Do you want to play a game with people who don't care enough about the title to pay a little monthly fee? How into something is a person who finds $10 a month to be an outrage?
As for gold-sellers, there needs to be a way to get aggressive outside of games with these people.
You could alleviate a LOT of problems, both with RMT and in-game behavior/abuse, by simply requiring identity verification to start an account. This wouldn't even mean sharing personal details with a single other player: merely allowing the developer run ID checks, the same IDs you provide to random bouncers and restaurant staff, would be enough to help cut down heavily on folks just starting new accounts to bypass prior account bans.
People are far too addicted to internet anonymity, though.
How about servers for people with verified identities?
I've often fantisized about a gaming network where if you get booted you cannot get into any MMORPG title at all. I'm getting really tired of asshats and cheaters and there needs to be more accoutability.
I'd be down with such a server. I've no problem with sharing an ID number along with address and CC number with a reputable company. Hell, I've given it to less reputable folks to than, say, Blizzard or EA, to rent a pontoon boat. To help ensure botters, hackers, dupers and abusers can truly be removed from the server, and not just their accounts.. Definitely.
Again, though, this is a bugaboo for many, mostly due to how it sounds rather than how it would actually play out.
You all are alot more trusting than I am of people on the internet and big business....YOu do realize alot of these companies sell that personal info?
Do you want to play a game with people who don't care enough about the title to pay a little monthly fee? How into something is a person who finds $10 a month to be an outrage?
As for gold-sellers, there needs to be a way to get aggressive outside of games with these people.
You could alleviate a LOT of problems, both with RMT and in-game behavior/abuse, by simply requiring identity verification to start an account. This wouldn't even mean sharing personal details with a single other player: merely allowing the developer run ID checks, the same IDs you provide to random bouncers and restaurant staff, would be enough to help cut down heavily on folks just starting new accounts to bypass prior account bans.
People are far too addicted to internet anonymity, though.
How about servers for people with verified identities?
I've often fantisized about a gaming network where if you get booted you cannot get into any MMORPG title at all. I'm getting really tired of asshats and cheaters and there needs to be more accoutability.
I'd be down with such a server. I've no problem with sharing an ID number along with address and CC number with a reputable company. Hell, I've given it to less reputable folks to than, say, Blizzard or EA, to rent a pontoon boat. To help ensure botters, hackers, dupers and abusers can truly be removed from the server, and not just their accounts.. Definitely.
Again, though, this is a bugaboo for many, mostly due to how it sounds rather than how it would actually play out.
You all are alot more trusting than I am of people on the internet and big business....YOu do realize alot of these companies sell that personal info?
If we're talking about a government ID check, they'd be selling public record info, at least here in the U.S..
The rest of the info I mentioned is already required to make a purchase in a cash shop or subscribe.
Do you want to play a game with people who don't care enough about the title to pay a little monthly fee? How into something is a person who finds $10 a month to be an outrage?
As for gold-sellers, there needs to be a way to get aggressive outside of games with these people.
You could alleviate a LOT of problems, both with RMT and in-game behavior/abuse, by simply requiring identity verification to start an account. This wouldn't even mean sharing personal details with a single other player: merely allowing the developer run ID checks, the same IDs you provide to random bouncers and restaurant staff, would be enough to help cut down heavily on folks just starting new accounts to bypass prior account bans.
People are far too addicted to internet anonymity, though.
It is almost like you are describing what they do in some other contrives (Korea anyone). They have a lot less problems due to this.
I will always believe that the P2P model is the most healthy one for every party, gamers to devs. The monthly subscription pays for the upkeep/maintenance of servers, bug fixes etc and the box purchase adds more content and further development of the product. There is higher incentive for the devs to make a game with longevity in mind and a good product is directly reflected upon the revenue. Same can IMO not be said about F2P games where we time and time again see an initial spike that dies out within weeks at most. Only the greedy people at the studio see a win in that.
I would gladly pay $15 a month for one game, rather than the same sum for some stupid game pass with games I would never play regardless or are discounted to the point that it would just make more sense buying it directly. I don't know how many humble bundle games I've gotten where I either already own the game or am just uninterested overall.
