D Moness said:
Therumancer said:
Perhaps it's an overreaction, but really I'm beginning to think that instead of chasing these people around it might just be time to ban all cash shops or whatever. Doing it piecemeal is just going to result in the industry adapting to find other ways to scam, just like they did with the phone problems, until someone just puts their foot down and axes the entire thing.
That would kill all F2P mmo's since they use this kind of payment to pay for the servers. I think they should kill kash shops in games aimed at games like this (or the hello kitty mmo out there). This smurfs game just smells/sounds like a scam too me
You know, I'm absolutly cool with it destroying all those free to play games. The free to play model has been a cancer on gaming to my way of thinking for a while. To begin with we had tons of those cheap korean games all over the place spamming the living crud out of people, which pretty much took the strategy of luring people in by saying "free" and then hitting them with the charges to progress beyond a certain point. That's more annoying than anything, and once your "onto" it, it's easy to avoid other than seeing them everywhere, though even then we had a few incidents of money being spent by parents who didn't understand the system, and playing some of those games despite the quality can actually be MORE expensive thana $15 a month subscription. Then you've got the entire "Zynga" facebook game thing which has been where most of the "accidental" uber-bills have been coming from before the most recent handfull of problems we've seen reported here. Then of course there was Second Life and the money some people were spending (and in response making) off of that one.
I think it hasn't gone unnoticed that in a lot of cases there are people being lured into spending a lot more than $15 a month in these games, sometimes knowingly, sometimes not, which is one of the reasons why you see so many Western games emberacing a model that used to be exclusively done by fly-by-night asian companies.
I've also noticed a major trend for games going the way of "hybrid" products where not only do you pay a subscription, but they also hold out a lot of content to sell it to people piecemeal. An example of this would be DC Univer Online's very limited costume creator compared to other hero games, apparentled so they can launch a costume shop to sell people more pieces.
Most of this is just annoying, and not something I'd scream "ban cash shops" for. I mean heck, I think Downloadable content has been out of control and responsible for a lot of the same annoyances as what games like DCUO and "Star Trek Online" have been up to, but I haven't been yelled for people to ban it.
What's changing my opinion now is simply that companies are designing their games to be deceptive (I think Zynga once admitted it designed it's menus to be deceptive so people would misclick and waste "free points" to encourage them through frustration to spend money), and as time goes on we're seeing more and more issues with people's kids spending small fortunes, or even adults themselves managing to spend money without realizing it, and truthfully in a lot of cases I am going "the guy was an idiot" but not always, and it's getting worse over time.
This is one of those cases where I don't think it's a matter of a few bad eggs ruining the whole bunch, I think the problem is that the entire system was conceived to scam money out of people. All of those korean games had some kind of sneaky angle to them to try and get people to spend money right from the beginning, or to get kids to do it without any real idea of what they were doing. The Smurf game seems very korean in the style of the bright, cutesy graphics, and an entire setup designed to lure in children (as befits the liscence). I think that it's going to taint pretty much any game it's part of, and be a stain on the online gaming community if it continues.
When it comes to games going free to play in order to survive, my basic attitude right now is they should just let them die, and if they can't compete in the MMO space, simply have the developers go back to making single player PC games. The entire "cash shop" thing is just going to get sleazier as time goes on and taint the whole thing, it's just that kind of system, either on it's own, or spliced with a subscription model as well. Attempts to regulate it are going to be just like the whole foreign pay line problem (which is why I mentioned it) the system can potentially be used legitimatly, but it's very nature is intended for abuse and exploitation, any changes involved are going to be circumvented, and as long as it's there, your going to have people go "WTF, how did I get this bill", until someone pretty much takes an axe to it.
I'll also be honest, for all my laughing at people for being idiots on a small scale at times, I'm really not that big of an elitist bastard in most respects. I do not think you should have to be smart to play video games, despite some of my elitist rants about missing the old days of gaming, I just wish not everything was not dumbed down for casual players. I don't think that because someone isn't too bright, that they deserve to be scammed, and that is going to hurt gaming. When your looking at a market increasingly catering to the lowest human denominator, you have to look out for scams directed at that level of person. X-Box Live aside, you'll notice most of the games doing the cash shop thing right now (though not all) follow a certain trend. We've got the over-simple facebook games custom made for those of very limited intelligence, we've got games based on comic books (Champions Online, DC Universe Online), and we've got cutesy games developed to be appealing to children like Smurfs online. I would normally consider things like "D&D Stormreach" to be an exception, but D&D has been being aimed at an increasingly younger audience for a while too, and that's the one that was leading the pack.
My opinion might change at some point, but the bottom line of this rant is that I'm actually hoping that now there is goverment attention they decide to really "overreact" to this and pretty much smite the whole cash shop and point transaction systems with a zeus-like bolt of lightning. Things like XBL will recover, but a lot of scam oriented games won't, and I think Zynga will stop being such a group of sleazes (in a general sense... I mean the entire company bugs me in their whole attitude above and beyond the cash shops, which are the key to the whole thing. They pretty much admit to designing their games to addict/screw people from what I've read over the years).
