hirn1appen

And - surprise - yesterday it was revealed that they "currently have no plans of removing the stat boosts".

Yeah. Of course, they could be serious about changing course, but without taking action, a plan or even any concrete mention of what they did wrong, this is indistinguishable from the typical non-pology. Sadly, given their history that's what we have to assume for the time being.

I don't agree it's a lot better than the stat boosts: the bonus only applies to the long-term player progression rather than to the missions themselves. I can understand why that appears not quite as onerous as the stat boosts, but it's still worthy of protest in my book. Fort completeness' sake: Almir Listo, Overkill's PR guy has publicly apologized for "all the distress we've caused the past few weeks", without going into any detail. In particular, he did not outline any measures to be taken to rectify the situation, just some discussions that are to take place with some community members in the future. So it's nice to see that they acknowledge that they have messed up, but at the same time the entire statement is very unimpressive, given that in lieu of any meaningful announcements of changes, it could very well just be empty rhethoric.

In any case, asking someone who is responsible for the curation to take a look into this would not be a bad thing - in the end, it's up to them to decide if their endorsement should be influenced by such considerations as business models and their ethics or not.

I'd argue that there is a difference between just bad value propositions and anticonsumer behavior. The basic idea of the marketplace presupposes an informed consumer who can evaluate his offers and choose those that offer him good value for his money. Bad value propositions are simply products that can be rejected because they don't meet this standard. But we're in different territory if a company subverts this principle, for instance by going back on their advertised promises, which means that in effect customers are denied the possibility of making an informed decision. And I think it's completely justified to use the term "anticonsumer" in such cases. To clarify this a bit: if PD2 had been released with the current business model, I wouldn't have railed against it. It would just have been a bad value proposition, and I wouldn't have bought it. But they turned a product I already paid a lot of money for into one that I would never have bought, and that's what I have a massive problem with. That's true for Death Wish, a difficulty level that's considerably more difficult than the next easier one. But at the same time, the unforgiving difficulty means that every little advantage counts, and hitting or missing that one shot can be the difference between success and failure for the whole team. Great that we're on the same side at least on this central issue.

I'll readily admit that my coming here has a lot to do with my own emotional urge of not wanting to tolerate being taken advantage of, but going here has a lot do do with my affection for the podcast (and 3MA in fact, my favorite genre is strategy, especially stuff like the Paradox games they're now planning to devote a monthly special episode on) and the way they talk about games intelligently. So formulating my critique in a slightly academic way seemed reasonable to me. But of course, I'm new to the forums, and I don't really know the etiquette around here. So: sorry for not discussing this in the appropriate thread you linked to. (I did not find it because I looked in the wrong subforum, thinking that "Multiplayer networking" was more about finding other players for MP.) Anyway, I don't know effective my actions are, and I can see that they look a lot like an impotent crusade from the outside. Are they? Or are they an example of an enlightened consumer who wants to harness free speech and market forces to make companies behave ethically, as I like to believe? I'm probably not the right person to judge. Some things people did (like kicking users of skins) actually do seem like an overreaction that is targetting the wrong people because the real objective is out of reach. I gave it a read and I agree with what you said in the email to Overkill. In fact, I sent them a similar email.

First of all, please quote me correctly. I called it "about the most customer-unfriendly way imaginable", so I did not claim an absolute. But you do have a point: Calling it that was incorrect (or at least betraying my lack of imagination). I'll edit the post accordingly. The main point of the argument still stands however: in total, the monetization scheme is more anti-consumer than in most F2P games (at least those I know of). Speaking of overreacting: calling out untrue statements is one thing, but maybe calling someone "full of shit" who is using hyperbole on a minor point is also something that's not ideal behavior - especially if this rests on misquoting the other person to a large extent. I'll let that stand on its own.

In general, I don't either, but IT is one of the more thoughtful and trusted voices out there, so if I see their curation somewhere, I might give something a second look that I might otherwise have dismissed. Vice versa, there is also the question what products and business practices a curator wants to approve and be associated with.