I'm just tired of all the P2W discussions and what not. We never had them back in the days. People just played the damn games and enjoyed them. P2P games worked and would still work today, but you need to create a quality product. A game like Tibia has been running for over 20 years, sure thing they added a cash shop, character marketplace and what not, but they were definitely sustainable during the P2P (F2P with a subscription option) era and just realised, like every other studio, that there is just so much more money to be made with other monetisation models. People still holding their fists shut in the pockets remembering the good ol days where every paying gamer played on equal terms.
One thing I think is worth being wary of, even if you like the Game Pass idea, is how that will affect game development going forward if it becomes dominant.
We *just* saw how F2P and microtransactions shifted development paradigms. Game Passes will do the same if they take over as a primary monetization method in the industry. Based on the last shift, I'd guess shallower, shorter games. As someone mentioned here: the perceived value in a game pass is getting multiple games included. The name of the game will become having *the most* attractive games available, which does not mesh well with deep games with dozens of hours of content. More BR-like experiences where the amount of actual content is low and is made up for by simply adding the X factor that is other players.
That shift will be justified by some folks saying "Well, it's not like you're paying the devs for a copy, you can't expect the type of games you got when you paid for them directly."
I hope I'm wrong. But the most recent paradigm shift doesn't leave me hopeful. And none of these things should be considered healthy or positive changes merely because they're happening. They also aren't necessary in the way some would like to believe: they're necessary to maintain the status quo of growth for many studios. They're not "necessary" for the industry to survive or thrive.
There has hardly been a shift in the way games get their money that has not had a negative impact on gaming. I would point to selling outfits if account bound as positive, I can't think of anything else of hand. The way the game makes money moulds the game and as we have seen so many times it is in a detrimental way.
We have seen a couple of MMORPG's try starting out with a subscription again, for years I have argued they are not coming back. But my recent look at how long players play games got me to thinking, does a sub not make more sense?
Players based on steam graphs are only spending two to three months on a MMO, now you must know who you are, this cannot be a shock to you...oh no me?!
So if you know that you know that if you subscribe you will be cancelling that subscription at the two or three month point, the idea subscriptions are expensive does not apply because you know you will be gone. From what I saw on steam that must be about 75% of the playerbase. For other genres that may differ but I think that's where MMOs are.
Now maybe there is a psychological factor here, "will I remember to cancel that subscription" or maybe the butterfly genes in you are strong "when they bring out an expansion in three years time I might want to play it so only F2P or B2P is for me". Though you could just sub an extra month.
Apart from that I can see no reason to not go for a subscription as long as a three months subscription is not more than what you would expect to pay for a B2P.
Pretty much agree.
The last part is spot on, too. There is NO reason for companies to bring subscriptions back. Well, maybe one... Players forget to cancel them when they stop playing
The one aspect of subscription games that bugs me is that they tend to charge AGAIN for each expansion. I pay $15 EVERY month and you charge me AGAIN for an expansion? May as well be like cable/satellite TV and charge me to watch your advertising! lol
Yet, businesses are there to make money, NOT be charity dispensers, so every nickel they can squeeze out is par for the course. It seems that F2P is much more lucrative when one takes the "$15 cap" off
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse. - FARGIN_WAR
Subscriptions have always made sense. They are ridiculously inexpensive from the perspective of the cost per hour of entertainment MMORPGs provide.
But that is a large part of the problem. They are too generous by far. Subscription rates haven't changed for decades as players are extremely price sensitive to them while the costs associated with operating MMORPGs continued to rise.
Something had to give, and it wasn't going to be the players' intolerance for subscription price increases. Hence additional revenue streams and more profit friendly marketing models that players were oddly more receptive to arose.
The reason subscriptions alone won't work is that players will not accept the price they would need to be in today's currency in order for them to be as profitable to providers as they once were when they were originally set, or anything close to.
This brought another point to my mind. When I paid a subscription, the games had me wanting to play them for months/years on end. I don't see those games anymore. Even the old ones have lost their "worldly feel."
A subscription usually indicates a desire to keep paying it. If companies want to spark that desire to keep coming back, they are failing miserably, in my opinion.
