![[H]ard|Forum](/styles/hardforum/xenforo/logo_dark.png){kind=logo}
Plus you really like to type a lot and hang out on message boards ? People that pic apart posts to be used as counter arguments are the people you should be ignoring not typing out long things and wasting your time. My Opinion of course.
The fact that so many paid to play early will only make game devs push out more underdeveloped S***. People who FOMO into stuff can't see that they're hurting the future for everyone including themselves. In the past when games had physical copies and no instant reviewers over the internet, it forced people to gamble into buying things early. That much I understand. But I can't understand why in this day and age why people are willing to commit so blindly into things and then savagely defend their bad purchases. This extend beyond games. Hardware has been hit hard by such a phenomenon. Intel grew complicit and allowed AMD Ryzen to eat away at its shares. Nvidia's 40-Series is the latest batch of garbage that plague the market. People just can't seem to help themselves.
Minecraft is also $30 or however much it is now. I paid $15 for the game back when it was beta. Also the game didn't have micro-transactions until after Microsoft bought them, which many players predicted that an in game shop would be added.
Either way it's terrible stuff.
I wouldn't call "professional" game reviewers... professional. You see this same problem with movies where "professionals" love it and yet the people hated it, and vice versa. If the people hate it, then they hate it, and nothing a "professional" does will change peoples minds.
Think about how many people gave the game bad reviews because of the micro-transactions vs the amount of people who are ok with it.
I played the game a month ago and I can't say it's problem free. I also can't say it's a good game as well.
I go by how much hype the game has before I try it out.
If people say it impacts the game then it impacts the game. You can spin it however you want but if it didn't impact the game then people wouldn't complain.
100+ hours of gameplay is subjective. Many games today, especially open world games take into account traveling and repeat quests. Especially Diablo type games which repeat the entire game over and over and consider that gameplay. Also, DLC and or expansions have the effect of alienating players from those who did or didn't buy it. So either you buy the DLC/expansion or quit the game because you won't be able to play with others unless you do. This is a problem in Souls games as well, since new DLC tends to add another section of the game with new loot, and in a PVP scenario that will give other players an edge.
It's bad when you pay for the game. It's also bad in that no game that offers cosmetics allows players to make their own skins which is something that we used to do a lot before micro-transactions took hold. Minecraft still allows players to make skins but Minecraft is also over 10 years old. Lots of animations showing what happens when players see the cosmetic micro-transactions entering the game and changing it for the worst. Remember, it's only cosmetic right?
Then let me make my own skins for the game, if it doesn't matter.
Drinking breast milk. Creating the Cosby room. Cubical crawling and of course Bobby's Yacht.
Why would anyone care about their investors? As a customer we literally fight with investors because we are no longer the main source of income for corporations. This is why everything has gotten worse since Reagan made stock buy backs legal.
I was a fan of them too, before Activision bought them.
I'm talking about Primordial Saronite which is going to be the biggest limiting factor in getting Shadowmourne. Getting a bunch of people to work with you to get the boss mechanics done to make the weapon is going to be the least of your problems.
Blizzard never banned the bots except in waves. Botting is extremely profitable.
Literally the #1 Ret Paladin in WOTLK, by rank. Actually #3, but raiding has been fucked since D4 release.
Most people in my guild buy gold. Pretty sure my raid leader sells it as well since he's done a shit ton of GDKP's. They won't touch WoW tokens since they get less gold for their money. They use dummy accounts to avoid getting banned. It wouldn't take much investigating on who's buying gold, but nobody at Blizz is ever going to look into it.
This right here is a key point. As the consumer, why should I care about the poor wittle investors? Why should I defend corporatism? It just seems to be making everything shittier.
