EA disables the ‘rape gaming’ option in SW:BF2, for now

Posted on November 17, 2017 by SynCaine

EA has caved, again, over the lockbox situation in SW:BF2. This time by removing the entire cash shop. Non-sheep rejoice, we won! Sheep people, enjoy your improved game despite your complicit sheep actions.

Of course even in their ‘we are trying to do the right thing’ announcement, EA couldn’t help themselves and said the cash shop would be back later, in some form.

The ultra-cynical (read: correct) take on this is that EA wants to grab the money from pre-orders and initial sales again, avoid lower review scores because of the previous garbage cash shop progression system, and will just bring basically the same pay-4-power lootbox cash shop back once the dust has settled and it’s too late for refunds.

The optimistic (read: very likely wrong) view is that after review, the cash shop will come back as a fluff-only shop, and any power progression will remain in-game only, as is the case in ‘good’ cash shop games.

The smart thing to do here is take a ‘wait and see’ approach with the game. Don’t buy it, and if/when the cash shop is back and doesn’t sell power, jump in. The obvious problem is not only did a ton of sheep not cancel pre-orders, but more are likely to get duped by EA here and buy the game thinking it’s not going to revert into garbage once their money is firmly in EA’s pockets.

This entire fiasco has been interesting to watch, especially because it drew a clear line between words and actions for some people. Saying you don’t like lootboxes or pay-4-power games rings very hollow when once a game with your flavor of lightsaber comes up, you dive right in regardless of how many systems you supposedly don’t support it contains, because ‘hey its fun’.

The ultra-extreme but still accurate example of this is saying you are against rape, but then at a party when you spot a ‘fun’ girl, you rape her anyway, because while you are generally against rape, this particular case you choose fun over the values you claim to have. Retaining your SW:BF2 pre-order when it was clear the cash shop was selling power lootboxes was raping gamers that don’t want that junk in our games. At least for now, in this situation, enough people said “Regardless of how fun that girl looks, lets not rape her”. And knowing EA, the ‘eh, rape her’ option is coming back. Don’t support that, even if it means missing out on this particular a fun time.

Posted in Blogroll, Random, Rant, RMT | 11 Comments

Think we can put a hotbar inside a loot box?

Posted on November 15, 2017 by SynCaine

First off, when did SW:TOR let go of the hotbar saleman? Who the hell is selling you chunks of the UI for the low low price of ‘bend over this barrel please’ in that dumpster fire of a game now?

That aside, today he is talking about lockboxes, because everyone is (thanks EA, have a downvote!), and, no joke, is talking about how to ethically design them. That’s right, the guy who use to sell you pieces of the UI that was intentionally taken out to make playing without paying suck, is now talking about how to fairly design lockboxes. I think his next topic is going to be “Heroin, not that bad in small doses, try some kids!”.

Wait nevermind:

“I’m pretty fine with those guys paying a lot of money so that a whole bunch of kids without money or credit cards can play my games for free “ – Damion “The whole UI is extra” Schubert

And of course he jumps on the whole “but but its 2017, videogames are oh so expensive to make now whaaa” train, which pulls up right behind the “but but what about the kids?” express of fake outrage over something.

You know what 1995 videogame devs had to pay to sell a game? Thousands and thousands for a short window of shelf space in a store, assuming they even had that possibility if Nintendo or Sega let them make a game for their console. Also the PC gaming market was super hot compared to today… The other option? Not make games and get a ‘real’ job instead.

Today? It’s $100 or so to get listed on Steam, which will put your game in front of millions of people, forever. Gee which one sounds cheaper? Oh you know what else cost money in 1995 but is absolutely free today? The physical box, the printing of the manual, and having to ship a game that is 100% fully done because you can’t change it later. But boo hoo in 2017 video game devs have it so rough because they can’t all take an existing engine, change a bit of code, throw in some pre-made art assets, call it PUBG, and be literally set for life after 20+ million copies sold in early access. Or hey, just take your fan made mod, give it a new title, and be able to retire at 30 because you own the company running LoL.

