I choose to try not to pirate, and thus this kinda thing absolutely pisses me off because this is so disingenuous, because I dig into the nitty gritty of how to do all this stuff legit.
Randomizers alone make Nintendo games in particular so much more alive, and all but require the use of ripping software and quite often emulators.
These emulators can make even current titles look even more beautiful and play more smoothly than their native platform, too.
Yeah, people are going to pirate using this stuff, but its wrong to treating the tools themselves as being inherently bad. They are quite often used by people who care very much about these games, and do give fair financial support to Nintendo.
It’s utterly ridiculous how copyright law has been twisted to erode the very idea of ownership. Does it have software on it? Well then it’s not just against the terms of service… It’s illegal!
It can be the least predatory mtx system ever, being in a paid game is still not acceptable and I’ll die on that hill. Never bought anything with a shop or battle pass and won’t start now.
I agree if those things leverage fomo to get people to pay. In helldivers you can earn that currency just playing the game so if you have less time to play you have the option of purchasing the currency and their versions of battle passes are always available to buy and work on at your leisure.
It started with “It’s just a silly horse armor DLC, just don’t buy it!”, continued with “It’s just cosmetics bro, just don’t get them!”, then we got “The shop is fine though, you can get the currency ingame!” and got to “The timed battle pass is fine, you also get free stuff!”. You can draw your own line for mtx, but slowly we’re both approaching and crossing it if you accept anything before that.
The way I see things, “the least pressured to buy stuff” reads like “the least aggressive cancer”. Sure, it could be worse, but like, you’ve still got cancer. There’s still the ideal option of being healthy instead.
I’m actually not making any of those arguments and disagree with all of them myself. My issue with mtx is generally that they prey on people with psychological tactics that are proven to work on a lot of (generally vulnerable and younger) people. Helldivers does none of that, it’s not “least pressured to buy stuff”, you’re not pressured at all.
And I know I’m being a little sensitive here but it really sucks to lose someone from cancer and see someone comparing it to a shop in a video game of all things.
I appreciate the consideration and at the end of the day I really agree with you and it sucks to see the state of the industry as a whole right now and really hope we can get back to being respected as consumers some day.
Having the option to use real money is the problem. Nothing is stopping them from adding more and more expensive stuff until you cannot grind it anymore. That’s how we went free cosmetics to 60+ bucks for skins.
Oh, they can add content not included in the original purchase? And they ask me to buy those things they worked on if I want to play with them? Fucking monsters… someone needs to stop them.
You know, drip feeding stuff is no fun. Paying for trivial things is no fun either. We used to get full-blown expansions for the price some companies want for a single skin.
Instead of adding stuff to a shop, games could get actual new content. Instead of buying every asset separately, they could all be thrown in with said new content. Like, yeah, they should get paid for their continued work, but that does not mean the consumer should be milked for every penny.
Sure, and it’ll be unacceptable when that actually happens. Saying “X is unacceptable because think about what they might do in the future” isn’t really an amazing argument if they’re not doing it now.
Unpopular opinion but I think it’s acceptable as long as its optional especially as multiplayer game where they are hosting servers. Those aren’t cheap and I don’t have the game so I wouldn’t know but if they do release more multiplayer content for free, I think it’s further justification because that’s better than paid content packs. As an example, CoD on PC had a recurring issue of DLC content being useless since too little people would buy them. Titanfall saw this issue as well and it was even worse due to the smaller player base. So with Titanfall 2 they just made it free and added cosmetics microtransactions that were actually reasonably priced.
Maybe this is not the solution for everything but as long as it has no bearing on gameplay what’s the harm? If you’re not one to spend on microtransactions then you only get the benefits. I don’t think a more benign implementation should be criticised just because we fear the potential of it potentially becoming worse.
To each their own, but I think this is a bit extremist. Life isn’t black and white. Free games with mtx can be good or bad, paid games without can be good or bad.
Just not buying solely because it has a shop/battle pass means you miss out on a lot of games where it has zero meaning and you’re not allowing any nuanced discussion to happen on the issue.
There are so many games available without microtransactions that I can happily never play one and not feel I’m missing out. We’re having the nuanced discussion now!
