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Loot Boxes Are Never a Good Thing a Column at MMORPG.com
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
Loot Boxes Are Never a Good Thing a Column at MMORPG.com
My good colleague, Billy Murphy, early last week wrote about five things we should stop complaining about. The fifth entry was random reward lootboxes and out of the entire list, I will never - as long as I draw breath - stop complaining about these. They are, as far as I’m concerned, a cancer across multiple genres, intended to do nothing more than extract money from unsuspecting players.
Comments
Loot boxes are evil.
All time classic MY NEW FAVORITE POST! (Keep laying those bricks)
"I should point out that no other company has shipped out a beta on a disc before this." - Official Mortal Online Lead Community Moderator
Proudly wearing the Harbinger badge since Dec 23, 2017.
Coined the phrase "Role-Playing a Development Team" January 2018
"Oddly Slap is the main reason I stay in these forums." - Mystichaze April 9th 2018
"Look I won a dice roll, I'm better than you. The Gods smile upon me not you. Better luck next time."
How many times have you been on a game forum where someone is complaining about not being able to get something in a game after 1000 tries only to see another great specimin of humanity come along and say either
"I got it after 1 try it's RNG, get gud"
or
"I got it after 10,000 times stop whining".
I'm starting to understand that the concept of an MMO doesn't mesh well with the concept of traditional RPG. Maybe that's why the MMORPG genre is walking around like a decrepit emaciated dog.
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I have no real objection to it probably because I do not participate but if others choose to it is not for me to say they should not. People who cannot stop themselves from eating too much having no self control about so many things in life must have similar issues. I do not think we have a right to stop others from what they want to do.
Gaming is a past time an entertainment so is gambling. So they've combined it. I have mixed feelings about these loot boxes because I do not see myself buying keys and such. I also think that it is up to each individual to exercise control and if companies can make money off of your lack of ability to stay away from a game...... people playing for hours and hours an addiction too . I ask you how great a leap is a loot box from a gaming addiction ?
So much for the tin foil hat supposition that we're paid by developers, wouldn't you say?
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If the lobi crystals weren't there I would never open a box. But if you are opening them in hopes of getting a ship let me just put in perspective here: I've played Star Trek Online since it was in beta, the entire lifetime of the game I've never opened a box and received a ship of any kind.
Brenics ~ Just to point out I do believe Chris Roberts is going down as the man who cheated backers and took down crowdfunding for gaming.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
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A For-Profit company will try to get as much profit as they can, and by law it's required for a publicly traded one. So if they can get people to buy a game box, pay a game sub, buy items in a cash shop, pay to win, whatever - they will do it. It's capitalism: the product is worth whatever they can get people to pay for it, and in this case, the game is the product. As a consumer, if you don't like that, you don't buy it. So in that vein, I don't blame companies for doing whatever they think is best to drive revenue. I don't like them all, and I chose not to participate in any that I don't agree with (I happen to not like loot boxes and cash shops, I just don't buy them, but I recognize the publisher/developer's rights to use them).
I think there are plenty of good payment models for revenue now. If the argument is that development costs are just too high, I would come back and say you need a better development model. Plenty of games, some of which are extremely good, get published without multi-hundred-million dollar budgets. Sure, MMOs require more capital to develop than, say, another Peggle clone, but that doesn't mean they need to cost hundreds of millions of dollars to produce something fun, and something that could be sold, start cranking out revenue, and start the process of continuous reinvestment and improvement. Case in point - League of Legends, one of the (arguably) highest grossing games of all times, started out as a mod developed by some college kids. Half-Life, which spun off to help found Steam, started off as a Quake mod.
That isn't to say that a game can't start out with a solid payment model in place, just that you need a good game to drive the payment model, not the other way around. I can point to plenty of bad games with perfectly good payment models that flopped, I can only point to a select handful of good games that had bad payment models and turned it around.
F2P, gamble boxes, P2Whatever gives publishers the opportunity to not have time constraints to fix or update anything without out real recourse while subjectively treating their base as "vocal minority".
There is a fair model out there that fits but all these developers wish to take great games and sacrifce why they're good, for short sighted monetary goals.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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Gw2 is unfair,but still at some point they are ok,reason is,they are allowing every1 to exchange gold for ingame cash so you can buy costumes and stuff,so they do need to earn profit somehow,as long as it doesnt make the game PAY2WIN im cool with it
you people need to understand something,developers dont have many choices,its either to earn money with PAY2WIN system or with loot boxes for costumes,to me personaly,id always pick loot boxes over PAY2WIN
all in all,its a lose-lose in every direction,if you do pay2win,people cry and quit,if you do loot boxes,people cry and quit
there is simply no solution to every1 dissatisfaction,not every1 has same amount of RL cash,so to some not needing to spend a dime to get stuff with grinding is awesome,and yet there are some with soo much cash that simply want to spend it and get it instantly and not bother with it anymore......
There are 2 options with hybrids inbetween;
- Get the capital, create your AAA game, with your AAA timeline, and your AAA expectations and responsibilites. Sink or swim.
- Get in your personal workspace, with people who believe in what you're doing, create your indy game, with loose timeline, and no expectations or responsibilities. Sink or swim.
All this "labor and insurance is too high for me, I'm going to have to sell my Lambo now" is getting to be a bit much.Sorry for the off topic rant.
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The difference is that children cannot enter Casino's, but do have access to MMORPG's.
Second, the loot boxes are not targetting People without addiction, they "specifically" target people WITH addiction, because they know they will spend enormous amounts of cash to get what they want due to them not being able to control their impulses!
That's why these loot boxes are a CANCER in MMORPG's! And why I hate these studios that incorporate them into their games with a passion! It's immoral and disgusting and has nothing to do anymore with gaming as a whole!
It's gotten so bad now, that their entire games get designed around these RNG lootboxes! Utterly disgusting and it's pretty much destroying the MMORPG genre at the moment.
The only two MMORPG's I can play right now without this cancer are WoW and FFXIV..... but for how long until corporate greed infects these two games as well. Especially Blizzard now doing it with Overwatch. It just a matter of time until they will start adding it to WoW. :-/
A small ray of light is that Square Enix is a Japanese Company, so FFXIV will luckily never see it.
ESO is not B2P. If it was, they wouldn't be able to keep on releasing high quality DLCs every quarter. They'd pretty much end up just like GW2.
ESO is a hybrid B2P/P2P MMO, that is actually leaning much more towards P2P with all the DLCs coming that fast. If you want a quick proof, just look at PS4 top-seller addons. You'll see that ESO+ (optional subscription) is still going very strong after 14+ months.
ZOS could have very well kept with the subscription-based model, I have no doubt it would have worked damn fine for them. But why when there is a goldmine with the ES playerbase that prefers the B2P + DLCs model?
Of course this model doesn't work for all MMOs. But I still think it's the most fair one. Subscription-based MMOs need to go, and F2P abominations as well.
That being said, cosmetic boxes in no way compromise the integrity of the "game".
Sure I would prefer not to have them, but I'm no where near hating them.
full disclosure - I've never bought one with cash in any game.
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