7 réponses à ce sujet

[Osena109]

 I saw somthing were EA plans too add micro transactions too all new upcomeing games am long time Bioware fanboy i own just about every game Bioware has come out with but this has got me little uneasy if its true

[Allan Schumacher]

I can raise any issue I please, but thanks.

This actually isn't true. For instance, referring to a year old poll regarding EA's success in the Consumerist poll isn't really relevant to the discussion, which is often how threads go off topic and I become all scowly.


To the topic at hand:

I don't find Microtransactions inherently evil. I think that they can be misused though, and it's entirely up to developers to not misuse them and for gamers to let developers know when they feel they are used inappropriately (note, vehemently complaining about it but still buying it sends very conflicting data!).

I have no real beef with ME3's microtransactions, for instance, because for some people their time is more valuable than their money. It perhaps flirts a line as it can be argued it is "paying to win" but in a cooperative multiplayer, I think that that is less of an issue.

I do think people need to be careful when criticizing microtransactions, however. Specifically in assuming that it's to blame for something bad being in the game.

For example, I often see people express a concern that the presence of microtransactions as an incentive for a designer to pad parts of the game and make it grind, in order to encourage purchasing the microtransactions. This is a fair concern, and it is indeed possible. By the same token, many gamers rate length of game as a primary metric for whether or not a game is worth the money, so on some level there is already an influence to help pad game time through some other means. So a game that has a grind and microtransactions may not actually have that grind because of the MTX, but rather to ensure that the game has appropriate length. (Obviously the ideal solution to game length is never having it be a grind, but that is a separate discussion IMO).

That's mostly just a thought experiment that simply because you can logically deduce that MTX may be a cause, may not necessarily be the case. Excessive grind is usually something I consider bad for games, and whatever the reason it exists should be examined and potentially remedied.


As for MTX in games, I'm pretty ambivalent. The likelihood of me buying any of them is exceptionally small. I can't think of any non-F2P game I played that had them that I felt I wanted to purchase, but then I can't think of too many games that had MTX present anyways, so maybe that doesn't mean much.

A game like Portal 2 had MTX that let you deck out your multiplayer bots, but it was too expensive so I didn't really care. ME3 had MTX for the MP, but I enjoyed the MP as it was so I didn't buy any. I did buy a sprite pack for Hearts of Iron III once. Was cool seeing the US and German units running around, but it only existed at close up zoom which wasn't very practical during gameplay, so probably not worth the money.


To the OP, your concern is definitely noted.

[Allan Schumacher]

Valcutio wrote...

The problem with Microtransactions are they beg the question, "Why are they there?"

Example 1: You can purchase 100 Rocks for 10 dollars. Why? Are Rocks hard to get without spending money? More importantly, were they difficult to get only after EA decided to put a price tag on them?

Example 2: You can purchase a Double Experience potion for 10 dollars. Why? Is Experience not balanced effectively while playing the normal game? Was is balanced appropriately before EA decided to put a price tag on it?

These issues are basically trading time for money.    I don't think it has so much to do with the rocks being hard to get, nor the experience awards being unbalanced.  Though I understand the concerns people have about MTX fueling decisions like that.

In a single player game, I philosophically consider MTX to be akin to cheating.  In that, if it doesn't affect your own game experience to do so, I honestly don't care what you do.

For some people (especially as gamers get older), time is more and more scarce (while discretionary income may be higher than it's ever been).


I have paid for accelerated XP growth in a game called Navy Field, because I was particularly interested in trying out the bigger ships.  It cost me like $10 or soemthing and accelerated my xp and money growth for some period of time.  In that case, it was easy to "justify" because I actually felt the game was worth $10 (it's free to play typically).

Once I got to the bigger ships, I didn't care so much about rate of progress because I was driving the boats that I wanted to drive.  I did something similar with World of Tanks.

Though I acknowledge that both of those games are free to play.

[Allan Schumacher]

Thing is, in a single player game I've payed money for I really expect to be able to cheat for free.

If I want to give myself 10,000 XP to make the start of the game more fun, I want to be able to use the console or fire up a save editor. And I'm unlikely to be able to do this, without risking getting banned anyway, if XP has been monetised.

This is true. I'm not sure it's really that much of an issue though. Especially since the only people that typically benefit from this are PC players.

I don't get the impression that cheats are really built into the game experience like they were back in the day. The old games like Doom actually had art assets for your "God Mode" while today's games typically involve utilizing dev consoles which is really more along the lines of debug hooks that just weren't actively removed because there wasn't really a reason too.

[Allan Schumacher]

And, regardless, you still had to play MP to receive all the different endings. And this was confirmed to be by design, not by accident. So as magnanimous as its MTX system is heralded as being, the MP system is tainted by proxy.

How was this confirmed?

[Allan Schumacher]

Interesting and unfortunate (found his post). I knew it was super close I wondered if there was a logic error.

[Allan Schumacher]

AlanC9 wrote...

I noticed some ME devs and staff seemed to be either genuinely confused about this issue or doing a great imitation of being confused. The story broke back when some of them would drop by the boards or at least answer PMs. IIRC a QA guy stated that he had been able to get all endings without MP. With some version that I guess wasn't the released version.

Yeah I had heard conflicting data (nothing internal, just the same musings on the interwebs) that there was some communication that it was possible, just exceptionally hard.  It made me wonder if there was some sort of bug that was introduced sometime just before launch.

Though rather than deny Chris' statements, I'm willing to take the lumps for it being the way that it is.

[Allan Schumacher]

This thread is now locked as its deviation from the main discussion is pretty cemented.

Modifié par Allan Schumacher, 23 mars 2013 - 07:56 .