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse. - FARGIN_WAR
The attrition rate of gamers has always been high. (Attrition rate is high in every media form) It is a misnomer that mmorpg players once all played for months over months and years over years never leaving and living in the world. (Which I find funny) Players have always come and gone. One month here two months there and then off to something else only to maybe return at another time. Large population games have just had the massive numbers to make that attrition rate not have a dramatic impact on their ROI.
Only large profile games and worlds can sustain themselves with a sub and it has always been that way.
Multiple revenue streams are the only way a game can sustain itself long term which is why they all do it. Even the biggest ones out there do it. Even with a sub they have a cash shop.
To think a small one can do it and survive is wishful thinking at best.
Many games, free to play or buy to play or otherwise, have an optional sub.
That's an interesting point about "attrition." Yes, players come and go all the time. When I got into fun guilds that were small-ish (where everyone knew everyone), players played every month for anywhere from 6 to 18 months. 18 months max for me because guilds "blew up" for reasons. WoW and CoX had game changes, EQ our Guild Leader left and never gave control to anyone else and went silent.
Yes, those guild players come and go, but many of them came back and did not "leave the guild." It may have been for a month here, a couple of months there, but they usually came back.
As for "others players" in the MMORPG, I didn't care if they left or not. It boiled down to "the world" and what the players found fun
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse. - FARGIN_WAR
The pattern of subs only at the birth of a new genre lasted for a short time compared to the age of the genre as a whole.
A quick question, if I may (if not already answered).
Subs did not start the online gaming. It used be "pay by the minute/hour" to start off. I never played under that model but remember hearing about players with $500 to $1000 phone bills long, long ago. I never MUDs, but think that is what I'm thinking about. Subs came about to help with those kinds of bills. Kind of like long distance plans for the old land line phones
Did UO or EQ (or any other early MMOs) start off with "pay the minute or hour" monetization? Or did they start off with subs?
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse. - FARGIN_WAR
Do you want to play a game with people who don't care enough about the title to pay a little monthly fee? How into something is a person who finds $10 a month to be an outrage?
As for gold-sellers, there needs to be a way to get aggressive outside of games with these people.
You could alleviate a LOT of problems, both with RMT and in-game behavior/abuse, by simply requiring identity verification to start an account. This wouldn't even mean sharing personal details with a single other player: merely allowing the developer run ID checks, the same IDs you provide to random bouncers and restaurant staff, would be enough to help cut down heavily on folks just starting new accounts to bypass prior account bans.
People are far too addicted to internet anonymity, though.
Credit Cards are wonderful forms of ID. That has your name, address, and many times a phone number as identification. The same info be it Visa/Master Card, American Express, Discover, et al.
When a player gets "banned", all other cards used have the same info to cross-reference.
The bad side is that with subs, a "ban" means loss of income for that game on a one-to-one basis. Not banning "may have" results of losing just more one account
Post edited by AlBQuirky on
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse. - FARGIN_WAR
The pattern of subs only at the birth of a new genre lasted for a short time compared to the age of the genre as a whole.
A quick question, if I may (if not already answered).
Subs did not start the online gaming. It used be "pay by the minute/hour" to start off. I never played under that model but remember hearing about players with $500 to $1000 phone bills long, long ago. I never MUDs, but think that is what I'm thinking about. Subs came about to help with those kinds of bills. Kind of like long distance plans for the old land line phones
Did UO or EQ (or any other early MMOs) start off with "pay the minute or hour" monetization? Or did they start off with subs?
I remember that we had to pay for UO but I dont quite remember how much it was or how it was set up...I was thinking it was sub but Icould be wrong..>EQ I started a year after it launched and it was sub at that point..>You also had to buy expansions....There really were not any other options until Anarchy Online came up with a free to play model (with ads) a couple years later.....The pay by the minute/hour model may have been used when people had to play by modem, before broadband was around.
I do hope services like these impact the industry as a motivator to make games that people want to play all the way through to the end, not just grab a sale.
I do too, but as I posted earlier, my fear is that it will actually reduce budgets per game even further, resulting in ever smaller and more shallow games supported by the ad hoc content provided by other players.
