The Brawl Store

Honestly, this thread has been a long time coming for me. I decided initially to leave things be and see if they were automatically changed after the EULA enforcement began in the Summer last year. However, nothing seems to have actually changed and so I've decided to go ahead and post a suggestion about this. I could just outright propose my suggestion right now, but to get a real sense of the problem you need to know some basic economics. I'm sure the staff I'm suggesting to already know this, but for those not well versed I'm going to give you what you need to understand the problem and then hopefully in response to this we can all work out what the best option is.

Ok, to really get a grasp of the economics behind brawl, you need to understand that brawl is actually a business, not a server to have fun on. The higher brawl staff get paid, and make money off the server. This doesn't necessarily mean that Chap's entire income comes solely from brawl, but it does mean that brawl is operated as a business, not as a regular minecraft server. As a business, brawl doesn't seek to make everyone's games more enjoyable (although that's what they tell you) it's to make a profit. They do this through providing a product that the consumers (that's us, the community) want. In this case, the products are on the brawl store- the ranks and the boosters. There are other ways brawl makes money but this is irrelevant for the suggestion so I'll skip over that. These products are sold by them, and bought by us in a market. Brawl wants to supply and sell as many as possible at the highest price possible, whereas we demand the products whilst trying to pay as little as possible. In this case, it's a war between our demand and their supply, which ultimately meets in the middle. In a perfect world, this is where everyone wants to be, because everyone's relatively happy, we'll pay for that rank, and brawl will supply it to us at that level. The last thing you need to understand is that brawl's total revenue (the money it receives on selling depends entirely on the number of products sold multiplied by each products price. In a perfect world, revenue would also be highest at this meeting point, as lot's of people want to buy a rank, and brawl can sell each at a decent price.

Unfortunately, the reality is a mess. Why you ask is this system a mess? Well, we only need to look at the brawl store:


Now, that seems like a lot of money, but as long as you get what you pay for, then really this doesn't matter. Unfortunately, when you look at the perks the people that buy these classes get:

Spoiler: Benefits

ON THE FORUMS:
Lifetime VIP, MVP, and ELITE Benefits:

• Access to premium rank forum sections
• Ability to create a custom user title
• Removal of timed post limit restriction
• Can delete your own posts without time limits
• Ability to give rank honor rating
• Can view forum bans list page
• Increased member tags per message
  • Regular: 5
  • VIP: 8
  • MVP: 12
  • ELITE: 18
• Can organize medal display order
• Increased avatar upload size
  • Regular: 51.2 KB
  • VIP: 81.2KB
  • MVP: 121.2KB
  • ELITE: 161.2KB
• Can upload attachments to conversations
• Increased maximum conversation recipients
  • Regular: 6
  • VIP: 8
  • MVP: 12
  • ELITE: 16
• Ability to select a persistent shoutbox chat color
• [ELITE Only] Can upload an animated avatar (.gif)

VIP IN-GAME

• Global:

• Access to most cosmetics (/cosmetics)
  • Excludes death particle, halo particle, and firework creator.
• Access to design a wardrobe (/wardrobe)
• Access to choose a pet (/pets)
  • Cave spider, chicken, cow, ocelot, pig, sheep, silverfish, wolf, and zombie
• Bright blue colored name above your head and in chat.

• Wild West:

• Access to change your horse's style, color, and name

• Party:

• Receive a fireworks display when you win.

• Minecraft Build:

• Ability to have 2 active maps

MVP IN-GAME

• Global:
  • Access to all cosmetics (/cosmetics)
  • Access to design a wardrobe (/wardrobe)
  • Ability to enable disco armor
  • Access to the firework creator (/fireworks)
  • Access to choose any pet (/pets)
  • Blue colored name above your head and in chat.
  Wild West:
  • Access to change your horse's style, color, and name
  Party:
  • Receive a fireworks display when you win.
  Capture the Flag:
  • Access to switch teams at all times (/switch).
  Minecraft Build:
  
  • Ability to have 5 active maps.

​

ELITE IN-GAME

Global:

• Access to all cosmetics (/cosmetics)
• Access to design a wardrobe (/wardrobe)
• Ability to enable disco armor
• Access to the firework creator (/fireworks)
• Access to choose any pet (/pets)
• Green colored name above your head and in chat.

Wild West:

• Access to change your horse's style, color, and name

Party:

• Receive a fireworks display when you win.

Capture the Flag:

• Access to switch teams at all times (/switch).

Minecraft Build:

• Ability to have 10 active maps.

It starts to make you wonder, well are these benefits actually worth up to $240? Before the EULA changed, these ranks could potentially be worth it because they gave you access to a load of classes (even though some said back then that it wasn't worth it). The sad truth is, with brawl now only being able to sell cosmetics, these ranks are now only worth a fraction of the money you pay for them, and I doubt many people would actually pay for them in their current state. In my opinion, I wouldn't buy these in a million years. These prices are in fact so high that you're making it very difficult for anyone to pay the costs. Sure the price means 1 sale gets you a decent amount of money but because of the huge lack of sale numbers, brawl is unfortunately making a fraction of the total revenue each month it could be if only it lowered the prices of these particular ranks. The same thing applies to other stuff in the brawl store as well, like the boosters to a lesser extent. I can't imagine anyone to really wanting to pay $19 for a 6 hour credit boost unless you're trying to encourage people to join the gamemode as an event (looking at you @_featherpaw_ ). I can't imagine many players playing for 6 hours straight anyway so no-one is really going to want to pay for a 6 hour boost they can't make full use of. The fact is, these ranks somewhat cater to what the audience wants (arguably there are better potential boosters you could make like unlocking classes for everyone for a certain time etc.) but the prices make none of these items actually worth paying for. No wonder brawl is having trouble financially, because the way they get money from the playerbase right now doesn't make sense economically! If they were to reform and change the prices of the ranks in the store, they would have a much easier time financially because people would buy more of classes, seeing them as actually worth buying for what they receive in return.

Please feel free in response to this thread state whether you agree with me or not, and what kind of price range you think you'd be personally willing to pay for a rank, because if the brawl staff do reform the system, they're gonna need to know what kind of price range they should be looking at for the benefits their ranks provide.

 

That's part of the problem here. The store isn't going to make a lot of money in the current format, the ranks aren't worth buying, so nobody buys them! I should have been more specific with the higher staff, I agree