When a game is "Free" then "YOU" are the product

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Nomancs wrote:

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DarthSki44 wrote:

There is no early access with the expansion purchase. All you had to do was read what you linked lol.

Lol, they don't have race to 100 anymore either, don't know why you decided it is about dlc and not about d4...

Exactly, it doesn't apply anymore, so what is the complaint?

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DarthSki44 wrote:

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Nomancs wrote:

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DarthSki44 wrote:

There is no early access with the expansion purchase. All you had to do was read what you linked lol.

Lol, they don't have race to 100 anymore either, don't know why you decided it is about dlc and not about d4...

Exactly, it doesn't apply anymore, so what is the complaint?

That it happened and was quite dirty move from Blizz. And it fits this topic.

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Nomancs wrote:

That it happened and was quite dirty move from Blizz. And it fits this topic.

There wasn't a race announced at the time of pre-order availability. There wasn't a leaderboard at launch. The whole "race" culture wasnt even a consideration during development of D4, and they admitted to this. And tbf this represents a small portion of players.

The paid early access was mutually beneficial. They got extra money, and the servers got a tiered stress approach to one of the largest launches in gaming history. Players got to play early.

It's wasn't a dirty move for P2W, that's a really bad take. It was a smart business approach to having many millions of players trying to access to an insanely hyped-game at the same time.

I get "D4 Bad" but cmon.

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DarthSki44 wrote:

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Nomancs wrote:

That it happened and was quite dirty move from Blizz. And it fits this topic.

There wasn't a race announced at the time of pre-order availability. There wasn't a leaderboard at launch. The whole "race" culture wasnt even a consideration during development of D4, and they admitted to this. And tbf this represents a small portion of players.

The paid early access was mutually beneficial. They got extra money, and the servers got a tiered stress approach to one of the largest launches in gaming history. Players got to play early.

It's wasn't a dirty move for P2W, that's a really bad take. It was a smart business approach to having many millions of players trying to access to an insanely hyped-game at the same time.

I get "D4 Bad" but cmon.

So I can't criticize multibillion dollar company now, because they made dirty move, it happened and they don't do it in this single moment?

It was a P2W, a huge one, as people who paid extra could practice 3 days for the race, those who didn't pay couldn't. There is no argue it was P2W for race - because ofc it was.

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superbomb1967 wrote:

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

Yes to both of your queries to me.

Gameplay affecting mtxes: stash tabs, character slots, guild member slots, arguably some of the visual effects that make certain gameplay elements easier to discern in a game where the action can be infamous for being difficult to discern (the mouse cursors being a fairly obvious example). These are all not strictly aesthetic.

And while stash tabs make up a tiny amount of the mtx shop, they constitute a huge percentage of the overall purchases with GGGold. Of course they do.

Exactly why I wrote that MTX is the product (to which you disagreed)

And I still disagree. We do not purchase items from the 'shop' with real money. We purchase them with virtual currency of GGG's making. GGGold. Which we actually do purchase with real money, either by itself or as part of a support pack.

And do you seriously think there isn't a difference when at no point is there a clean conversion rate between the real money and the virtual currency? When the purchase amounts of GGGold very rarely neatly match up with the virtual currency cost of items in the shop?

I stand by my definitions and breakdown.

Don't do it, Diabloski. Signatures, man. Signatures.

It's so hard! The logic blows my mind...

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DarthSki44 wrote:

It's so hard! The logic blows my mind...

So back on topic:

When did we forget the wisdom of 'no such thing as a free lunch'?

Or 'there are always strings attached'?

Do you know, during beta, there was a fair chunk of people who referred to support pack purchases as donations? And GGG did nothing to disabuse people of this opinion because why would they? Of course, anyone who's ever paid taxes will know that they aren't donations because donations can be claimed as a tax deduction.

Dude imagine the tax perk I'd have gotten!

Anyway, this seems like semantics but truly is not because once you start thinking of voluntary support as a 'donation' you really lose sight of the reality that just because something is 'voluntary' that doesn't mean it's not a regular old transaction. That you aren't doing something inherently altruistic, even though there were ways of being pretty altruistic in the early days -- purchasing beta keys for people was a big one.

Thankfully people are a lot more cynical now, especially now that GGG are owned by a deeply unaltruistic corporation and deep, deep in bed with the least altruistic sort of symbionts I've ever seen in any business: influencers.

It seems it is no longer ok to criticize blizzard for p2w early access/practice for race while charging for full game anyway, but ok to shit on GGG, go figure...
Mocking disabilities tho... Not cool, although I'm immune to personal attacks.

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Nomancs wrote:

So I can't criticize multibillion dollar company now, because they made dirty move, it happened and they don't do it in this single moment?

It was a P2W, a huge one, as people who paid extra could practice 3 days for the race, those who didn't pay couldn't. There is no argue it was P2W for race - because ofc it was.

The point is that racing was not and should not have been a consideration at all. Racers are a miniscule minority of an ARPG's playerbase, and they're also always among the most diehard and dedicated sorts who can be expected to get in on early access.

Making the game actively worse for twenty thousand people to every one guy who is minorly inconvenienced by a thing is not great. There does, in fact, come a point where "THIS IS PEE TWO DUBBLEYOO!!" is no longer really valid. is early acxcess in general kinda scummy? Yes. Are there nevertheless valid reasons to do a tiered launch, especially for a game expected to have day-one concurrence numbers in the millions? Absolutely.

I am reminded of Fatshark's release of Darktide, wherein they did a two-odd week staggered launch, rolling out features one by one rather than dropping everything at once, and actively advertised their preorder/early access as a way for players to help them stress test things prior to full release to minimize the amount of game-ruining bugs and server glitches the game would experience on launch. That was a proper way of doing the thing, and I was happy to help.

Did it give me an "advantage" over people who didn't pay for the pre-launch rollout? Yes. Oh well. That's the payment I receive for playing the game before it's quite finished cooking.