Fiona Blamont
Gallente
The Scope
   |
Posted - 2011.06.24 01:57:00 -
[1]
I'm not shocked or surprised by what was revealed in the Company Newsletter that was circulated on these forums and elsewhere. It's obvious that the company feels that microtransactions are an attractive alternate revenue stream that they can tap into. Other game companies do the same thing. What I find objectionable is the blatant intention to use microtransactions to close the gap between players by offering "power ups" disguised as vanity items.
In other games, vanity items are just that. Cosmetic items that don't contribute or alter game play or influence its outcome. A funny hat, eyeglasses, clothing, a pet, or a mount are just items that give your subscribers' characters something to make them stand out. If people want to spend money on these things, that's fine. But you've already decided that you have the intention to allow people to buy their way in buy purchasing better ships, weapons, and ammunition that would give them an advantage over other players that don't purchase these things and wouldn't be available through regular game play.
This breaks the fundamental tenets of a "sandbox" game. The game universe is driven by the player community. Players discover the items, research those items, manufacture them, sell those items to other players, and inevitably destroy those items owned by other players. Influencing that universe by allowing people to buy items for cash, you've proven no better than the RMTers we've been complaining about.
I don't see the release of Incarna or microtransactions as adding anything to the game experience at this point. If anything, Walking in Stations is premature. It has altered the new player experience but it brings nothing for the established player. We were told that Incarna was going to offer a new mini-profession as a smuggler with clandestine meetings in stations and the trafficking of contraband. I don't see this anywhere. Presumably this is a feature we'll have to wait some months for again. For the new player, the introductory tutorials have been altered. But what is really so different? AURA still guides them through the process of finding an agent, getting a mission, equipping their ship, inserting a skill in the queue, and then they exit the station in their ship to commence the mission. In due time, the new player comes to the conclusion that this is a space combat game, not a Sims Spacestation game. Eventually they'll progress to joining a corporation and spend less and less time in station.
I think its unfortunate that so much development effort went into what is essentially window dressing when there are so many more important facets of the game that need to be addressed. Worse is the side effect of increasing the hardware requirements for the game, for an aspect of it that is so small. If we spent 80% of our time in station, I could appreciate it more. But in reality, in a given week, less than 5% of my time is spent in station buying things, equipping them and leaving. Considering I did follow your advice and upgraded my video card, the rest of my game experience isn't improved because of it. I took the liberty of testing Incara on a two year old Dell computer with onboard Intel graphics. The requirement of Shader Model 3 is a non-issue. The game is still playable with the graphics quality set to "Performance" even if the frame rate in station drops to 8 to 10 FPS.
The most annoying things to come out of the past 48 hours since Incarna was released, and have yet to be addressed, are all the things that are broken that have nothing to do with the in station experience. Weapon upgrades, capacitor modules, scanning/probing mechanics, implants, and missile drones are just a few of the things I've experienced and have seen others complaining about. I would have expected these would have become an immediate concern for your developers, but so far we've haven't heard a thing in the past two days of which bugs will be fixed and when.
|