I think there need to be a balance. If it’s a service game, they need money to keep servicing the game. There is a fine line between a reasonable voluntary option to support a game in exchange for some symbolic cosmetic and gross predatory practices.
I don’t think every topic deserves nuance. Every mtx shop is predatory, every successful service game lives off whales. You’d just draw an arbitrary line at how aggressivly they hunt whales, but they need them all the same. Even if you can get everything with ingame currency drops, if people wouldn’t spend enough, the game wouldn’t get new content.
The only fair solution is to scrap mtx entirely and make all service games subscription based. But people aren’t ready for that, this conversation often comes down to “as long as they don’t exploit me, I’ll take my free games”.
I would not call Deep Rock Galactic predatory… They release one! cosmetic pack for each season, and that’s it? There is no whales to catch, because in that case it’s very limited how much you can even spend. Like 10 euro every 4-5 months and that’s it. Is that predatory to you?
I honestly can’t answer you, I don’t know anything about the game besides seeing it everywhere for years. Stuff like: How in your face is advertising? Do season even add anything besides these packs? Are they missable? The only thing I can say for sure: I dislike how they present multiple bundles with varying amounts of DLC on their steam page. Without prior knowledge I’d have to go through everything and check if I’d be missing out on some actual DLC content and I’d assume there are people buying an actually reasonably priced game for over a 100 bucks because they want all DLC assuming it’s real content. Sure, that’s on them not checking, but also kinda on the developer naming it stuff like “Deluxe” or “Master” Edition instead of “All Cosmetics Edition” or something among those lines.
Regardless, even if it is an genuine exception, they add massive content updates and don’t push these packs at all. Do they even make a profit then? Massively successful games like DRG, Terraria or Stardew Valley can do whatever they want - they have funded themselves more or less for life already and probably would still sell anyways. Normal service games need to turn a profit with their updates which still means either having a subscription or predatory mtx.
It’s OK for people to spend as much money as they want supporting a game. If you enjoy the work that a developer does for a live service game, it makes sense to fund their business.
I paid for a couple of the cosmetic packs in DRG for example. They genuinely made a great game, and they released additional content as well. I like that I’m not pressured into a subscription, and I can choose how much extra money I want to throw their way.
Destiny 2 is a bit ridiculous in my opinion. The DLC is very expensive, each pack corresponding to the cost of a full game, and there are several of these packs at least. That being said, some people really like Destiny 2. Who am I to say that their spending is wrong? It’s their hobby, and they’re funding it by supporting the company that makes the content for them.
It’s OK for people to spend as much money as they want supporting [gambling]. If you enjoy the work that a developer does for a [gambling service], it makes sense to fund their business.
Would you feel the same about your paragraph with these changes? Destiny 2 used to have full blown loot boxes after all.
I think it is important to still ralley against predatory mtx mechanics even if they don’t work for you. Other people don’t necessarily have full control over their own spending habits and by allowing these systems we openly allow developers to exploit these people. Luckily we started having laws against gambling mechanics (although Gacha is still a thing), but there are still many other psychological tricks at play for almost all of these shops.
If it were a level playing field I’d be inclined to agree with you, but it isn’t. These companies are hiring specialists in the psychology of creating a sense of need where there is no need. It doesn’t work on everyone for everything but there are people who are susceptible to these techniques and they’re the people funding everything. The issue isn’t people spending their money on what they want, it’s them being put in the situation where they feel compelled to purchase things and encouraged to do so by companies who know full well that these people can’t handle it and will cough up the dough no matter what comes their way.
There’s merit to that, but keep in mind that sometimes the game is bound to a service for the sake of enabling microtransactions to begin with, and if not for that they would have let players to host their own servers. This has happened to most multiplayer games from larger publishers.
The reason is the cash shop of course. I know, it’s cheap and fair compared to every other live services, but it still limits your play to be online only.
We can only hope the game does an Avengers when it closes down and patches offline play, but we can’t trust these companies.
My partner and I just played through this together in co-op and had a great time. We thought it was a good game.