More BR-style competitive multiplayer games with relatively little dev-made content and less singleplayer games with lots of depth and content. More games like Hunt: Showdown and Foxhole, less games like Pillars of Eternity, Divinity, and Elden Ring.
I do hope services like these impact the industry as a motivator to make games that people want to play all the way through to the end, not just grab a sale.
I do too, but as I posted earlier, my fear is that it will actually reduce budgets per game even further, resulting in ever smaller and more shallow games supported by the ad hoc content provided by other players.
More BR-style competitive multiplayer games with relatively little dev-made content and less singleplayer games with lots of depth and content. More games like Hunt: Showdown and Foxhole, less games like Pillars of Eternity, Divinity, and Elden Ring.
Just throw 100 people in a gymnasium sized room with just their bare fists...Whoever comes out alive wins....How much better can it get than that?
Well, its relatively simple to stop goldsellers. Just be sufficiently restrictive in regards to communication, make it harder to start the game so new characters allowed to communicate cant just be created within moments, things like that. Ideas for that:
- Dont have global channels, only group chat and guild chat.
- Dont allow anything but "say" to new players; "tell X" is only allowed to people in the same group, guild, or on the friend list.
- Possibly even force people to either buy a physial copy of the game or wait until their bank accounts have been verified before they are allowed to play. This could be implemented as such that you cannot see other players until you are verified, basically having your own private copy of the game world until that point.
- Maybe even have a starter area that works as a tutorial to the game and that takes some time to solve that doesnt allow group play just yet, making sure that goldsellers have to spend a substantial time to create a new character instead of just being able to create a n00b.
- You can of course skip all that on an account that already has a higher level character and just creates new characters after that.
- You can bypass all that if you have somebody who
can "vouch" for you, making it easy for people to jumpstart friends into
the game. Of course if the new account turns out to be a goldseller, the person who vouched gets also into trouble.
- Dont allow people to "friend" other people without the laters permission. This permission can be removed at any moment, too. There can also be a feature that automatically inserts people you grouped with for a week into your friend list that makes it more convenient to use.
- The group finder can also be done in a restrictive way. So you can only announce your interest there for your level range and the areas you would like to do, and anyone not in the level range and not interested in the same area wont see you and wont see your group finder chatter in the first place.
- You can also have a forum in which gold sellers will of course still try to place their offers, but which gets constantly moderated.
- The early levels of the game, which might be overwhelmed with players especially when the game starts, are automatically cloned so the total population stays manageable.
- You can also limit the usefulness of any in game currency. Like the best items are all quest or raid rewards you cannot trade and can only get if you actually do the quest.
- This still of course doesnt stop goldsellers to offer to play your character but if people accept that I would have to say they are pretty far gone because obviously the moment its more profitable to rob your characters instead of playing them the goldsellers will do just that.
So theres a lot of more ideas and sure all these ideas have their drawbacks, but I guess one has to experiment what works and what doesnt work.
I do hope services like these impact the industry as a motivator to make games that people want to play all the way through to the end, not just grab a sale.
I do too, but as I posted earlier, my fear is that it will actually reduce budgets per game even further, resulting in ever smaller and more shallow games supported by the ad hoc content provided by other players.
More BR-style competitive multiplayer games with relatively little dev-made content and less singleplayer games with lots of depth and content. More games like Hunt: Showdown and Foxhole, less games like Pillars of Eternity, Divinity, and Elden Ring.
Have game passes not been out long enough to get some idea of where they are headed? It seems to me the lack of competition would push towards what Dalai is saying, but then one pass has to compete with another so maybe not?
I had some real Steam disappointments last year, my "infallible" system for making sure a game was for me broke down. So I now take extra care when I see certain flags, one of which is single player and multiplayer, as we were talking about in that other thread. That has always been something to keep an eye on, but increasingly you get a multiplayer game with the single player barely bolted on.
I have always (almost) preferred subscriptions. When F2P first came out, I admit that I was enticed. I quickly became unenticed and hence the 'almost always'. I would rather just pay a flat fee for content then various other methods to get me to spend coin. If I play a f2p a lot, I always buy something so that I support the game and help the develpors, but I would much rather just subscribe. Plus, I feel an irrational dislike for supporting the 'I'll never pay' crowd who want the game, but not support it.
