Between all the different modes (10-man, 25-man, normal, hard, flex, farming for pets or mounts, etc), how many times do you figure a raid is run by the typical player in WarCraft? Once a week for a year for just a couple modes is pretty much that.
By a typical player? Maybe 5 or 10 times. A hardcore raider, perhaps 30 times.
But that isn’t all to get a single drop, of course.
You may not but you need a competent level of stick skill. NBA 2K17 did a horrendous job of teaching new players any fundamentals. It is fine if I wanted to play as Lebron but if I wanted to create my own player then this because a massive hindrance.
This is the best line in the entire thread.
per the reddit new players guide.
“Don’t forget to do your daily prize spin!”
Yeah, I am not buying this game.
Why? I don’t have anything against even B2P games offering daily rewards to keep players engaged. GW2 and ESO do something similar, although their rewards aren’t random. I don’t think that’s predatory taken in isolation. Yes it’s a mindfuck to get people to login every day, but it doesn’t in of itself dip a hand into your wallet.
Maybe it is because the free spin wheel is located in the in-game casino where you can wager VC against other players.
This is not the features I look for in the myplayer mode in my basketball game.
Oh! Yeah, that’s awful.
It’s too bad, because I’m really in the mood for a basketball game for some reason. Not even thinking of buying this, though.
Interestingly my son, who has a young mans righteous anger at anything that has a whiff of F2P, thinks Warframe “does it right” when it comes to the model. He recognises the game is a grind, but a fun one with friends, so its cool. He has even happily bought several items in the game and has zero buyers remorse.
Yeah, it’s grindy, but the missions are short, the combat is fun and the parkour never gets old. The upthread uproar about 119 attempts to get a drop is the statistical worst case. The statistically typical case is getting the parts for an entire frame seems to be 30 runs or less. (Primes not included! (currently trying to the rare bit for a Zephyr Prime >.< ))
Warframe is a loot-based game, so repetition is an intrinsic part of the design. The devs do make a conscious effort not to abuse the microtransactions though.
EDIT: Could probably say the same about Path of Exile, though I haven’t played it much.
The enduring success of Magic the Gathering and peoples’ enduring willingness to literally pay for a chance of getting a card that the company could easily just sell to them directly (but chooses not to, because the entire system is predicated on artificial scarcity) tells me that micro transactions are here to stay.
Consumers are dumb.
That was the model for the baseball card packs I bought at the corner store as a kid, and I had a great time buying and trading those with my friends. Zero regrets.
How often do you hear about kids blowing thousands of dollars on their parents’ credit cards buying baseball or MTG cards?
There’s a fundamental difference between virtual and physical goods.
Buying a virtual good is a very low threshold. You already handed over your credit card to Apple or Google, so there’s no barrier to overcome there. Or your parents did, which is even less of a barrier, as children don’t understand what it takes to earn that money. Then you tap “buy 20,000 gems (best value!)” and it’s done. You don’t need to go to the corner store and confront the reality of carrying away 100 packs of baseball cards, the physicality of that, the giant bag in your hands.
If your kid did somehow buy five Gs worth of baseball cards, you would at least own those physical cards and have the opportunity to resell them to recoup some of your loss.
@stusser has a very good point about how the virtual nature of digital goods, and the accompanying lowering of barriers due to the commerce model, change the consumer dynamic dramatically.
Though I do sometimes think there’s an analogy in some ways to diamonds, in terms of artificial scarcity. As I understand it, diamonds are not that rare, comparatively, but firms like De Beers control the supply in order to keep prices high. It’s something that requires a really unique set of circumstances in the physical goods world, but because virtual goods are essentially IP, they are much more easily managed.
This is a good point. Digital goods are generally useless and unsellable. They’re not a commodity. Magic cards or baseball cards are commodities. Now you can argue they’re crappy commodities, but you get a physical object that has some value. Heck with a lot of digital products it’s against the EULA and the like to try to sell it to someone.
More than you think.
When I am presented with a UI like this, my expectation is every piece of the well have the same odds (3%). Not that one item have 30% and other item have 0.5%.
Honestly, I never understood baseball cards either. But baseball cards were not a game, where you gained competitive advantage in the game by buying baseball card packs until you randomly found the good rare cards you really wanted, that they could have just sold as part of a comprehensive game.
It’s a bit like if you were playing golf, and had to buy “mystery clubs” with the knowledge that only 1 in 100 clubs would be the driver that you actually want.
BRB, finding some some venture capital for seed funding.