Greedy Goblin

Thursday, August 25, 2016

When you're struggling to make 1mil an hour... 20mil doesn't seem so bad.

This is a very sad story from someone who spent $2400 on Black Desert Online. If you can't figure out how is it even possible when you can't find enough items in the Cash Shop to spend that much, he gladly explains: he purchased lots of pets and used them for "breeding", a process of sacrificing 2 pets in order to gain one high level pet. So he got 4 tier 4 pets. Same with mount. And all kind of "convenience" items. The result was:
"I was rather frustrated with the game. I was progressing while my friends who couldn't afford the cash shop items, lagged behind. At first, only in gear progression, but quickly enough in terms of level as they could not make it past certain points in the gear progression system."
OK, he is a textbook social who bound himself to moron and slacker "friends" instead of playing alone or with similarly progressed players. If he was any competitive, he would attribute his progression to his "skillz". Like any good social, he wanted his "friends" to grow with him and wanted their team to be successful. But "Once more my group of friends seemed to continue to lag behind, as I continued to "play" against the Gear upgrading system. Until I was past them by several enchanting levels, while they weren't even close to 15 at level 52, locked behind hours and hours of grinding before their next attempt. Bad luck. I thought."

Then he "realizes" that it was because of the game being P2W and boo BDO. This is obvious. For a social, the failure of the team always due to external factors and never ever being bad at what they were doing. So, "I was more worried about my friends that were in the progression hole. When you're struggling to make 1mil an hour... 20mil [for selling a $30 costume on the marketplace] doesn't seem so bad. If they would not pay it, I would. For them. Just to keep them playing."

Yes, that was the problem. His friends not spending enough money on this P2W game. Not sucking at a level I couldn't even imagine to be possible. 1M/hour isn't "bad", it's a horrible joke. I make 15-20M/hour with methods clearly explained on the forum. Random grinding nobodies get 5M/hour. But they rather thrown money at the game and then quit "realizing" it's pay-to-win, than reading some basic guide. You might think they were some isolated hive of idiocy. But look at these screenshots:
That's $40K on just one server in one week on the most common items. It has a very long tail. And for what? 20M, a sum I can make in an hour while reading news on the other screen. This is what "P2W" is about: morons and slackers wasting money just to suck a bit less while their social friends try to help them by paying for them. And then blame the dev. After all, who else would be responsible for losing $2400?! Not him for sure, "he is just a nice dude who wants to hang out with his friends".

However the elephant isn't even the $2400, but the fact that they were not in a siege guild, so "lagging behind" wasn't even defined. You can't be undergeared for smelling the flowers! Obviously we are talking about lagging behind from the Joneses. You must keep up with them, I heard! This is why games are worse and worse every year: an idiot social spends more real money on it than dozens of good players, so the devs obviously cater to them. We are simply not the target demographics anymore, even if we pay. We are tolerated, but not supported, as much more money come from the socials who are trying to keep up with the Joneses and too dumb to do it without spending hilarious amounts.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good MMOs are dead, every devs are now catering to the masses.
I work in the videogame industry so I can understand why, $$$ appeal.
But still, I think there's a niche for a MMO targeted at players wanting a challenge.
I though Eve was that game for a while, not anymore.
I'd love an Ultima Online redesign and reboot...

About your moneymaking in BDO:
If I understand correctly, you can buy a $30 cash shop item on the market with 1 hour of ingame semi-activity.
It just means that 99% of your "competitors" are there "for fun" and social stuff and that they have low ingame money in their pocket.



On a side note, take a look at that blog: http://www.wolfsheadonline.com/
A few articles and comments are quite good at explaining what went wrong with MMOs

NuTroll said...

Why would his friends bother to grind 5m an hour when that would reduce their realized income / hr from what I will politely term their "friend with benefits".

What we have here is one idiot , not 5.

A true non social would not play an MMO because an MMO will never be as good as its single player variant in most genres. The difference is made up by playing with other humans. Technology increasing might close some of that gap, but not all. When a solo player (or cooperative small team) plays against AI, theres no need for balance or mechanical "fairness". Nobody cares if the AI loses, not even the AI. In human v human the game is constrained by networking/hardware and game mechanics considerations. The two human players avatars have to be equal and almost identical in ability.

The one exception to this is a free market where most of the resources items and services (if not all) are player generated in a game with only a subscription model. Only because such can't be believably simulated by an AI.
*as an aside, what do you think will come first? Believably generated AI market participants or AI that plays a FPS avatar indistinguishably from a good human player? I'll go with the later because there is more demand for it. A smart dev would make a "goblin killer" , allowing it to have a true free market with a bot market participant that out goblins the goblin. Nobody would be the wiser, and everyone would have to pay more as the excess wealth produced by economic activity was sucked away from the player base covertly.

Anonymous said...

@anon
>every devs are now catering to the masses
Every game caters to the masses, and there are plenty of good and populous mmos running right now.

>I'd love an Ultima Online redesign and reboot
This happened twice, and both times no one wanted to play them until cash shops got added.

Your options are to whinge, play older games, private servers, fund your own game, or make a community of like-minded players around an existing game and play with them. Like how mmos worked from the beginning.

@NuTroll
Keeping up with your namesake, I see. Here your reply:

>an MMO will never be as good as its single player variant
What's the difference between a playing a game with human players vs playing a game with bots that are indistinguishable from humans? Protip: not only has this already been done years ago, the bots were even MORE HUMAN than the human players! And if you've read this blog for more than a week, you'd see just how unskilled most human players are.

>balance...equal and almost identical in ability.
No one wants balanced games. Imbalance is what creates variety and challenge. "Competitive" players do EVERYTHING THEY CAN to make things as imbalanced as possibile.

>goblin killer... out goblins the goblin
http://greedygoblin.blogspot.com/2009/09/industry-part-2.html
http://greedygoblin.blogspot.com/2009/09/how-many-goblins-could-server-support.html
http://greedygoblin.blogspot.com/2009/12/limit-of-free-market-1.html
http://greedygoblin.blogspot.com/2009/12/limit-of-free-market-2.html

You know nothing about games, economy, simulations, or ai.

Smokeman said...

"so "lagging behind" wasn't even defined."

He wasn't concerned so much about his "friends" lagging as he was his surging ahead. He was the one setting the bar. All he had to do to "be social" and "support his friends" was to stop surging ahead.

But he couldn't do that because he wasn't social at all, just wanted to get ahead at all cost. This whole "Oh! My friends!" schtick was just to hide his "cheating" problem.

This is what happens when you are not true to yourself. Buy powerups in a P2W game. Or do not. Choose. Don't blame the game or your loser friends for your choices.

As an aside... the horrific consequence of a lack of the "trade barrier" is idiots like this would fund their loser friends, who would then use then without mercy.