Well if you want my 2 cents on the matter, if you want to SPECIFICALLY address microtransactions in MMOs then, yes, I greatly preferred paying a monthly rate to play. For starters, if we want to look at WoW or EVE, huge updates rolled out every couple of years or sooner and they were of considerable quality, all the classes were unlocked up front, and frankly, the community was much better when you had to pay monthly. Also, F2P and micro transactions are two closely married concepts, you really can't have on without the other. For example, once LOTRO went free to play, it fucking imploded. F2P and thus, highly extensive, intensive, and invasive microtransactions really do sound the death knell for MMOs. FFS, if you were F2P in LOTRO you had to pay per area of the map you wished to unlock. C'mon man.
And that's just the annoying, immersion/fun-ruining stuff. If you want to talk about money, microtransactions are the physical manifestation of the industry trend to charge more for less. How aggravating it is that games that are literally 20+ years old are not only more complete but contain more content and polish than games today? I mean, let's take a step back for second and think about how absurd the market has truly become for a consumer:
0.) You fucking pay the developer to just develop the game, you don't even pay for the game sometimes, you just pay for it to be made! WTF. (kickstarter/crowdfunding)
1.) You pay--often times at a premium! At a fucking premium!--to test a mostly content-free, bug-ridden, and largely unfinished game prototype. (early access)
2.) You pay for the game (at the very least these days most devs allow you to have the game now that they've milked you for money far in excess of the actual worth of the game), it's usually unfinished or lacking many of the planned features or vaguely misleading promises.
EDIT: 2.5) You pay for fucking "Season passes" for DLC that may not even exist. What a fucking laugh. AAA companies are fucking shitting on us.
3.) You pay for DLC, which oftentimes either A.) has no impact on gameplay whatsoever or adds next to nothing at ridiculous cost or B.) adds what should have been in the game from the very beginning.
And that's the simplified model. With microtransactions it is multiplied exponentially. The only steps which a right-minded consumer should ever participate in are steps 2 and 3, and then only if the game is actually finished on launch and that the DLC down the line actually adds new content to the game that wasn't promised to be in right at the start.
For an MMO, at it's worst you literally have to pay for every little thing individually, which just fucking sucks all the fun out of the game, and when you can buy things that actually effect gameplay? That's like encouraging bribery in a sporting match to win. Not to mention taking out the point of playing. But listen, tell me what's GOOD about microtransactions? Basically no matter how you cut it, you're paying more for the same, unless it's a F2P MMO in which case you're basically paying for a sub-par gaming experience.
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Topic: Fortnite (Read 23599 times)