Valve Discusses Charging Customers Based on Popularity

[ArmorArmadillo]

I can't even begin to wrap my head around how anyone could see this as a good idea.

Well, basically, a company like Valve wants lots of people playing their games. Some players encourage other people to play by making the experience better for everyone. They encourage lots of others to play the game, and they want to encourage those players to stay because they attract other players to join. Others are awful, and drive people away and cause the player base to shrink.

I think it's worth experimenting with, since Valve's getting into DotA, an DotA and LoL have the WORST player base in all of gaming. They are going to need some way of de-smacktarding these communities to make them approachable for people.

 

[BoogieManFL]

I hate internet jerks as much as anyone, but paying more for being a dick? No.. Couldn't really be sure it was justified. But paying less for being good? Yes.

 

[Eggsnham]

So, like someone else said above, what if one had a bad connection and ended up dropping out unintentionally?

And then what if some random people decide to spite me and make some sort of negative comment/review/complain etc. about me?

Will I then have to pay more to play a game when I'm innocent and the person who decided to wrong me gets to play for free?

I'm sure that they'll have some sort of protection from that, but still. It sounds a little... Dumb.

 

[TheRealCJ]

What about us poor people with only a dozen friends, who only go online to play a game, rather than enrich or destroy the online community.

 

[Nautical Honors Society]

Nope, you should never charge anyone extra money to unlock features of a game they own. Once they buy the game it is theirs even if they are a jerk...just police them without monetary charges. Extra $100 for using voice? Really? Wow.

 

[SkinyJim]

HORRIBLE idea. I can forsee one single person being picked on for a small reason (ie an entire clan submits a bad review) and just for somethingas small as simply not agreeing with a particular persons idea that person would would have to pay mega bucks for the next game. It's completely unfair and would promote bullying.

Where has Valve said they are considering a player review system? If they did that of course it wouldn't work, but an autonomous system could work. Do you agree with that?

I'm not sure how a program would go about determining the decency of people. No algorithms used to measure a persons skill has been perfect. They don't even have perfect accuracy determining someone's meaning in a sentence. So an autonomous system to measure the decency of a person? No way. Not anytime soon at the very least.

 

[gideonkain]

Never gonna happen, Gabe was just talking out of his A$$.

To charge someone for how popular they are is like charging them based on how attractive they are...who's to say what's more attractive?

 

[i7omahawki]

Okay then Gabe, we'll have that system in place, and then we can do the same to developers.

We should only pay full price if the developer is 'popular' enough. If they've churned out some shitty sequels or left a buggy game without any support then their next games' price will be significantly lower.

Will give all the developers reason to step up and provide good content.

But really, this is just a blue sky idea that I don't see being implemented in any decent state. I mean sure, give priveleges to those players who really make an effort to make the scene a nicer place. But don't effectively charge far more to gamers who are unpopular, a lot of good gamers are unpopular for that very reason.

How does that threaten Valve at all?

Where did I say that it did? The point is that it'd be terrible for gaming.

Effectively they'd be paying people to behave on their games, only they get to decide what 'behaving' is.

Again, giving people rewards for playing well is a good idea, but penalizing those who don't, for behaviour that happened on a completely different game, seems unfair and unworkable.

snip

Actually, yes. Valve's idea is pretty damn absurd because they can't accurately measure our popularity, and it seems wrong to sell two identical products of the same quality at the same time for different prices, but refusing to pay full price for mediocre games is exactly what everyone should already be doing.

But the popularity of the developer would be determined by their previous game, not their current one. The previous could be terrible, the new one excellent. Just like somebody could behave badly on one game, and then (if they're not put off by the massive price tag) excellently on the next.

 

[Grabbin Keelz]

This would just not work. Everyone on the internet is an asshole at one time or another, even me. What if that ONE time you were an asshole and someone popular noticed and told all his friends about it, making games cost more for you. In fact, lets go back to the popular part. This may cause games to become nothing but a popularity contest, with people bribing players with Microsoft Points and hats. There's just way too many ways this could go wrong.

 

[RedEyesBlackGamer]

This is, without a shadow of a doubt, the single worst idea I've ever heard from Valve.

Yeah. The potential for system abuse, the very idea that they would charge some people extra on the basis of being a "jerk", etc. This should be shot down immediately. Please be a joke.

 

[Flunk]

I'm on track for supporting charging jerks for voice but I'm conflicted on the varying charges for different users. It's an interesting idea, but I'm not sure it's not going to be too easy to game the system.

 

[Eclectic Dreck]

interested i am but i mean who dosnt love a good trolling every once in awhile

I certainly don't. I play games to have fun. If my only means of having fun is trying to ruin the fun of other people, I move on to something else. There are plenty of better things to spend my time doing than wringing entertainment out of a product through jackassery.

 

[ItsAPaul]

Cute idea, but I highly doubt it'll actually work. Obviously Valve can charge less for community MVPs and such without much fuss, but the entire system seems very easy to either manipulate or be thrown under the bus because people will become extortionists for ratings.

 

[Sovereignty]

This sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen.

You can't let people sue over inequality in racial or sex based situations, and not allow users to say they're judged unfairly due to personality prejudice.

This would never work. Not even in a perfect world. One person thinking that your voice sounds annoying and leaving bad feedback cause you talking to teammates over the mic disrupted their game-play causes you to have to pay more for your next game?

No.

 

[Kyoufuu]

Does this mean because my 'popularity' is not likely to go anywhere that I'll still be paying full price, even though I'm not an arsehole...

Like you already are? Yes.

 

[BarbaricGoose]

This is bad for everyone, nice players, mean players, developers, everyone.

An asshole won't buy the game because his price went up, then the good players will have fewer people to play against, they stop playing the game and don't buy more steam games for the same reason. Simple...

Yeah, I'm gonna stop playing online because one asshole quit.

Not quite that simple.

I think you're taking what i said a bit too literally...

Okay, let's say more than one asshole quits. I still don't see how that's bad? It would only be bad if the assholes far outweighed the decent people, and they don't. It's easy to say that they do, but they don't. When I'm playing Call of Duty, I encounter one asshole every 3 or 4 matches or so, but most of the people in the match are just silent--not nice or mean. That's not a favorable ratio for assholes. If all the assholes quit CoD, I'd still have millions of to play it with. Same goes for Halo and TF2. Have you had that different an experience?

I'd consider it a selling point if no assholes played a certain game. If they could, I think they'd display that right on the case: "NO ASSHOLES PLAY THIS GAME! YEAH!"

I will say that the "DotA-like" games attract assholes. I would say that a large majority of the player base of those games are assholes. I don't know why, but those games corrupt people.

 

[Saelune]

No no no no no no no!
So much potential abuse and bs. This is an idea that is a rank or two below "Lets force everyone to use their real names as IDs"

 

[Thorvan]

What about us poor people with only a dozen friends, who only go online to play a game, rather than enrich or destroy the online community.

What are you, a Communist?

OT;
They're never going to actually do this, everyone stop getting up in arms. It'll probably boil down to moderators of reputable servers getting more hat points, or something of the sort.