Not that this Forbes article is saying anything we don’t already know, but I find it somewhat funny to read about anti-accessibility from such a source. It’s also amusing how close the issues in FPS-land mirror those of the MMO genre. A game is better when it’s based on working with others for bigger goals, yet what sells is solo-hero, simple, short-term objectives that appeal to Xbox kids.
Now one might ask “what happens when the Xbox kids grow up?”
I don’t think they will. I think a lot of those ‘kids’ are middle-aged right now. They just prefer games at a mental level somewhere around grade school. Maybe it’s because they are just that casual. Maybe gaming is ‘brain off’ time for them. Or maybe the difference between ‘brain off’ and ‘brain on’ is negligible. Whatever the reason, I don’t see the average gamer ‘growing up’ and flooding smarter, more niche titles, be they FPS’ers or MMOs.
In other ‘brain off’ news, you know Blizzard has stopped monitoring the interns running WoW when they can’t even copy/paste PLEX correctly into their game. I get that most of the stuff CCP is doing is “impossible” for Blizzard, but PLEX? One would think allowing one group of players to fund the subs of another group would be of interest to a game bleeding so rapidly.
Hardcore Casual 
To be fair, Blizzard probably knows it does not have a robust enough in-game economy to support something like PLEX. Having three auction house economies (Horde, Alliance, and neutral) on every one of how many dozens of servers means that there is such fragmentation that some pockets could never support such a plan.
Even CCP made PLEX convertible to game time remotely. You have to go and pick up anything else you buy in game, which is part of what makes the economy so viable, but PLEX you can buy as a contract from anywhere in the game and add the game time to your account without any travel needed.
The EVE economy wins again.
Would PLEX in WoW work like it does in EVE? No.
Would it work ‘enough’ to be better than PLEXcat™? Yup.
Lots of stuff sucks on low-pop servers. Does that mean you don’t add something because of them? Especially something like this, where lets face it, from Blizzard’s perspective, it’s just more cash?
Maybe it’s just technically impossible…
Your theory of insufficiently robust game economy doesn’t make sense. plex makes the economy more robust, not less. If the economy is totally broken, a plex-like system would be tricky, but if it’s even 10% as functional as Wow’s economy I fully believe adding plex will only improve it. Do you have any specific criticism of the WoW economy that you think would make plex not work in wow? To me, the fact that gold-farmers and botters infest wow to large degree, despite their automated software having more, although limited, success against such than many other game companies makes it incredibly obvious that plex would work well in WoW.
My theory is actually based on observations rather than wishful thinking. And believing that something like WoWPLEX would be all good is clearly wishful thinking.
No, PLEX does not make the economy stronger. Quite the reverse. It is a luxury good. Nobody in the game needs it. It requires a strong economy to make it viable. Think Magrathea.
EVE has a hugely more complex and robust economy than WoW. Here is an auction house with 300K or so users. You simply cannot play the game and stay out of the market. This was so before PLEX. This would be so if they took PLEX away. And even in that environment, CCP felt the need to make PLEX special to keep prices from fluctuating wildly. Because you do not have to go pick it up, price pressures work across regions, and with contracts, across the whole game.
WoW has a rather simple economy. Actually, it has 720 little economies in the North America alone. If you want to do trade skills or are optimizing your equipment, you get involved, but it is really optional. Relatively few people use it as a percentage of the population compared to EVE.
Ideally, on a server in a faction with a strong economy, WoWPLEX would serve to move gold from those at gold cap to those who want some gold. Everybody is happy.
But there is a point where people will stop buying. Like the cubs, any given economy can only absorb so many before people are sated in their immediate need. On the low pop faction of a low pop server, you might find that the price of your WoWPLEX is lower than you want. So low that illegal gold seller gold is much much cheaper. WoWPLEX will then fail at its purpose and people will gleefully point that out and/or bitterly complain. People stuck with WoWPLEX will want refunds if they cannot get enough gold for them.
Now Syn says fuck people on low pop servers. That is his opinion. But Blizzard is not going to implement something that only works on some, or even most of the servers, and they certainly aren’t going to do anything that will increase customer service calls.
Cross faction auction houses would mitigate this issue. That would pump up the total potential AH users to something like an average of around 6,000 people per server. Pricing WoWPLEX attractively, making it less than $15 per 30 days, would go a long way to smoothing things out as well. People would feel less bitter about it if it were still a good deal to use if they couldn’t sell it.
So Blizz could do things to make it work, or at least not fail in as many small economies, but that includes things that they have been reluctant to do so far.
“. Like the cubs, any given economy can only absorb so many before people are sated in their immediate need.”
Theoretically, a low pop server would be proportionally lower in both supply and demand for WOWplex. Prices for scarce goods are generally higher on larger servers, but going by Gevlon’s analysis of raiding population versus total population, that could possibly be completely explained by that difference, and the difference doesn’t tend to be that large.
“On the low pop faction of a low pop server, you might find that the price of your WoWPLEX is lower than you want.”
