Moo
Hey, I should actually use this account sometimes.
Galaxy of Microtransactions
Had a bit of a SWToR relapse and went back to the game after a long hiatus. It's F2P now, though with a subscription option where you can bypass all the freemium annoyances, which is about the only context in which I'll actually play an F2P game. But there are a couple of things that bother me about the microtransaction model, so some musing on why that is. Spending money is not an issue for me personally since I'm pretty conscious of how much I spend. I do, in fact, buy Fanboys-Hate-Money editions of single-player games and WoW pets because hey, that Cinder Kitten is so gosh-darned cute.
Even at the extreme financial end, it's not so much the fact that the option to put hundreds of dollars into a game exists as the murkiness of the exact value of what you're getting for that money that bothers me. If a player pays $10 for a sparklepony, they get a sparklepony and know exactly what that money is going towards. Regardless of why they're buying one - because they like the model, because it was one of the first adaptive speed mounts, because they have a lot of alts, to show off before they realized everyone would buy one - it's a clear-cut purchase with no strings attached.
If a player pays $10 for a box that has a chance of dropping a sparklepony but generally drops something irrelevant or useless, that's playing slot machines. The question here is whether or not it's clear-cut to the player that they are, in fact, playing slot machines, and since most of these types of transactions omit the actual percentage at which specific items may be included, it seems as though the implementation is designed to obscure that fact to the player.
That's less providing value for money as encouraging a gambling addiction, and that feels a bit skeevy. Certainly nobody is sitting behind the player's chair forcibly charging their credit card for them, but at the same time practices designed to manipulate a player into paying more than they realize they're shelling out are somewhat manipulative by definition. The extreme end of this are in-game power boosts - spend $5 to defeat this boss (or worse, spend $5 to keep the loot you got from defeating this boss), but it can apply to non-essential items depending on the system in which they are implemented. In fact, in the case of SWToR I suspect "leaderboards" for things like player housing and %-based microtransaction collections are designed specifically to feed that addiction.
You can also argue that for actual gamblers part of what they're buying is the thrill of gambling, which is probably fine if they consciously realize this. In fact, distilled down to the basic principle you can even argue that raids and combat encounters in MMOs, for those whose primary motivation is loot-seeking, wind up being something similar because of boss drop RNGs. But the activity itself is supposed to be fun and challenging, one supposes, and why people are paying for the experience.
So I'm not too fond of the Cartel Pack stuff they have going on in SWToR because it is exactly that - RNG gambling. Furthermore, encouraging this by attaching Reputation grinds to the cash shop, where you can't even use the item if you get lucky and get one without having first sunk x amount of cash into the RNG works strictly against the player in the system.
On the one hand retaining the subscription model is a great move for player convenience and the only reason I went back to play it. On the other hand, the RNG-based Cartel Market stuff feels kind of skeevy.
*An alternative model being attempted by Wildstar provides a more restrictive avenue of trade between players of electronic and real-world currency. Namely, players with more time than money can buy subscription time blocks and sell them to other players for in-game currency, while players with more time than money can earn in-game currency and purchase these blocks.
Sexism and Entertainment
Had a discussion about this over lunch with the usual suspects. The gist of it is this: fanservice games don't bother me. The lack of non-fanservice games in certain genres, however, does. I certainly don't object to the existence of works like Idolm@ster or Free!, but it's disappointing that fanservice creeps into everything else because I'd like to be able to play epic fantasy RPGs without having to wince and ignore the (invariably male power fantasy) archetypes, make a female toon in an MMO without worrying if it's going to be subjected to bikini armor, and so on. There's a school of thought that believes female gamers hate on female characters in games because of jealousy or something. Probably true in some cases... and a response to the common shallow caricature in others. No I don't care about your panties, sorry. If I can get this character eaten by a dragon maybe the camera will no longer be taped to her giant tracts of land?
I do not demand or even particularly care about having a Strong Female Character. I merely wish for a lack of Stupid Fanservicy Female Characters (or Stupid Fanservicy Elements in Supposedly Serious Characters) - I would be totally fine with a cast comprised entirely of featureless bouncing cubes.
