Streamer priority confirmed. PoE is free to play, so play it for free, but Boycott GGG.

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Kiss_Me_Quick wrote:

...

OK, we can leave it at that. The fact that you cannot image giving people money simply because you agree with what they're doing doesn't mean others are as limited.
No need to continue this thread; you're either incapable or unwilling to get my point. So you assign motives to my actions which would be your motives.

Mildly interesting, but pointless to discuss.

I think the alt+f4 logout macro is a perfect analogy.

A lot of people want to play like this, they basically want a mmorpg.
The times of Line-of-sight positioning and unallocated loot have gone past and i accept this development.
Sometimes i wonder why i can use townportals to refill my flask or better press the ressurect button and die Piety (or any other metaop boss) slowly down by instantly spawning infront of the arena again.
People like not seeing their character and drown in unlimited amounts of spellcasts.
People like zooming through maps not caring about the loot dropped by white mobs but complain when someone else would be capable of picking it up.
They exactly got what they voted for during the beta process.

I would have preferred a much more tactical positioning game because i know that resources like mana life orbs resis armor evasion and all other possible numbers are bound to hit the maximum. Hate to spoil it but there are people out there with the sole goal to hord as many mirrors for the duration of 3months.

Also people don´t like to wait, after 3minutes they loose the attentionspan, yes 3minutes is the standard timeframe to sell any product in advertisment. Humans, pah!
And streamers have to sell their babble in the same time, no exception.
It´s understandable GGG went for this.
A technical solution would have been to stagger the login into several regions, divide into several realms or reduce the amount of players interested in the game. But noone would like that either.
Maybe a "Void my items, i don´t do standard"-button could lower the load on the database.
I call GGGs busniessmodel which is based on the first 3minutes of how good a new league is, unlucky. They can´t never escape the cycle.

So many people still stuck in 2012 here, games evolve, maybe in a direction you don't want them to but they do none the less. Thankfully the game has moved on from being a good but clunky and unrewarding niche hipster game with a few thousand players online at a time.

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RandallPOE wrote:

Thankfully the game has moved on from being a good but clunky and unrewarding niche hipster game with a few thousand players online at a time.

Has it?

PoE is still a largely niche game, is still quite clunky, has massive performance and clutter issues, loot & drops are both terrible and OUTRAGEOUS in quantity, and overall, outside a few days after each league launch, are mostly enjoyed by a few thousand players consistently.

So this is interesting although not quite a 1-to-1 as a comparison to PoE but you can judge for yourself how much overlap there is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhZst83kX_8

For context this is a long time WoW player ranting about a decision to put new cosmetic items into the 'classic' version of the game. Here is a text highlight from the middle that I found relevant to this thread:

"

This was done artificially to make money. This does not make the game better. And this is another important factor I want to say:

This mount does NOT make the game better. I think it makes it worse. And the only thing you can argue is that it's neutral. Maybe some people don't care. And if you don't care about it? Great. But what kind of argument is 'I don't care!'? Yeah, that's gonna make the game better - not caring about the game. It's ridiculous.

Why should I argue against cosmetics? Because cosmetics matter. A big reason a lot of people play the game is cosmetics. I've been against store mounts since 2012, but there are enough people that are willing to insulate Blizzard from criticism and in doing so protect them while they make decisions that cannibalize the game. At this point I'm tired of it.

I'm just tired of it. I'm tired of making these comments and people calling me a loser or something like that because I care about the game. If people wanna brag and pat each other on the back for giving this multi billion dollar company more money through mount sales so they can turn around and treat their employees poorly while giving their CEOs huge bonuses, be my guest. It's so pathetic. The WoW community is so fucking pathetic. Gamers in general - as I said -

Every gaming boycott is one 30 minute cinematic from being over. For the WoW community, its one picture. Here's the truth: the amount of us who really care about it - there's not enough of us. I've learned this over the years. There's not enough of us that really care. Blizzard can make all this money selling mounts at the expense of the integrity of the game until the end of time. And the masses [heavy edit] will slurp it up. There's enough of those people out there that we don't matter.

Idk, replace 'store mounts' with 'streamer privilege' and 'Blizzard' with 'GGG' and see how it reads.

Most people have things they value and when it feels like someone is stepping on your value it hurts.

You respond with emotion when you are hurt, whether that pain is physical or mental, because unless you are dead inside you value your own thoughts and feelings.

To each their own.
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3100304
This made me sad.

They have become nonchalant in how things concerning money are handled.
Grab your coats folks, for a blizzard truly is approaching on the horizon.
Or just hold your eyes and ears closed tight, that works quite well in the short term.

P.s. Completely besides the point, but got Rate limiting active. You must wait 3000 seconds. when i tried to preview this post to look at formatting. So stupid, new account takes 5 min, who has time to wait 50min

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Kiss_Me_Quick wrote:

everyone wants attention

You sure like attention. Just no balls to accept a challenge when you got it.

Never not a fan of people stating that which would sound like reprehensible verbal abuse were it to issue from my precarious position. :)

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Innervation, what you've done there is unpleasantly specious. Sure, you can replace certain words and the message remains the same, as does the outrage, but it loses all context in the process. It's not just 'not a 1-1 comparison', it's at best a vague similarity in that a user is enraged at something the developer has done or might do, and then attempts to justify that passionately. But comparing something like mounts in an MMO to streamer privilege in a game that absolutely shouldn't have it because said game is explicitly 'fair for all'? Yeah no. Just no. Did Blizzard feel the need to apologise for adding this mount within 24 hours of doing so? If not, completely different situation.