I read the whole discord drama stuff, and I’m more on Crema’s side. I think they’ve made the mistake of trying to talk to a fanbase like they are just a group of reasonable people that will understand and empathize if you just lay out the facts. But they aren’t. They’re just going to pick apart anything you say and relentlessly shit on you because they are, collectively, not able to be reasoned with.
They released an MMO in its final state, minus some Kickstarter promised stuff, that they have said they will deliver. They tried to monetize the game how they felt was best, it didn’t work out, so they’ve moved on and left a functioning, small-scope MMO. You can argue the quality of it or whether you agree with their decisions, but they made what they said they were going to make.
And they are still releasing small updates to a community that is, frankly, awful. The subreddit is just a hivemind of asshole armchair developers.
Honest question: can you name an asshole gaming community that isn't tied to a live service game? Because I feel like the shitty community comes from expecting everything to be continually improved, and lots of those improvements are subjective, so someone's improvement is someone else's regression. I'll happily revise my hypothesis with some good counter examples though.
Sometimes. The chess community is very weird in my experience. Like, anarchy chess is a thing and shitposting seems to have permeated chess culture. Case in point, the double bongcloud being played in tournament (1:32 length clip). (For context, the bongcloud opening is very bad, playing it is basically a self nerf. Because of the way that tournaments and points work, the end outcome of this game was basically a mutually agreed draw, but they did it in the most shitposting way possible.).
Personally, I think this is great, it’s made it harder for some people to be gatekeepy arseholes within the chess community. I am always slightly perplexed by the memes though - with absurd humour, it can be hard to tell whether I’m missing the joke, or whether the joke is that there is no joke.
Warframe’s community is the nicest, least toxic community I’ve ever encountered. Not saying there aren’t toxic ass holes, there certainly are, but compared to other online game communities I’ve been part of the Warframe community is a breath of fresh air.
No, there are asshole in all types of games including Single player. Even if Souls has multiplayer, I’ve seen toxic communities in even games like Breath of the Wild
Half the community is from the intelligence community, it’s in their interest to keep it nice so new players keep joining and leaking top secret technical specs
It's because the fanbase is a bit tired of the developers.
The developer already set the tone very early on by being a pompous prick over the whole ban nonsense. No one could prove it but it seemed like certain key remappers (like for joysticks and things like that) were causing the anti cheat to trip even if they weren't being used, just running in the background. The CEO was a real jerk about it on twitter when people asked why there wouldn't be any appeals.
That kind of arrogance and behaviour came out several times. There isn't any reason for the community to give them the benefit of the doubt.
I wonder if shit like that will eventually lead to more people using wine in windows, in order to sandbox rootkits. Helldivers 2 works fine with proton on Linux, at least.
The absurdity of having a reason to run wine on windows through WSL is amusing.
If Linux gaming continues to increase in popularity, I imagine the anti-cheat will start to crawl its way out of the WINE environment and into the native system. But I actually have no clue about how these AC work or is handled by WINE.
Unfortunately you can’t get through to these people. They refuse to accept that rootkit as a security concept isn’t just an admin level process that can be hijacked, but a specifically malicious bundle of programs that embeds itself in your firmware and runs in secret.
The anticheat isn’t running secretly, as the game informs you of its use and requirement. It also doesn’t access your MoBo firmware or UEFI, merely the kernel of the OS.
No one with even the bare minimum Sec+ cert would call it a rootkit, and only those with no actual knowledge take that claim seriously.
Oh damn wikipedia, that’s never been edited by someone with an agenda before. Go look up the dictionary/CompTIA definition of a rootkit, not what some FOSS bro edited the wiki page to be.
Is this a sponsored post by a bought-and-paid-for shill, or is the writer just so worn down by microtransactions over the years that they’re Stockholm-Syndromed into thinking this is somehow OK?
I think this is just what happens when an art gets big and becomes an industry. Film buffs don’t get (too) wound up at every new formulaic action movie, soulless remake, or low-brow comedy (and all the money-grabbing tie-ins that come with them); maybe we should all just chill out and stop worrying about the mass-market blockbusters when there’s still a wealth of great stuff to play.
Yeah, I think this is a great take. It’s pretty easy to avoid all the mercenary practices that tend to plague most “AAA” titles these days— mostly by not buying the games at launch; eventually they all come around as giveaways, or at least at a deep discount. And as you say, there are a plethora of small developers putting out amazing games all the time. I’ve been getting a ton of mileage the last couple of months out of Vagrus and Dredge.