*That doesn't mean support for, eg, the fraudulent "feminist gamers" out there who collect money and play the victim card to spout poorly-researched nonsense that can be made up in five minutes' worth of blog posting, however.
More Hipster Than Thou
Also picked up a game called Child of Light from the XBox Live Arcade. It's an RPG reminiscent of Valkyrie Profile - some exploration and puzzle-solving in the a 2D sidescroller view, but the actual combat is turn-based RPG with some gimmicks. It's also a gorgeous hand-drawn game themed around a Ukrainian fairytale.
The developer is Ubisoft, better known for things like Assassin's Creed. And apparently that makes it pretend-indie or something. What does that mean, really? The idea that games without pre-rendered CGI and grizzled action heroes [tm] cannot be produced by a large company or be "mainstream"?
World Cup
Most sports are just so much horse elbows to me, but I admit to a passing interest in the World Cup acquired from four years ago when the games were playing on the large screens in our cafeteria (and often coincided with lunch break). It's actually interesting to watch to the unlearned, since something is going on almost all of the time (as opposed to in fits and starts like baseball) and you don't need a giant complicated rulebook to understand what's happening under the dogpile like handegg American football.
The one event that spawned the most memes, of course, is That Thing That Happened To Brazil, which was in hindsight not terribly surprising. Soccer is generally a low-scoring game, so high scoring matches are conspicuous; the one thing notable about the scorelines in 2010 was that while most teams "won" or "lost" games, Germany seemed to be the only team to repeatedly conjure up terms like "demolish" and "steamroll". In retrospect, the idea that the US' game plan involved winning against Ghana (done), tying Portugal (done), and avoiding getting crushed by Germany (also done) did not seem at all unreasonable, and pretty much everybody, even Portugal, can point and say that at least they're not Brazil. That Germany won was also unsurprising - people talk about national teams (and probably club teams) as though they are some sort of unchanging constant, but "this happened in 1970" is just not terribly relevant because none of the people who were involved are playing now, and after a bunch of near misses in the last few years that same team is bound to get it right at some point.
Galaxy of Microtransactions
Had a bit of a SWToR relapse and went back to the game after a long hiatus. It's F2P now, though with a subscription option where you can bypass all the freemium annoyances, which is about the only context in which I'll actually play an F2P game. But there are a couple of things that bother me about the microtransaction model, so some musing on why that is. Spending money is not an issue for me personally since I'm pretty conscious of how much I spend. I do, in fact, buy Fanboys-Hate-Money editions of single-player games and WoW pets because hey, that Cinder Kitten is so gosh-darned cute.
Even at the extreme financial end, it's not so much the fact that the option to put hundreds of dollars into a game exists as the murkiness of the exact value of what you're getting for that money that bothers me. If a player pays $10 for a sparklepony, they get a sparklepony and know exactly what that money is going towards. Regardless of why they're buying one - because they like the model, because it was one of the first adaptive speed mounts, because they have a lot of alts, to show off before they realized everyone would buy one - it's a clear-cut purchase with no strings attached.
If a player pays $10 for a box that has a chance of dropping a sparklepony but generally drops something irrelevant or useless, that's playing slot machines. The question here is whether or not it's clear-cut to the player that they are, in fact, playing slot machines, and since most of these types of transactions omit the actual percentage at which specific items may be included, it seems as though the implementation is designed to obscure that fact to the player.
That's less providing value for money as encouraging a gambling addiction, and that feels a bit skeevy. Certainly nobody is sitting behind the player's chair forcibly charging their credit card for them, but at the same time practices designed to manipulate a player into paying more than they realize they're shelling out are somewhat manipulative by definition. The extreme end of this are in-game power boosts - spend $5 to defeat this boss (or worse, spend $5 to keep the loot you got from defeating this boss), but it can apply to non-essential items depending on the system in which they are implemented. In fact, in the case of SWToR I suspect "leaderboards" for things like player housing and %-based microtransaction collections are designed specifically to feed that addiction.
