Red Intensity

Posted to GW2 Forums, I don't expect it to last.  Please comment there as well.

TLDR: Points are boiled down here, but I encourage you to ready the body.

The Right to Make Money

No one is arguing against any individual or company’s right to make money.  What is generally a point of contention is how that money is made.  If oil was a clean, safe resource to produce, with absolutely no environmental impacts and operated in more of an open market than say, OPEC, there would be very few people who could complain about how they do business.  If the market crash had not occurred due to irresponsible lending and selling of securities, no one would have an issue with how much money the banking industry makes.

What this piece attempts to do is describe how poorly these practices are for consumers (ie: you) not just in terms of yourself, but for the game as a whole, and your fellow players.

More Money than a Flat Rate?

The product could in theory be sold on the  Cash Shop for a flat rate, especially if they are already being offered for a limited time.  The question becomes, why not?

There are various reasons.  The return on investment (ROI) of the lottery boxes is higher than that of a flat rate.  The cost of a flat rate in order to equal the return that the lottery boxes provide, a flat rate would appear to be too expensive, with too large of a price tag to pay in one expense.  This goes towards the wedge of individual experience, further below.

If it were a flat rate, you could determine whether you liked the product enough for it to be worth the flat rate quoted.  Or you could consider the product to be worth no money at all, at which point the company has lost your sale and has to make up the difference from a user who wants the product.

The drop rates are unknown until someone bothers to invest and do the research, either by grinding a lot of boxes or buying them outright, the latter of which is a net-positive for the company.  And by the time the results are recorded and posted, the company has already seen sales from consumers assuming that the drop rate cannot be that bad.

The Wedges of "Individual Experience" and "Personal Responsibility"

Divisiveness is the greatest weapon of any entity against a collective to shield from its greatest weakness. You want the populace to be split on issues because if a high percentage of the body every aligns itself against you, you will feel its effects.

The randomness of these boxes creates a variable experience.  However unlikely it is, it is possible for a lucky person to get the products he needs by opening a mere ten boxes.  Suddenly, his experience is “this is the best thing EVER.”  For another individual, they could open box upon box upon box and spend a large amount of money without getting a single claim ticket.

Since experiences vary, its harder to reach a consensus on drop rates.  There will be people satisfied with their experience and others who feel as if its unfair.  Some will be accused of merely being “unlucky.”  Some will engage ad hominem, attacking other consumers for buying so many boxes irresponsibly, despite that being the intent of the company.  Strife ensues and its much harder to direct blame against one specific entity as the customers squabble amongst one another.

It is therefore much harder to get consensus on implementation than if the product had a flat rate.

They benefit from these wedges to keep their customer-base from coming to a consensus on anything, even as far as debate the value of the implementation instead of the value of the product being offered for the price.

Instilling Urgency Artificially: Limited-Time Offers

If you could just grind these out through normal activity (gameplay), there are always going to be those who stick with the grind over the shortcut of buying the product outright.  So to convert even a tiny percentage of those people (a net positive for the company), the company has a limited time offer on the product.  That is greed.  The limited time offer on the product is nothing more than a trick, to artificially give a sense of urgency.

In games like Tribes: Ascend everyone can get access to everything.  If just takes time.  You can choose to grind it out or you can buy it outright.  There is no limited time offer.  There are sales to incentivize a period where you would like to see more income, but a gun in Tribes: Ascend is never going to disappear because you did not buy it this month. It is a psychological trick meant to make you spend more money, and is an anti-consumer practice.

This operates much like the Disney Vault, in which Disney only releases a movie for a limited time every seven years or so on home media.  This increases the scarcity of the movie and instills urgency to purchase the movie when it eventually becomes available.

Worse than Gambling

Gambling can be viewed as an experience. You play the game and the money is the barrier for playing the game, with more money as a reward for winning.  One usually goes in knowing that you will likely lose money, but there's also a chance you could come out of ahead.  It can get impersonal, such as with video poker machines or slot machines, but generally, it's an experience at playing a game of chance.

