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Don't play hearthstone
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Jan 30, 2015 13:30
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Ularg posted:I still find F2P games an easy sell when you and your friends just want a game to play together as a way to just hang out. Me and my friends actually used to hop between really bad Korean f2p MMOs for the entertainment of it. And by god some of those mmos are creepy beyond the f2p monetization. F2P is a good sell if you are a preteen child with infinite time
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Jan 30, 2015 13:33
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Rexicon1 posted:F2P is a good sell if you are a preteen child with infinite time It's true.
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Jan 30, 2015 14:26
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infinity wars is a pretty good free to play card game thing i think. they hemorrhage free cards at you and theres generally 2-3 really good decks in the 5 ones that are free every week, and you can build competitive decks with just what you have laying around
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Jan 30, 2015 14:45
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Ularg posted:I still find F2P games an easy sell when you and your friends just want a game to play together as a way to just hang out. Me and my friends actually used to hop between really bad Korean f2p MMOs for the entertainment of it. And by god some of those mmos are creepy beyond the f2p monetization. Plus you get to try it before you buy it, so you can be lazy and avoid doing the diligence of going to youtube reviewers and game review sites and reading hyperbolic goon reviews. Win/Win.
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Jan 30, 2015 14:47
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All f2p games are bad so you can save yourself even more time
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Jan 30, 2015 14:51
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I actually hear hearthstone is a decently fun game where you don't have to sink hours upon hours to play it competently and since the games are pretty short it's easy to just play when you have 20 minutes to kill.
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Jan 30, 2015 15:08
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i have hearthstone on my tablet and i think it's fun. my husband played it a bit too. it isn't something I'd play a lot but if you just want a quick game or something to do while you wait for whatever, it's great. never really felt compelled to buy anything from it.
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Jan 30, 2015 15:10
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Yea, I really like Hearthstone as a "I like Warcraft's art, style and lore but don't really want to try the MMO again" feeling that I get every so often. Matches against other players scare me though, so I stick to getting beat up by the AI.
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Jan 30, 2015 16:30
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virtualboyCOLOR posted:Don't play hearthstone  I have gotten months of entertainment out of hearthstone for less than the cost of a console game. I am sucker for card games though. And hearthstone is the only professionally done card game I have found that doesn't want me to spend hundreds of dollar just for basic play.
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Jan 30, 2015 20:46
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Hearthstone is A Good Game.
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Jan 30, 2015 20:58
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I think Hearthstone is good but I wonder where the game would be if they ditched the dust system and added a auction house/trading system. It would never, ever, ever happen but I wonder if building a good deck would become cheaper or if it would actually end up more expensive
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Jan 30, 2015 21:35
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virtualboyCOLOR posted:All f2p games are bad so you can save yourself even more time
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Jan 30, 2015 21:44
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Jmcrofts posted:Hearthstone is A Good Game. If my friend plays daily and I play once or twice a week hows our duels going to go? How would I fix that?
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Jan 31, 2015 02:18
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Junkie Disease posted:If my friend plays daily and I play once or twice a week hows our duels going to go? How would I fix that? In Hearthstone, this equates to your friend having more cards in his collection. This will make it easier for him to put a variety of decks together and add powerful rares, epics or even legendaries to round out his decks. He will have a much easier time than you saying "I would like to play a Secrets Mage deck, so I'll put one together". It does not mean that you have no chance of beating him. You'll just have to pay more attention to what cards you are getting from your packs and what deck(s) you can make with them. You may have to to turn cards that you aren't playing with into dust, so you can craft cards that would be beneficial to you and focus more on getting 1–2 good decks together. Hearthstone has quite a few decks that require very little investment and many easy to get and/or cheap to craft cards that either hold their own or are even competitive enough to go for legendary ranking with. In addition, the game has quite a lot of randomization in it (many cards have random effects) that can swing games either way. Even with a limited cardpool, it is entirely possible to put together decks that you can enjoy and win games with without feeling horribly underpowered compared to those who have the entire collection together. What likely is going to be a bigger deciding factor in your matchups is his added experience and knowledge of the game, compared to yours. He'll be able to analyze the board better and make better decisions about which cards to play, which trades to make or what to expect from your deck than the other way around. Assuming you are both players of (roughly) equal skill, of course. Edit: And to answer your question, if you do feel the need to 'fix' anything, then yes: it becomes an obvious choice between either playing more or paying for more cards.
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Jan 31, 2015 13:23
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Leshy posted:Like with most things in life, your friend is going to have an advantage at anything he spends more time doing than you. That's some crippling brain disorder you have.