Banished and Stardew valley, both A+ quality games, were made by one person. ARK was made by a small team. How many games were successfully funded via Kickstarter and delivered? None of that was happening in 1995. The average game dev in 2017 is MUCH better off than that same dev in 1995, and it’s not even remotely close. And for gamers? Steam sales, humble bundle, the fact we have thousands of new titles a year? Please, 1995 sucked in comparison as well.

Of course if your gaming ‘talent’ caps out at “I removed the UI and sold it back to people boss!” you are going to cry about how rough it is, but spare me the sob story. Blowing 500m to bring us the much-wanted 4th pillar isn’t an example of the rising cost of video games, its an example of not having the first clue on how to make a decent game. The cost was just icing on the shit cake. You want to know the difference between 500m for SW:TOR and whatever GTA:V cost? One game was good and made money, the other drove all the big money out of a genre for a decade.

The saddest thing in all this garbage related to power lockboxes is that plenty of examples already exist in gaming of in-game purchases done right. LoL doesn’t sell power and somehow not only manages to be the biggest game out year after year, but pulls in a ton of cash. PUBG is the new hotness, and surprise, also only sells you fluff. Yes, via lockboxes, but if its fluff, I don’t care if its delivered on a unicorn or at the bottom of the ocean.

The reason games like SW:BF2 sell you power items in lockboxes isn’t because they are ‘trying something new’ or want you to feel a sense of accomplishment, but because they are shit-tier games that won’t be relevant or popular in 6 months, so they need to collect as much cash as possible right away. The lack of ethics here is knowing that if you polish a turd enough, you will fool people into buying in short-term. It’s pump-and-dump, but in the videogame world. And the saddest thing about all of it is that people get burned, get mad for a minute, and then when the next polished turd comes around, they get right back in line asking for more. That model will never lead to anything great or resume-worthy, but hey, it makes some money, and for some that’s all that matters.

To bring this back to talking about 1995, games that rely on power lockboxes to make money are the 2017 version of a movie-based videogame; a piece of shit produced by people who didn’t care, but knew they would sell enough simply based on the fact that they had a popular movie on the cover to fool enough people to make the next one.

Posted in Rant, RMT, SW:TOR | 4 Comments

Sheep sheeping it up like sheep

Posted on November 13, 2017 by SynCaine

The new Star Wars Battlefield game has been in the news a lot recently, and mostly for negative reasons. For those unaware, SW:BF2 is a game made by EA that is the current poster child of shitty cash grabs. You buy the box, and then either play as a gimp until you grind out upgrades, or put money down on top of your box price to unlock things like, say, Darth Vader. Vader is locked in a SW game that has a box price folks.

Now listen, anyone who actually buys SW:BF2 is part of the problem, unless said person doesn’t consider the box+lockbox model a problem, and then that makes them an asshole. So while its cute that in the SW:BF2 subreddit an EA community manager is sitting at -280k+ downvotes over telling someone who paid $80 to keep grinding or pay more to play Vader, everyone who owns a copy of that game (guessing most of the people in that subreddit) and downvoted is also part of the problem. You aren’t ‘taking a stand’ with your downvote, you’re just being a hypocrite.

The only way companies like EA won’t continue to pump this garbage out and bend players over a barrel is if said players stop actually giving them money to be bent over. Paying and then crying while bent just likely makes whoever from EA is giving it to you chuckle while giving it to you, you dumb sheep.

Edit: An important note about all these kinds of games. Playing but not paying (either zero in a F2P game or only the box in something like SW:BF2) also makes you complicit in all of this, just marginally less so. The whole system works because a small percentage of the playerbase dives head-first into the cash shop, which an even smaller percentage going full whale. But if a game is overall unpopular, the whales won’t drop 10k to show off in an unpopular game.

Part of the scumbag mechanic in a lot of the worst examples isn’t just that they have lockboxes or a cash shop, but they design them such that whales have an easy time showing off. That mechanic fails if no one is around to witness said showing off.

Posted in Random, Rant | 18 Comments

Gevlon wins super-elite level PUBG game! Proof inside!

Posted on November 8, 2017 by SynCaine

Every time I think Gevlon has reached the depths of his personal stupidity, he goes ahead and digs just a little deeper. It truly is an impressive talent.

