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Planetside 2 community stops SOE from adding pay to win.
ice-vortex
Member UncommonPosts: 960
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/07/18/planetside-2-paid-for-buffs-rebuffed/
The fact that they even attempted to slide this by under the radar shows SOE simply doesn't get it. Georgeson can talk all he wants about being the 'white hats' when it comes to the cash shop, but when there is proof SOE is willing to try to slide pay to win into one of their games built ground up as f2p, it completely discredits everything he has said. Actions speak far more than words.
Higby's previous statement on implants:
Microtransactions, of course! However, creative director Matt Higby reassured us that the game won't be "pay-to-win." At Game Developers Conference last week, Higby promised that "anything that affects gameplay, such as grenades or medkits or implants that give you additional power within the game, will be exclusively unlocked via [in-game] resources."
http://www.shacknews.com/article/72872/planetside-2s-free-to-play-economy-explained
Comments
SOE was recently added to my list of companies NOT to buy from.
Smedley is an idiot, and would find a way to screw up a wet dream.
I have never seen any company continue to alienate its own customers the way SOE does in screwing around with its own products. On the rare occasion they actually manage to put out something decent, they then go and mess it up. It's like they can't stop themselves. It almost seems they want to piss people off...I really don't think this was intended to be added in It's current form, probably just testing what they can get away with.
Do something horrible, nerf it a bit, re-introduce it.. People will justify that It's not as bad as last time and Voila.
You screwed your playerbase.
^this.
"There are at least two kinds of games.
One could be called finite, the other infinite.
A finite game is played for the purpose of winning,
an infinite game for the purpose of continuing play."
Finite and Infinite Games, James Carse
The items in question were capable of being payed for or earned in game. I don't see what the fuss is about. Players disagreed with the implants being purchasable with money, so they pulled it before it even hit the scene.
Other games would have said get bent, you can still earn them in game. SOE actually listened to their players and people still find occasion to gripe. Me thinks thou dost protest too much.
And Smed/SOE never said one thing and then turned around and did another? I could name several instances where that very thing happened: SOE "decides" to not do something so they can "wear the white hat" and then six months down the road, they do the same thing anyway, when the revenues are worse. You can say what you want, but SOE for a fact did that several times in the past.It is purely pay to win and Higby even admitted it himself when he promised they would never add such a thing to the cash shop. Certs are already strained for anyone who hasn't maxed everything they wanted already. This would mean that any other player that would want to keep up with the veteran player in power would need to spend money.
It's company apologists like you who won't hold a company accountable for their actions is why a lot of companies would tell everyone else to get bent.
Perhaps it just doesn't hit close enough to home for me. I play PS2 on a somewhat regular basis, and I just don't feel its that big of a deal. I'm around battle rank 50, and have most of the upgrades I need. I have upwards of 3000 certs sitting around that I just don't care that much about spending, so I could easily afford to drop them on those implants if I thought they were all that important. Unlike an mmoRPG, the form of progression in an FPS of that sort is just not that important. The weapons are just variations of the stock guns, and at the end of the day skill is going to be the prevalent factor. I could log on a battle rank 1 and go anywhere from 3:1-10:1 with just the stock equipment. I imagine that was the way they felt when considering implementing them with the option of station cash.
Again, the fact that they listened to their players and decided against it is of more import to me than the fact that they were considering making a sketchy move in an FPS.
edit: I just logged into PS2 to review all the things you can buy with only certs and what you can buy with station cash. Theres a ton of stuff available to buy with station cash. You can almost completely deck your tanks or vehicles with upgraded weapons and so forth with cash that you would otherwise have to earn. I'm just trying to figure out what the difference is here that would rustle so many collective jimmies.
Recently? I am sorry to hear that. They haven't made a decent game since 2005. Their technologies suck, their programming code sucks, and most of all their management teams suck.