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Jan 31, 2015 13:31
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Drakes posted:Hey man I'm an addict for them loot grinding games
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Jan 31, 2015 13:32
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I love F2P games and I play a ton. Then usually stop playing them after anywhere from a week to a month. I've played Puzzle and Dragons for almost two years now and it's still pretty fun, and ultimately spending money doesn't really give you a definite advantage in it. Another F2P game I'm playing right now is SD Gundam G Generation Frontier which is a bit of a mixed bag in that regards. Like PAD it relies largely on random gacha rolls and it hands out the stuff you use for them like candy. But at the same time they release new content every week to spend it on and the rates of getting rare characters with the free items is super low. But it's not really that much of a downer if you don't get anything good because next week you'll have another shot at getting something better. I think I have some kind of retarded gambling problem, I love rolling in games like this and have more fun just trying my luck than I do actually playing the game.
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Jan 31, 2015 13:46
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lol
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Jan 31, 2015 17:25
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All trading card games are P2W. Only game that wasn't designed to steal your money was the Pokemon TCG for the Gameboy which is why it's still the best one.
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Jan 31, 2015 18:47
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halokiller posted:All trading card games are P2W. Only game that wasn't designed to steal your money was the Pokemon TCG for the Gameboy which is why it's still the best one. All trading card games? yeah probably. There are few yugioh gba games that are self contained similar to that gameboy game. But for card games in general, there are a lot of fun non cash grab games. Card city night is an amazing game. And I think it is even free if you want from the humble indie bundle. The board game ascension is pretty fun. Calculords for the iOS/andriod is pretty great.
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Jan 31, 2015 19:11
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halokiller posted:All trading card games are P2W. Only game that wasn't designed to steal your money was the Pokemon TCG for the Gameboy which is why it's still the best one. TCGs do have the advantage that you are spending your money on things that actually, you know, exist and are tangible. They may even have resale value! F2P games are basically casinos with no prospects of an eventual payout.
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Jan 31, 2015 20:10
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Many years ago I played Battlefield Heroes. It was so obviously P2W. If someone in a custom outfit joined the server, he'd wipe the floor with everyone. I played with a few friends, we'd all move servers if this happened. But the devs knew people would do this, so they implemented a queueing system for servers, if you wanted to join a game your friend was in. You had to choose between hoping the buffed P2W player would leave, or sit on your hands for a few minutes before you could play again. Didn't take long before we stopped playing entirely.Nuebot posted:random gacha rolls I had to look that up. What a horrible mechanic: http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2012-05-07-gree-dena-stocks-plunge-as-japanese-government-cracks-down You pay not to unlock something, but you pay for more tickets in the lottery to have a chance to get what you want. One thing about these free-to-play/freemium games is that they get bunched in with actual free stuff. Even on Steam the tag "Free-to-play" includes both games with in-app purchases and those without. There are no tags for "in-app-purchases" and "pay-to-win". So games like DOTA 2 are in the same category as Coil, America's Army and Moonbase Alpha. I like how Eve Online has dealt with this phenomenon through PLEX. It's an MMO with a regular subscription system. PLEX cost a bit more than a regular month's gametime, and function similarly, but you can choose not to activate it and trade it in-game, for the in-game's spacemoney. The players decide what this PLEX is worth simply by setting up buy and sell orders for them at prices of their choosing. If you have plenty of in-game money, you can spend that to keep subscribed. Or if you are spacepoor and have disposable real money income, you can swap the two. This system was probably implemented as a response to illicit in-game money sales. There's still bots that farm money though. What is pretty hilarious is that PLEX are an in-game item in every way. You don't need to be at the location the PLEX is stored at in order to use it, but quite a few people try to transport them, and then have their ship destroyed and PLEX stolen, or also destroyed. Lots of schadenfreude to be had in the killmails. It's been a while since I played Team Fortress 2, but that game also has a decent implementation of F2P. It's all vanity poo poo that doesn't really affect gameplay. Not pissing off the old playerbase, who actually bought the game when it was not F2P, probably had something to do with it.
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Feb 1, 2015 04:23
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When did DOTA 2 become any more pay-to-win than TF2?
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Feb 1, 2015 05:20
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it didn't, and it's impossible to pay money to win in dota 2, because everything is 100% cosmetic and nothing changes how your heroes operate, unlike tf2 weapons, because the game absolutely depends on everything behaving exactly the same
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Feb 1, 2015 05:23
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Stick Insect posted:
Yeah the games that try to really push the pay-for-rolls thing are really, really bad about it but most of them, like PAD and G Gen Frontier basically hemorrhage the currency you use to roll with, and paying is basically just if you're really, really determined to get a specific character and luck didn't shine your way. I've managed to get all but one of the best units in G Gen so far without dropping a single dime on the game. Those complete set gacha laws are great though and it's fascinating that it go so bad that the government had to actually step in and put a stop to it and frankly, games have only improved since they went into action.
