The monetization of World of Warcraft has evolved significantly since I played during Burning Crusade over 10 years ago. Back then, the model was straightforward - you bought the expansion and paid a subscription fee. That was all you needed to access 100% of the game’s content....
Idk what point you’re trying to get across. Back in TBC everything was in game. Every mount and cosmetic. There was no shop. Collectors edition obviously existed, sure. How is cosmetics and mounts not content? It’s part of the game lol
Thanks for contributing in unneccessary witch hunting. You’ve shown that Lemmy can be just as petulant and inhospitable as reddit. Nothing I have ever written is AI generated, such a weird criticism and hilarious to lob that at someone considering that even million dollar tech companies who have made “ai detectors” have failed spectacularly with false positives. But you dislike what I say so you’re 100% correct, right? yea that makes sense dude sure.
It’s amusing to me how you felt the need to write this incredibly long “shame on you” rant, like you were really that bothered by some words you saw that you had to write up a long witch hunt and try to harass me.
It’s really weird to include ~500% additional monthly contributions into the math.
Thanks for pointing that out. My math was horribly off here. That’s what I get for using Google sheets to try and work this out myself :( I corrected it. I was accidentally multiplying by something without realizing it.
I don’t know how anyone has time for two live service games at once
Think of an MMO as a theme park. Used to have to wait in a really long ass line to get to each of the rides. Now, you have fast passes to get through all of the attractions as quickly as possible. This explains the MMO market nowadays. If you subscribe for 12 consecutive months to World of Warcraft, you won’t have enough stuff to play. The gameplay loop when you get to end game is essentially brainless and monotonous, it requires no time investment really at all. You just log in daily to do some repeatable tasks, Then you spam the exact same brain dead content over and over again currently it’s raids or dungeons. They added a scaling system about halfway through World of warcraft’s lifespan. So you either go normal heroic mythic raids or you do normal heroic mythic dungeons and then mythic dungeons scale all the way up to like the 30s so you just repeatedly run the same exact stuff over and over. Lots of people don’t have the fortitude to do this, so there is a lot less time invested nowadays in a single MMO and a lot more interspersion across other MMOs.
Elder scrolls online has some pretty good story content, but it’s not enough to keep you busy for an entire month either. Some people swear that it’s worth paying for and subscribing to the game for. If you don’t subscribe to the game, you don’t have any crafting bag, and by extension, you don’t have any inventory space to hold any materials, so it’s almost required to subscribe to Elder scrolls online. You can buy all the expansions with money, but that won’t give you a crafting bag and a bunch of other goodies. Game becomes virtually unplayable at that point and it’s frustrating
If you can’t afford subscriptions like those, then you should probably have other priorities to really worry about.
If you did a simple search for poverty and How much people struggled back in 2004 when World of Warcraft released versus now, you would see that families are having a lot harder time than ever before. It has not improved at all for most people. Wealth inequality has grown massively in the past 20 years that World of Warcraft has been around. So yeah a lot of people do have different priorities, And now, the price of playing a live service game that required a subscription can definitely impact you. The same thing can be said though with other subscriptions like Netflix and Hulu. It really fucking destroys your monthly income. Alone they don’t, but added up they definitely do
BEFORE DOWNVOTING ME, PLEASE READ: This is my opinion, you can disagree with it all you want, but it would be really nice to at least respect what I have to say just the same as I respect that people really enjoy this game...
First of all this is a lot of text and I appreciate all the effort you have taken to express your opinion.
Apologies, still new to the posting style here on Lemmy. It cut off the TLDR which I have added back in
There are some points I would like to comment on even if I have not played the game myself
I don’t get it. How can you provide your commentary on something you have never experienced? Like, I get what you’re saying and respect to your opinions but like… You kind of have to try it and live through it for a little while to really get it.
Secondly I don’t blame devs for not beeing active on social media with the community. Especially when your game is rather small
If you look at their actual team website, they have a huge team. I think there’s no excuse for them to have no community presence, considering that concerned ape is just one person, he’s just one dude developing the entire thing himself and he has been very vocal and very active. Their website shows that they have at least 10 members on their team, and they barely interact with the community. It just feels like a cash grab when you take that into account. Sorry if that sounds harsh but it is what it is
Fair point. I didn’t find it relaxing, it just felt like a gutted version of Stardew that treats me like I’m not smart enough to figure anything out. Everything has an unskivable tutorial like blacksmithing and cooking. You can’t buy any of your own basic recipes. It just sends them to you automatically in the mail, which is extremely annoying because it undermines player choice. That’s what was kinda annoying to me. Maybe if it was more like old-school RuneScape it would be more relaxing ? That game has no recipes, you just level up and know the recipe by default.