Common wisdom is that the results are stacked in the house's favor, and there is generally a poor outlook on people who think they can regularly come out ahead by playing, or in other words, playing to win.

Or going to a Dave & Buster’s (or Chuck E. Cheese’s).  Sure, you may be attempting to win tickets for a particular prize, but you are usually paying as much for the experience of playing the games themselves.  You get the experience.  It is a poor value and poor sense to play at these places just to win tickets and win prizes, especially without a particularly good run of luck, you would end up buying the prize outright than trying to win it with tickets.

But these lottery boxes are different.  You are not paying to gamble for the experience, generally.  There is actually no experience, or at least less of one.  The similarity is very much like buying a box of cereal you hate because it has an item you really want.  At that point, you are just ripping open the box, pouring out the cereal for the product and potentially getting nothing for your trouble.  Rinse and repeat ad nauseum until the limited time offer (artificially created sense of urgency) expires or you get the prize you want.

The Company’s Gamble

The company has its own gamble going.

It is relying on the obfuscated nature of its game of chance, with its accompanying ability to change the odds at their leisure, to keep its customer base arguing and speculating over the factual details as much as the subjective details.  If you knew all the details, it would be much easier to base an argument for (or against) purchasing the product outright and there would be less coloring and argument from individual experiences.

It is relying on the artificial sense of urgency to push people into buying the product without spending a lot of time thinking about it, as well as pushing those who attempted grind it out to ultimately buy into the lottery boxes from the Cash Shop at the eleventh hour.

It is relying on human nature.  There are people out there who are gullible, naive, have little foresight and in some cases, an addiction to gambling.  These people with a clinical lack of self-control who will hand over money to engage in this process in hopes of getting the rush of a win.

Defending the Indefensible

The fact of the matter is that there will always be people attempting to defend these practices.  Usually, the sum of the arguments is that the company has a right to make money.  But why?  Why are these practices worthy of money?  And why do these people, who can only benefit as a consumer if these practices were revised to be less abusive, defend them?  Why implement these practices over a flat rate, offered through the Cash Shop, unless this lottery box implementation makes more money.

I tend to look towards a rather quotable piece of TotalBiscuit:

What the hell happened to gamers looking out for each other?  When did that suddenly fall by the wayside in favor of being an unemployed PR representative for a company that has been milking you for money?  When did this happen? Was this with the advent of the Internet?  Is this a recent thing?  I can’t exactly pinpoint when it happened, but fanboy culture has gotten to the point of being actively detrimental to video games.  It benefits nobody whatsoever other than the companies in question.

It’s wonderful that they’ve got a small little army of people that are willing to actively suppress dissent.  Actively lie about the game.  Actively try to character assassinate people.  Engage in ad hominems.  Slam them over social networks.  Downvote videos.  Lie in the comments section.  It’s wonderful if they’re willing to do that, if you happen to be [the company] or any other company that has people like that.  It’s terrible for the rest of us.  It’s really really bad.

…

Gamers don’t look out for each other anymore.  And that’s really depressing.  The last thing that should be happening is gamers actively trying to mislead other gamers because they want to feel better about their purchase.  Or because they want more players in their game, even though the game is clearly not up to spec.  Where do you get off doing that?  That is morally bankrupt.  That is ethically unsound in the worst possible way.  It sucks, and you suck for doing it.

People who defend these practices want the games they play to succeed regardless of how the company in question behaves, because they have some investment.  They either want the game to have more players, be more successful so it will stick around for a long time, get more development, release expansions, etc, etc.

TLDR: Ultimately, it boils down to the idea that the lottery boxes offer a better return on investment than just simply slapping a flat rate on the product.  It adds nothing to the product itself and is just a method for increasing profits, without doing anything.  It is a form of predation on consumers, it should not be tolerated, but there will always be people willing to defend a company’s decision either out of apathy, a belief it does not nor will ever affect them or some other selfish reason.