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Feb 1, 2015 07:24
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Stick Insect posted:It's been a while since I played Team Fortress 2, but that game also has a decent implementation of F2P. It's all vanity poo poo that doesn't really affect gameplay. Not pissing off the old playerbase, who actually bought the game when it was not F2P, probably had something to do with it. For some reason everyone glosses over the fact that the drop + crafting systems in TF2 are pretty bad and are clearly a timesink meant to goad you into paying real money for weapons instead of waiting for them to drop randomly out of a huge pool of potential items or crafting them with plainly unfair recipes that probably require the average player to craft the prerequisites as well, which will take forever. It doesn't totally sink the game because the vanilla weapons are all pretty good, but it's still a F2P scheme like most any other. Edit: New weapons do tend to devalue on the trade market really fast, to the point of being able to get them for basically free, but they don't devalue on Valve's own store anywhere near as fast if at all. Also a lot of ostensibly purely cosmetic stuff you can buy into in TF2 ends up affecting the gameplay on some level anyway, by encouraging lovely player behavior (kill tracking weapons) and/or breaking core design tenets of the original game. John Murdoch fucked around with this message at 16:21 on Feb 1, 2015 |
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Feb 1, 2015 15:53
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Oh, yeah completely forgot about the crafting. I never bothered with that, tended to sell what I could. Some idiot paid me four bucks for a hat that does absolutely nothing. Also forgot about those terrible crates  . "Here's an item. But you don't get to use it , and you don't even get to see what it is, unless you pay us."New players who have never spent a cent on the game apparently also have a severely limited experience, such as a very small inventory, encouraging at least one purchase. How does kill tracking affect gameplay though? Most negative thing I noticed when the game went F2P was the influx of new players, all of them inexperienced and bad. I was in a game with three snipers guarding a doorway, one enemy shows up, two fire, two miss. One never shot. Or spies that give themselves away by staring at you or blocking your way Here's an old article about the various techniques F2P games employ to get people to pay http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RaminShokrizade/20130626/194933/The_Top_F2P_Monetization_Tricks.php One of them is obfuscating the actual price of things by using in-game currencies like gems, and using exchange rates with real money. As the OP illustrated by converting them back to Euros, suddenly everything looks a lot less attractive.
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Feb 1, 2015 17:53
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Stick Insect posted:How does kill tracking affect gameplay though? One of the original design concepts in TF2 was that they emphasized the more ambiguous "points" over raw K/D/A like other shooters, in order to help promote the fact that healing teammates, destroying sentry guns, and taking objectives are just as important as sick frags. Adding kill tracking to weapons obviously goes against the spirit of that. As a further consequence though, since they reward you for racking up large numbers of kills on tracked weapons by appending a "witty" affix onto them for each rank you reach, you end up with players trying to farm kills with them. Not as big of a deal when it's a normal rocket launcher or a Spy knife or something, but more than once I've been on servers where a Medic is flailing around with the lovely crossbow trying to get kills over healing people. Amusingly, it also turns the whole thing into a self-defeating concept. Since anyone can just spend way too much time farming scrublords kills on public servers, a high kill count weapon isn't actually all that impressive. I have no idea if weapons with high counts have better trade value, but that could certainly influence things too.
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Feb 1, 2015 20:38
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Kill counts on Strange Weapons reset if traded.
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Feb 1, 2015 20:42
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Since going f2p I haven't been in a match of tf2 that felt like 80% of the team that started the fight were on when it ended. And afk players runs rampant like typhoid. But spam for trades? Yes. I miss the golden year or two tf2 had. I don't think f2p is completely to blame, I think it just sped up a process of people getting bored with it.
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Feb 1, 2015 20:46
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There's also a ton of strange parts that track things that aren't kills, so I think most of that post is "I don't like tf2 anymore because it's not the same".
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Feb 1, 2015 20:46
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Geight posted:There's also a ton of strange parts that track things that aren't kills, so I think most of that post is "I don't like tf2 anymore because it's not the same". I get where hes going, but the horrible achivements they had beat the "strange parts" causing making GBS threads players issue. I don't think the get 4 assisted kills as a medic while ubering a scout was something to bank on.
