|
|
Post by Gunga_Din on Feb 14, 2015 22:52:34 GMT
P2W should stop being used. Its pay to have an advantage.
If you start the game with housing and more bank slots, then u will have advantage. You won't have to allocate gold to bank slots and housing which will lead you to have funds available for other aspects of the game.
If I didn't have to worry about buying a house, I could use all my gold to purchase better gear, more potions etc. Thus, that player will have a head start in developing his character and progressing in the game.
If there are 2 people who PvP and one already has a house and plenty of bank storage, he then could use all of his gold / resources to maximize his PvP potential and gain advantage.
Same for a crafter, if I have a house and max bank slots then I'll be able to hoard more resources and items for crafting. I will be able to level that crafter faster then a person with less storage. That crafter will most likely increase his skill quicker and become established sooner than a player without those advantages. Like UO, the first Grandmaster crafters were always well known and favored. They had vendors setup sooner etc and this leads to an advantage.
I
ts that simple. ADVANTAGE which could = winning in whatever your goal is (owning a house, becoming the 1st grandmaster, making more gold etc).
Games have to stop selling advantage, that creates the imbalance between people. I have no problem if everyone starts the game equally and then that advantage is earned, but to start off with such an advantage just puts a sour taste in my mouth.
I mean, they are selling players towns too ! Those 1st towns will have an edge in drawing in people, selling from vendors and building guilds. Just like UO, whoever started setting up players towns the quickest became well known and had more visits then towns that came after.
Don't you think Paxlair will have the edge in recruiting players if they have this mega town already setup? They already run events in the alpha !! Its a huge advantage. How would I compete with a Paxlair if it takes my guild 6 months to try and build a town. Are people gonna visit my new town or just go Pax and spend their gold their on vendors they have known from day 1? SotA is just gonna suck for new players and those looking to make a name for themselves.
|
|
|
|
Post by Gunga_Din on Feb 14, 2015 23:29:41 GMT
Wasteland 2 made over 4 mil with no problem. Maybe SotA would have made 10 mil if it was a single player RPG without housing bullshit.
|
|
|
|
Post by Membrane_on_Vacation on Feb 15, 2015 0:40:03 GMT
I'm not quite sure on the housing. I actually see housing, and decorating and good old general Carebearing the reason they ARE making so much money. It is a bunch of people who wan't Sims / Second Live in an Ultima game which are pushing this fucker into the black hole. The UO crowd seems to be stronger than they thought, I suppose that is why PvP is looking like it will go UOesque at the moment. I think I agree with Gunga on the post, but really it all comes to who you are and how you define Win. Not an easy thing. If all you want is a house and a place to pop out cutsie emotes, then SotA is very pay to win. If you want to play through an SPO campaign, it is not. Some of the advantages in SotA are getting on the pretty big side, I saw it early, one of the worst things is them taking their direction only from the highest levels of pledges. Not even Dev+ people, but higher. Wilfield/PAX is the perfect example. But Gunga!! You were PAX when you were in SotA!  |
|
|
|
Post by Mordecai on Feb 15, 2015 1:32:53 GMT
I agree Gunga Din. Only aesthetic items should be sold imo.
|
|
|
|
Post by Gunga_Din on Feb 15, 2015 2:57:39 GMT
Wasteland 2 made over 4 mil with no problem. Maybe SotA would have made 10 mil if it was a single player RPG without housing bullshit. That's a variable that's hard to quantify. What we can say, for sure, is the aspects that have attracted most people to SotA are that it can be played in an MMO style and that it had persistent housing. You only need to spend time in the SotA community to see that. More people want it to be UO than a single player Ultima. To me, there's just as much chance it would have made less money without the MMO aspect, than more money. Yea its hard to say. I think a better plan would have been to make a successful SotA single player RPG and THEN ! SotA Online Full MMO. I understand the draw of the words MMO and UO, but I believe we would have been better off with just an RPG. |
|
|
|
Post by Housewife Brittish on Feb 15, 2015 3:16:31 GMT
Whatever you want to label it, the person who pays more money definitely will be miles ahead of someone that doesn't. From money, storage, vendor spots, prime housing locations, tools, pretty much everything but heir level. It's taken so far that you can pay money and pretty much not have to obtain anything else in game but level up your character and do the storyline, it's almost end game. I think they should of only sold cosmetics only. What really gets me is if you bring this up certain places, it stirs up a shit storm of fanboys preaching that the pledges and web stores sole purpose of existing is to support the game and it's not about what you get. What's funny about this is that I see the exact same people crying that their lot isn't big enough, their building needs work, that they deserve this that and everything else. I'd guess that if these materialist people weren't receiving all this crap that we wouldn't be seeing such high pledgers, even though they will try to pretend differently. Pay to be a fanboy?
|
|
|
|
Post by kb on Feb 15, 2015 18:37:39 GMT
I think for a lot of people, P2W is a very vague term that means "pay for an advantage" (even if winning overtly is not possible)... I've seen it used this way, and I have a tendency to use it that way too. It's not really meant to say people can "win" at an MMO or anything like that. Just remarking about the state of how "even" things are in respect to players competing against each other (be it directly or indirectly).