Preaching to the choir mate, I run freegames@feddit.uk, I acquire recent-but-not-brand-new AA-but-not-AAA games faster than I can play them! It’s still a great experience to be a patient gamer.
Maybe you are right but it is a bit like when search engines are flooded with crap: super annoying. I would any day prefer fewer options of mid to high quality stuff to whatever this is.
I mean Skull & Bones, the $70 always-online piratey piece of shit from Ubisoft, has an ad in the game for the Premium Edition - which, I shit you not, the first line of the description says “premium edition gives you access to the Full Game.”
Like, fuck any form of modern gaming whatsoever after this point. I bought the Arkham games cause they’re on a huge sale on steam (literally $10 for the whole trilogy, and Origins is currently $5) and have been having a fucking blast replaying those amazing games.
I made a coupleof posts recently about how it doesn’t really matter that there’s all this money-grabbing because we’re so spoiled for choice from the past few decades. My conclusion was that there’s no point in worrying when I’ve got a big pile of great games to play already!
Diablo 4, a full priced game, has microtransactions that are as expensive as the game itself, and skins that cost as much as 30 USD, when a game doesn’t fuck the people as hard it draws attention.
Picked the game up yesterday. No queues, but the matchmaker is still having trouble filling pubgs. Also running into massive CPU utilization straight at start of game, and with Nvidia recommended graphic settings im getting dips to 25fps in some missions. Hopefully the technical patch is not too far away.
What card are you running, performance turns out to be pretty decent. I run this on a Radeon 6950 and on 1440p with everything on high and fsr on quality, I get 120+ fps on average. Or is this game more in favor of amd cards ?
If you are genuinely asking, I can play Devil’s advocate:
Because then they can set the price at 40 USD, making it more affordable, and possibly make back the difference with some (mostly) cosmetic premium content.
This is not so easy to argue for games that are sold at 70 USD, and premium content is much more tied to gameplay, and all the FOMO dark patterns are turned to max.
Why I think people are praising the helldivers2 monetization is that isn’t the case. The “premium currency” is earnable in game and at a reasonable. I haven’t bought any but still have the battlepass and a few of the premium armors.
You get it as part of the battlepass, and the gameplay loop guides you to the currency. You’ll be looking for ammo or in game currency, and there also happens to be premium currency sometimes. The battlepass not being timed and on a work at your own pace is great too.
It feels fair to me? Like the developer can still make a buck but not ruin the experience. I.e. the monetization lets people pay to instantly gratify if they want vs punish you for not spending.
I’ve already given up on online games. I don’t enjoy them like i use too a few years back and endlessly grinding doesn’t come close to the satisfaction of actually finishing a game. My friend streamed some of this to convince me to get it, the gameplay looked bland and he clipped through the map and had to start the mission again. I think ill stick to finishing my backlog of single player games.
No. This is not a “creative” way to nudge us towards the store. Definitely not. It’s just the type of monetization every gamer has been secretly yearning for, right?
Yeah I know, still not interested in any battlepasses, never was. I usually quit as soon as any game start their “Season of the…” crap and return to my evergreen Guild Wars 2.
I also got me a decent looking outfit already and the stats fit my playstyle, so I’m pretty much playing the game for fun now with no interest in any additional unlocks besides stratagems and ship upgrades.
Ah I get you. Just so you know, the battlepasses are more like level unlocks than typical battlepasses, but you probably know that. Also, old battlepasses that you didn’t finish or even start will stay in the game permanently, so don’t feel like there’s a rush to finish them.
Premium currency is freely available on missions and it’s not hard to accrue enough to make frequent buys in the money store without spending a cent. The problem becomes the amount of time I spend in game, which doesn’t feel like a problem.
I just looked and I may give it a try. Looks good. It’s worth mentioning it’s in Alpha, some people don’t enjoy trying to play games that early on and it explains why it’s free.
Beyond All Reason is a Spring Engine game which is an open source rts engine that has been in development for probably a decade and a half at this point.
pcgamer.com
Aktywne