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

Never not a fan of people stating that which would sound like reprehensible verbal abuse were it to issue from my precarious position. :)

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Innervation, what you've done there is unpleasantly specious. Sure, you can replace certain words and the message remains the same, as does the outrage, but it loses all context in the process. It's not just 'not a 1-1 comparison', it's at best a vague similarity in that a user is enraged at something the developer has done or might do, and then attempts to justify that passionately. But comparing something like mounts in an MMO to streamer privilege in a game that absolutely shouldn't have it because said game is explicitly 'fair for all'? Yeah no. Just no. Did Blizzard feel the need to apologise for adding this mount within 24 hours of doing so? If not, completely different situation.

Well there's an important part of the context missing which I may have taken for granted but can probably be gleaned from watching the whole video. Let's go back in time for a minute - I'll do my best to get the facts right but if I'm off know that it's not enough to ruin the point of the history.

WoW added a cash shop to their game in like their 5th expansion Mists of Pandaria where they sold their first cosmetic mount. This was many many years ago.

Just a couple years ago WoW released 'WoW classic' a vanilla version of the game just as it existed pre expansions. Like PoE going back to an open beta patch, or a 1.0 patch but it's own game and it's own world for people to enjoy if they want to - running in parallel to the live servers ('retail') - completely not interfering with live development.

It was so successful that ActiBlizz is planning on releasing their first ever expansion to Classic - The Burning Crusade (TBC) - as a classic version of itself. TBC was WoW's first expansion.

WoW classic was more or less recreated faithfully. The video I linked to was spawned because we recently learned that TBC won't be recreated so faithfully - it will have a cash shop for in game cosmetics (and possibly level boosts and all kinds of other things).

So that's maybe the connection you're looking for that I didn't mention - this rant is about how releasing MTX mounts into the WoW 'classic TBS' environment is a violation of principles because it will cheapen the experience of in-game grinding for rare prestigious mounts and also goes against the spirit of the point of the exercise - which is to faithfully and fairly re-create what it was to play TBC.

And as a final note I don't think ActiBlizz feeling guilt free about this is great evidence that things are different. At least GGG say they feel shame. Bobby Kotick may not have access to that emotion anymore. They OUGHT to rescind the decision and apologize. But as the man in the video said, the people who will happily subsidize the cannibalization of the ethical foundation of the venture far outnumber the amount of people upset. And ActiBlizz knows that damn well.

Given everything you wrote already, I don't think I need to convince you that GGG knew, or had at minimum calculated, the same math for the players here.

I think you're still missing something key here: explicit vs implicit. What Blizzard did is possibly an implicit breach of principles (although I'm not sure I even want to open the incredible can of worms that is 'does Blizzard have principles anymore?'), whereas what GGG did was an explicit breach of principles, again evidenced by the swift apology and promise not to do it again.

Railing against an implicit breach is a lot more subjective than railing against an explicit one.

That all aside, none of this really changes the matter at hand. I don't believe you're deliberately trying to derail but that's where this track stops, so I'm going to flick a little switch and get us back on course.

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You will likely never stop seeing threads, by newbies and locals alike, questioning the price-point of PoE's mtxes. I speak from experience when I say they're ridiculously high for what you get, especially when compared to other major f2p games that are considered 'ethical' with their balance of mtx offerings ranging from purely aesthetic to borderline pay to win. While I agree that PoE STILL needs that high price-point because it has so few 'essential' mtxes (I suspect stash tabs are their only 'meat and potatoes'/'nickel and dime' revenue generator), I also think that price-point, which can put certain sets of armour skins well past $100 USD, is riding on the basic image of GGG still being some sort of indie dev where purchases are first and foremost about supporting something passionately as opposed to straight-up value for money. I think it'd take a fairly...unique individual to think that those $100 sets of armour are good value, knowing their money is going, first and foremost, not to needy NZ workers but some rather deep pockets. I used to buy those armours because I had the GGGold lying around but there came in an interesting inflexion point where it was no longer possible to buy every mtx even with the GGGold gained from my level of support.

The most obvious reason for this is that the Ruler pack, the monstrous $12.5k behemoth itself, didn't grant $12.5k worth of GGGold (which surely would be enough), but instead only 1.5k worth (11000 GGGold) -- that of an Eternal pack at the time. At the time, this didn't matter: there were so few mtxes it seemed impossible I'd ever run out of GGGold. I later negotiated some more after the Tencent acquisition and I figured a little retroactive remuneration might be due (but still nowhere near $12.5k worth of GGGold), but even then it wasn't enough to buy 'em all. Point being, unless you actually buy GGGold outside of supporter packs, you're never going to have every mtx at their current price-point even if you're a fucking Ruler of Wraeclast. That is how ridiculously expensive and expansive these things have gotten.

In my vast idiocy, I honestly thought for a moment that the 'please support us; we are super ethical and need your money' price-point might drop under Tencent because GGG would no longer be relying so heavily on mtx sales to stay afloat -- surely Tencent would provide a measure of safety, security and support. But no, of course not. They bought GGG as an investment, and investments give returns. You buy an investment; you don't keep putting money into it. So not only did the price-point not drop, it stayed where it was with a marked increase in mtx releases.

Which is all to say, they're still selling these things at a ridiculous premium with the knowledge that enough people feel it's 'supporting their favourite ethical company'. And I find that basically disingenuous in light of what happened. If we're going with the bottom line of, 'it's about money, and life isn't fair', then it'd probably be somehow more ethical to just give preference based on money spent than on how much money a person can make for them. That's still fairer than what they did, in that it at least shows long-time supporters the love that this time went not to the community but the wholesalers, the pyramid sellers. But that'd be far too honest at this point, far too hard to apologise for.

But if they can get away with what they did, if that wasn't too honest and wasn't too hard to apologise for, maybe next time. Or the time after.

Or maybe this really was the highest spike of their questionable decision-making based on financial motivators. The nadir of their ethical decay. Yeah, I'm...just not convinced.