Edit: I lost a ton of formatting moving from Google Docs, and I'm adding it back in.

Would like my Norn Guardian to look like this...



Pick by Greyall. Check out his Deviant page for more awesomeness

The fanboys and girls here, along with the paid sockpuppets, always get riled up if you criticize their baby.

I say amen brother to the OP's premise that basing a PVE MMO on instanced PVP is pure BS.

As game publishers rush to monetize every little aspect of MMO's thanks to microtransactions, they tend to dumb down what was once rich and diverse.

It results in sad situations like we have in GW2 where many combat skills which were obviously much stronger when first designed but were nerfed to keep it possible for the squishyest caster to go toe to toe with the tankyest melee character. The end result is that many of the skills are a waste of keyboard space or so worthless that although they are broken, neither players or Anet care enough to want them fixed.

Despite all of Anet's efforts to 'balance' all the classes and kill the trinity, GW2 has a new trinity: warriors, guardians, and Mesmers.

They are the goto classes for dungeon runs,  always welcome, and often preferred.  You simply don't see things like "LFM COF, esp rangers."

Sure you can PUG dungeons with any mish-mash of classes, but if you have bought into the grind Anet requires to get any significant reward from dungeons, then you will min-max things and want to bring the new trinity to speed things up.

PVP is already instanced away completely from PVE in GW2, why not separate them entirely and un-bundle the class balances?  The answer is surely to keep development costs as low as possible.  

Although I agree with the sentiment, sadly Anet and most other current MMOs will not change this situation.  Breaking PVE free of PVP constraints is going to have to be left to a new MMO that is truly revolutionary.

I don't think this proves what you think it proves at all, OP.

What this proves is that predatorial, exploitative, insidious business models can exist in both pay-to-own and subscription models. What we have to watch out for in the future isn't the financial model, but whether any of the people involved have acted like sharks. I know I won't trust an NCsoft product ever again. Blade & Soul, WildStar, and any future titles are all off my list solely because they're NCsoft. With NCsoft being obviously owned by Nexon at this point, it's clear that future games will only be more predatory, not less.

And I'm not the kind of sheep who'll roll over and take bad punishment up the butt. I actually respect myself enough to not stand for that. So NCsoft isn't getting any more of my money. So long, ArenaNet. It was nice knowing you when you were you. Back when you were the ArenaNet that put together the likes of Prophecies, when you actually believed in your passions, rather than the shameless construct of exploitation you've become today.

Peoples reactions so far:



(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻)

I have over 3,000 hours in Guild Wars 1 which was my first real MMO (for as much of one as it was with instances and all) and enjoyed every minute of it. Even after 7 years I still found myself pushing other characters through the stories and revisiting locations just because they were fun or interesting. I did alot of Heroes' Ascent PvP and elite areas, never speedran anything and had fun.

Sure Anet did did not build up a good reputation with all the speedrun and skill nerfs fromt he players that abused it but they overall did not affect me as a normal player. Sure major changes happened to classes I played but I was able to adapt and never complained like many.

With Guild Wars 2 I think they lost touch with their players which in my opinion has been happening more and more since Factions. With Factions and beyond grinding starting becoming more and more of the game, alliance battles were optional but then Nightfall and Eye of the North required it to progress the story at all. That was fine because areas that were interesting helped to facilitate this and even with a huge requirement it was not that burdensome.

Bugs got reported and things got addressed in a timely manner, even if some were delayed. But now it seems with the introduction of the gem store (and whose fault this is really Anet or NCSoft I am not sure) but I think that is now guiding decisions. I have never even stepped foot in Cathedral of Flames but now I am punished for those who did. Say I am playing in Orr, which I have issues with I will go into later, events are everywhere, just playing the areas normally equals heavily reduced rewards if any even though it isn't farming. In Orr I get frustrated as it is by the high density of enemies and low respawn time. I will kill one enemy, get up to use the bathroom for not even a minute and I am under attack again, or running through an area just to get pulled out of nowhere. This is not fun.

