regularly, and has a stupid amount of debt.
Too Long; Didn’t Read (TL;DR)
Think mathematics is the work of Satan or [insert another fairy tale villain here]? Well, here’s the consolidated, reduced evil version of the guide for you to quickly digest…. and then cleanse yourself of its sin later.
Spend only as much cash on the game as you think you’re going to realistically use Meteor Credits on stuff. The discounts are a bit deceiving and the only respectable discount increase is at the $100 mark, so that’s your reward for loving the hell out of the game, and you’re buying proof of it.
144 Meteor Credits is sold at $1 (one USD).
- Cosmetics Make Over (between $8 (a new chassis and paint) and $24 (a new everything))
- Hawken Credit Boost (3 days)
- XP Boost (3 days)
And only the last two because they’ll save you a ton of grinding time for the rest of the stuff you’re going to want to unlock and buy (without using MC). The best idea is to stick with the 3 day boosts. They have the best increase in discount, and can you really plan on playing the game a bunch in a solid month? Maybe….