The Betrayal Brimmed Hat

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Punjy wrote:

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Innomen wrote:

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Punjy wrote:

Totally in favor of whatever they have to do in order to keep pushing out free content every 3 months

Selling 80% of the company to a 500 billion dollar chinese megacorp insured infinite funding till the end of time. I strongly suspect only a tiny fraction of money handed to GGG gets used as you expect.

Look at the office photos on twitter. Do a mental audit of just that room.

1. I understand your and agree with your position on the value of microtransactions in this game. It would be nice if things were a little cheaper in this game. But thinking it can happen after being bought out by a major public corporation is foolish. GGG is now in a position where they're under pressure to make more money for shareholders, not less, so what you're asking for is NOT going to happen. Ever. It sucks and I don't agree with it either.

2. Developers are out here selling half finished games for $50-60, and selling the rest as bullshit "expansion packs". Friggin DLC, or you gotta buy the "season pass" to unlock this "additional content" that was supposed to be part of the game you already spent $60 on, like give me a break. But GGG managed to avoid all that; imagine if GGG said you gotta pay us $5 to play in this league or $10 for this expansion. What if there were players that couldn't access shaper/elder or couldn't ascend because they had to pay some BS fee? Wouldn't that be a lot worse than overpriced microtransactions?

All I'm saying is that I'm in favor of whatever they have to do to avoid that for as long as possible.

You may be right that it's qualitatively unavoidable. And yes this is the least scummy model possible overall assuming you are right.

Thing is, without a (human readable) audit or some sort of substantive transparency we have to take their word for it. And deciding whether or not I should I would want to know, if the sell out was done to keep the lights on or to gold plate them?

Frankly I just can't believe it was unavoidable, and even if so, keeping the lights on in this context just meant keep them living the dream while the majority of the player base has to be slaves to real jobs. (No, renting numbers and selling electricity via a server at 10,000% mark up thanks to intellectual property monopoly isn't a real job any more than collecting dividends is.)

If the business was honestly about to fold they could have just open sourced it and moved to a new project. We could easily have crowd funded actual maintenance costs without trust being required.

I just don't buy the no choices line of thinking.

I can't help but believe the Wikipedia model would work here, thus I see no ultimate excuses for any of the scummyiness, including absurd mtx prices, and sale to chinese megacorps, that don't boil down to greed.

It's impossible for me to imagine people this adept at manipulating crowd emotion are gonna just choose to not use those same skills to influence our beliefs about the real world side of poe.

They would parse it as "leaving money on the table" so to speak.

Put simply, if they can con us into spending 15$ on a hat texture, they can surely convince most of us there was no other way.

But yeah like I said you could be right, maybe I'm just a hippy idealist.

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Innomen wrote:

Which makes me wonder, are you an aspiring, or current, developer or publisher yourself? Because that at least would explain how your thinking could become so unabashedly reminiscent of a standard-bearer.

no. just a long time fan. i know the team and chris from times they dwelled in the small office at titirangi road, 20+ people in a average sized room. my trust is based on knowing them and being a programmer myself who is amazed they managed to maintain a code base for over 10 years so well. well, that's it.

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vio wrote:

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Innomen wrote:

Which makes me wonder, are you an aspiring, or current, developer or publisher yourself? Because that at least would explain how your thinking could become so unabashedly reminiscent of a standard-bearer.

no. just a long time fan. i know the team and chris from times they dwelled in the small office at titirangi road, 20+ people in a average sized room. my trust is based on knowing them and being a programmer myself who is amazed they managed to maintain a code base for over 10 years so well. well, that's it.

So by "no" you meant, "yes."

Thanks for explaining :)