Or you might find that the price of your WOWplex is higher than you ever dreamed of. What of it? If you’re saying that wowplex will give less gold on low pop servers b/c prices are lower there, than you’re not saying anything, as that less gold will buy more items, making the wowplex an equally good purchase in terms of actual goods. If you’re just saying than prices are more volatile in smaller markets, then sure, that’s a reasonable hypothesis, but why then only look at the cheaper case?
“WoWPLEX will then fail at its purpose and people will gleefully point that out and/or bitterly complain.”
So, possibly, on a few small servers, the price will be very different than the large servers–and you go from that to “WoWplex will then fail at its purpose”??? You lost me there. illegal goldseller gold will always be cheaper than official, that much is obvious.
“Now Syn says fuck people on low pop servers. That is his opinion. But Blizzard is not going to implement something that only works on some, or even most of the servers, and they certainly aren’t going to do anything that will increase customer service calls.”
Well, I think they have and will, for both your points above, and since you made the first positive claim on that issue the obligation is on you to provide reasoning and evidence supporting it :)
“Pricing WoWPLEX attractively, making it less than $15 per 30 days, would go a long way to smoothing things out as well. People would feel less bitter about it if it were still a good deal to use if they couldn’t sell it.”
Are you proposing they make WoWplex cheaper than subscribing otherwise, the same price, or only slightly more expensive? Because pricing it cheaper = totally unrealistic, the other two options are possible.
“My theory is actually based on observations rather than wishful thinking. And believing that something like WoWPLEX would be all good is clearly wishful thinking.”
Let me get this straight, your theory is actually really real, and mine is wishful, clearly. These emphatic adverbs aren’t just poor writing, they’re also symptomatic of those who wish to replace argumentation with verbal volume, as it were. I’m not impressed by it, sorry to tell you.
“No, PLEX does not make the economy stronger. Quite the reverse. It is a luxury good. Nobody in the game needs it. It requires a strong economy to make it viable. Think Magrathea.”
Hm, wikipedia gives me :”The word Magrathea might come from Agartha, a supposed underground kingdom from which Aryans originated in Nazi and Tibetan ideology” That’s amusing, although probably not what you wanted to discuss. That aside, I completely disagree, every single player in the game needs either plex, or real money, to pay the subscription cost. That makes plex one of the most basic goods in the game. Can you give me an example of a game that tried to implement Plex, where the economy couldn’t support it?
“And even in that environment, CCP felt the need to make PLEX special to keep prices from fluctuating wildly.”
Do you have a link supporting this, or are you just asserting this without any justification? I mean, even if that’s true, you’re just talking about CCP’s feelings, which I don’t care about all that much. But until you provide the link, it’s just you theorizing about CCP’s feelings, which is supremely uninteresting.
“In other ‘brain off’ news, you know Blizzard has stopped monitoring the interns running WoW when they can’t even copy/paste PLEX correctly into their game.”
Or, they’ve told the interns to slowly work WoWplex into the game by incrementally adding in features leading up to it, such as PlexCat.
Obviously, if they were going to implement only consumers buying gold with dollars, or consumers selling gold for dollars, but not both, they’d do it this way. Whether they plan to complete the cycle and add in selling gold for dollars/playtime in the future, is debatable. I’m leaning towards yes.
I am finding your misanthropy considerably less thought-out than Gevlon’s (although he’s going off the deep end lately).
Hundreds of millions of people enjoy watching sports on television. They find it entertaining. The difference between them and Xbox “kids” is… what? Is everyone who watches sports a “brain off” person? Are you in a particularly defensible position to judge others’ entertainment choices?
I agree with the Forbes guy that BF3 won’t be more than a niche game, and I played BF2 for years. I’m just glad the market is big enough to have titles that can cater to every audience.
“I am finding your misanthropy considerably less thought-out than Gevlon’s (although he’s going off the deep end lately).”
What’s your point?
“Hundreds of millions of people enjoy watching sports on television. They find it entertaining. The difference between them and Xbox “kids” is… what? Is everyone who watches sports a “brain off” person? Are you in a particularly defensible position to judge others’ entertainment choices?”
Why do you ask so many questions?
What’s your point?
That if Syncaine is going to casually insult wide swaths of the population, that he should at least put in some more “brain on” effort into it.
Why do you ask so many questions?
Oh, you’re a cute one.
Fundamentally, I do not see the rational thinking that says MW is “brain off,” that there is something “lesser” about that compared to other games, in the same world where hundreds of millions of people watch sports on television and that is “fine.” Normal, even. Indeed, I would say most of them are the same people.
Accessibility is not, and should not be considered a dirty word. If someone wants some quick FPS deathmatch with no strings attached, that does not make them a “brain off” person anymore than a physicist who watches UFC when he gets home.
“That if Syncaine is going to casually insult wide swaths of the population, that he should at least put in some more “brain on” effort into it.”
Isn’t that an oxymoron? ‘ intellectual casual insulting’?
