For all you people shrugging your shoulders and saying: "eh, it's optional. You don't need to pay for them."
Congratulations, you've fallen into their trap. People seem to build this bizarre myth around micro-transactions, as if they simply drop from the sky; as if they're an after thought and the in game economy isn't designed around them from the beginning. Well, you're completely and utterly wrong to think that.
Okay. How?
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[img width=200]https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/378800000822867536/3f5a00acf72df93528b6bb7cd0a4fd0c.jpeg
wow
such meme
very epic
much reference
When you play a game with micro-transactions you are playing a game that's designed to give a sub-par experience to those who don't pay up.
Damn, Mortal Kombat X sure has everyone nailed to the wall with their Easy-Fatality economy. You just
cannot do Fatalities otherwise. It's impossible! They stacked every possible card against you to perform a single fatality! You absolutely need to buy Easy-Fatality tokens in order to do Fatalities! I mean what, you expect them to let you practice fatalities to do them yourself? They're tied to Microtransactions! Of course they wouldn't let you-
ooooh wait, they do let you practice to your hearts content and allow you to memorize each and every fatality.
Darn. It's almost like the microtransactions don't matter. But...
you're completely and utterly wrong to think that.
Huh. I mean, I just provided a specific example of how MT's don't actually provide a 'sub-par' Fatality experience here, and how they don't actually matter at all.
Care to explain for this specific instance how I'm wrong without moving the goalposts to another game or DLC concept altogether? (Hint: You cannot.)
Ah, again with the absurd hyperbole, because I definitely said it was
literally impossible to do these things without paying up. I never said there were absolutely
no games with micro-transactions that aren't completely ruined, you're just wilfully misinterpreting statements that should probably have been worded slightly less strongly (it was right before going to bed). Nonetheless, your smug sarcasm and hyperbole isn't appreciated, nor is it helpful to the discussion.
I agree that Mortal Kombat X wasn't ruined (although I never played the game, so that means very little). Regardless, those micro-transactions were more of an outlier, rather than an accurate representation of micro-transactions over all. And of course, they were still bullshit in their own right. Rather than fucking with any economy, bafflingly enough, they were more along the lines of selling jars of air. Completely pointless to buy, but still completely farcical and audacious to actually sell them.
The tedium of it all is designed to get players to weight up their time against their wallet, and ultimately decide to start paying; to incentivize players to pay up. To put it in the crudest way possible, it's pretty much the equivalent of them taking a shit all over their own game, then offering you the option to pay them to clean it. But hey, it's optional, right? Well, I don't want your shit-covered game, and I'm not going to go through the grind of cleaning it myself just because these arseholes wanted more money.
I'm just waiting for the day that they announce Fallout 4 has micro-transactions, then I can just give up on AAA gaming altogether.
The alarmist demagoguery sure is tiring. It's entirely possible to wait and see how MT's are implemented before rightfully criticizing them. But no, showing apprehension and giving way to critical thinking instead of outrage knee-jerkery makes one an "ignorant defender."
If the MT's turn out to be paying for things like power, then I'll definitely criticize it. But if MT's turn out to be things like dances or making my gun pink, then you'll have to excuse me for not giving a shit.
Yeah, I guess rather than dancing around the issue, I'll just come out and say it: you clearly feel personally slighted by my words, as if you think they were aimed at you. They were not. By "ignorant defenders" I'm referring to people who'll defend the more audacious implementations under the belief that just because it's
optional then it doesn't effect the gameplay itself, as if they were simply bolted after the rest of the game was developed. I'm not saying that
not automatically opposing them is the same as defending them. Since you seem to see any lack of ambiguity as grounds for more sarcasm and hyperbole, let me clairfy;
not all in game economies are slanted to the same degree, some are absolutely despicable, others are merely slightly annoying, and some are completely pointless.
As for whether or not it's simply emotes and cosmetic items, this is more of a semantic quibble, but I don't really count them as micro-transactions unless they can be unlocked in-game, although it seems others do. I count them as small DLC items, and was somewhat surprised to learn that others count them as micro-transactions. To me, micro-transactions are when they're selling in game items (weapons, guns, armour, unlocks) or some form of currency (xp, levels, money), or, pretty much anything that effects something other than apperance. The line between such things is rather blurry at times, I'll admit.
As for why I'm not giving them the benefit of doubt; you seem to have completely ignored the part I quoted, so let me point it out again.
Steven Bogos said:
...
"Microtransactions will be available at launch, but we'll have no gameplay items that will be gated through microtransactions," he told GameSpot [http://www.gamespot.com/articles/uncharted-4-multiplayer-to-include-microtransactio/1100-6431779/?utm_source=gamefaqs&utm_medium=partner&utm_content=news_module&utm_campaign=hub_platform]. He added that striking the right balance, between grinding for items and <color=red>incentivising real-money acquisitions, will be determined after Naughty Dog looks at the data from the Uncharted 4 multiplayer beta.
...
So don't tell me that this will be another Mortal Kombat X type deal when they are blatantly saying they'll try be fucking with
altering the game balance in order to "
incentivize" players to pay up.
This was the main reason I even brought up people's ignorance; since they are out-right telling people that micro-transactions alter game balance and economies yet people still seem to believe otherwise even when they're at their most egregious, simply because, again, they're
optional.
And the reason why this annoys me so much is that people in the past shrugged their shoulders so much that micro-transactions, of all varieties, in full priced games, are no longer news any more. This development annoys me, but it doesn't surprise me in the least, since it's par for course with AAA gaming at the moment. "This won't set a bad precedent," they said. "Slippery slop fallacy," they said.
And now here we are.
