Lower cost of canvas in general

Building condos is long and costly proroses. I am tired of farming in minigolf, ballrace, bolling, and on rare occasions the casino. I need shit loads blocks and therefore a lot money.

The devs have stated before that they would never change the price of items (besides the copycat tool). Also, how did you spell process so incorrectly?

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if they lower the price of canvases and other items, then that would basically screw over all the people that bought thousands of them already

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You are right about that

I am an lazy writer.

I honestly agree. “People always had to pay this much money” isn’t a reason to keep throttling player creativity. Better decrease the price sooner than later.

Obviously I don’t know the inner workings of TU’s systems, but couldn’t they also issue a mass refund if they were to lower the prices? A simple calculation to send players the difference when they log in doesn’t seem unrealistic so I don’t see the whole “People spent lots of money already” argument as valid.

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I think pricing changes ought to wait until all of the unit-earning activities have been implemented, meaning every Gameworld and Plaza attraction. Not only is then a suitable time for polishing each aspect of the project, there are going to be far more options for earning currency in the future. This is of course not to mention how Gameworlds have already received a buff in payout and how GMT had store sales that occurred every once in a while, which has a possibility of being brought back for Tower Unite.

The economy of this game is going to change a lot from now until then.

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I agree that canvases are expensive. People with regular life schedules would never grind that much to build large projects.
This is why TU’s building is so horrible. Only those who spend hundreds and thousands of hours seem to have condos worth browsing for more than a minute.

To be entirely honest, this game has no sense of balance or sensible economy at all.
The amount of skills and time you need to earn units in different games have no consistent basis around it.
To simply put, the balancing of payouts are terrible.

With that said, I agree that changes are need to be made. That’s what early access is for, but the developers seem to currently lack tools and framework that they should have built on to accommodate economy changes. Rookie mistake. You can clearly see this with the copycat tool fiasco how they basically duplicated the item in the manifest.

So people like Umbra had spent millions of units to buy canvases, and unless the developers work to refund the difference, it would be extremely unfair for those who had dedicated their time on them.

I’ve worked with local databases, foreign API databases and Steam Inventory before and it is certainly possible to create such tasks in a few days, but ,like Erickson said, the problem is economy and balance changes can happen at any point of Early Access and we can’t have those tasks ran every time the developers make changes.

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We’ve been balancing the economy very carefully. We have made efforts to keep all payouts for each games similar to the other games. It’s based around a few key factors: player skill, amount of time spent, and repetition.

We also recently adjusted payouts for Game Worlds: Steam :: Tower Unite :: Payouts Increased! Patch 0.3.4.2

We are limited by Steam inventory in this department. Changing the prices of items is totally possible, refunding back the difference is not (unless we track everything ourselves on our own database system, which is beyond the development time we wish to expend). We’ve always known this and planned accordingly. We also lose information on items when they are stacked (which is a requirement for using the Steam inventory system). Copycat was a decision I made to reduce it so players can more easily gain access to its useful tools.

It is difficult to really estimate or balance the economy without having every single item or every single game completed, but we’re refining and adding new payouts all the time. Minigames in Plaza will help, Arcade will help, achievements will help, and new game worlds will help.

Another thing to consider is that most big projects with canvases involve using canvas cubes to create walls. I am planning to make a canvas wall item that allows for insane scales, repeating textures, and more finer control. I also want to look into supporting adding doorway support for this item. This item will most likely not cost much and players can switch out their canvas cubes with it for their walls.

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I will build things of immeasurable scale. Thank you for this. Thank you all. God bless America.

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I’ve been playing this game way longer than the payout adjustments. My statements claiming that it lacks consistent basis is not empty. I’ve experimented a lot of things, and although the adjustment update definitely improved it, but I still think you guys need to value more of your player’s time.

Right now, TU is a game of grind if one’s focus is to build. I do think the new canvas item you mentioned will fix most of the problems, but it seems like more than necessary amount of contents are balanced around players who played this game for a long period of time, time that most can’t or won’t dedicate enough for just one game.

Locking a small amount of contents like Catsacks exclusive to high achievers is totally fine, but because of how awful the contents inside them are, it feels like a punishment or a letdown. (Yes, I know among other things Wowzela is one of rewards you can choose from Cosmic in the future). Those players support your game as much as they play, and you’re giving them a bunch of junks (apologies to those who like them for decorating) and diminishing returns at an above average rate. I’ve seen so many players spending 10 million units and not receiving any Cosmic Catsacks.

Please do note that I’m not suggesting you to improve the existing catsacks. It would only devalue their inventory even further. I’m simply making a note that the player’s times should be valued a lot more than the game makes it to be in terms of units rewarded, and that adjustments and balances are not up to a rewarding standard.

I’m a Steamworks developer and I believe quantity in Steam Inventory is relatively a new thing. How did you know about this and plan accordingly when it didn’t exist when you built this game?

Regardless, that’s why I said the game lack the framework that should have been built on in the first place. I’ve already acknowledged what’s happening and I understand the difficulty you’re facing. I do hope that you guys still find a solution before the game is officially launched, so it doesn’t make it too difficult to balance things better when existing owners are concerned.

I’m glad this is coming. Thank you for finally adding it. I just hope that we can see this soon enough.
Again, I’m a game developer myself and I’ve worked in an indie company even a little bigger than Pixetails with similar scheduling challenges. More than anyone, people like me outside of your team understand your situation, and I’m not here to demand new features.
I understand as much as you have given us about the difficulties your team face, but for the sake of voicing my concern, I’d like to add that it’s sad to see different issues being raised with sounding solutions, but only to get dismissed with “this is already planned”. I say “dismissed” because we never even see them in our client for longer than a year.

To eliminate issues raised in this thread, canvas walls will definitely help and I do hope it doesn’t get delayed too much.

We have been working very closely with Valve on this new feature. A good majority of the new API calls are due to us talking with them.

It’s a good thing we didn’t do this early as we would have had to make a completely different system now that stacks are a thing. We decided very early that we did not need this feature for our inventory implementation.


Our game is huge and we work on different parts of it to satisfy everyone we can. Walls have been a plan since the beginning of the project, but our goals shifted due to player desires and where we wanted to take the game. Canvas was a well-liked feature that now factor into custom walls, which lead us to the Canvas Wall. By saying things are planned, it’s not a dismissal at all - and shouldn’t be. If enough people clamor for a feature (even if it’s planned), it will alter how we prioritize the feature (and bring it up more in daily talks) and probably move it closer to release than initially planned.

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Maybe instead of lowering prices, each store could have a daily discount on a few random items. People love sales.

Store sales are planned.

https://trello.com/c/am2rQHvU/294-plaza-events

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