As you may recall, the statistically worst player on the internet had 735 games played without stumbling into a single win, an almost impossible feat considering the amount of RNG in PUBG. Well not anymore everyone! Was he shamed into finally winning? Did the PUBG RMG gods finally take pity on him? Did he go afk so his personal play wouldn’t get in the way of winning?

Naw, you see Gevlon is super smart and a top-ranked player, so he only plays against other top-ranked players because thats definitely how the rating system works in PUBG. His games are really hard, and all us plebs are playing in lowbie ranked games that are super easy to win. I mean, Gevlon can’t possibly be wrong about that and then post clear evidence on his own blog proving it, can he?

Wait for it.

Wait for it.

Here it is (at the bottom, the garbage about is another Grrr CCP nonsense rant). Congrats on 700+ failed efforts and then finally getting a single win. Huge accomplishment, uugh!

The money quote:

While winning a top 0.5% ranked game isn’t nothing (and nothing like winning a 1200 rated lolgame), luck had a part in it (guy shoots me to 10% HP when drops dead from a headshot from mr-soon-to-be-#2). – Ultra-leet goblin leader Gevlon

Of course he only had one kill, the final one. And who did he kill? A 1600 rated player who’s name you can see in his screenshot (with an aggregate skill rating of, of course, 1200, because clearly even the universe enjoys laughing at Gevlon at this point). A player who has also never won a single game, though in that players defense, he only has 100 games played total, so he might not be a complete goblin.

Why was a 1600 rating zero-wins player in Gevlon’s ‘leet’ top-tier game, and why did he make it to the final two players in a game that also contained Gevlon? Because as Gevlon has now perfectly shown, the rating system in PUBG doesn’t do anything, which is why only idiot goblins care about it. The game just grabs the first 100 players who queue up and puts them in a game. That’s why the queue is almost instant regardless of when and where (what region) you play, and why 12 people of VASTLY different ranks can all queue up in 3 squads and get into the same exact game 99% of the time, as we do often in INQ. It’s why stream sniping is possible in PUBG but doesn’t exist in LoL (Gevlon thinks stream snipers are just bots hired by the streamer to boost their stats, but that’s a joke for another day).

Anyway, grats on your ‘leet’ win Gevlon, I’m sure many, many more are going to follow, even with you playing at the top-tier of the ratings against fellow top-tier players. Can’t wait for your guide to teach us all how we too can be as ‘successful’ as a goblin. Personally I can only hope its as good as your LoL “just queue dodge, it’s fine, lots of people stay in Silver for 1000+ games” guide.

Posted in Blogroll, PUBG | 13 Comments

I’d play Classic WoW

Posted on November 7, 2017 by SynCaine

I think I’m in for vanilla WoW if its done right. ‘Done right’ is of course the key, and with New Blizzard, I think its safe to say the odds are great they are going to screw it up by enabling something dumb like cross-realms, or phasing, or some form of WotLK-era welfare. But that’s a topic for another day, when Blizzard gives us more info.

Today I want to talk about why I’d go back. For one, vanilla WoW was some of the best MMO gaming for me in my long run with the genre, and at least some of that time was prior to getting into top-end raiding. I want to see if it still holds up, in large part because I believe it will. A lot of people are saying that quests like “kill 10 of this, then kill 5 of that in the same place” are terrible and should be replaced, but to me that sounds far too similar to people saying that mining in EVE is boring and should be made more fun and interactive. On paper that sounds correct, but when you consider how that gameplay HAS held up, and how many people enjoy it, there must be something to it.

That something is the fact that you play an MMO for a long time, so the basics need to be… well basic. If every quest is some new ‘figure it out’ thing, you not only tire of that after the 100th quest, but you also run into quests that really suck, and content that sucks sticks out far more than good/great content. If you keep it consistent (kill 10), you keep the fun consistent. The same goes for combat; its the most basic and core activity you do in an MMO like WoW, and if its too taxing (long rotations, too heavy an emphasis on movement), it goes from being fun and engaging for the first few hours to a chore in hour 100, and hour 100+ is what you should judge an MMO by, not the first 100. Yes, that sounds crazy, but WoW in 2005 wasn’t successful because the first 100 hours were magic (though they were for most because it was their first MMO), it was successful because it kept millions playing well beyond the first 100 hours.