I understand MMOs have grind but when they repeatedly said it was not required outside of costmetic items I believed it. But then they gave exotics and legendary weapons better stats, this is not cosmetics only, sure you don't need the extra bonuses to play but it had led to people only forming dungeon groups with those who are "properly equipped" meaning all exotics. So I am stuck not being able to experience content because I do not farm or waste cash in the gem store for exotics.

This is not to say I want to even do dungeons. I have done all paths of Caudacus Manor and did not enjoy it one bit, same with Catacombs story mode. They are not fun. I would rather have longer dungeons than overpowered enemies that cause me to spend more time respawning and running back to where I was (along with my team) than doing the actual content. The rewards also are not worth it without a huge time investment working on goals that are not fun to even reach. Another point to make is all the groups are speedrun groups that I see in areas spamming map chat. For people like me who want to actually experience the content this again makes doing it impossible. Sure guilds could help or friends but we all know this is not always possible.

I have just under 200 hours in and am losing interest since there is being less reason to play or stay interested. I am fine with how dynamic events are, peopel say it isn't what was promised but I have no issue with them. same with story and level progression. But when they start sucking the fun out of the game and almost requiring gems to be purchased I have to say no. I stuck with Guild Wars because of the no monthly fee and this was a sneaky way to get it in there.

I also find the lack of bugs being fixed disheartening as if they do not care about the game. They spent so long fixing the trading post initially and now nerfing drop rates (which I had issue with since the start) that bugs like a skill point in Malchor's Leap and other areas go unfixed. Granted they may not know the cause or cannot fix it easily but at least attempt and more specific patch notes is in order. There is a lack of communication now between Anet and the players.

On the subject of PvP here is also my opinion. With all the types of PvP from the first game there was enough variety to keep it interesting. In Guild Wars 2 I find world vs world to not be fun at all, it does not appeal to me. I am left with sPvP which has the same few maps with the same goal, the variations are so small it isn't even worth mentioning so it is not as viable as a game mode in my opinion as the PvP from the original Guild Wars.

Overall I find the lack of care on Anet (or NCsoft if they pull the strings), unfun content, limited rewards with a major selling point (dyanmic events) to be making me lose faith in Anet and not want to play or purchase more of their games and I am sure others feel the same.

I can see farming and botting being handled by Anet properly (anti-farm code, bans, etc) but is affecting too many legitimate players. I think that since many posts I have read here and on the official forums say very similar things that Anet/NCsoft should take notice. The game should not be easy but it should be fun. If they think playing normally should be penalized it would be nice for someone to come forward and officially anounce how we should be playing the game we all purchased with our hard earned money. At least then there is a base to work off of rather than nerfs and restrictions just being thrown around half thought out. But if they do this will more people leave thus making the game a failure? Who knows but it would be nice to hear something official about the issues that so many people with legitimate reasons are complaining about.

Hope we get a shot at Logan at some point ... man , how i wish i could kill him.

*deep breaths* How in hell is this a good thing Arenanet?

I had hoped guildies who could'nt get on our main server could just go where they liked and enjoy the full benefits of membership with us. But noooo heaven forbid people actually want to do things together and reap the rewards together. They've now go to go and earn all the perks themselves too.

They can't share in the guild bank, they cant donate money there. If you want buffs then you are so out of luck, go earn them. Want an emblem or weapon markings. Tough. Sorry that everyone else in the guild has got one, but you know you were too slow and ended up on another server.

I am just simply amazed at how little Areanet seem to regard their players, the guilds and the community. It's just one farce after another atm which is a massive, massive shame because the game mechanics are great but the game itself has no heart or soul anymore.

XgreatArtist, on 13 August 2012 - 08:35 AM, said:

im done with ea...

EasymodeX, on 10 August 2012 - 02:44 PM, said:

1. People play overpowered classes to win.

2. People who need to win need ego gratification.

3. People who need ego gratification need to call others inferior by blaming them for losing with no consideration of the circumstances.


edit:

I'm just sayin... balancing is needed, thats pretty much what the last month or two has been about.