See Coral Island is so cute and unique that I personally felt it was just perfect. It wasn’t so closely resembling SDV that I felt like I was playing a bootleg version haha
I played during vanilla and burning crusade, so the first few expansions. It was nothing like it is now. Now people running around in yeti costumes and everything looks just plain stupid in my opinion. I’m not saying graphics wise they were ever super impressive or something like that. I’m just saying like, it looks clowny
And we’re saying it’s always looked that way. It’s always looked like a cartoon, but that’s not a bad thing
The reason it looked like that back then was because of the fact that It was relatively new, had just started out, that was the state of technology back then. It just doesn’t make sense to me that after 15 years and being acquired by One of the largest companies in the entire world, they can’t afford to design characters that don’t look stupid. If you look at the statistics for World of Warcraft, all of the animal races are barely played. About 85% of people either play human, or some sort of elf because they want characters that look good. Basically, almost no one plays the ugly ones
Amazing how this cash grab of a game has been in early access alpha development for about 8 years now, finally releases, and this is the best they can do
I thought this was a joke but it seems like it’s actually legit. WoW, which has a subscription and paid expansions, just added a $90 item to their store. This is Korean MMO levels of absurdity. What do you think of this?...
I quit after they fraudulently charged me a 6 month subscription renewal and then refused to refund it for months because no customer service reps anymore, and then the next expansion had paid early access for a huge paywall. It’s a total scam now
Out of my friends list of 45 people, I know that’s not a lot but still, small list of friends that I have that have played this game actively since the very beginning, two of them still play the game and one of them does not even subscribe full-time. Only when there’s a major update… When I asked every single one of my...
I think your need to do some inflation adjustment, their costs increase a lot as well. And raw “record profits” aren’t meaningful when not inflation adjusted.
They added microtransactions to both Runescape 3 and Oldschool, bonds never existed back then, so now you can buy gold in game, which is huge insane revenue amount for them. World of Warcraft has never had to increase costs even once.
Ohh darn you’re right. I misremembered. Thought it was always 15. But yeah, I get the cost of running the game and all that stuff. Totally valid points.
Hmm idk… The community is mad half the time at the devs. The voting is awful and simply doesn’t work at all. They’re not a tight knit company anymore either, they’re owned by an investment company
It’s honestly crazy how horrifically they monetized RS3. You’re spammed with login notifications for your free gambling opportunities. Idk what it is now but it was squeal of Fortune, then some weird chest opening game you get two keys from or you get them from just playing the game and at random. Met a guy who spent $3600 on getting his skills up. Unfathomable to me
Don’t worry, there will be better times ahead friend. Maybe not for this game, but I’m sure that someone will be inspired by the joy that the game brought them and create something similar. Games like Valheim arose this way, and the original dev (Gower) is creating another game with no microtransactions in it at all. Just sucks that this has to keep happening repeatedly with every game
You know it’s so funny about the hunting skill that was really controversial? The people who actually did the skill did not enjoy it at all It was extremely tedious and frustrating, myself included. One of the worst skills and I’ve had no interest in doing it since. But it is by far the most botted skill in the game, pretty much everyone that I came across two years ago doing that skill when I still played, they were all bots. Like every single one of them. You could even mess them up just for fun by putting boxes around them so that you captured stuff and they would basically error out because the spot wasn’t working
It’s globally accepted in the Sims community that no one wants a multiplayer Sims. We’ve been asking for Sims 5 for years now, and they tell us they’re no longer doing Sims 5 they’re doing multiplayer Sims next, with a paid store similar to Fallout 76. So yeah, fuck EA 100% truly vile shit company
After playing World of Warcraft for 15 years, I started becoming increasingly bored and disgruntled with the game. The game being grindy and repetitive is no real surprise, I mean it’s an MMO. But the one thing that was really frustrating was paying monthly for a subscription and a huge chunk of cash for an expansion, but...
My default skinned character can still win against a guy in a bear-suit with a golden AK and that’s really all I need. I have no particular FOMO of not winning the fashion part of the game.
Twitter user strahfe recently shared a patent by Activision that suggests buying cosmetic items could increase your chances of being placed in games against less-experienced players. The patent reads: “The microtransaction engine may match a more expert/marquee player with a junior player to encourage the junior player to make game-related purchases of items possessed/used by the marquee player”
I’m not heavy into conspiracies, but I’m suspicious enough to not give Activision the benefit of the doubt and bet that they’ve done this in secret if they have a patent for it. But really… if we’re even thinking about these kinds of things, the game is a lost cause.