I’m also personally interested in playing it because I could duo with my wife, and vanilla leveling content was very good for duos. Sure you spent more time on the ‘collect x’ quests, but there were plenty of areas where having another player helped, and dungeon content is far easier when you already have 2 of the 5 people you need to bring. I’m also guessing that if this is done right, a lot of the INQ crew would give it a shot, so putting together full groups for dungeons would also be pretty easy and fun.

I also hope this happens correctly because it would be a very interesting test for the genre as a whole. If Classic WoW is basically 2005 WoW, and it becomes massively successful, that will send a strong message to everyone. It could, potentially, undo all the damage WotLK+ did, where devs were copying the bad version of WoW and bringing all its junk forward, then claiming its the players and not the games that were the reason for failure.

Will any of this happen? Guess we will find out ‘soon’.

Posted in Inquisition Clan, MMO design, World of Warcraft | 7 Comments

PUBG: 735 losses before a game is rigged now I guess

Posted on November 6, 2017 by SynCaine

I knew it was coming. You knew it was coming. Now here it is; Gevlon trying to explain how PUBG is rigged. Honestly its a sad attempt even by his standards (buying fluff boxes means the devs flag your account for better circle placement, really Gevlon, that’s the best tinfoil you got?).

For those keeping track at home, it took Gevlon about 1000 LoL games in Silver before he explained that failure away to rigging, but in PUBG the rigging excuse is up after only 735 or so games without a single win. He is getting weaker at face-slamming a wall I guess. (That said, 735 games without RNG handing you a win is insane in PUBG. That’s literally ‘intentionally trying not to win’ territory of unlikely.)

 

 

Posted in Blogroll, PUBG | 5 Comments

PUBG: Winning and improving

Posted on November 2, 2017 by SynCaine

I’m still playing a good amount of PUBG, and surprise, playing more leads to getting better at a game (at least for most people). Am I Shroud yet? Not exactly, but I am at the point where if combat happens, I expect to win rather than praying the other guy is a bigger potato. That’s a big jump for me, especially because FPS games are BY FAR my worst genre of games when played competitively.

My best game to date, a 7 kill, fairly high damage squad win, happened recently. The ending was especially crazy, as the final circle was around the trench near Gatka, with myself and one squad member down inside the trench, and the final two enemies on top, one on each side. This was after a lengthy firefight with another squad on the opposite end of the trench that lead to the death of a squad mate.

After that fight ended, I peeked the top of the trench to see one enemy crawling towards us. He didn’t have vision on me (yay third-person-perspective camera shenanigans), so when I saw him peak in the other direction, I popped out and gave him the business end of my UMP. He got a shot on me, so once he was dead, I turned and backed away into the trench to heal, only to see the final enemy on the other side, looking directly at me. Or at least, I thought he was, because for whatever reason he didn’t shoot at me. This gave me the chance to get out of his view, heal up, and wait for him to peak in the other direction before lighting him up for the chicken dinner. Wins where you do more of the carrying for a squad always feel great, because god knows I’ve been on plenty of wins where I’m more weight than help.

As with most PUBG games, it was a combo of skill and luck to get that win. If the final enemy wasn’t blind, I’m dead after killing the first guy, and then it would have been a 1v1 with my squad mate. On the other hand, getting to the final circle was the result of good shooting, good movement/planning, and playing well as a squad. I never get to the final potato player if the first 6 people I killed end up killing me.

Speaking of our squad, I feel we are also improving as a unit. We are still sometimes spotty on communication (I’ll hear “cross the street” when someone actually said “enemy across the street” and run head-first into a bullet), but it’s getting better, and just takes time. You have to learn to fight the instinct to say something like “I see an enemy!”, and instead say “enemy at 235, solo”. I’m still the guy going “I’m hit” on comms, when that helps absolutely nobody and is just distracting noise, but again, improving.

I think the gradual improvement in PUBG is also a reason it’s so successful. It’s not like CS:GO where landing headshots is 90% of the game, and until you get to that point, you are basically fodder. In PUBG, great aim is important, no doubt, but so much more goes into winning, and even if your aim and reactions aren’t improving as fast as you’d like, you can still continue to improve in other areas and continue to become an overall better player.