As far as I'm concerned, if you're keeping the lights on while paying your employee's and making a healthy profit, then that's all that matters. Shareholders want "infinite" profits, which from a video game company is absurd. The only reason Blizzard is still part of Activision is the potential for unlimited profits, which has drastically diminished over the years. This is why World of Warcraft has drastically dropped in active subscriptions and why Overwatch 2 is losing features, because Activision demands more. The only reason this works because a lot of people like 1_rick who are fans of the company, don't realize that most of the people who used to make games like Warcraft 3 and Diablo 2 have left the company a long time ago. What you have is a name that Activision is riding hard on while offering you games with less value over time. It's not like the stock market hasn't nearly destroyed gaming in the past, as anyone who knows about the whole situation with Sierra knows that Blizzard was involved and almost faded away from existence, as well as a number of notable games like Half Life. The only reason mico-transactions work is because the few people who are willing to put up with it are also allowing whales to pay far more into the game than the games purchase. I don't even think that's the case anymore as we've seen Overwatch go from a loot box hell game to a micro-transaction hell game that isn't gaining any more traction and so the new feature to OverWatch 2 the PVE mode was removed. We saw this with Diablo 3 where they added an in game auction with real money, which they quickly removed because it destroyed the game. If Diablo 4 is or isn't a good game I wouldn't know, but this being an Activision-Blizzard game I do expect micro-transactions and I expect them to get much worse once sales for the game peaks and starts to decline, because again the shareholders expect infinite growth which is never possible.
You've got quite the active imagination, but next time, have the courage to @ me.
Firstly, I'm lazy. Secondly, I knew you'd see it. It wasn't meant to be offensive, even though it sure seems like you took it that way. Fact is most if not all the people that made the games for Blizzard have went their ways. Ghostcrawler aka Greg Street is one of the many employee's who went to Riot due to the direction Blizzard was going. It's not like there's this single guy working there with a vision of how the games should be made, like Hideo Kojima. To praise Blizzard like it was 20 years ago is ignoring a lot of changes that went on in that company. People like you forget that the company name is just that, a name. Nobody who made Diablo 2 or World of Warcraft still works for Activisoin-Blizzard to this day. The reason Activision bought Blizzard is to ride that name as best as they can, devolving the games into micro-transactions because that's what companies do when they buy other companies. The exception is Microsoft because soon they'll own all of Activision Blizzard, which from my standpoint is a good thing because the point of Microsoft buying them was to bring their games to Xbox, probably exclusively. Which I'm a huge Bobby Kotick hater, and can't wait to see his ass booted out. That says a lot consider I'm a Linux guy and Microsoft isn't exactly my friend.
If you played Diablo 3 for the Real Money Auction House then are you're not having fun, unless fun for you is making money. If that's the case then there's this thing called a job that'll pay you way more for your time. Auction houses that use fictional game currency work just fine.
Cosmetic or not, it's all about catching whales. The non cosmetic ones are just trying to catch the biggest whales, like Diablo Immortal.
No point mentioning Early Access games because they don't really fit the Diablo 4 discussion. There's plenty of good alternatives to Diablo, like Hades comes to mind. So far I've heard good things about Diablo 4, but I'm still waiting from reviews from sources I deem worth my time. Diablo 4 is somewhat open world and that's interesting. The problem I have is that I'm sure Blizzard wants people to repeat parts of the game over and over until people are bored and then an expansion is released. That expansion will likely have a Paladin or Crusader and that's probably when I'll get into Diablo 4. Plus I'm sure the price of Diablo 4 will go down from $70 at some point. Not like I'm not already enjoying other games like TOTK.
Most people who play games aren't aware of what a Live Service Game is. Even if they are, the idea of a game that gets constant updates doesn't sound bad. The problem is when the game gets an update that makes changes that aren't in your favor unless you're a whale. There should be a law that a game can't just change how the micro-transaction system works after you purchased the game, because that's what Blizzard does, a lot. It's akin to buying a car with heated seats, but then finding out that an update to the software has taken that feature away and now you must pay a monthly fee to reactivate something you already had. That's the problem with Live Service Games.
The funny thing is neither are a lot of "whales", especially for mobile gacha games.
They call it the Lipstick recession. Micro-transactions kinda meet that cheap impulse purchase. "The lipstick effect is the theory that when facing an economic crisis consumers will be more willing to buy less costly luxury goods.[1] " I've seen that lots of time in World and Warcraft when this guy buys all the mounts and then suddenly vanishes, then months later he appears again but you find out he was homeless and was bouncing around looking for a place to stay. He also found a way to pay for WoW too.
chatgpt explains it better
Very fair.. and 100% true as well..