Well, its relatively simple to stop goldsellers. Just be sufficiently restrictive in regards to communication, make it harder to start the game so new characters allowed to communicate cant just be created within moments, things like that. Ideas for that:
- Dont have global channels, only group chat and guild chat.
- Dont allow anything but "say" to new players; "tell X" is only allowed to people in the same group, guild, or on the friend list.
- Possibly even force people to either buy a physial copy of the game or wait until their bank accounts have been verified before they are allowed to play. This could be implemented as such that you cannot see other players until you are verified, basically having your own private copy of the game world until that point.
- Maybe even have a starter area that works as a tutorial to the game and that takes some time to solve that doesnt allow group play just yet, making sure that goldsellers have to spend a substantial time to create a new character instead of just being able to create a n00b.
- You can of course skip all that on an account that already has a higher level character and just creates new characters after that.
- You can bypass all that if you have somebody who
can "vouch" for you, making it easy for people to jumpstart friends into
the game. Of course if the new account turns out to be a goldseller, the person who vouched gets also into trouble.
- Dont allow people to "friend" other people without the laters permission. This permission can be removed at any moment, too. There can also be a feature that automatically inserts people you grouped with for a week into your friend list that makes it more convenient to use.
- The group finder can also be done in a restrictive way. So you can only announce your interest there for your level range and the areas you would like to do, and anyone not in the level range and not interested in the same area wont see you and wont see your group finder chatter in the first place.
- You can also have a forum in which gold sellers will of course still try to place their offers, but which gets constantly moderated.
- The early levels of the game, which might be overwhelmed with players especially when the game starts, are automatically cloned so the total population stays manageable.
- You can also limit the usefulness of any in game currency. Like the best items are all quest or raid rewards you cannot trade and can only get if you actually do the quest.
- This still of course doesnt stop goldsellers to offer to play your character but if people accept that I would have to say they are pretty far gone because obviously the moment its more profitable to rob your characters instead of playing them the goldsellers will do just that.
So theres a lot of more ideas and sure all these ideas have their drawbacks, but I guess one has to experiment what works and what doesnt work.
With your solutions, I know a better way to stop gold sellers. Just don't even make the game problem solved.
Just things like getting rid of global chats with only group/guild makes the game feel dead. Making people verify themselves enough to stop gold sellers, yeah prepare to see about 80% loss of initial customers.
Sorry but if a game implemented all these solutions, you wouldn't even have many customers.
These games are actually trying to make money not run off their entire customer base. Why does a game even care about gold sellers unless they are also trying to sell gold themselves and see them as a competitor. The reality is, if you are popular enough to even have a bunch of gold sellers, then you certainly didn't run off your player base which is what these solutions would do.
The other problem with bot spam is also a lot of times these are hacked accounts that do this until they get banned. Its like email spam, sometimes its legit people but don't even know they are spamming due to the hack.
I don't think they earn as much as they do with cash shop and nickle diming. I don't think they want to go back to a sub game. Only smaller developers might that may find that their base is not one they can exploit the way many do now.
I don't think they earn as much as they do with cash shop and nickle diming. I don't think they want to go back to a sub game. Only smaller developers might that may find that their base is not one they can exploit the way many do now.
Sure, more than the baulk of studios want it every which way, pre-order, crowd fund and/or early access payments, every item monitorization can buy and an optional subscription on top of that. So we are really talking smaller studios, it seems though that there is a psychological barrier to overcome as well, subscription is seen as more expensive and you "own" your stuff less with that model.
We have seen a couple of MMORPG's try starting out with a subscription again, for years I have argued they are not coming back. But my recent look at how long players play games got me to thinking, does a sub not make more sense?
Players based on steam graphs are only spending two to three months on a MMO, now you must know who you are, this cannot be a shock to you...oh no me?!
So if you know that you know that if you subscribe you will be cancelling that subscription at the two or three month point, the idea subscriptions are expensive does not apply because you know you will be gone. From what I saw on steam that must be about 75% of the playerbase. For other genres that may differ but I think that's where MMOs are.