Another key to the games success is that, unless you are someone like Shroud, victory doesn’t happen so often that it becomes normal, so each one feels great. Some better than others, but I doubt many players out of the millions don’t get a high from seeing that chicken dinner screen. The other group I play with has two guys who are insanely good at the game, and win fairly often (20% maybe?), but even for them each win is still a feel-good moment.

Those two factors keep people interested in the game, and keep them playing. It’s almost MMO-like in a way; you have long-term progression, and each major success feels great. Oh, and there is also the ‘collect fluff’ mini-game that some people take to extreme lengths (the pre-order coat item sells for over $1500 on Steam trade, and the price continues to go up).

I’m very excited for the big patch that has vaulting and a bunch of other stuff to hit the test servers, because it should make what is already an incredibly fun game that much better. Too bad it was delayed this week, but I’m sure it’s coming ‘soon’.

 

 

Posted in PUBG | 6 Comments

Rigging, lockboxes, and all the innocent children!

Posted on October 27, 2017 by SynCaine

The topic of lockboxes and matchmaking rigging is making its way around the blog world of late, so lets pile on another post to the fire.

I’ll use Az’s post about it as a starting point, because I think it raises good points about the details while unfortunately missing the big picture. I fully agree that Pay-4-Power games stink, especially if the point of said game is also to compete against others. If you throw lockboxes on top, you have a giant dumpster fire of a game. 100% full agreement from me on all that.

But no one is holding a gun to my head forcing me to play such a game. If one came out tomorrow (lets call the game Goblin) that had P4P lockboxes with horribly, horribly odds for getting a super-powerful weapon, and had a matchmaking system that secretly heavily favored buyers and put them up against non-buyers to entice them to buy, I’d laugh at Goblin and anyone playing it before moving on. It would have zero point zero impact on me outside of it’s comedy value. And the same goes for you; if Goblin doesn’t sound like your kind of game, you don’t play it and nothing bad or evil happens to you.

“But but SynCaine, what about Goblin influencing others and suddenly everyone is making terrible game and I have nothing to play?”

Glad you asked blog reader. The only way the above problem happens is if Goblin is successful. And I don’t mean turn-a-profit or sell-a-million-copies successful, I mean WoW/LoL/PUBG success. The reason I ranted about WoW post-WotLK is because not only had the game become “Even a Gevlon can succeed” easy, but WoW was still a major influencer at that time, and now, all these years later, we see just how many bad MMOs we got because so many were copying a greatly flawed version of WoW. If you want to know why the MMO genre is in such terrible shape, look no further than WotLK and the direct it took most of the genre. It’s only now that we are seeing major efforts to do something else, like Crowfall, CU, or SC. (Not saying ‘something else’ will be good, but it will be better than welfare status WoW-clone at least).

Now, can you name me a single Goblin-style game that is even remotely close to such levels of success outside of Asia? WoW isn’t primarily focused on PvP competition, so that’s out. LoL only sells fluff, and has a working ladder system that keeps Gevlons in silver for 1000+ games while placing those with some ability to win at the correct levels, plus Riot is open about the different types of matchmaking manipulation they do (toxic account flagging, smurf acceleration, etc). PUBG also only sells fluff, is more comedy than serious competition (when a player at Shroud’s level isn’t aware that the do-nothing ladder has been reset, that should tell you all you need to know about it’s importance to the vast majority of players), and lets players of any ‘rank’ get into the same game if they queue at the same time.

Will player aversion be worn down over time to such design? Perhaps. Certainly today people are more accepting of lockboxes and microtransations then they were ten years ago, but again, that hasn’t resulted in a full-on Goblin game yet, and I don’t think it ever will.

Remember when F2P was the new hotness, and some people though all games going forward must be F2P because how else can you compete? Now look today, where a lot of players avoid F2P games simply because they are F2P, and the most successful game of the year (PUBG) isn’t F2P, while other massively successful games like ARK release and INCREASE their box price. People learned, albeit too slowly IMO, that F2P brings a lot of baggage with it, and isn’t a great option for a lot of games. Can it work? Sure, CoC/CR are perfect examples of high-quality, solid F2P games, just like countless other games are perfect examples of why F2P can be terrible.

