0.10.0 patch notes, balance explanations and how microtransactions work

"

solistus wrote:

I have only skimmed a few of the other responses to this and the main patch notes thread, so I'm sure this has all been said before, but here's my two scroll fragments' worth: I don't like the idea of requiring a paid item to remove cosmetics without destroying them. I totally understand wanting to generate continual revenue in smaller amounts rather than having everyone spend just a few bucks on effects once and then never pay again... That said, I see a few problems with this implementation:

1. The whole /destroy_cosmetic_effects thing sounds like a disaster waiting to happen. Someone, somewhere is gonna lose something really valuable to a dumb misclick, or some malicious user is gonna harvest account logins and destroy people's premium upgrades, and then the players who have voluntarily supported GGG are going to have just about the worst possible support experience for an online game: "your shit is gone, and there is nothing we can do about it. Sorry!" Sure, maybe it's "their fault" for making a mistake or "their responsibility" to keep the account secure, but at the end of the day, this will probably cause bad will between you and some of your customers. You already have a better system that could avoid all these problems; you just want to monetize it.

2. It seems, for lack of a better word, greedy to many people. It's something that doesn't cost you any significant time and money to offer us. It's not a piece of content that artists had to model. Its only function is to allow me to make better use of the cosmetic upgrades I already paid for. I'm not saying it's inherently unfair for GGG to charge for this, or that we should be entitled to have optional cosmetic upgrades work in some other specific way. I'm just saying that this one microtransaction will *feel* much less 'ethical' than all the others to many players.

3. It encourages 'waiting till the endgame' to even bother with cosmetic upgrades. If I mostly play events, races, try out new HC builds, etc., it would be exorbitantly expensive to keep moving my shinies onto new gear every couple levels and new characters every couple days. I don't want to have my one or two 'mains' that I spend a bunch of time grinding endgame on, and it seems like PoE has a lot of game systems explicitly designed to encourage rolling alts and playing through the early level content repeatedly; this system of paying to move cosmetic upgrades around doesn't jive with that at all. This also means most towns outside of Act 3 Merciless aren't going to have nearly as many cosmetic items showing up (since that's where all the high level toons with gear worth applying cosmetic upgrades to will be).

4. Obviously, allowing cosmetic-enhanced items to be traded would open the pay2win can of worms (those items would presumably be valued more by players, so paying real money for cosmetic upgrades would become an indirect way of purchasing in-game wealth). However, this approach still has a distorting effect on the in-game economy: it makes players who use cosmetic upgrades more averse to swapping/trading their current gearset. This could slow down the endgame item economy.

5. Nobody is going to *like* buying and consuming this 'item'. Nobody is going to be excited to have them. Even if people don't actively mind it, and don't stop buying cosmetics because of it, they will still have a negative experience every time they have to hop over to the Shop and buy more of them just to keep their current cosmetics on a new item or character. You want people to enjoy spending money on the game, for it to be an impulse buy that satisfies an immediate want. That's a much better psychological relationship to cultivate with your players than the sort of nagware model where the game makes you feel like you have to pay to remove some artificial barrier to your continued enjoyment.

Everything else about the patch sounds awesome, and I'm psyched to try it out tomorrow! Just wanted to share my thoughts and let you know that I will definitely spend more money on the game if this particular microtransaction fee is abolished, and I believe other players likely would as well.