I hope they prove me wrong though
SOE said that about DCUO and EQ2 too. look at DCUO : added pvp trinket and soda only available to legendary players(separated playerbase by vendor pricing), top tier mods available to only legendary players, belt with slots to put trinket and soda; highest slotted belt to add multiple pvp soda only available for legendary players. i can keep going; they WILL add pay2win items in game with "optional" tag on them sooner or later.
Boobs are LIFE, Boobs are LOVE, Boobs are JUSTICE, Boobs are mankind's HOPES and DREAMS. People who complain about boobs have lost their humanity.
And Smed/SOE never said one thing and then turned around and did another? I could name several instances where that very thing happened: SOE "decides" to not do something so they can "wear the white hat" and then six months down the road, they do the same thing anyway, when the revenues are worse. You can say what you want, but SOE for a fact did that several times in the past.
This is why I avoid F2P games. They say what you want to hear, when you want to hear it, to get some of your $$. And they reserve every right to change their mind whenever they want to. So nothing is sacred, and even if they promise no P2W at launch, nothing is going to stop them from doing it. Hence why I never even downloaded PS2 in the first place.
Luckily, i don't need you to like me to enjoy video games. -nariusseldon.
In F2P I think it's more a case of the game's trying to play the player's. -laserit
I like SOE but i agree
EQ2 fan sites
The problem is, of course, that their P2P games also now offer PTW features. Want an uber speed mount in EQ? Guess where you can get one? Want a bunch of no-weight bags so that your monk can grab loot and maintain maximum efficiency? Hey, look what's on sale this week!
In a mainly PVE title, you can ignore it, but in PVP.... I hope that the player base does walk out when they eventually put these implants into the store, 3 months down the line. SOE has to be trained like young children, and they only learn sadly via negative reinforcement. Every time they screw you, you have to punish them harshly. The Planet Side players should do a week boycott just to show that they mean business.
I really think this thread is jumping the gun and just trying to make news out of something that shouldn't be. They have been wanting to include implants for a long time (They were in the original Planetside) and have also been seeking feedback/suggestions for a long time. With this in mind they threw some ideas out there and they got some great feedback so they pushed back the release to allow more time to work on them... Nothing more, Nothing less.
This whole idea that the community stopped them from doing something evil is just absurd. People need to grow up and stop jumping to conclusions. Instead, they should see things from other points of view rather than their own shallow view. The facts are that there are only so many people working on the game and there are a whole lot more people playing it. And of those people working on the game there's even less people in charge of this particular area of development.
The minds and ideas of a few will always be trumped by the many so while the few developers working on this may have seen nothing wrong with these initial ideas (Or maybe they did, but simply wanted feedback so they knew in what direction to move) the fact remains that it is still up to the community's response to determine its fate and in no way were the developers trying to force it down their throats.
DCUO the last time i checked was an epic failure of a game, one of the reasons they went F2P with it was because people were just not playing it, now maybe things have improved a bit on the console servers, but if so, their the only ones, and yes, Planetside 1 was pretty good, until SOE went and broke it, with BFR's and cave combat, which were just the more ridiculous changes they made to the game - they didnt learn, havent learned from the SWG debacle, and then there is EQ2, the successor to EQ1, and yet another epic fail, they probably did more for Blizzard with that game than most other companies out there. SOE's biggest problems seem to be game management, and monetising their games which are all now to be F2P in the future, which for some in itself may be an issue, and when it comes to P2W its a huge issue, sure people are sore about SWG, and with good reason, but thats not the only game in SOE's repertoire that has earned them this degree of ire, and you'd have to be blinkered not to know this. So take off those tinted spectacles and wake up and smell the coffee, because if you think DCUO and Planetside 2 are some of the better games since WoW then theres a bunch of other games out there that would like a word.
I'd just like to comment on the breaking of Planetside 1 you mention.
