Blizzard: willfully engage in a business model that manipulates players into constantly looking for the next thing, and structures their games around that model to drive sales of microtransaction
Blizzard's Player Base: fills with people responding to that manipulation
I'm ruining friendships by doing this, but idc.
If a game is "Free to Play" but features a bunch of "Optional purchases." That's an immediate NO from me.
So many times this cycle has gone "Free to Play" but the game is only meaningfully playable and fun if you invest ??? money into it.
I avoid F2P games like the plague now. Even if it was paid before. It's just not ever worth it. Even if it's not predatory now, the only way they can make money is through season passes, P2W mechanics, or ads/data selling. All unsustainable imo.
If all it takes to ruin a friendship is not playing a game with someone then I would reevaluate whether they were actually my friends and not just casual acquaintances.
That's called pay to win. Obvs free to play has to make money somehow, reputable companies accomplish this through cosmetics, etc. a bad actor here is Blizzard, who are selling skins for $20, battle passes for $10 , and they used to be free in OW 1 which many people paid for.
Was anyone even asking for diablo to be a live game? Saying as politely as I can, we ran the same D2 campaign for YEARS and there was enough variety in just characters and play styles to keep us busy.
The bit of D3 I played seemed to come down to finding a cheese build, whirlwinding through increasingly large enemy hordes, and collecting a golden trinket at the end, one you'd never use because it didn't match the meta.
Now the only people left playing want to "zone out" and mindlessly tear through blizz content faster than they can pump it out, blizzard did this to themselves.
Right there with you. I don’t enjoy OW2 as a heals & tank specialist. I have a pet theory that they should have bifurcated the tanks in OW1 into two different required classes and kept 6v6.
Those smug assholes have been whining about "entitled" players since WotLK after the rightfully negative reception of the artistically lazy "Argent Crusade" gearsets that looked like tracksuits and were hard to tell apart from each other, class by class.
I feel like games should limit their monetization to 2 methods, and not utilize FOMO like a battle-pass does. Any cash shops should be designed to be accessible to players not wanting to spend real money (either a game system to handle in-game currency exchange, or have players work it out by allowing players to directly trade in-game currency for either cash shop currency, or cash shop items directly - ensuring there are worthwhile things to purchase both with in-game currency as well, so cash-shop players are encouraged to participate).
Guild Wars 2 I feel does a good job of it. Occasional expansions to purchase, no sub, a cosmetic+convenience shop, but everything in it, can be purchased by converting earned in-game currency into cash-shop currency.
Yes, people want new stuff, problem is blizzard doesn’t know how to make games anymore. All of the giants who made the magic happen left the company before the sexual harassment shitstorm. All they do now is capitalize on nostalgia.
When the original main Diablo maker left to make Torchlight after criticizing the company for being a corrupt and gross place to work, the corpos left behind tweeted "fuck that loser" about him.