You can also argue that for actual gamblers part of what they're buying is the thrill of gambling, which is probably fine if they consciously realize this. In fact, distilled down to the basic principle you can even argue that raids and combat encounters in MMOs, for those whose primary motivation is loot-seeking, wind up being something similar because of boss drop RNGs. But the activity itself is supposed to be fun and challenging, one supposes, and why people are paying for the experience.
So I'm not too fond of the Cartel Pack stuff they have going on in SWToR because it is exactly that - RNG gambling. Furthermore, encouraging this by attaching Reputation grinds to the cash shop, where you can't even use the item if you get lucky and get one without having first sunk x amount of cash into the RNG works strictly against the player in the system.
On the one hand retaining the subscription model is a great move for player convenience and the only reason I went back to play it. On the other hand, the RNG-based Cartel Market stuff feels kind of skeevy.
*An alternative model being attempted by Wildstar provides a more restrictive avenue of trade between players of electronic and real-world currency. Namely, players with more time than money can buy subscription time blocks and sell them to other players for in-game currency, while players with more time than money can earn in-game currency and purchase these blocks.
Sexism and Entertainment
Had a discussion about this over lunch with the usual suspects. The gist of it is this: fanservice games don't bother me. The lack of non-fanservice games in certain genres, however, does. I certainly don't object to the existence of works like Idolm@ster or Free!, but it's disappointing that fanservice creeps into everything else because I'd like to be able to play epic fantasy RPGs without having to wince and ignore the (invariably male power fantasy) archetypes, make a female toon in an MMO without worrying if it's going to be subjected to bikini armor, and so on. There's a school of thought that believes female gamers hate on female characters in games because of jealousy or something. Probably true in some cases... and a response to the common shallow caricature in others. No I don't care about your panties, sorry. If I can get this character eaten by a dragon maybe the camera will no longer be taped to her giant tracts of land?
I do not demand or even particularly care about having a Strong Female Character. I merely wish for a lack of Stupid Fanservicy Female Characters (or Stupid Fanservicy Elements in Supposedly Serious Characters) - I would be totally fine with a cast comprised entirely of featureless bouncing cubes.
*That doesn't mean support for, eg, the fraudulent "feminist gamers" out there who collect money and play the victim card to spout poorly-researched nonsense that can be made up in five minutes' worth of blog posting, however.
More Hipster Than Thou
Also picked up a game called Child of Light from the XBox Live Arcade. It's an RPG reminiscent of Valkyrie Profile - some exploration and puzzle-solving in the a 2D sidescroller view, but the actual combat is turn-based RPG with some gimmicks. It's also a gorgeous hand-drawn game themed around a Ukrainian fairytale.
The developer is Ubisoft, better known for things like Assassin's Creed. And apparently that makes it pretend-indie or something. What does that mean, really? The idea that games without pre-rendered CGI and grizzled action heroes [tm] cannot be produced by a large company or be "mainstream"?
World Cup
Most sports are just so much horse elbows to me, but I admit to a passing interest in the World Cup acquired from four years ago when the games were playing on the large screens in our cafeteria (and often coincided with lunch break). It's actually interesting to watch to the unlearned, since something is going on almost all of the time (as opposed to in fits and starts like baseball) and you don't need a giant complicated rulebook to understand what's happening under the dogpile like handegg American football.
The one event that spawned the most memes, of course, is That Thing That Happened To Brazil, which was in hindsight not terribly surprising. Soccer is generally a low-scoring game, so high scoring matches are conspicuous; the one thing notable about the scorelines in 2010 was that while most teams "won" or "lost" games, Germany seemed to be the only team to repeatedly conjure up terms like "demolish" and "steamroll". In retrospect, the idea that the US' game plan involved winning against Ghana (done), tying Portugal (done), and avoiding getting crushed by Germany (also done) did not seem at all unreasonable, and pretty much everybody, even Portugal, can point and say that at least they're not Brazil. That Germany won was also unsurprising - people talk about national teams (and probably club teams) as though they are some sort of unchanging constant, but "this happened in 1970" is just not terribly relevant because none of the people who were involved are playing now, and after a bunch of near misses in the last few years that same team is bound to get it right at some point.