Penny Arcade - Comic - Levels Advocate

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Penny Arcade - Comic - Levels Advocate

Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.

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dennis

Now I'm just itching to replace all the dialogue with a strip about them both working customer service/telemarketing.

V1m

Do it but leave in the punchline.

Grendus

Battlepasses have become a turn off for me. Now I have intense FOMO whenever I pick up a game with it. It's happened to me on Warframe, Destiny 2, and The Division 2, as soon as I start focusing on getting through all the seasonal stuff I just burn out HARD. It stops being a game I can just log into and play around and starts being a list of chores that I'd rather not do. And while I could just ignore them, just their nagging presence is enough to trigger that completionist part of my brain.

Sonneillon

Charging for Battlepasses to me is sort of a "the worker has fallen in love with the system that exploits them" thing. (Sarcasm incoming) Sure I'd love to pay to have to have my leisure and fun taken away from me to lock myself into your game only to transform it into a chore to meet a deadline so that negative emotions of missing out on what should be free cosmetics 15 years ago don't go away. Gee wiz, I can't wait to do this again next month, take that social life and work! In the end, you're paying time and time again for virtual manacles for a thing you're supposed to be having fun with.

taliosfalcon

Sonneillon wrote: »

Charging for Battlepasses to me is sort of a "the worker has fallen in love with the system that exploits them" thing. Sure I'd love to pay to have to have my leisure and fun taken away from me to lock myself into your game only to transform it into a chore to meet a deadline so that negative emotions of missing out on what should be free cosmetics 15 years ago don't go away. Gee wiz, I can't wait to do this again next month, take that social life and work!

At least the halo infinite battlepasses don't expire; if you buy one you have however long it takes you to finish it.

Preacher

I guess I don't mind buying a battlepass, I'm not buying the base game so this supports the dev. But I have disposable income and routinely make bad decisions.

Lttlefoot

I assume the point of paid battlepasses is that a free player who happens to ascend through them just by playing will then want to unlock what they’ve already earned

MichaelLC

Radiated Ronin

I choked that down, and then choked down the 'story' that was Destiny 2. Then, I got to pay even more money to play more Destiny 2 (several times). They still want even more money on top of the pile they already have. Imagine Smaug, but with piles and piles of greenbacks, looking at the players and hollering "thief!"

Does money go bad? Is there a large warehouse full of expired and rotting money stinking up the place, causing the management to ask Bungie to please remove it? I know silverfish can get into it, thanks to Breaking Bad, but how much more do I have to play to have fun, Bungie? How much to just get a game that feels like it is worth the money? In short, can you get out of my wallet and finally give me something for all the money you have already Taken from me (see what I did there)?

Preacher

Radiated Ronin wrote: »

I choked that down, and then choked down the 'story' that was Destiny 2. Then, I got to pay even more money to play more Destiny 2 (several times). They still want even more money on top of the pile they already have. Imagine Smaug, but with piles and piles of greenbacks, looking at the players and hollering "thief!"

Does money go bad? Is there a large warehouse full of expired and rotting money stinking up the place, causing the management to ask Bungie to please remove it? I know silverfish can get into it, thanks to Breaking Bad, but how much more do I have to play to have fun, Bungie? How much to just get a game that feels like it is worth the money? In short, can you get out of my wallet and finally give me something for all the money you have already Taken from me (see what I did there)?

Bungie has nothing to do with this Halo, nor does 343 have anything to do with destiny.

Bursar

Of course the progress through playing is glacial; how else are they going to get people to buy the XP boosts and levels for $2 a pop?

Preacher

What's nice is there is literally good news already here. They are changing aspects of this to be nicer to players and looking into ways to have matches be more rewarding. So they are actually listening to complaints.

H3Knuckles

On the one hand, I definitely feel what Grendus and Sonneillon were talking about regarding the job-ification of our playtime.

On the other hand, I think people tend to get too didactic and binary when it comes to talking about monetization schemes. I think there's real value in acknowledging that there are degrees of good and bad to any approach, and while some structures seem to skew worse than others, it's worthwhile to talk about the pros and cons of different implementations, and it's important to acknowledge when developers try to at least round off the edges (and are allowed to by their publisher).

Lttlefoot

Yeah we didn’t like “put a quarter in the arcade machine and play till you die” but we didn’t like “pay $90 to own this game forever and hopefully it’s good”

V1m

Preacher wrote: »

What's nice is there is literally good news already here. They are changing aspects of this to be nicer to players and looking into ways to have matches be more rewarding. So they are actually listening to complaints.

This kind of feels like a "Good news! Your daily flogging will now only be 9 strokes of the whip, not 10!" thing

MichaelLC

And here's an obscure reference:

Preacher

V1m wrote: »

Preacher wrote: »

What's nice is there is literally good news already here. They are changing aspects of this to be nicer to players and looking into ways to have matches be more rewarding. So they are actually listening to complaints.

This kind of feels like a "Good news! Your daily flogging will now only be 9 strokes of the whip, not 10!" thing

Eh if you think playing a game is akin to being whipped than don't play? I don't know what I can tell you here, they heard the feedback and they are adjusting it to be more rewarding, its a good thing for people who want to play.

jothki

Grendus wrote: »

Battlepasses have become a turn off for me. Now I have intense FOMO whenever I pick up a game with it. It's happened to me on Warframe, Destiny 2, and The Division 2, as soon as I start focusing on getting through all the seasonal stuff I just burn out HARD. It stops being a game I can just log into and play around and starts being a list of chores that I'd rather not do. And while I could just ignore them, just their nagging presence is enough to trigger that completionist part of my brain.

I flat out will not start playing a game that has a battlepass. Warframe managed to grandfather itself in by not adding one until I had been playing for quite a while, and because it was free.

Heck, I've failed to get into games entirely becuase there happened to be a daily log-in event happening at the time.