ESOFollow

Friend discovered that medium and high render water reflections differently, and it actually looks cooler on medium. Just straight up reflects the light source, it seems.

I noticed that in the Let's Play I watched, the free horse is only about 5-10% faster than just running.

For me it'll hold out til we see the first 50% off sale, probably.

I mean, sales on the retail price of MMOs come quickly. The real money in a MMO is in the longterm fees. The big initial purchase is the company capitalizing on the fact that early adopters will pay it, but there's really no reason it's financially necessary.

What's irritating is that the stupid Imperial upgrade will be $20 until they finally roll it into the game (probably with the first expansion).

But I'm really not amused by their decision to provide something as extensive as a race in their CE upgrade package. I think that's absolute crap. Particularly in a game like ESO, where they get unique racial skills that aren't just cosmetic.

In TOR, I would have been pissed if the Twi'lek were behind a paywall. But at least that'd have been just a character skin. This actually comes with unique traits.

Erm, the other people can't see your monitor anyway for you to show off your system. What on earth do you think you're going to be showing them over a MMO?

High entry price keeps the population down at launch, that's less hardware you need to buy and then discard in 2 months when the population crashes.

And a high price does it without any need for a release schedule. Why not let the people decide whether or not they want to pay the price instead of trying to sort them into groups? Two birds with one stone or something.

I dunno, it costs years and millions of dollars it costs to develop an MMO and people are crawling over each other in a desperate bid to give you an extra $50 so they can have the deluxe version that comes with a bonus pair of elf panties and a spiffy neon lion you can ride around on.

There's a point it just doesn't feel like exploitative behavior anymore.

Edited, Apr 11th 2014 8:44am by someproteinguy

No.

No.

Well if they're clearly superior to the other races I'll buy an argument about P2W stuff. That's not something that has worked out well in games in the long term, and really undermines the idea that it is a "game" per-se (I'd also be really disappointed to see ESO go P2W so soon in it's lifespan). On the other hand if it's just another flavor of racials and some unique looks I can't say it'd bother me at all. I mean, it's not like there aren't other human races as well. SpoilerI never cared for Imperials anyway...

Edited, Apr 11th 2014 9:24am by someproteinguy

The biggest thing that comes to mind would be some kind of addiction exploitation. For example, those goodie boxes that you have to unlock with real money keys. If you put items in them that are important for the game then you end up with people rolling the dice constantly and dropping more cash then they really want to. TERA was bad for this with having things like their good Alkahest and Spellbind in the lockboxes, and making people play that RNG nightmare to masterwork stuff.

Creating additional premium content that's necessary to enjoy the game would be a nice example too; but I think we've pretty much lumped that in with P2W stuff. So for example if you have to pay a subscription, then you realize you'll pretty much be excluded from endgame unless you drop the extra $20 for an Imperial character for the racial benefits, I'd consider that exploitative.

1) Optional additional premium content is not exploitative.

2) Necessary additional premium content is P2W (and thus exploitative, or at minimum deceptive).

3) RNG based addiction exploitation is bad.

I'm certain there's about 50 shades of grey in there as well.

Edit: If you want to talk Blizzard, they're in an interesting position of having people with thousands of dollars invested in characters in WoW, and they have to keep paying $15/month for access to them. I'm not going to out-and-out call that exploitative, there's still plenty of reasons people enjoy playing the game, but if you want to argue there are people there who want to move on and are being taken advantage of I wouldn't bat an eye. Of course you can unsub/resub at any time, which would seriously diminish that argument for me, especially with lulls like now in the content where nothing new is happening for a year or so. Nonetheless it's probably getting into that grey zone for some people.

Edited, Apr 11th 2014 10:38am by someproteinguy

I don't think they should have limited Imperials to a higher priced edition. I think that's a completely unnecessary turnoff to customers. There are plenty of cosmetic things to offer in a collector's edition that aren't as major as a race. I also don't think Imperials are pay-to-win. I'm interested in their racials for the specific character I'm building one with, but I don't think they're fundamentally superior to anything else. So I guess I'm somewhere in the middle.

I wouldn't go so far as to say the fans are being exploited. I'm a pretty smart cookie, and I have complete agency in this situation. I know what they're doing. I also know I could wait a few months or a year at the outside and get everything I'm paying for now for a lot less. It's either worth the price to me to get the product now, or it's not, and that choice is entirely my own to make. I think it's a little self indulgent to apply the term "exploited" to such a situation, thereby putting myself in the same company as, say, a minor-runaway-turned-sex-worker, you know?

Of course, my credibility is slim when you consider I upgraded to the Imperial edition mainly for the mudcrab.

Not gonna lie, I had the exact same thought.

MUDCRAB!

You see what I'm saying?

Worth every freaking penny.