The same applies to lockboxes. They fits some games (random skin gift boxes in LoL), are neutral in others (basically any fluff-only boxes, or some Pay-2-Skip setups), and are a total disaster in some cases (SW:TOR). Ditto for matchmaking rigging. When World of Tanks came out, anyone paying attention knew it wasn’t a pure-skill game (gold ammo), so only a fool would also consider its matchmaking as being pure. But a lot of people didn’t care about all that and just wanted to blow some stuff up, and so WoT saw some success. Did it become the standard, where all future games had gold ammo and wonky matchmaking? Nope. Because LoL exists, is significantly bigger, and shows that a far larger audience will play a F2P game that sells only fluff and has a real, actually working ladder that reflects player skill and only player skill.

So put down your torches until the WoW/LoL/PUBG version of a rigged and lockbox-stuffed game comes out. Until then, the only people affected by such games are the dummies playing them, and as of now, that pool isn’t large enough to matter.

PS: The “but what about the kids?” aspect of all this is maybe the biggest joke of all. If you suck so much as a parent to not only allow your kid to play garbage, but then also give them access to a CC to spend money on said garbage, that’s on you and only you.

Posted in ARK, Camelot Unchained, Clash of Clans, Clash Royale, Crowfall, League of Legends, MMO design, PUBG, PvP, Rant, RMT, Star Citizen, SW:TOR, World of Warcraft | 19 Comments

Asian whales

Posted on October 26, 2017 by SynCaine

The US has more millionaires than not only any other country in the world, but more than the next dozen or so combined. The US and Asia are pretty close in terms of billionaires, but that is a very small group of people (just over 1000), while the number of millionaires is… in the millions.

Yet if you play any mobile game online, the odds are pretty good that when you run across a whale, they will be Asian (basing this on player name, but I doubt many US-based players are using Asian names). Why is that? Again, the number of people with enough money to whale-out in a game and have it not really matter (spending 10k matters as much to someone with millions as spending $5 does to someone earning 40k) is higher in the US, so why isn’t that reflected online?

Maybe it’s a new money vs old money thing, where people with new money are more likely to spend it foolishly. Or maybe it’s just a culture thing, where people from Asia are more likely to whale-out compared to someone in the US/EU. I honestly don’t know, but maybe someone with more experience with that region (Az?) might be able to chime in.

Somewhat related to the above, right now PUBG is still experiencing a wave of hackers (mostly in solo TPP, which honestly a lot of people don’t care about, but still), at least as it relates to the pointless leaderboard, and those accounts also come from Asia. There has been a push on Reddit for PUBG to be region-locked, and while that wouldn’t completely fix the problem (it’s not that difficult to get around a region lock), it would keep the most amateur of hackers out, which is what a lot of these accounts are as they are simply buying and using a popular hacking program.

The more work you require someone to do before they can successfully hack and disrupt your game, the lower the overall number of people who will do it, and in turn the lower the impact the hackers have. If I see one hacker in 100 games, I honestly don’t care. If I see one in every 5 games, that’s a problem. Right now my own experience is far closer to the one in 100, but again I don’t play PUBG alone in TPP, so maybe just for that one game mode the issue is as bad as Reddit makes it out to be (not likely).

Posted in PUBG, Random, Rant, RMT, Uncategorized | 4 Comments

D:OS2 finished

Posted on October 25, 2017 by SynCaine

No spoilers here, just want to note that I wrapped up Divinity Original Sin 2, final playtime being 113 hours (that’s with restarting after completing act 1).

Overall its still a great RPG, one that will be made better in the future with bug fixes and hopefully an expansion or two.

The endings are good. There are 5 major ones, with countless minor details changing based on early decisions, that do wrap up the game well enough, though I feel it was overall a little too vague for my tastes. Again perhaps an expansion gives us a bit more.

I’d actually love to play the game again right now with a different party and class composition, but I know I wouldn’t finish it, and I don’t want to burn the content too much at this point, again because I think in the future the whole experience will just be better.

Posted in Random | 6 Comments