My interactions with EA have all been fairly positive, and I'll echo the thoughts on WAR. Sometimes you just get shitty developers, so please stop blaming the publishers just because the developers couldn't design worth a damn.

The Mass Effect debacle was all on the lead writer and executive producers' heads.

*Moved my post from another thread.  It's more relevant here.



Right now, playing a Mesmer is like having had sex with someone long fantasized about, only to discover it really was really not that amazing. Oh, it was great to finally rip off all the clothes of preconception and finally get down to it. But there was something each step of the way that just ruined the overall experience.

The lackluster illusion AI was like the profession not knowing how to kiss. Weapon skill and utility cast times, including slow-mo casting animations, as well as mantra recharging at the speed of molasses, was like poor hygiene. The various playstyles was like foreplay with too much teeth. There's something really good about the Frenzy, but the Scepter just didn't measure up. And each encounter feels like it was over before it barely begun.

Well, I toughed it out. I made the best of the experience based upon the reality of what it was. Now it's like I'm waking up the day after, with the Mesmer in bed beside me snoring like a band-saw, panting morning breath, and drooling all over the pillow. I'm staring up at the ceiling and wondering if everything that happened during the tumultuous night of the BWEs and Stress Tests was really worth it.

Maybe it will get better! Jon Peters said changes are coming! Or is that just another kind of fantasy: clinging to the idea that if I just hold on a little bit longer then everything will be all right. Based upon the changes experienced so far, how trustworthy are more promises from the Design team now? How long, and what, will it take for the transformation from frog to prince to finally happen?

I don't know. I still want to like it. But at this point, I can't decide if the experience was enough for me to brag, "I got laid!" and hang around to see if the little that was good about it gets even better ... or if I should just grab my things and quietly sneak out before Release, because the bad stuff sometimes really made it more like having been just plain ol' fashioned screwed.

I dont care anymore, im pretty bored of the hype.. Anet is dragging it out too long for my tastes and it will only get worse!

I changed my vote to 2013 just because i could..

After staying away from this thread for a few days because of pure frustration due to the lack of information from Anet I decided to come back to see if there was any news besides the stress test... (just sitting my self up for disappointment I know)

I can not agree with more ...

tyj2012, on 27 June 2012 - 12:49 AM, said:

Now, I do not believe that Anet should rush an unfinished product. I know what I bought. I pre-purchased a game with no release date other then the infamous "2012" & "When its ready." My Problem with Anet is how unprofessional they are. No company, does not matter what industry you are in, should lack so much in communication with their customers (THE PEOPLE WHO PAY THEM). I really don't care if the release is 12/31/12. All we would like to see is a release or at the very LEAST a time frame smaller then 2012. If that is to much to ask for, then the game should not have been up for pre-purchase, period.
For those who are going to say "why don't you just ask for a refund" well, I will. If we do not see a release date after the third BWE I will demand a refund. It is not because I need the money (and I will probably buy the game when it is actually released) but rather it is about how you run a business. And folks, for those of you who do not know, this is the incorrect way. No company deserves a full payment for their service or product before it is released with no further information regrading when the product will be available after this much time. I have not played GW1, so I do not know how Anet has been like outside of GW2. But from what I have seen, they need to get their stuff straight.

Honestly? what I think? I have reached the stage where I do not care anymore.
The hype is at it's lowest personally for me.
I am not very excited about the Stress test, and if the next BWE has the same content, I might just give it a miss.
I know it's about finding bugs blah blah, but until they give us something else, it's just meh.
It's getting wiped, so why try? after 2 BWE's of bug reporting etc.
They have those starter zones practically nailed now. Why keep it going?
They have to add Sylvari or Asura soon or else they risk those zones not being up to scratch.
They seem pretty relaxed about it, which makes me think November, even though it is unlikely.