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Feb 1, 2015 20:52
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^^ That was pretty bad. They did eventually go back and loosen the restrictions on milestone cheevos, and of course the drop system was supposed to theoretically help with that problem too... Though that also reminds me of those hats that gave gameplay bonuses.Geight posted:There's also a ton of strange parts that track things that aren't kills, so I think most of that post is "I don't like tf2 anymore because it's not the same". The fact that there are other strange parts doesn't really change anything I said though?  Edit: I'm not even saying it's a huge deal, I'm just making the point that "cosmetic only" items can occasionally affect gameplay in negative ways.Dr Pepper posted:Kill counts on Strange Weapons reset if traded. Good to know. John Murdoch fucked around with this message at 21:04 on Feb 1, 2015 |
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Feb 1, 2015 20:53
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John Murdoch posted:As a further consequence though, since they reward you for racking up large numbers of kills on tracked weapons by appending a "witty" affix onto them for each rank you reach, you end up with players trying to farm kills with them. Not as big of a deal when it's a normal rocket launcher or a Spy knife or something, but more than once I've been on servers where a Medic is flailing around with the lovely crossbow trying to get kills over healing people. PvZ Garden warfare has a similar problem: To gain ranks, you have to complete challenges and they can be poo poo like "vanquish 3 engineers in a session", when you're playing as sunflower (the plants' healer). So the game encourages you not only to go and And because it's "in a session", you must
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Feb 1, 2015 21:02
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I sometimes wonder how secure those F2P games are, and if they actually phone home to a server to verify the amount of gems/coins you have. Maybe a little save-file editing can give you all the gems/coins you need. But since it's an essential part of their profit model, it's probably secured to some extent. I like using mods and trainers so I can play games the way I want to play them.  Guess that's no option for these F2P games. At the same time, MMOs have a certain appeal, in that you can't cheat, which creates a level playing field for everyone. But what it usually comes down to, is that it rewards players who are lucky (good loot drops) or who have lots of time to play (grind for loot/xp all day long), as opposed to players who are actually good at the game. Add P2W elements, and you also reward those who have disposable income.
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Feb 1, 2015 22:11
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Stick Insect posted:I sometimes wonder how secure those F2P games are, and if they actually phone home to a server to verify the amount of gems/coins you have. Maybe a little save-file editing can give you all the gems/coins you need. But since it's an essential part of their profit model, it's probably secured to some extent. Whether or not they're very secure (in regards to coin/gem acquisition, not privacy data) is probably not that important honestly. I'm sure that far less than 1% of players for your average lovely mobile title have both the knowledge and desire to do something like that. The dudes behind Clash of Clans or whatever wouldn't be hurt very much if a tiny portion of players cheat in extra coins or whatever. The absolute, overwhelming majority of their players will never even attempt it so it's probably not worth putting a bunch of resources towards stopping a few fuckwads who will probably never be paying customers anyway.
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Feb 1, 2015 22:27
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I suppose another thing that makes cheating gems useless, is that you've just removed all the challenge from the game. If those powerups literally cost nothing, you don't have to be selective in when to use them.
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Feb 1, 2015 22:38
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Chomp8645 posted:Whether or not they're very secure (in regards to coin/gem acquisition, not privacy data) is probably not that important honestly. I'm sure that far less than 1% of players for your average lovely mobile title have both the knowledge and desire to do something like that. The dudes behind Clash of Clans or whatever wouldn't be hurt very much if a tiny portion of players cheat in extra coins or whatever. The absolute, overwhelming majority of their players will never even attempt it so it's probably not worth putting a bunch of resources towards stopping a few fuckwads who will probably never be paying customers anyway. For a big game like CoC, I'm sure they have some sort of server validation for that poo poo. Even < 1% of their population is such a big amount that it's worthwhile to do it. Same when you're a big company like EA. It's probably worthwhile to develop the infrastructure and then have all devs use the same code modules to get validation/anti-cheat "for free" Smaller games and devs, they probably won't bother. Just calculate and store an md5 hash of the number of gems and coins use that as a validation, if that.
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Feb 1, 2015 22:42
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Stick Insect posted:I sometimes wonder how secure those F2P games are, and if they actually phone home to a server to verify the amount of gems/coins you have. Maybe a little save-file editing can give you all the gems/coins you need. But since it's an essential part of their profit model, it's probably secured to some extent. Its not possible unless the developer is staggeringly incompetent. It is standard procedure for any game making money off in-game goods (F2P games, MMOs, ect) to handle everything important server side. The server tells your client what your account has, decides your loot drops, ect. Some one capable of hacking into the servers is more likely to be a criminal trying to steal credit card info, not a player trying to get some extra monopoly money for their game. In that scenario, about the most you can cheat client-side is a bot to play the game for you.
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Feb 2, 2015 00:15
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