The ideas themselves weren't bad... It was the implementation. Much of the community wanted some kind of urban-style combat and that's what the caves achieved. They also wanted some heavier tanks which came in the form of BFRs. BFRs were simply too powerful when they were released and it took a little while for the developers to level things out, but by then it was too late. It didn't take very long for them to fix them, but the damage had already been done. As far as the caves go I don't think many people had a problem with them, but when the game took a hit from the BFRs and lost a lot of it's population that's when the caves became nothing more than a nuisance because of that lack of population.
Have you met EA?
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Hey I agree with and like your entire post. Regarding PS1, SOE absolutely failed by forcing BFRs on everyone, instead of spawning a new server/codeset to see if it gained a following. SOE does this ALL THE TIME and seem incapable of maintaining more than one code base for the same game; which I think costs them many $millions as well as the jobs that wealth would've created.
BTW, I joined PS1 because of how cool a BFR looked in their video. By the time I joined, BFRs had already been nerfed and were, I thought, balanced nicely. Not long after, Galaxy Fun Ships were added, and those of course were stupidly overpowered for a while.
Luckily, i don't need you to like me to enjoy video games. -nariusseldon.
In F2P I think it's more a case of the game's trying to play the player's. -laserit
The moment they announced PS2 was going to be F2P I walked away from ever trying it, and I did enjoy PS1 originally but I did feel PS1 needed more to it for it to be interesting for more than a month at a time.
Every company will "assure" everyone that when they switch to F2P or launch a new F2P it won't be P2W. They have to say this because otherwise people will avoid it. So once people get into the game and are attached to it, they will slowly creep in P2W options over time. The reason is because F2P can only work if people continually pay, which is why F2P as a term is so humorous. A company can't operate if it is truly free. When all you offer is true cosmetics, there simply isn't a high enough return to keep the game running or to apply a lot of company resources to it. So slowly they add in ways to speed up progress and eventually expand it into actual power gains.
There was an article a long time ago about how the browser game Battlefield Heroes started off as cosmetics only. Sales were low, the game wasn't worth a lot to the company, so they tried a new strategy. They added P2W directly with cash shop guns that were better than the free ones (I think they were temporary too so you had to keep buying them). People bitched and moaned, many stopped playing. However, despite the negative press and lower player numbers, their profits shot through the roof because people will pay for advantages. Examples like this highlight what all companies know, they're just all trying to find the right approach to slowly sneak those in so that players just end up accepting it and they don't get stuck with the negative press. It is why F2P is simply not good for gaming in the long run. There are plenty of other articles from those who worked in Asia where F2P has been around a lot longer. P2W along with pay to humiliate, are where they make all of their money. It is what drives the entire Asian F2P market and those are the revenues that the western companies want.
Agreed, EA way worse all around.
You guys are living in the past.
In another 2 to 3 years, no new games will be pay to play. Everything is going F2P because empirically it offers more longevity, and thus more money in the long term.
Yes people play planetside 2
as for this thread a couple things to point out.
1. this was not slide under our noses, higby before AND after the implants were talked about mentioned what they were going to do with them in the game, and when they posted their proposal to US, they Asked for feedback, evidence of this can be found in multiple areas; On his twitter, planetside2 official forums, and planetside2 universe forums. so the idea or notion of SOE sneaking this in is incorrect.
2. prior of asking for feedback, we unanimously rejected it, gave our explanations why it would not work, as well as some of us preparing to walk from the game if they put such features in. 24 hours later Smed and Higby made their necessary responses and said they will go back to the drawing board. http://www.planetside-universe.com/showthread.php?t=56008
I am glad to still be part of the PS2 Community to keep SOE from crossing the line. we remember Higby's statements as well as Smeds and T-Rays, and for what they are putting into the game so far, we offer them the support they need to get it done.
However, Much like the thread i made before this one was posted, We will let them know if we disapprove of something that either goes against their current philosophy, or if its straight up game breaking. Not everybody gets what they want, but if the majority of the community says your in danger of messing up- it is best to listen.