Apex Legends … the microtransactions and battle passes were just straight up toxic
My friend bought Battlepass for Apex once because it had a pretty decent skin in it. Then, he was straight up *PISSED * when next season they had the most ridiculous, incredible looking skin ever. He felt like he had to purchase it again that season, and was bitter he spent money the previous season for something so mediocre. That kind of thought process is just awful. These games lure you right into it.
I don’t find myself having any negative feelings after playing a game like Zenless Zone Zero
I agree with the rest of what you said but this part is crazy. Gacha games are so heavily monetized it’s wild. I played zenless as well up until a few weeks ago, that game is such a trash can. I used every single currency that I had earned in the entire game and couldn’t get The character I wanted. Some people spend as much as $2,000 on the game just trying to get a single character. That kind of gambling is even worse than what I’m talking about
Any lottery style game (let’s be honest, Gacha = Lottery) is psychologically harmful in my opinion because it trains you to gamble, there’s no other way around it. These games purposefully condition you to spend currency that you’ve earned, lose majorly, and then get rushes of dopamine when you finally win. They are designed to keep you wanting more. If you think I’m making this up, then read Got ya!: The Psychology of Gacha Addiction
Gacha games have mastered the art of making us eagerly anticipate each draw, activating our brain’s reward system and flooding us with dopamine — the pleasure neurotransmitter. It’s the chemical cocktail that keeps us engaged, excited, and coming back for more. Next on the list is the ‘just one more try’ mentality
There’s nothing remotely healthy about this at all, which runs completely contrary to what my personal goals are
I really appreciate that because someone was over here trying to convince me to play a gacha game claiming that it’s not that bad. Some people just don’t get it
I actually have played around 900 hours of it on Steam alone. I’m not going to support them anymore though because of their bullshit price increases. They are owned by an investment company now That is milking them for every cent. World of Warcraft has never once increased the prices of their game at all. I’m not going to support a game that is like that
you seem to be upset that it offers cosmetic items for sale. One of your proposed solutions is to bundle all of the cosmetic items together and sell it as a DLC. What is the actual difference in those two options?
The difference is cosmetic items in an in-game shop are designed to get you to “browse” the store regularly and then become mentally conditioned to “shopping” for additional things to buy that aren’t included in the game. This is a very unnatural way of acquiring cosmetics in a video game. A more natural approach is to simply discover them in the game or earn them through gameplay. Simple example: Red tiger camo in Call of Duty 4. No need to browse a shop and see skins and wade through other crap to find the one you want and then see a price tag. You also don’t have to see a DLC you don’t have, since you haven’t bought it. Adding things in a game and being like “Sorry, you don’t have this… but you COULD have it, for $5!” that’s just nutty to me
Pointing at the 5-10 indie games that won the lottery isn’t really relevant to what is required for the average indie game.
This is an interesting comparison. Winning the lottery isn’t tied to honest hard work or passion or anything like that. It’s literally a gamble. Stardew wasn’t really a gamble, it was a passion project that delivered to people what they wanted. There are other games that are very successful too. The “average” indie game is also some really strange hyperbole to use, how do you even know what’s average? is there a scale, a criteria, a rating board for “lottery” indie games and “average” ones?
As a long-time Stardew Valley fan, I never thought I’d find a game that could capture my heart quite the same way. Fields of Mistria has done just that. I’m honestly blown away by how good this game is...
This has been on my wishlist for a while so I bought it last week. It’s been a magical experience tbh. Stardew kinda bored me and this one has a feel good feeling
This is by far the highest reviewed one I’ve seen lately. 8k reviews with 97% is insane. Some of the other early access games I’ve browsed look like abandon ware or something else
I totally understand this, and I used to feel the same way but then I realized that these creators probably need the support if they are going to go from early access to full release. It really helps, and it wasn’t really that much, $14. I canceled World of Warcraft And Hulu for a month because there was nothing to watch there anyway. That was more than enough to buy it. But I don’t blame you at all of you don’t want to support early access games! I totally understand
I’m going to be honest, you sound like a zealot. Uncompromising about your ideals about gaming, and any that don’t conform to it exactly are “not impressive” in your own words. I’m not opposed to libregaming, and everything that’s listed on that page you linked sounds great on paper, but in reality, doesn’t always work out the greatest. This isn’t the '90s where you can go and create an open source game for everyone to enjoy and everything works out fine in the end. This is the age of artificial intelligence, which is already known to be scraping and stealing large amounts of copyrighted works from the web and using them in ways that are unknown. This unknown is actually quite damaging to the gaming industry as a whole, and even threatens the idea of Libregaming. worst case scenario, AI models get their hands on the source code for someone’s new game, and now, someone who has never programmed a day in their life can use an AI model to create the exact same game with no credit given to the original creator. That’s not that far-fetched in the current day and age. Perhaps that’s the reason why Stardew and other games don’t want to be open source? So people can’t just steal their hard work after years and years, and then go churn another one out.