Now maybe there is a psychological factor here, "will I remember to cancel that subscription" or maybe the butterfly genes in you are strong "when they bring out an expansion in three years time I might want to play it so only F2P or B2P is for me". Though you could just sub an extra month.
Apart from that I can see no reason to not go for a subscription as long as a three months subscription is not more than what you would expect to pay for a B2P.
They could come back, but only as an option, similar to games like EVE or ESO. Way too many people are now accustomed to "f2p" model and variations of it. I've seen frequent posts at /r/MMORPG where people were asking for game recommendations "without monthly subscriptions". And even FFXIV is a game that has "free to play" trial, which basically lets everyone to play most of the game for free up to level 60 and I'm sure they will eventually add a way to keep playing the rest of the game for free since I've seen many people in it unsubscribe between major patches or major story expansions to save money (which makes the game feel very empty at certain times of the day).
Personally, I'd love a new subscription based game like Asheron's Call, with monthly story content updates like that game had. Then, you really know what you're paying for, and you can also expect something fresh added to the game regularly instead of having to wait 6+ months for a new raid to make the previous one obsolete.
Respect, walk, what did you say? Respect, walk Are you talkin' to me? Are you talkin' to me? - PANTERA at HELLFEST 2023
Personally, I'd love a new subscription based game like Asheron's Call, with monthly story content updates like that game had. Then, you really know what you're paying for, and you can also expect something fresh added to the game regularly instead of having to wait 6+ months for a new raid to make the previous one obsolete.
I am not sure that level of investment in the game could occur these days on a sub alone, but I too wish it could. With the additional stumbling block of players psychological aversion to the idea of a sub it may be that such a game would need to be B2P and then add a sub on as optional. You will have spotted I am sure that players seem happy to join a F2P, then don't bat an eye when an optional sub is introduced. So B2P with optional sub may be the way forward.
Comments
You all are alot more trusting than I am of people on the internet and big business....YOu do realize alot of these companies sell that personal info?
The rest of the info I mentioned is already required to make a purchase in a cash shop or subscribe.
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
Look at woe today. Still has a sub, gets a dlc, which also cost money, and two major updates in two years.
That's not worth it imo.
I remember that we had to pay for UO but I dont quite remember how much it was or how it was set up...I was thinking it was sub but Icould be wrong..>EQ I started a year after it launched and it was sub at that point..>You also had to buy expansions....There really were not any other options until Anarchy Online came up with a free to play model (with ads) a couple years later.....The pay by the minute/hour model may have been used when people had to play by modem, before broadband was around.
More BR-style competitive multiplayer games with relatively little dev-made content and less singleplayer games with lots of depth and content. More games like Hunt: Showdown and Foxhole, less games like Pillars of Eternity, Divinity, and Elden Ring.
Just throw 100 people in a gymnasium sized room with just their bare fists...Whoever comes out alive wins....How much better can it get than that?
I had some real Steam disappointments last year, my "infallible" system for making sure a game was for me broke down. So I now take extra care when I see certain flags, one of which is single player and multiplayer, as we were talking about in that other thread. That has always been something to keep an eye on, but increasingly you get a multiplayer game with the single player barely bolted on.
Just things like getting rid of global chats with only group/guild makes the game feel dead.
Making people verify themselves enough to stop gold sellers, yeah prepare to see about 80% loss of initial customers.
Sorry but if a game implemented all these solutions, you wouldn't even have many customers.
These games are actually trying to make money not run off their entire customer base. Why does a game even care about gold sellers unless they are also trying to sell gold themselves and see them as a competitor. The reality is, if you are popular enough to even have a bunch of gold sellers, then you certainly didn't run off your player base which is what these solutions would do.
The other problem with bot spam is also a lot of times these are hacked accounts that do this until they get banned. Its like email spam, sometimes its legit people but don't even know they are spamming due to the hack.
Respect, walk
Are you talkin' to me? Are you talkin' to me?
- PANTERA at HELLFEST 2023
Yet no one takes into account that ALL mmorpgs sucked in the last 10 years.
Why would ANYONE WANT TO PAY A FEE ?