Digital Extremes removed a microtransaction from Warframe based primarily on one player’s behavior.
Oh, my sweet summer children
DE are great :)
The cynic in me wonders if this was done primarily to then roll back!
😀😀😀
Jokes. Good to have ethics.
I didn’t see it mentioned if they refunded him?
You mean, they did it to gain publicity? I doubt it.
I dunno if it’s really gambling if you don’t even get anything if you win.
I find that argument really confusing personally. You do get something, and you get something that has value. It might not be tradeable but it obviously has value to the people willing to pay for it.
If you pay money for something you want and it’s random/luck to get the exact version you want, that’s gambling. The thought that digital stuff has no value just isn’t true at all because it it truly had no value, nobody would pay anything for it. The fact that anyone is willing to pay for it is the very definition of value.
I was making fun of the people who did it.
It has been some time since i played the game, but from what i remember, the Kubrow was an INSANELY high maintenance pet that was clearly designed that way to encourage microtransactions from people who weren’t SUPER SUPER SUPER time invested in the game. So you will forgive me if i find the whole situation ironic.
If I understood correctly the problem is that it was a slot machine. You pulled the lever and if you got lucky you got something you want.
So far, so good. But you could then trade or sell that thing. So, not only the ingame motivation of cool looking thing, but also possibility of financial gain.
Because you could share your sick looking skin or whatever with other people.
What do you mean high maintenance?
You build it and equip it.
@Guap
Once you have unlocked a pattern or colour you keep it.
Man, that’s pretty baldfaced of the developer. So instead of adding drop-down boxes for color and pattern like every other game they make you pay a buck to randomly select those? Ha ha ha.
Holy cow, that’s a moneygrabbing design.
These are real time addiction experiments going on in the marketplace.
I want to know this too.
This seems like they used the occasion of them changing minor feature to make themselves look good. Someone spent $137? The top-tier prime access bundle (which refreshes periodically) costs $140. That can’t have been an alarming amount.
I mean, Warframe is a good quality game that’s pretty fair on people who don’t ever pay, but this also feels like me inviting a news crew to film me helping my grandmother to her neighbor’s house so that people know that I routinely walk old ladies across the street. Nothing wrong with it per se but still kinda weird.
Or you could, you know, take them at their word that the feature was unintentionally exploitative, they were horrified, and immediately fixed it. I mean, either way.
Hey guys, we devoloped a Free To Pay game, which by its very inherent nature is exploitative, but these micro transactions were beyon the pale. Whoops!
Warframe as it exists today is a “good” F2P game, like Path of Exile. It doesn’t mistreat its players. Except in this example it did, and they fixed it.
Path of exile has micro transactions boxes that contain a random armor skin from an assortment. How is that implementation different from this one? I don’t think I understand the distinction here.
My understanding is that this was a slot machine costing real money that would cosmetically dye a pet with a random look, and if you got a cool looking rare one you could trade it to other players. That’s some dangerous stuff right there, and they were right to get rid of it.