In some games, things are pretty even. There might be differences according to classes, starting areas, RNG/luck, ability to find viable static groups to grind with, etc. There are even things like hardware differences, connection speed/latency differences, and the physical state and abilities of the gamer that come in to play to account for reasons that some players are more competitive and "successful" when measured against other, but in traditional games, none of that stuff was purposefully built into the game as a funding mechanism. There are games that take stuff like that (and other things, like end-game kind of content like... housing as one example), and they cut it up and sell pieces of it to you via micro transaction. So, those with the funds and willingness to "cheat" or take a "shortcut" can bypass a lot of grind and boring shit to get the reward instantly.
In the worst cases, the game at every turn is geared toward manipulating the player's desire for the reward at the end of the task (and aversion to all the boring work it takes to normally get there), so there are plenty of ways that the game offers up "quick and painless" shortcuts like buying a house on the add-on store, or just going all out on a pledge package (because holy shit they include XYZ! ... a $1500 value if purchased separately!!!!111!11!111). It feeds into our human struggles with classism, greed/avarice, lust, narcissism, etc. and exploits the very worst parts of us.
In the best cases, the game itself is fun to play (so many players don't actually mind the "grind" of earning stuff, if they have the time and are playing the game anyway), and players sort of buy things mostly for vanity's sake (i.e., cosmetic items... like cool skins for armor, character models, weapon skins, etc.) almost out of devotion for the game and that it is given away for free. Items that give an advantage, as it were, are ultimately pretty meaninglgess in the game (i.e., they offer a very minor advantage and normally players pick them up because there is some sort of cosmetic coolness factor to the item). They mostly offer something like a cool visual effect when gathering a particular type of resource as their "exclusive" property that makes them worth it to the player to pay real money to obtain an item like that....
I don't think it is possible to "win" at an MMO. I think something like that is ultimately in the eyes of a player. Even in games that sell huge advantages that totally distort the playing field and make the game miserable for lone wolf newbies without a prayer for success, the people who shell out the big bucks to be OP are normally kind of sad (and are hardly somebody I'd normally call a winner). I know a lot of people pledged mostly to see a cool game made, they weren't all about Lording it up over their serfs in their POT, demanding that the peasants have 20 banks spaces while they start the game with every slot unlocked. I know many of us pledged accepting some of the evils of the pledge packages, but wanting the game to transcend that bullshit, even as some like me behaved like a fool to all sides of the community quite a number of times. But, I really did pledge to SotA hoping they could pivot away from the "pay for an advantage" stuff and more toward making something so exceptional and special that it sort of funded itself via a true altruism/grassroots love for it (not this astroturf steam review bullshit)...
I admit that I got caught up in the rewards side of things a few times (badly), but I woke up to what I see are critical problems after considering a lot of things that a certain member posted about the row lots/Lord of the Manor changes (especially when it came to how they just justified the changes and tried to "smooth things over" by handing out crafting stations like candy to current Lords). This game caters to Whales, unabashedly (and those of us who bought into it hoping that to change sort of deserve our bad experience, tbh). This game is clearly about catering to the most hardcore of fans who will spend over $10,000+ on a game during the lifetime of playing that title. It looks like that is their plan and they are fully committed to it.
Without divulging too much info (thought I'll probably be banned in due time anyway), there is some stuff in Dev+ that shows what is widely known since the last pledge changes: a very large majority of the game's financing coming from a very small portion of its user base. Some players seemed impressed by numbers (not exact: but, along the lines of 5% of pledges accounting for 2/3 funding), but I found those numbers horrifying. Those numbers do not include Steam sales either (nor does the counter on the homepage), so it is probably less skewed toward most of the funding coming from the higher dollar pledge amounts, but the games funding numbers has shown continued expansion/growth in these high dollar pledge areas. So it appears that their strategy of catering to a niche crowd with ample disposable income (and showering them with rewards/etc) is initially viable. I doubt its longevity, but the POTs and new higher end pledges have proven popular, so I wouldn't expect Portalarium to deviate from this course any time soon.
