User blog comment:BooYaah15/Merit Points Are Dumb/@comment-25646419-20161122224151

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If you are genuinely only 5 Town Points away, consider responding to Achilles' post on the subreddit. He helped out a user who was 5TP away last night... Maybe he can help out now and if not, we'll have to see if BMG is going to take a different action.

As for why Merit Points were introduced:

"Merit Points: I realize from your guys perspective you are bummed about Merit Points. You use to be able to unlock everything in the game for free anytime you wanted to if you played enough and now you either have to purchase some Town Points or wait for the newer cosmetics to go onto free rotation. You can still unlock 75% of the shop for free, you can play the entire game for free and even the new skins will eventually be free as we rotate cosmetics, but hey we are trying to encourage people to support the game a little for the newest cosmetics so were scummy money grabbing assholes. I get it.

Having a two tiered currency allows us to have better control over the economy and be able to easily determine what items are free and what aren't free. We will be able to offer promotion sales for Town Points which we couldn't do before because having an 80% off sale on a promotion that can be bought with free currency wouldn't work. Were also going to be able to offer double Merit Point weekends and Town Point sales.

I'm sorry some of you are so mad because the system is different now but this is how FTP games work.... we have to make some money somewhere to keep things running. Despite what the internet haters out there think we aren't rolling in money and we have to constantly stress about new systems and ARPU to keep the game running and people employed." (Reference)

"Our Rackspace bill is over $10,000 a month. We also employ 5 programmers (including Blake and myself) a CM (Brandon) an artist and have a contract artist and contract sound engineer. Before people start raging at how we overpay... everyone at the company is underpaid by industry standards, we offer no benefits (health insurance, life insurance, dental) and no 401k benefits. I don't even know how we have such a loyal and devoted staff. We really got lucky and they are dedicated game developers.

Then keep in mind Steam and PayPal take a decent chunk of all purchases made.

Maybe if you take a second to step into our shoes you can see how much it hurts to have your community abuse you for trying to improve ARPU a little bit. We aren't like these AAA games that have ARPU perfected and make fuck tons of money." (Reference)

"People see the big numbers and make assumptions. It's hard to talk them out of it. People don't realize that Kickstarter takes 10% and then another 60% goes to manufacturing and shipping. They think we just put this money into our pockets." (Reference)