PTR Spoiler/Discussion Thread (Part 2)

Argent Dawn
2031

I know I’m just gonna echo James Stephanie Sterling on this but “just cosmetics” is such BS.

People love dressing up their characters! That’s a huge part of the game. Paywalling that sucks! By tying a monetary benefit to Blizzard to release good looking things (gear, mounts, etc.), that creates a soft pressure to make the ‘free’ stuff worse in comparison so that people buy the good looking stuff.

Imagine if they’d paywalled character customisations - high elf skin tone for VElves, dark ranger skins, night warrior eyes, that sorta stuff.

They might still end up doing that, if they add such things to the trading post and add a tendie-purchase option.

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2032

I feel vindicated in my initial hatred for Trader’s Post.

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2033

Let it sink in that this game has more monetisation (despite being a monthly sub + expacs) than most mobile games.

5 Likes
2034

Or in this case, new bad stuff.

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2035

Adding to that: by selling tendies in the store Blizzard are financially incentivised to make in-game tendies harder to get. Currently you can cap your tendies in a day if you pick the right tasks but there is nothing stopping Blizzard from changing that so it will take, like, a week or a fortnight.

4 Likes
2036

We truly live in a Diablo Immortal

1 Like
2037

If this makes it off the PTR I’d wager one of three things will happen.

  • The objectives for tender will become harder to complete or reward less requiring more objectives to be completed
  • The cost of trader items will gradually increase
  • At the moment there’s usually around two or three 700-1000 price tagged items in the rotation. That number of items will double or triple. So that many people will wind up with 3 items they want and it works like this; They can afford one with ingame earnings, they can freeze another till next month, but what about the other one. You’ve activated my trap card, get your wallet out or its gone forever.

If I were an avaricious corporate scrooge I’d do the third option. It’s the sneakiest and most likely to slip past the radar of gullible paye- I mean players.

1 Like
2038

I appreciate Blizzard for making it crystal clear that nothing has changed, only the fronts and scope have varied. Unfathomable greed and tone deafness are still deeply ingrained in their DNA as I’m being consistently convinced of.

Even if someone or something isn’t purposefully malignant they can still reach such levels of malicious ignorance and unawareness that it’d make no difference to you upon experiencing it and the only proper response is the most retaliatory one that you can enact.

2 Likes
2039

I mean, I don’t disagree with you, and the prices are quite high for the amount of tenders you get: but I think they also said, at the very beginning of the Trader’s Post, that it wasn’t the goal to be able to buy everything every month and that pieces will rotate, even if it may take years.

Obviously they have partly backtracked on that by making tenders buyable with reallife money, but they are not forcing you to buy those Tenders. And blaming FOMO on Blizzard is such a lazy cop-out…

I mean, overall I do not disagree with what most people say, and I am not trying to defend this practice, imho the Trader’s Post is fine as it is, so I hope these buyable Tenders do not even make it to the PTR!

I can see them do that even if this doesn’t take off, lol

1 Like
2040

I do wonder what the trader tendies will cost. If a transmog set and mount are already priced €25 on the store that could mean they will probably set the value based on that. So €25 for about 800ish trader tenders?

2041

My brother in christ they engineered the fomo purposefully to manipulate people into buying

9 Likes
2042

I’m sure everyone on the Trading post picks what they absolutely want first but that doesn’t stop them from desiring the rest just because they don’t have enough tender coins on them. The premise was 500 guaranteed per month and 500 more for you taking part in activities in the game. It was an equalizing ground with the difference only depending on your participation in the game’s content so people had some measure of responsability.

My Brother in Aman’thul, even if this was done by Mr. Rogers himself I’d still call it a bad practice because it is. A bad system/incentive, even if no one ever engages in it is still bad and let us not pretend this isn’t for the sake of preying on whales and such. A company being greedy and wanting profit isn’t the issue but an excess of that instill a small measure of rot for even the most innocuous of features.

It’s not game dooming but it’s still unpleasant for this to even be present… We don’t all have the same gaps either in financials, shelfing the money for the tendies might be literal pennies for some while for others it’s something they want but shouldn’t purchase.

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2043

I can understand people arguing on behalf of a giant corporation if they feel the game it creates has value in its gameplay or feel. DS2 is better than DS3 etc.

What I can’t understand is why people, and quite a lot of them too judging by this and the OW2 news yesterday, arguing on behalf of a giant corporation on why it’s actually totally fine to give them more money. It’s not too bad, if you look at it through this very special lens it’s actually value etc.

There will never be a situation where you do not look like a crazy person arguing that Blizzard needs more of your money.

5 Likes
2044

It’s not really though? They could have made it so the trading post monthly gives you enough tendies to buy everything if you do your requisite activities, they didn’t. They made the system, they decide what things cost and how much you can earn.

