They're not just cosmetic.

One of the main arguments that people often advance for the inclusion of paid, free-to-play-style microtransactions in full-price, AAA videogames is that they're just cosmetic, and therefore harmless. This is an argument that the AAA videogame industry has pushed themselves on multiple occasions, arguing that MTs were entirely optional, and weren't in any way intended to manipulate players, or the games themselves, to squeeze more money out of customers who've already paid for the games themselves.

There's just one problem with that line of defence: it's bullshit. AAA videogame companies absolutely intend for their MT systems to be as manipulative and exploitative as possible, and at least one of them is actively working on ways to make them even more so, as reported by Brian Crecente at Rolling Stone:

Activision was granted a patent this month for a system it uses to convince people in multiplayer games to purchase items for a game through microtransactions.

[...]

The patent details how multiplayer matches are configured, specifically how players are selected to play with one another. That process used by Activision involves a computer looking at a wide variety of factors including skill level, Internet latency, availability of friends and other things. It then goes through a system to first soft-reserve a slot in a game for a player and then assign the players to the same match.

This patent, though, specifically discusses how that system for pairing up players can also be used to entice a player to purchase in-game items.

"For example, in one implementation, the system may include a microtransaction engine that arranges matches to influence game-related purchases," according to the patent. "For instance, the microtransaction engine may match a more expert/marquee player with a junior player to encourage the junior player to make game-related purchases of items possessed/used by the marquee player. A junior player may wish to emulate the marquee player by obtaining weapons or other items used by the marquee player."

The patent goes on to note that the same information could be used to identify which sorts of in-game purchasable items should be promoted.

Activision, naturally, claim that they haven't put this patented technique to use in any games.... yet. Specifically, they haven't added this special bullshit sauce to Destiny 2, in spite of that game clearly having been designed around its microtransaction system. This was just some R&D people "working independently from [the] game studios," and doesn't represent any intention at all (😉) on Activision's part to basically turn all their online-only multiplayer games' match-making systems into the shittiest experience possible, and their players into helpless victims of this cynical exploitation.

Activision's newly-patented match-making system describes exactly the opposite of an enjoyable player experience. It literally sets the player up to fail in the least fair way possible, matching them against players who have out-geared them, and then advertising that gear to losing players in that emotionally charged and vulnerable moment, pushing paid content that will let them victimize other lower-ranking players in exactly the same way... and then going on to reward them with exactly that kind of griefing experience if they cave to the pressure and drop the cash. It's not so much a match-making system as a grief-making system, encouraging toxic behaviour that more-reputable developers are trying to eradicate from their games' online communities.

But Activision aren't planning to ever use it, of course. Heaven forfend!

BULLSHIT.

It is time to stop rewarding these assholes with your money. It is time to stop paying full-price for games are come deliberately broken in order to push free-to-play monetization mechanics at you. Do not spend money on any game that also tries to milk you after purchase for paid microtransactions. I don't care how "optional" or "cosmetic" they're supposed to be. These systems are not intended or designed to feel in any way optional, and they are not harmless.

At least lawmakers in the UK are starting to take an interest in this issue; hopefully more lawmakers in other countries follow suit, so that regulators can impose some controls here, since it's painfully obvious that AAA publishers either can't or won't do so on their own.

Jim Sterling, who's been covering this issue since dinosaurs roamed the Earth, has a pretty good video out on the subject, as do Pretty Good Gaming, who have been covering this issue pretty intensively for months now.

 

How to kill a golden goose, the Blizzard way

A while back, I deleted my Battle.Net account, and all my Blizzard game licenses with it. I was done with Blizzard's bullshit, and had no intention of ever going back, and certainly no intention of ever spending money on another Blizzard product. There was still one Blizzard game that I kept an eye on, though, one game which looked to be something that might potentially lure even a die-hard downer like me back into Blizzard's orbit.

That game, of course, was Hearthstone.

Free to play, or at least free to try, Hearthstone was a real departure from the rest of Blizzard's stable of games. While their other franchises seemed to be locked into the AAA death spiral of searching for new ways to extract increasing amounts of revenue from diminishing player bases, the Hearthstone team seemed to be keenly aware that a game like theirs can only thrive if it keeps attracting new players. The Whispers of the Old Gods expansion, in particular, gave every player at least one of the set's fun legendary cards to play with, along with a handful of essential support cards for that legendary, and then strung together a series of "free pack" reward quests for those players who actually decided to play the game afterwards. And it was fun, like really fun; fun enough that I actually bought a few Hearthstone packs just to show my appreciation.

That was before I deleted my account information, of course, but I'll admit that I kept an eye on Hearthstone anyway, just to see if Blizzard managed to keep it on this same course. Maybe, I thought, they'll convince me to buy back in, at least for this one game.

I needn't have bothered, though, because Blizzard have done nothing since WotOG that hasn't served to screw up the new player experience. And results have been predictable; the game's active player population has dropped sharply, fewer new players are entering the community, and the players who are still around are spending less. F2P games like Hearthstone really do need to keep luring in new players; Hearthstone isn't doing that anymore, and revenues are down as a result.

Blizzard's solution? Why, to make it even harder for new players to get into the game, of course. How AAA of them!

From The Independent:

With Journey to Un’Goro, Blizzard has released their first back-to-back Expansion. Importantly, this happened following a price hike as well, two packs previously costing £1.99 as opposed to £2.99. These two factors have led to outrage among Hearthstone fans.