The rest of your comments are just a bunch of straw man insinuations not worthy of any other reply. But, I’ll give you one example of such just because I know how you respond to being called on fallacies: You overstate what he actually said about “brain off” gaming, while going on and on about sports-watchers, which is irrelevant because you don’t link any comments he made about sports-watching and as you yourself state, his comments were casual in nature and therefore you can’t expect him to develop them generally. So, you’re arguing against something that no one is advocating, straw man. Not that I was expecting any more from you.
Yea…I’m not sure what syncaine means here.
Is the idea xbox games are on average less complex and mentally challenging than PC games? To have this make ANY sense we have to ignore the fact so many are cross platform, and pretty much just look at mmos.
Hilarity ensues when you realize that if you look the average complexity/challenge of online games, it’s laughably low. Farmville ftw.
To summarize, it’s pretty obvious that any objective observer would see that xbox games are on average an order of magnitude more complex and requiring of brain power.
Do we mmo players not realize we are the dregs and losers of the gaming world.?
P.s. I’m aware that a tiny fraction of mmo games are more complex and challenging, ie those like eve dark fall etc that are actually sandbox virtual worlds, and for obvious reasons.
However the vast majority are simplified versions of console/PC single player RPGs.
Did you read the Forbes article? It explains it pretty well, and we are not talking ‘average games’ here, but looking at MW3/BF3.
PLEXcat isn’t gonna change shit. Everyone who bought a sparkle pony will buy 2 plexcats, one for the collection and one to try and sell. Market will be flooded. No one is really going to pay that much gold for them. Fail rmt imo.
I wish I could offer some kind of rmt venture that would fail in exactly the manner you describe…everyone buys 2. I’d be crying all the way to the bank.
Not everyone bought a sparklepony. IMO rmt implies paying real money for an advantage in the game. The advantage this would provide would be the gold you get from selling it (since it is Bind on Equip). No one is going to make gold off of it, therefor, it sucks for gaining an advantage, aka, fail rmt.
Purely semantical argument with no relevant point, with a baseless foundation of “IMO rmt implies x” Nice two-fer fail there, sir. More than a bit circular in nature, as well.
@Rammstein
Isn’t that an oxymoron? ‘ intellectual casual insulting’?
No.
You overstate what he actually said about “brain off” gaming, while going on and on about sports-watchers, which is irrelevant because you don’t link any comments he made about sports-watching and as you yourself state, his comments were casual in nature and therefore you can’t expect him to develop them generally.
1) Overstated? He specifically said: “They just prefer games at a mental level somewhere around grade school.” I would say being good at a FPS is more mentally stimulating than many other activities even, say, driving a car, but I was willing to accept the comment on face value for follow-up purposes. Sports watching is relevant because it too is an activity which requires a grade school mentality to enjoy – my claim, and not a straw man, but a comparison – and I was curious if his disdain was centered strictly in the gaming sphere or if it applied more generally (like Gevlon’s).
2) It was less “expecting” and more “inviting” him to expound on his worldview, which I clearly have more than a passing interest in for commenting in the first place. However, I do try to match tone for tone in doing so.
3) Claiming fallacies without bothering to demonstrate them should be a fallacy itself, if it is not one already. Perhaps “Poisoning the Well with a Red Herring.”
Compare apples to apples. Based on the article, which game requires more thought (or tactical decisions) vs which game is more focused on individual twitch skills (which I would argue have nothing to do with ‘smart’ gameplay, but not the topic).
It’s the same for MMOs. Some are now focused on the solo experience, and maximizing that aspect. Others are focused on being a member of a virtual community.
The TV part is a totally different topic. You brought up UFC; I’d argue intelligently watching UFC is more stimulating than ‘intelligent’ watching Jersey Shore. Both can be done in ‘brain off’ mode, one is designed for it.
And while I’ll watch stuff like Jersey Shore, I prefer UFC. Just like I prefer ‘brain on’ games to stuff like MW/SW:TOR.
Thank you for the clarification. I was trying to determine whether you simply disliked brain off games, or felt brain off games shouldn’t exist, or that people should be playing more brain on games (for their own good), or brain off games were impacting brain on game availability, or some other angle.
I have always preferred BF2 to, say, Counter-Strike but mainly because it is easier to meaningfully contribute to the former without having the preternatural reflexes in the latter. Then again, sometimes I simply feel like some fy_iceworld instead of driving across a map in a Jeep for 15 minutes… into a landmine. And I think it’s better for Battlefield to have some fy_iceworld situations for people in the mood rather than having them log out and play a different game.
“Isn’t that an oxymoron? ‘ intellectual casual insulting’?
No.”
Oops, you answered a rhetorical question.
1 “Overstated? He specifically said: “They just prefer games at a mental level somewhere around grade school.”.”
Yes, he refers to “brain-off time”, you refer to “brain-off people.” That is a clear overstatement.
3. “3) Claiming fallacies without bothering to demonstrate them should be a fallacy itself, if it is not one already.”
Thus, why I gave you an example, anticipating this very point.