Lootboxes and World of Warships Greed

[Quackers101]

Seemingly the creators of these free to play games, have increased their shady business practices, as they move more and more towards into lootboxes.

As players felt this by a recent addition of content USS Missouri WWII battleship, now this content being something that was in the game in 2016 as DLC that you could buy? and removed in 2018 (for "balance" issues?) and re-released in 2021 in lootboxes. (not getting it back if you buyed it and they hope people would not notice). Which made some of maybe more hardcore/longtime fans last bullet in wanting to cover the game or play it, and what is stopping a free to play game to screw over their customers? If you know the grind of hours for rewards at some point could be deleted and resold later on.

 

they had another issue for DMCA'ing people before, by having negative reviews that cover their greedy monetization business in the gameplay part. Like the method of buying ammunition with real money that has an advantage over others.

 

Kotaku and jim sterling, talking about this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJUssxiQzCY

https://kotaku.com/world-of-warships-players-are-in-open-revolt-over-shady-1847506495

[da na]

I stopped playing War Thunder for very similar reasons...

[Middcore]

There was already a thread about this: 

 

 

To bring people up to speed a bit:

 

They had a mass exodus of their community contributors over the cynical lootbox/monetization practices. They alienated another highly-respected CC (LittleWhiteMouse) to the point she quit over a fiasco where the different departments of the company apparently weren't talking to each other so one department was asking Mouse and a couple of her friends to help design a new premium ship and the department in charge of actually coding ships completely ignored all the CC suggestions. They kicked a Russian CC called Tury out of the program because he called the devs out for not playing their own game (the known developer accounts played less than 300 matches last year total between all of them), then used "FKUTURY" as a promo code.

 

Anybody who ever thought it was going to turn out any other way was naive, frankly. I remember when World of Warships launched people tried to say "It'll be different from World of Tanks! It's a different team at WarGaming running this one!" 

 

It would be really nice to see a decent (non-Russian) dev try their hand at this style of game someday, but nobody but shabby outfits like WG and Gaijin seem interested. They know they have a hard core audience of people who will keep playing just because they like ships (or tanks or planes) and there aren't really any alternatives, so their objective is to wring as much cash as possible out of that group and if they alienate everyone else through rampant greed, treating players like dirt, hideously unbalanced and stagnant gameplay, etc. so be it. 

[Middcore]

To add to the above, some things that happened before this that already had much of the community in a state of discontent...

 

They severed ties with community contributor Flamu, probably the game's most popular streamer/YouTuber a few months ago. The stated reason was that Flamu was toxic in deriding people who played poorly in his videos, but he's been like that from the start, so it was widely perceived that the real reason was that WG was stung by Flamu constantly criticizing how badly they had botched the rework of the game's aircraft carriers.

 

(Aircraft carriers in the game are seen by most players except those who main them as ruining the game for everyone else. I mean, in real life aircraft carriers made big gun battleships obsolete, so maybe having them in a game about big gun battleships was just a dumb idea to begin with?)

 

WG swore for years they would never put submarines in the game. In the past year they added them after all, with all of the attendant balance problems, and I believe they're now also going to allow them in the ranked competitive mode. I believe aircraft carriers have also been added to competitive, or are going to be, which was already perceived as the death knell of competitive play due to the aforementioned balance issues involving carriers. 

 

WG basically ran out of actual historical ships to put in the game, or even ones that were designed but never built, a long time ago, but they keep churning out new lines of almost completely made up ships to keep people buying and grinding and put virtually no effort into improving the core gameplay. Being a Russian company, they put multiple lines of "fantasy" Russian ships in the game (in real life, the Russian navy was quite small in WW1 and WW2 and had very little role in either conflict) that are perceived as OP before even before bothering to finish out the tech trees for countries with navies that actually did things, like Britain. What's more, in an effort to give people an incentive to grind for the new ships, they resort to increasingly contrived "gimmicks" to distinguish new lines of ships from the ones already in the game, which leads to more imbalance and older lines getting power-crept out of relevance.

[Morrie Sells Wigs]

It's a free game, that anyone can theoretically play forever without spending a penny.

 

How do you propose they pay for servers, pay their staff, who will need to keep the game fed with content and maintain balance etc...?

Now, it's different if a game makes it impossible to realistically play without spending money. 

 

You know, like they do in some mobile titles with regards health regeneration and what not.

But, I don't believe this is the business model in World of Warships.

 

Ultimately, you are not forced to play the game or buy lootboxes. 

 

[Quackers101]

6 hours ago, Maury Sells Wigs said:

It's a free game, that anyone can theoretically play forever without spending a penny.

 

How do you propose they pay for servers, pay their staff, who will need to keep the game fed with content and maintain balance etc...?

Now, it's different if a game makes it impossible to realistically play without spending money.

wasn't against microtransactions, just the general shady behaviour in how they use them.

empty rewards and empty grind is the issue at times, and if its something you wanted and never got to it?

6 hours ago, Maury Sells Wigs said:

Ultimately, you are not forced to play the game or buy lootboxes.

Which goes into this, "you are not forced to play" which is true but there are many ways to "force" people into an unhealthy ecosystem like with Fifa (other sports) and shooters. To the times the lootboxes does more harm to both the game and its players, which comes back to the "keep the game fed with content" etc. These seasons and lootboxes can be big gains and losses.

 

(skipped the "acting" part of the video)

 

[Morrie Sells Wigs]

57 minutes ago, Quackers101 said:

wasn't against microtransactions, just the general shady behaviour in how they use them.

empty rewards and empty grind is the issue at times, and if its something you wanted and never got to it?

Which goes into this, "you are not forced to play" which is true but there are many ways to "force" people into an unhealthy ecosystem like with Fifa (other sports) and shooters. To the times the lootboxes does more harm to both the game and its players, which comes back to the "keep the game fed with content" etc. These seasons and lootboxes can be big gains and losses.

 

(skipped the "acting" part of the video)

 

Sorry, but I couldn't care less about Jim Sterling's opinion. 

 

I agree with you personally, however, in a way.

 

Broadly speaking, you have a point - and I won't defend lootboxes per se.

 

I just feel like nobody is forcing anyone to play this game, and anyone that does can leave at any time. 

[Quackers101]

2 hours ago, Maury Sells Wigs said:

Sorry, but I couldn't care less about Jim Sterling's opinion. 

while there is a lot to agree to disagree about (more so in more recent years)

Some of his videos are good insight, like this video and the videos he use of the gaming market trying to exploit people for profit with various tactics.

Just as much how a casino tries to exploit people that just want to try their content, at least they have an age limit.

 

from

"Activision Patents Matchmaking That Encourages Players To Buy Microtransactions"

social engineering and future experiments on using matchmaking, and other behaviours to their wanted goal.

Quote

I just feel like nobody is forcing anyone to play this game, and anyone that does can leave at any time. 

As one could say, nobody is forcing the game to need updates and "content", unless its fixes for the previous update that might not be balanced or buggy.

Edited August 25, 2021 by Quackers101