Before you feel like this will explain everything, this post is merely filled with my thoughts and half discussions with people about V3 and its lack of progress.
Introduction
In the Firestone discord, “V3” has been mentioned 25,180 times in one form or another, and the earliest time it was mentioned, 13th of June 2017. And the first bit of confirmation that V3 was in the works was released by Fergie, the 7th of July 2017:
Ever since that day, I can say with a large degree of certainty that the community’s reception to V3 has dwindled, from people claiming broken promises, to even just below the post by MrFergie on the same day by Sharkfish:
How wrong he was, V2 was still clearly in the lime light, it’s Firestone’s crowning glory. For as incredibly and boundary pushing was V1, V2 was were things took off. Where streamers discovered this community, where we reached the front page for numerous things, where the player-base began to exponentially grow. Which is exactly why I feel, V3 has been pushed back even further.
Follow the Money
V2 is a moneymaking machine, and Roblox isn’t the same as it was when it released. No longer do we see people make the front page with a variant of SFoTH or another Ro-pokemon clone, it’s clear cut advertiser friendly content, or in other words, moneymaking machines. And the introduction of DevEx has most definitely helped boost this goal. By no means is this me attacking people for wanting a payout, at the end of the day the work these developers do does warrant incredible payment, but it can also stagnate a development cycle.
A leap but I hope the idea is still there, look at GTA 5, Rockstar’s crowning glory. 110 Million Copies sold internationally, across nearly 3 generations of hardware. During this life cycle they also released Red Dead Redemption 2, a positively received game owing to it’s incredible detailing, story line, and amazing graphics. But saw it’s downfall when it’s online variant seemed to be getting silent patches to make the player want to purchase more in game currency, where hunting rates were lowered, and costs rose for items like ammo and assorted others. The same system that plagues GTA: Online, found its way into the heart of another Rockstar project, and it feels like it’s creeping into Firestone V2.
For as much as I hope to doubt this is entirely the reason for V3’s delay, the recent addition of new boats back into the game hasn’t really helped the case for it not being that reason. For as incredible as it is to have boats back into V2, there was clearly an attempt to gain some serious coin off the update.
The Yacht
The recently added Yacht costs $285500, which is obviously the most expensive boat we have in game. The big thing is, it was added after the main boat update, people were hyped for the Speedboat and Fishing Boat, $64075, and $52250 respectively. People quite obviously could’ve piled together to save up for the Yacht if they knew it existed, but it came out later, leaving the only option to buy in game currency, after buying Robux.
Maths
To buy a single Yacht, assuming we have 0 in our wallet and bank account, it takes 285500 to purchase. Using the rates of payment to get Firestone Cash, we get:
285500 = 2 x 100000 + 20000 x 4 + 2500 x 2 + 500 x 1
Therefore, translating it now in terms of Robux, substituting in each related value of robux:
= 2 x 5000 + 1350 x 4 + 250 x 2 + 60
=15960 Robux
And then to translate this into REAL CASH:
10000 Robux = AUS$144.99
4500 Robux = AUS$71.99
2 x 800 Robux = AUS$27.98 or 1700 Robux for AUS$28.99
Giving us a grand total of either: AUS$244.96 or AUS$245.97 to purchase the Yacht starting from nothing. It also serves purely to carry passengers with no real benefit, unlike the Yacht in GTA:Online where you can at least do missions. This is a tangent but during the duration of all this taking place, V3 has been “updated” in the background, purely.
Finishing Up
Whenever questioned about why V3 hasn’t been updated it’s always, “It’s been updated, just not pushed to be released for testing” now for something expected to be the new flagship game for Firestone, you’d assume we’d want it tested inside and out, every single way from Sunday, but no, V2 instead gets updated with new/old features being reworked. I really don’t have any issue with this, I got V2 Early access and V3 early access, and came along from Norfolk, I understand that development takes time. But this feels like a drastic shift.
A few months ago, Envelope and Path I believe commented that they’d be the only ones touching up V2 and then focusing on V3 development, that it was close. But the actions of late don’t seem to match up. V3 still feels like a world away, with broken server joining, cars which haven’t been updated to the newest chassis at all even though there have been leaps and bounds with it’s development.
Conclusion
V2 is a moneymaker, it’s successful at what it does and seemingly does it well. Even where patch jobs are needed it’s still this community’s heart. Maybe I’m clouded by the fog of years past, seeing trailers for Norfolks revival of an AED coming to life requesting to shock and cutting to black. Maybe it’s the years put into this community that make me want to believe that V3 is truly coming, but we need another year on it. This is not a call for V3 to just be released overnight, but just saying “It’s happening, don’t worry, V2 is getting polished up and V3 is still being worked on” would be enough to quell the fears of a lot of people, myself very much included.
But, maybe Chuba is right, maybe V2 is truly their final project.