I agree, if it had just been individual guns and skins for sale, I wouldn't have minded them going back on their promise that much. But the fact that they broke their promise in about the most anticustomer way imaginable a very anticustomer way (credits go to to Merus for reminding me of several worse things they could have done) is what makes me angry. In their system, we have this: gambling intransparency of the lottery (impossible to know what you'll get for what price or even what chances you have) the requirement to pay for a third time (for DLC, after paying for the base game and the lottery) to actually be able to use a prize you won high price definite in-game advantages AKA P2W (for at least half a year deliberate) inability for a customer to see what business model the product actually has (see the next paragraph for an explanation). unlike their vague claims that the money would be used to finance the further development of the title, presumably a large part of the revenueis going into their other projects in-game advertising (which had been present for some time) So in fact, in comparison even the monetization schemes in most F2P games are more customer friendly. In every other business, we expect companies to hold their advertising promises as well. I really don't see why this should be any different. If they're in such a volatile business that they can't keep long-time promises, maybe they are the unreasonable ones to make them in the first place? Or they should at least try to be as customer friendly as possible when breaking them? For instance, half a year ago there was the "Hype Train" event. Back then, they sold a 20$ "completely overkill pack" containing just 4 masks and 1 out of 25 secret cosmetic items for a limited time "to support the company and the community" (I'm paraphrasing), basically on their customer's trust and goodwill (selling a pig in a poke for a limited time in and of itself is a pretty shady business practice, if you ask me, but that's not the main point I'm making). The details of that offer make it pretty clear that they had already planned going the microtransaction route when they were offering them, in other words that they would be breaking their promise. What would a decent person have done if that had been an inevitability at that point? Talk to their customers, let them know what's coming and let them decide on a rational and informed basis if they wanted to support this. Maybe even engage in a discussion what forms exactly the new business model should take. Instead, Overkill decided to keep their customers, even their most loyal core audience that had paid 20$ specifically to support them, in the dark right until the time of release. My interests would have been served better if they had done that: in that case I would have a Payday 2 that would no longer be supported with more content, but that would be a game that I actually wanted to play, as opposed to a game I have very little interest playing because it shows me everywhere that its developers think it's okay to try and manipulate me psychologically in ways that are worse than in most F2P games (where something like that would be okay, because it's transparent and the accepted "price" of the product) after taking more money, in excess of 150$, from me than almost any other game on the market costs. Then it would be their job to sell me their new "Payday 2: Remastered", and they would have to make a damn good offer if they wanted me to swallow the pill - probably F2P would have been too expensive for me. Instead, they took the easy route by removing my option to choose.

That's hard to answer, because at the same time they introduced a re-balance of all guns that's really strange, to put it diplomatically. Now we have pistols that have damage and accuracy in the sniper rifle range while some shotguns now deal damage in the range of a weak pistol before the update. In any case, if you want to min/max your weapon, there is no way around a stat-boosted skin (which cost upwards of 10$ on the marketplace each), and some skins have been confirmed to make some weapons way more effective, for example by pushing the damage above the magic threshold of 40 - which means that instead of two shots, you need only one to kill the most common enemy. Isn't that bad enough? If a game people paid a lot of money for on the specific promise that this wouldn't happen ("shame on you if you thought otherwise!") suddenly becomes frustrating for purely economic reasons, that's a damn good reason to protest (and, in fact, demand your money back). Edit: even if you couldn't win, what other than "frustrating" would that be?

The point is that as long as there are any paid gameplay advantages at all, they can sometimes mean "we lost because not enough of us paid". As soon as that can't happen anymore, by definition the advantage is gone. So what we have is a continuum, with a paid ingame item that just looks as if it conferred any advantage to the player but doesn't (and why should something like this exist except to fool players and make them open their wallets?) on one end and a blatant paid win button on the other. If you avoid one problem, you automatically run into the other. In my view, the only way to solve this is to make the items cosmetic and to let players know this is the case.