A price hike was always going to cause issues; who wants to spend more money on the same product? Releasing back-to-back expansions is a less obvious problem, but something that has affected players quite deeply. For an extended period of time, we’ve been purchasing packs with no guarantee of a card they actually want. Adventures gave stability — core cards every player could use — and often form deck archetypes.

[...] Singular cards have never dominated deck archetypes as heavily as with the introduction of Legendary Quests, a new card-type singular to Un’Goro. These cards require you to build decks around them and will no doubt help define this year’s meta. However, to gain a Quest — like with all Legendaries — you need to be very lucky with your card openings, spending huge amounts of money.

The argument can be made that Hearthstone requires you to eventually earn these cards as time goes on. But, considering there are nine of these Quests, and each is basically a requirement for the majority of new deck archetypes, these have become almost essential additions to your collection.

By introducing so many Legendary-but-pretty-much-necessary cards, Hearthstone now commands you spend your savings to make the most of the game. We’re not even talking about £49.99 you would spend on an AAA game — that would likely only get you one of the Quests. Plus, in four months when another expansion is released, you’ll need to spend the same amount again to stay on top.

These Quests should probably been released differently. Perhaps through an Adventure-like system where you complete challenges to win them, therefore not forcing your wallet to empty itself unnecessarily. Whatever the case, Hearthstone currently feels like a huge cash grab when it hasn’t before, and that’s putting off casual players like me.

This is looking more and more like the consensus opinion, too. Take Polygon:

WHY SO STINGY, BLIZZARD?

While the issue of quests is specific to the Journey to Un’Goro expansion, the question of how much value packs provide (and how frequently) is a much bigger question that players have struggled with for a long time now.

Popular Hearthstone streamer Kripparian lays out the problems elegantly in the video above [link]. He makes a living off of playing and making videos about this game. He played Journey to Un’Goro for 17 hours on the day it launched and opened over 1,100 packs on stream, so obviously he’s not concerned about missing cards.

But Kripp also plays others digital cards games, and he’s noticed a clear trend: Every other major digital card game is much more willing to provide players with free packs, doling them out as daily login rewards, event celebrations or as a gift for even the briefest of server problems.

Blizzard, by comparison, is downright miserly. When the developer announced the details of Hearthstone entering the Year of the Mammoth, I praised the news that the game would implement daily login rewards for the first time ever. In addition to the regular quest rewards, players could get gold, dust and even full packs just for logging in each day.

It was a big, smart step forward for the game. Unfortunately, it was also short-lived. The login rewards were only offered for a couple of weeks, as part of the celebration of the Year of the Mammoth beginning. As of the launch of Journey to Un’Goro, they are no longer in the game.

There’s no easy fix to the issues Hearthstone is facing, but I have no doubt that Blizzard needs to fix them. The game certainly isn’t at any immediate risk of failing. As of last year, it had reached a milestone of 50 million players. But to keep that number climbing, it needs to pull in new players.

Some people have pretty definite ideas on how Blizzard can fix some of these issues, and do so pretty much immediately -- por ejemplo, Paul Tassi at Forbes:

'Hearthstone' Should Dump 50 Free Un'goro Packs On Every Player (Seriously)

I’ve been thinking a lot about Hearthstone this week in the wake of the Un’goro expansion. It’s a game that I’ve sunk a lot of time and money into, with more hours played than anything else in my library other than say, Destiny or Diablo 3 these past few years.

Yet it’s hard to feel like the game isn’t in a bit of a downward spiral as of late. Revenue has been falling pretty sharply on mobile, and a bit on the desktop version as well, which has led Blizzard to try and extract more and more money out of Hearthstone to compensate. Now, that’s led us to a point where Adventures no longer exist, and old drop rates and duplicates now feel oppressive due to the fact that there’s an extra expansion per year, and this latest one is designed around must-have legendaries that are hard to get.

My solution? Blizzard should dump 50 free Un’goro packs on every player, full stop.

This is not me saying “Blizz messed up, give us free stuff plz.” Rather, I genuinely believe this is the kind of gesture that Blizzard needs to consider for its fans, maybe for this expansion especially, yes, but possibly for all future expansions going forward, for the sake of the overall health of the game.

For what it's worth, I think Tassi and Kripparrian are onto something, here. Rather than doing the AAA-standard thing of strangling your player base by extracting as much money as possible while giving back as little as you think you can get away with, Blizzard should really look into how much they can afford to give away, and trust that the benefits of that, in the form of new and returning players that add to the enjoyment of the game even for their regular players, and who might even spend some more money, too. Sadly, Blizzard seem to only care about pulling as much money as possible out of their remaining "whales," even if it harms the long-term prospect of the game.

I am not surprised to see Blizzard going down this road; there's a reason why I cancelled my account, after all. I have, however, still managed to be slightly disappointed. Hearthstone looks like a potentially fun game; it's a real shame that Blizzard's corporate overlords seem so intent on spoiling it. There's nothing inherently wrong with the Free2Play business model; I'm still a long-time and active Path of Exile player, after all. But there is a point at which your game stops feeling like it's F2P, and starts feeling like it's Pay2Win, and Hearthstone would seem to have strayed a long way into P2W territory, apparently with no idea how to find their way back... or any desire to do so.

GG, Blizzard. GG.