*Sigh* (English is not my native so I guess sorry for the grammar and typos)
I feel sad, the gaming now is totally sick, intoxicated with this "malpractice", because well, greediness.
After big debate on the forum of Hearthstone and the most recent Magic the Gathering Arena. I wanted to come on neutral ground and tell my opinion.
Loot box, microtransaction for skin or simple pay to skip (experience potion, more stash, etc..) is a bad thing.
Loot box (or booster pack for CCG), you can't directly buy what you want or the price for individual items is ridiculously overprice, some stuff are arbitrarily more rare for some reason, and often, loot boxes are filled with a lot of "useless" junk that barely few people care (like spray, icon or even flag in Heroes of the Storm for example). Just so you think the rare stuff is more interesting (gambling mechanic).
Like in HotS if you buy one character with gems it's like 5$, I have seen some skin with 20$ attached to it, wtf?
Micro for skin, well I think this one is hard, and some psychology and philosophy may get into, but for me, paying for a skin can give you an advantage that some other players don't have. Not everyone as the same kind of vision, if you have a different skin than the "normal one" you may blend better or may be harder to see for some players.
And why back then in a game like says Quake 3 arena, everyone had access to the 4 or 5 pages of 16 skins, now we have to buy them individually?
And the last one, which for me is the worst of all, the Pay to Skip.
No matter the form it takes, I despise all kind of P2Skip a game can offer, even worst when it's already a P2Play like WoW where you can pay 60$ to have a max level character.
Because of if the method of P2Skip exist it means the original game and the method to attain a certain aspect of game has been artificially slowed down, either by time gate, loot box randomness, restriction of daily quest or similar.
I just rage, because no matter what, paying for skipping is NEVER a good thing, because, all you do, is throwing money out of the window (in a way). You don't give money to buy more content, or to have access to thing you couldn't before, you pay to access them faster, because you made them slower so I could lose my patience and pay you to skip ahead.
Let now talk about the fact of paying for a virtual currencies, I think I have never seen a game that offers good well rounded virtual currencies, its always Pay 500 gems for 5$, 1100 gems for 10$ and such, but in the shop, almost no items cost exactly 500 or 1100, they have cost like 750 or 1300, so you are stuck with a portion of the amount you paid in virtual currency that you can't spend. So instead of paying says 7,50$ for an item, you paid 10$, because they made this artificially, again, not having something at 2,50$ so you gave them more than you would have.
So people say, let other people do what they want with their money, but the problem is, if you buy the skin at 5$ or the pay to get more boosters in Hearthstone, you say to the design that its correct to do it and thus making my own enjoyment of the game of not having P2skip worst. So no, you do have an indirect impact on me.
Now I am sad because more and more games are getting through this route of giving more and more granular content and trying to squeeze from us more money by using "morally grey" mechanics and design choices like more grindy games and gambling mechanic.
Honourable mentions to basically 99% of the mobile games which either use one or a lot of these practices.
I feel sad, the gaming now is totally sick, intoxicated with this "malpractice", because well, greediness.
After big debate on the forum of Hearthstone and the most recent Magic the Gathering Arena. I wanted to come on neutral ground and tell my opinion.
Loot box, microtransaction for skin or simple pay to skip (experience potion, more stash, etc..) is a bad thing.
Loot box (or booster pack for CCG), you can't directly buy what you want or the price for individual items is ridiculously overprice, some stuff are arbitrarily more rare for some reason, and often, loot boxes are filled with a lot of "useless" junk that barely few people care (like spray, icon or even flag in Heroes of the Storm for example). Just so you think the rare stuff is more interesting (gambling mechanic).
Like in HotS if you buy one character with gems it's like 5$, I have seen some skin with 20$ attached to it, wtf?
Micro for skin, well I think this one is hard, and some psychology and philosophy may get into, but for me, paying for a skin can give you an advantage that some other players don't have. Not everyone as the same kind of vision, if you have a different skin than the "normal one" you may blend better or may be harder to see for some players.
And why back then in a game like says Quake 3 arena, everyone had access to the 4 or 5 pages of 16 skins, now we have to buy them individually?
And the last one, which for me is the worst of all, the Pay to Skip.
No matter the form it takes, I despise all kind of P2Skip a game can offer, even worst when it's already a P2Play like WoW where you can pay 60$ to have a max level character.
Because of if the method of P2Skip exist it means the original game and the method to attain a certain aspect of game has been artificially slowed down, either by time gate, loot box randomness, restriction of daily quest or similar.
I just rage, because no matter what, paying for skipping is NEVER a good thing, because, all you do, is throwing money out of the window (in a way). You don't give money to buy more content, or to have access to thing you couldn't before, you pay to access them faster, because you made them slower so I could lose my patience and pay you to skip ahead.
Let now talk about the fact of paying for a virtual currencies, I think I have never seen a game that offers good well rounded virtual currencies, its always Pay 500 gems for 5$, 1100 gems for 10$ and such, but in the shop, almost no items cost exactly 500 or 1100, they have cost like 750 or 1300, so you are stuck with a portion of the amount you paid in virtual currency that you can't spend. So instead of paying says 7,50$ for an item, you paid 10$, because they made this artificially, again, not having something at 2,50$ so you gave them more than you would have.
So people say, let other people do what they want with their money, but the problem is, if you buy the skin at 5$ or the pay to get more boosters in Hearthstone, you say to the design that its correct to do it and thus making my own enjoyment of the game of not having P2skip worst. So no, you do have an indirect impact on me.
Now I am sad because more and more games are getting through this route of giving more and more granular content and trying to squeeze from us more money by using "morally grey" mechanics and design choices like more grindy games and gambling mechanic.
Honourable mentions to basically 99% of the mobile games which either use one or a lot of these practices.