No one is saying they’re forced to buy the currency, but people are susceptible to FOMO so when blizz makes a system designed to engineer that, it’s pretty understandable that they call it out as being bad. Despite every joke, they’re not a small indie studio who don’t understand what they’re doing - they know exactly how this works, and how people will respond to it. I’ve got little doubt that their accounting guys have done the maths and projected fat cash from people who don’t want to miss out, after being given a few months of ‘free’ hits first.

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2045

But how is this not akin to what, for example, the MCU does with connecting their movies, shows, etc? People with FOMO are forced to watch it all, otherwise a movie they want to see in the future does not make sense, or how is it different then, for example, having Infinity War end on a cliffhanger, thus forcing the people susceptible to FOMO, to also watch Endgame(or Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 and 2, ) etc?

I am not trying to be a contrarian here, I am just wondering why one can be blamed on FOMO-abuse by a company, and the other isn’t even considered that…

And I’ll restate that I really, really, hope this doesn’t make it to the PTR, because we have a good thing going with the Trading Post :weary:

1 Like
2046

Which is… also… bad. Yes.

Exploiting FOMO is bad.
Manipulating your audience to squeeze out cash from people who might not actually be able to afford what you are puppeteering them into buying is bad.

It is not good.

It is a bad thing to do.

But also there’s a huge difference between what the Marvel movies do (seventy interconnected movies/series) and what the other example you make, the Harry Potter movies do (8 movies based on a book series)

One is telling a story that simply requires time, the other is squeezing moolah out of vulnerable people

2 Likes
2047

I mean, I don’t like the interconnecting of the MCU as a general rule, it has been criticised as something which is bad for consumers (and bad for storytelling). In their case it’s inherited from comic books…which is also bad, and has been criticised. Endless crossovers requiring you to buy issues from other runs that you might not be interested in? It sucks! It’s a major thing people complain about for Marvel/DC comics.

Direct sequels aren’t the same thing though, since they’re…direct sequels.

Neither of the above are exactly FOMO though because they’re not time limited; it’s not like if you don’t watch Infinity War in cinemas then they delete it forever, or maybe promise to re-release it at some unspecified time (for a brief window) in 2-5 years. They’re still there, and the comics* are still there.

*…to some extent, obviously getting physical copies is more difficult than that, but in the digital age it’s a little simpler.

FOMO is most commonly seen in live service games. Like WoW, like Overwatch, like Fortnite and Destiny. Any content which exists and then is no longer available is a form of it, though arguably moreso when you know it’s going away.

Zul’Gurub OG getting deleted by Cataclysm wasn’t really FOMO (at its release, at least) because people didn’t think it was going away. Ditto for the legendary quest in MoP.
But event skins in Overwatch, rotating trading post items, battlepass exclusive items, and even arena elite sets are, and they’ve all long been criticised for it.

People were generally accepting of the trading post’s FOMO mechanics beforehand (though it had received criticism) because there was no real money attached to it. It was viewed as a bonus for a subscription (something that a lot of people had asked for).

But once you start tying it to real money purchases? Not so much, because now you’re manipulating people to drop more cash on it, which - for the reasons I’ve gone over above in this thread - can impact game design.

6 Likes
2048

I’ll just target this one detail for now, there’s no FOMO related to movie series unless you worry about spoilers. You have all the time in the world to catch up and watch whatever you need to even if it’s 50 movies and series’ worth of material. All of that is still available.

The Trading Post stuff have limited availability and with currently no indication when the items you haven’t bought will make a return. It’s not a good comparison.

Moving on to the Time Rifts:
The tone-deaf topic aside (I’m sure that will be discussed to death on Twitter, couldn’t care less) I would love if at one point a qualified Historian or theorist would sit down and examine the absolutely banal take of the Timewalkers / Bronze dragons that what the Infinite Dragonflight is doing has to be undone.

As an example, there is not a single night elf under any circumstance who would agree at this point to stopping the infinites from murdering Medivh when he opens the Dark Portal, or protect Arthas during the Culling of Stratholme. Hell, most Night Elves, if they were offered a chance to have a timeline where the Scourge never claimed Arthas as the Lich King, or the orcs never reached Azeroth, they would go on a mass exodus.

Mind you, I understand the basic premise of how these scenarios can potentially cause Azeroth’s destruction or whatever, but we have been a hair breadth’s away of that happening several times already. I’d even chalk it up to pure luck that we survived in some cases.

For all we know the Timewalkers and Nozdormu’s spawn want to keep the status quo because they feed on misery and tragedy.

1 Like
2049

No, no, it’s not abuse, because Christie Golden wrote her forgiving them all because she loves everyone equally, including those guys :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

blizzard continues teaching us intriguing lessons, Chromie’s “hehe oopsie don’t tell her we borrowed her car and got a scratch on it hehe” tone about it all would be bizarre with any company other than the Cosby Lounge Co™

4 Likes
2050

I’m the sure the Forsaken, Blood/High/Void elves, humans and quite few others would quite like that too.

I still haven’t got over mass murder and other obscenely villainous behaviour being easily forgiven if you’ve got big boobas and heels. Looking at you Kerrigan and Sillyvanas.

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