Speaking of Restaurant analogies and Free To Play... (Destiny)

by Korny , Dalton, Ga. US. Earth, Sol System, Friday, January 05, 2018, 07:54 (2355 days ago) @ narcogen
edited by Korny, Friday, January 05, 2018, 08:01

Maybe it's more like a restaurant. Not a super fancy one, but like a Red Robin, where you go to chill with your friends to eat near the airport while you wait to pick them up. As you eat, you can see the dessert menu in front of you. You already paid for your meal, but it's there, in your face.

Now, once you're done eating, the server asks if you've saved any room for dessert? Sure, you probably would have asked for dessert if you were interested, but he/she just threw it in your face. Most people recognize that the dessert isn't really that good and is just a way for the restaurant to make some extra money. On the other hand, maybe you're really craving that milk shake. Most people just say no thank you and move on with their lives. Something drastically different happens on the internet.

Paying for a meal in a restaurant is a time and space limited transaction in a way a game purchase really isn't (or didn't used to be).

It's understood that a restaurant serves many things, and we are only ordering a specific portion, agreed upon in advance.

It's understood that we will occupy space in the restaurant only, generally speaking, as long as is necessary to consume the portion we have purchased.

It's understood as part of the experience that additional purchases are always possible, and indeed encouraged!

But nothing about the menu interferes with you eating what you've bought. The menu is on the table-- it isn't stapled to your steak when it comes. Salt and pepper are available for use-- they aren't an upsell opportunity. Every time you lift your fork to your face, there's not a reminder written there that you could be eating more, or eating something else, or a mention of what the special of the day will be tomorrow.

Destiny isn't a $5 burger and fries off an extensive menu. It's a full price, $60 (or more!) game, with $40 DLC. The only obstacles between the player and the consumption of that content is supposed to be their own time and skill. It is now being considered acceptable to have a bunch of content in the game that is expressly gated behind grindy behaviors, in order to attract the portion of your clientele you can consider "whales" to buy past those gates.

I'm just agreeing with those who say this is a bit crass and not much fun to interact with, and is not an experience one expects after paying full price. It's the experience you expect from a F2P game.

Your example is far more polite than what is actually going on in Destiny right now with the Eververse, and the restaurant example is one far more conducive to what is going on in Destiny than one that I would accept. I didn't rent Destiny, and I didn't opt for a Destiny experience that contains only a portion of what it offers. I bought the whole thing, for full price. Whether I consume all or part of it should surely be up to me, and I shouldn't be continually nagged while I play about the stuff I'm missing out on because I don't have enough time to do everything and hey why not just buy your way past that?

This proposal doesn't tempt me at all, but that isn't the point.

It makes me think less of Bungie for making it, is all.

$60 every 3 years from every Halo fan used to be enough to make the Halo games.

Now, somehow, after launching on 2 additional platforms and adding $40 a year of DLC, somehow that's not enough to make Destiny without also adding MTX, while at the same time the general opinion seems to be that while Destiny offers more hours of play, it actually offers less content than the Halo games did-- the additional hours are taken up by repetitive tasks designed to place barriers between players and items or other activities.

Remember back when Skill Up was discussing Bungie's mistake with CoO, and he made a restaurant analogy that cheapLEY didn't quite understand?

Polygon put up an article a few days ago about a developer doing right by customers when they made a mistake with Microtransactions, by pretty much following Skill Up's restaurant analogy to the letter.

Back when DE introduced optional "pets" into Warframe, they added cosmetic hair (well, fur) dyes to go along with them. There were a bunch, and you could use real money to buy them. The only problem was that the color/pattern you were going to get was random.

Paying real money for a randomly-rolled cosmetic item. Sounds familiar, huh?

For a small amount of platinum, you could pull a lever and get a random color for your Kubrow if you wanted to change its cosmetic appearance. One player pulled that lever a ridiculous number of times, and fans began to complain about the random aspect of the system.

“We weren’t trying to make a lottery,” Crookes said, looking back on the situation. “That wasn’t the kind of system we wanted in there. We had that out within a day or two. As fast as possible.” They also said they refunded the players the money spent on the random coloring. [Emphasis mine]

The restaurant acknowledged their mistake, took the problematic food out, gave players the food they wanted in the first place while refunding the money that they had spent, and gave them a complementary dessert by letting them keep the skins that they had bought.

So here's where Bungie's patented "We're Listening"™ really bugs me, even though I don't dislike Eververse. They acknowledged, before Eververse was released, that it would not have a negative impact on the game. That it would be an optional market on the side. That it would just be for people who wanted to help fund the Live team, and would give us cosmetic items for the sake of expression.

But they frog-in-potted players long enough that they've all but gone back on that initial promise, by integrating Everse deeply into the game's loot foundation.

Fans didn't like that, fans complained, and what did we get? Bungie said "We're listening", then had even more of the game's content getting locked into Eververse, and we had to pay for the new meal on top of that. Players have erupted in anger, and Bungie's response so far is... "We're listening".

DE had that problem prioritized and resolved in a matter of days, and it was an optional cosmetic for an optional pet.