In conclusion, sorry for the wall of text/rant and for veering off topic so badly. I got shit on my chest that I thought I could ignore. Didn't mean to "rant", but that is kinda my tragic flaw (and a big part of why I was doomed with this community before I ever even tried). The thing that bothers me is I can still see some promise in the game, in some of the graphics/music/aspects of its world. Even though I know some things are disappointing and pretty meh, there are flashes of promise that make me all the more depressed when I see how hard they are pushing the "pay for advantage" side of things (and how it appears to be an effective fund-raising model). Sorry to OP if my rant on the forum, where I used "pay2win" indiscriminately made the points I was making look bad. This is why I rarely speak up anymore, why I hate posting (in forums in general), because I suck at concision and my shitty wall of texts do more damage to the side I take than they should.
|
|
|
|
Post by Housewife Brittish on Feb 15, 2015 19:01:12 GMT
It's ok by me to go off topic, I do it all the time. I agree with you that the graphics and music aren't that bad at all, I like it. How they utilize textures in the wrong way and the hype around some of the keyboard warrior "bards" is a different story though.
|
|
|
|
Post by Membrane_on_Vacation on Feb 16, 2015 1:01:23 GMT
Fine by me and I hope we won't be topic nazis here  To me the final nail in the coffin for this Pay for Advantage swing was when the SotA intro first came out, I wrote about this not long ago on the blog. insanemembrain.wordpress.com/2015/01/07/shroud-of-the-avatar-stretch-goals-unobtanium/"The only thing that I have come across so far in this SotA project which was as bad, maybe worse, than this was when the Trailer came out. I swear to christ when I heard the Guardian’s voice again it nearly brought a tear to my eye. Only to be chased away by disbelief at the end where the Guardian started to prattle on and plug the SotA online store. That was pretty fucked up, and this is all making me wonder if the game will make it into the fifth and final episode or…Will they simply crank the first episode out which completes the majority of their kickstart promise and then cancel and refund some of the rest?" Listening to Bill Johnson push the online store in the intro of the game. Fuck. I wanted to curl up in the bathtub and suck my thumb. |
|
|
|
Post by kb on Feb 16, 2015 3:02:38 GMT
Listening to Bill Johnson push the online store in the intro of the game. Fuck. I wanted to curl up in the bathtub and suck my thumb. I know what you mean about the intro. I raised hell in private when I saw the original E3 trailer that talked up the item store and all the rewards/items players could buy (maybe the same video we are thinking about, maybe not). That was one of my first real blow-ups with the devs when I really decided to give up on the game. I seem to remember that was around the same time they changed the pledges and introduced Lords and Knights of the Manor pledge level (and row lots) too. I sent several enraged PMs to a community member that I respected (who was very pro-game) explaining why I was so upset with the way these types of changes were marketed and higher level backers were being bought off by receiving shit tons of extra crafting stations. I trashed the pledge changes and all the emphasis on rewards/items/store bullshit in that trailer. With my knowledge and permission, those PMs were shared with Starr and I saw that later, Dallas and Rick were added to that conversation as well. I told them it was my "exit interview" (a type of feedback that most MMO's never get from departing players) Not long after, it seemed that the trailer was reworked a bit with less emphasis on the store and pledges/rewards (but they're still here). Maybe some of you remember how it was changed. Or maybe I am just dreaming it, but it seemed like it was even worse when first released than it is now. At the time, I was glad they reevaluated that abomination of a sales pitch, and when they developed the in-game opening cinematic, I think they incorporated some of the points I made in my PM's about how I wanted to be pulled into the game world and to feel excited about what it has to offer on a much deeper level than talk about the rewards I can buy with real money. I hope that my enraged feedback had some positive effect, or maybe it didn't (and I'm still not exactly thrilled about the in-game intro too... something about it feels a bit weird), but at least it gives me a bit more of a feel of what the game might be about than the E3 trailer did (which was just a string of nostalgia/references back to past games/and plugging the rewards and item store). That "hundreds of items" shit from the E3 trailer is just sad. |
|
|
|
Post by Gunga_Din on Feb 16, 2015 3:16:43 GMT
Listening to Bill Johnson push the online store in the intro of the game. Fuck. I wanted to curl up in the bathtub and suck my thumb. Yea I know right? lol "Enter into the world as the AVATAR and fulfill your destiny. !!! ....oh and stop by the add-on store and throw us a few bucks" |
|
|
|
Post by kb on Feb 16, 2015 17:44:02 GMT
LOL. Yeah, please buy a useless 3D cat model so you can say, "Look! I have a cat!" It's your destiny! Everyone loves cats, right? Right? (Zombie) Kittehs are SotA's final boss.... |
|
|
|
Post by kb on Feb 17, 2015 21:16:32 GMT
Wtf... this is no laughing matter! Shit is SRS, yo. Just wait until you see the unrevealed Cat-astrophe of SotA's mainland: Kitty CityThen you'll know just wtf "Den of Terror" really means.... |
|
To me the final nail in the coffin for this Pay for Advantage swing was when the SotA intro first came out, I wrote about this not long ago on the blog.