There are dozens of other reasons as well why it doesn’t work, but this isn’t really the time or place to explain it. I would recommend though that you remain a little bit more open to games that are closed source, because there’s a whole team working on mistria, it’s not just a solo developer. It’s their right to keep their game closed source as an indie developer. That’s totally their choice
Every time a shares something in the Stardew Valley genre, there’s like a militant group of commenters who are outright hostile to that new game. And yes, I’m seeing that sprinkled in the comments on this post.
Oh definitely. It’s really funny though because these keyboard warriors that keep criticizing any game that looks similar to Stardew Valley, doesn’t realize that Stardew Valley faced those exact same criticisms when people said that crazy ape, the developer of Stardew, was heavily inspired by* harvest Moon. It was such a silly and absurd thing to say, but everyone started regurgitating it over and over again. Just because one game starts becoming successful people forget the other games that they were very similar to in the past
If people really wanted to go down the rabbit hole though, this all started when Farmville hit Facebook. That was the beginning of it all that I remember personally. Farmville made people lose their fucking minds. People were all over that shit, it was like cocaine. No one would shut up about it for years
Yeah, it’ll probably be quite some time until they have a Linux version. But can’t you download some sort of emulation for Windows if you really wanted to try it? I don’t know how that works though I’ve never used Linux
it’s a different flavor. Stardew is more like a farming sim, and a lot more rugged and rural farming feeling. Mistria is more anime themed and cozy feel, definitely geared towards chicks or those who like pretty aesthetics and cozy vibes. I also really LOVE the color palette, everything is gorgeous
Magic. Love the magic
The romance options are just better. They’re more authentic, they’re special
Less nuance/annoying stuff that Stardew has you have to mod out, like friendship levels that decrease over time and become annoying as fuck tbh
Less hardcore. Some stardew-ers have minmax strategies for everything and it’s hilarious. Exact locations to put items in order to min-max the absolute biggest harvests
I’m still learning but Mistra is soooooooooooo much more fun
It was, but the important thing is that it was conveniently located inside of Facebook, and generic enough that it grabbed people’s attention, which is exactly what you need sometimes. When it’s too niche or specific, that’s when people lose interest. That’s why fields of mistria is not necessarily as popular. It’s a little bit more niche and specific, with magic and washed out color theme, pastel colors, appealing to the cozy gaming crowd. And that’s okay! Not every game needs to be so generic that it appeals to everyone
World of Warcraft's monetization seems to be getting way more aggressive angielski
The monetization of World of Warcraft has evolved significantly since I played during Burning Crusade over 10 years ago. Back then, the model was straightforward - you bought the expansion and paid a subscription fee. That was all you needed to access 100% of the game’s content....
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Fields of Mistria review: A boring, soulless Stardew reskin angielski
BEFORE DOWNVOTING ME, PLEASE READ: This is my opinion, you can disagree with it all you want, but it would be really nice to at least respect what I have to say just the same as I respect that people really enjoy this game...
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Linux hits exactly 2% user share on the October 2024 Steam Survey (www.gamingonlinux.com) angielski
7 days to die is no longer Early Access, but still looks like this (lemmy.world) angielski
Amazing how this cash grab of a game has been in early access alpha development for about 8 years now, finally releases, and this is the best they can do
World of Warcraft adds $90 mount to in game store (lemmy.world) angielski
I thought this was a joke but it seems like it’s actually legit. WoW, which has a subscription and paid expansions, just added a $90 item to their store. This is Korean MMO levels of absurdity. What do you think of this?...
Corporate greed is killing RuneScape angielski
Out of my friends list of 45 people, I know that’s not a lot but still, small list of friends that I have that have played this game actively since the very beginning, two of them still play the game and one of them does not even subscribe full-time. Only when there’s a major update… When I asked every single one of my...
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My mental health has improved after deleting games that have microtransactions in them angielski
After playing World of Warcraft for 15 years, I started becoming increasingly bored and disgruntled with the game. The game being grindy and repetitive is no real surprise, I mean it’s an MMO. But the one thing that was really frustrating was paying monthly for a subscription and a huge chunk of cash for an expansion, but...
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Fields of Mistria is one of the most impressive games I've ever played (lemmy.world) angielski
As a long-time Stardew Valley fan, I never thought I’d find a game that could capture my heart quite the same way. Fields of Mistria has done just that. I’m honestly blown away by how good this game is...