Valve Discusses Charging Customers Based on Popularity

[Ilke]

Oh boy, I can smell the grief.

How are you going to judge a player's jerkiness, Valve? By looking at the bans and kicks? Too bad moderators and admins can be douchebags themselves, kicking and banning sometimes for no reason. A report/points system? Well expect it to be griefed as much as ever possible. People can hate each other for no logical reason. Or wait, how about a system which counts how many people quit the server after you joined it? Oh, wait a minute...

 

[Jodah]

Bad idea is bad. The jerks won't clean up their act, they will just look for ways to screw over nice players. If you start charging him, bam he makes a new account and gets it at the base price or, even worse for the industry, turns to piracy.

 

[Tharwen]

So what about the hordes and hordes of people who just play uneventful games for fun, without griefing or being hyper-popular? Do they just pay the original price?

Also, at first I thought it meant automatically adjusting the price of games on the Steam store based on its sales. That might be a good idea too, although I suppose a developer could just buy the game for itself over and over again to push the price (and perceived popularity) up, if they wanted to be real dicks about it.

 

[GoldenShadow]

I'm getting annoyed that Valve keeps doing these silly experiments and not finishing Episode 3

 

[Katana314]

I like his theory - if there were some effective way of it working. Obviously, no easy implementation would work without people gaming it. The only way I can half think about it is to price the game very high, say $100, then give partway refunds for good behavior. Actually, that does seem like an interesting concept. But as people have said, it's difficult to reliably indicate good behavior.

I at least agree that the static $50 payment isn't going to work much longer, especially since the gaming world is already obsessed with micro-transactions. It seems okay that some people would pay $20 of a game to only get part of the experience, while some go to $120 because they're dedicated customers.

 

[Papadam]

League of Legends is going to implement something called the Tribunal where players can vote for different cases when people get reported for trolling or whatever. Then you gain currency if you voted the same as the result. But you only gain currency for 3/day.

http://www.leagueoflegends.com/news/griefers-beware-tribunal-coming

Could be something similar and I tihnk it's a great idea.

 

[RayTheGod]

I don't think that would ever work.

 

[WanderingFool]

It's be to easy to manipulate. Imagine you piss off the wrong person for an innocent reason. For example, some triple A player gets killed by some noob and is furious about it; that A player gets all his clan members and followers to rating bomb that noob and eff him over.

Exactly what I see wrong with the system. If it involves the players in such a fashion, than there will be such griefing done. A simple fact is that under the right circumstances, everybody can and will be an asshole. If they were to make a system like this, they would have to run it without player feedback, as while bad feedback is better than no feedback, dishonest feedback is not better than no feedback.

 

[DannibalG36]

Possibly the worst idea for pricing I've ever heard of. The system would be incredibly easy to abuse by jerks who have a grudge against a fellow player and might actually cause more grief than it sets out to correct.

Furthermore, a lot of customers are simply not going to put up with paying $100 dollars for voice when they can get that option at no additional charge from another vendor. And since those customers who are really "nice" pay less, Steam would lose money on two fronts.

Newell's idea is bullshit in an economical sense.

 

[redisforever]

Perfect. I like this, because I am in good standing on Steam, and I may get free game.

 

[Mandalore_15]

I think this would lead to players who don't concentrate on multiplayer (like myself) to feel victimised. I hardly ever play MP games, but now they're going to let people who do get games borderline free while I still have to pay full price? They'd probably even have to increase their prices for me to recoup their lost revenue, which really would be bullshit.

Having said that, Steam prices are far too high anyway. I buy almost all my games at retail because of the savings, which seems to defeat the download game business model in my eyes. Also, how can you regulate prices at retail based on people's MP performance?

 

[Lizardon]

...Wait, What?

Surely this is some kind of joke, or sarcastic comment, or poking fun at someone ... no idea who though.

 

[Pyode]

... People are either taking this seriously, or they are very good at pretending.

As soon as I started reading the article I was like "Wait, April Fools was last month."

I can't bring myself to believe that he is truly serious about this, but at the same time I am the kind of person who takes my online persona seriously and acts like a decent human being, so the idea has some appeal to me.

 

[Pifflestick]

...

Terrible idea.

Let's just have a hypothetical situation. Player A plays against Player B.

Player A is an amazing player. Player B is not. Player A wins.

Player B gets butt-hurt about losing because he's a prepubescent idiot. Player B decides to report Player A for offensive language, or whatever.

Terrible, terrible plan.

Let's have more hypotheticals, shall we?