I've read this argument a lot, but I could never really understand it. Why should only PvP games be able to have P2W elements? After all, the term is "pay to win" and not "pay to win against human players". (Or more accurately, pay to get gameplay advantages which make winning more probable, which is absolutely the case here). I agree that it's particularly bad when there are human losers, but there is indirect competition in the game (for instance about being able to play on the highest difficulty), and the psychological nudging towards making a purchase is exactly the same. Edit: I personally have a strong dislike of being manipulated this way, and that makes a game I have spent a lot of money on a lot less enjoyable.

It looks a lot like what happened here is overambition. PD2 has been Overkill/Starbreeze's (the two companies have a large personal and financial overlap, and you could say that Overkill is Starbreeze's stage name if they are acting as game developers) only cash cow for the last two years, and they have started several new game projects, including a Walking Dead game, a SF game called Storm, a million dollar investment into a Payday game for the asian mobile market and even an expensive VR hardware project that wants to compete with the big boys, Facebook and Sony. And Payday players are the only ones paying the bills for all of this. Unsurprisingly, new things they produce get more and more expensive. For instance, a single spin on the item lottery costs 2,50$, and you only get a single gun texture with an unknown but small chance of a direct gameplay advantage. They do, but I'm not at all impressed by this. If what is said about the drill drops is true (it's totally intransparent), players get up to one drill drop a week, and there are dozens of items, each in different quality levels, of different rarity with different bonuses. So the chance to actually get the drop you want within a reasonable timeframe looks pretty low, which makes this a lot worse than their previous loot system, where you could force all drops eventually by just playing enough missions. Unfortunately, I can't back this up by numbers, because they don't release them. But in any case, they will can never make the game drop drills with less tedium required than what people would pay 2,50$ to get around, because if they did, they couldn't sell a single drill. So far, nobody in the entire thread used that term. ;-) By the way, I'm not opposed to game developers making money at all: I want this to be a worthwhile business. But that doesn't mean I'm fine with people going back on their marketing promises: that's at least a shady business practice, and in many legislations (for instance most of the EU), it's (for good reasons) prohibited by laws against false advertising.

I'm both a long time Idle Thumbs podcast reader and Payday 2 player. I spent hundreds of hours in that game, and it was great. However, they have now added microtransactions to the game that let you play a lottery for the best equipment. Now, I can justify something like that in a new F2P release; somehow a developer has to earn money, and if it's transparent, I would never touch it, but I'm fine with it it existing. Unfortunately, it's not transparent at all: players have no way of knowing the drop chances or the properties of the prizes they could win. And this is happening in a game that cost more than 150$/Euros if you bought it and all of its DLC (more than 25 packs so far) at release. Changing the core business model in such a way AND at the same time turning a product people paid a lot of money for into a slot machine without their consent seems really unethical to me. What makes matters even worse is that at release, they publicly and explicitly promised on multiple occasions not to feature microtransactions, including on the steam store page. For instance, their producer said: "The Steam page for PAYDAY 2 has been updated based on your feedback. We've made it clear that PAYDAY 2 will have no micro-transactions whatsoever (shame on you if you thought otherwise!)" Unsurprisingly, the community is in flames because of this. If you want to read more, you might want to read this steam forum thread about a lot of the misgivings the community has with the developer: http://steamcommunity.com/app/218620/discussions/8/598199244886890714/?tscn=1445102935 Or read this writeup that's more focused on the current situation: https://steamcommunity.com/app/218620/discussions/8/490123197949998159/ I believe that we as a gaming community and you as curators have a responsibility not to tolerate such behavior. That's why I would like you to remove the recommendation, at least until they change course. Note: I already posted it on the Idle Thumbs steam forum discussion, but that seems to be a place few people actually read, so I'm re-posting it here. I also tried to contact a few of the steam group's administrators to inform them of this by adding them as friends on steam (otherwise, you can't send direct messages). I'm aware that that could be considered a little pushy and would like to apologize for that.