Player A is gay. Player B is homophobic.
Player A is black. Player B is racist.
Player A is athiest. Player B is Christian fundementalist.
Player A uses XBox. Player B uses Playstation.
Player A dislikes COD. Player B is a COD fanboy.
Player A dislikes anime. Player B is an otaku.
Player A is a newb. Player B is impatient.
Player A is spy. Player B is not.
Player A is a furry. Player B is 80% of the internet.

Or; Player B is a troll. Player B is a griefer. Player B is a prick. Player B is jealous.

In other words, this system would be so easily abused by people with differing opinions or skill levels that it would cause Valve to lose tons of costumers cause everyone would have to pay a hundred extra just because they thought differently then Player B.

 

[BanthaFodder]

funny thing is, I didn't like this idea at first, then I reaslised that the only people who would be negatively affected by this are dicks, so yeah, this works for me

 

[Firehound]

I'm glad to know Valve is ready to measure my worth as a human being.

This. Because a game company should do that.

 

[BanthaFodder]

...

Terrible idea.

Let's just have a hypothetical situation. Player A plays against Player B.

Player A is an amazing player. Player B is not. Player A wins.

Player B gets butt-hurt about losing because he's a prepubescent idiot. Player B decides to report Player A for offensive language, or whatever.

Terrible, terrible plan.

Let's have more hypotheticals, shall we?

Player A is gay. Player B is homophobic.
Player A is black. Player B is racist.
Player A is athiest. Player B is Christian fundementalist.
Player A uses XBox. Player B uses Playstation.
Player A dislikes COD. Player B is a COD fanboy.
Player A dislikes anime. Player B is an otaku.
Player A is a newb. Player B is impatient.
Player A is spy. Player B is not.
Player A is a furry. Player B is 80% of the internet.

Or; Player B is a troll. Player B is a griefer. Player B is a prick. Player B is jealous.

In other words, this system would be so easily abused by people with differing opinions or skill levels that it would cause Valve to lose tons of costumers cause everyone would have to pay a hundred extra just because they thought differently then Player B.

except Valve doesn't just take people's word for it. they'll review chat logs and see if the accusations have any actual weight to them. if they just banned people because Player B said they did something bad, there would be next to no one on Steam. hell, I probably would have been banned. it's the same as when people ask Valve to restore item X to their TF2 backpack; they don't just say "oh, okay guy, here's those 20 unusual hats you said you lost, have a nice day". Valve is smarter than that.

 

[BanthaFodder]

I'm glad to know Valve is ready to measure my worth as a human being.

This. Because a game company should do that.

jeez guys, it's not like Valve chooses who shall live and who shall die. if you act like a dick and cheat and grief, you will have to pay more. they aren't measuring your worth as a human being, they're seeing whether or not you play nicely with all the other boys and girls. if you abide by the rules, you get rewarded. if you act like a total cockend, you don't get rewarded. it's that simple.

 

[Trogdor1138]

It's a great idea in theory.

But... I feel it's open to backfire more than the positives that will come out of it. So it's stupid to pursue something with so many potential flaws.

 

[Pifflestick]

...

Terrible idea.

Let's just have a hypothetical situation. Player A plays against Player B.

Player A is an amazing player. Player B is not. Player A wins.

Player B gets butt-hurt about losing because he's a prepubescent idiot. Player B decides to report Player A for offensive language, or whatever.

Terrible, terrible plan.

Let's have more hypotheticals, shall we?

Player A is gay. Player B is homophobic.
Player A is black. Player B is racist.
Player A is athiest. Player B is Christian fundementalist.
Player A uses XBox. Player B uses Playstation.
Player A dislikes COD. Player B is a COD fanboy.
Player A dislikes anime. Player B is an otaku.
Player A is a newb. Player B is impatient.
Player A is spy. Player B is not.
Player A is a furry. Player B is 80% of the internet.

Or; Player B is a troll. Player B is a griefer. Player B is a prick. Player B is jealous.

In other words, this system would be so easily abused by people with differing opinions or skill levels that it would cause Valve to lose tons of costumers cause everyone would have to pay a hundred extra just because they thought differently then Player B.

except Valve doesn't just take people's word for it. they'll review chat logs and see if the accusations have any actual weight to them. if they just banned people because Player B said they did something bad, there would be next to no one on Steam. hell, I probably would have been banned. it's the same as when people ask Valve to restore item X to their TF2 backpack; they don't just say "oh, okay guy, here's those 20 unusual hats you said you lost, have a nice day". Valve is smarter than that.

This system would require them to monitor everyones multiplayer games at all times or just take peoples word for it like Youtube likes and dislikes. One would require so much man power it'd cost more money then it'd be worth and the other would be easy to abuse.