moved

wolf486

Wouldn't it be more logical to just have a monthly sub if it came to needing cc to survive

NolaArch

No [ESO shuts down and you can no longer play]

I buy crown crates when I want to. However, if the situation were so dire that selling crates was their only means of staying afloat, that speaks volumes about the state of the game from all aspects. I simply wouldn’t buy crates to mercy support a game.

Belegnole

No [ESO shuts down and you can no longer play]

Just about everything costs money,and I'm willing to pay a fee to play a game. However I'm not willing to pay large amounts for nothing. Virtual items are generally worthless, in fact they're not even yours. We just have been duped into thinking that they have value. Tricked into thinking they're ours, and they keep rolling in the dough because we're too blind to see it.

Apache_Kid

Yes [ESO stays up and running]

I don't understand being so against something to keep the game running. No one is forcing you to buy the crates and those guady mounts are ugly as all hell anyways. I have no issue at all with the crown store. Yeah some of the prices are too high for sure and i really wish it felt like they were investing more profits back into the game and hiring more employees to fix bugs.

While I would like to have a sub model to be required to play that isn't going to happen again so this is what we have. Don't like the crates then don't buy them. Yes you might not be able to get some eyesore of a mount but I promise you'll be better off. All the mounts do the same exact thing anyways, get you from point A to point B. Who knows what kind of horrible shape this game would be in if it wasn't for the crown crate money?

Orticia

Yes [ESO stays up and running]

But only if the game itself is still very much worthy of playing. Which is doubtful if it comes to the state crown crates are necessary to even keep the lights on.

Aeslief

If Crown Crates was the only way to keep ESO alive it would deserve to be shut down.

A quality product will support itself without having to resort to cash squeeze gimmicks.

Radiance

No [ESO shuts down and you can no longer play]

What kind of Reverse Psychology, Twilight Zone Logic is this!? Since when are Games funded by Gambling!? Why not just Fund it by starting a Drug Ring... Or open a *** casino! Not sorry.

Nerouyn

No [ESO shuts down and you can no longer play]

JamilaRaj wrote: »

Scam crates have to die. So do microtransactions. If videogambling companies can not make games without them, then they have to die too.

It's an over-saturated market desperately trying to recoup its pipe dream expenditures.

Post World of Warcraft's phenomenal success, every programmer and his donkey shuffled foward to stick their hand in the money bin. WOW would have been profitable with half a million players. With a well made and polished game, good timing and excellent marketing they ended up with twenty times that.

Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent developing new MMOs all keen to eat into WOW's playerbase. But they typically failed. Even the big IPs like Lord of the Rings. ESO seems to also be in that category. I think they came really close to being a hit but some bad design decisions (eg. its hellish inventory management) severely detracted from its great story, world, armours and weapons and combat.

Elsonso

No [ESO shuts down and you can no longer play]

Nerouyn wrote: »

JamilaRaj wrote: »

Scam crates have to die. So do microtransactions. If videogambling companies can not make games without them, then they have to die too.

It's an over-saturated market desperately trying to recoup its pipe dream expenditures.

Post World of Warcraft's phenomenal success, every programmer and his donkey shuffled foward to stick their hand in the money bin. WOW would have been profitable with half a million players. With a well made and polished game, good timing and excellent marketing they ended up with twenty times that.

Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent developing new MMOs all keen to eat into WOW's playerbase. But they typically failed. Even the big IPs like Lord of the Rings. ESO seems to also be in that category. I think they came really close to being a hit but some bad design decisions (eg. its hellish inventory management) severely detracted from its great story, world, armours and weapons and combat.

Inventory management? Really?

ESO has some pretty decent inventory management for an RPG game. It is item count based, with stacking, rather than weight based. It has reasonable limits that can be expanded using in-game gold. The expansions are on the expensive side, but gold really isn't an issue in this game like it is in other games. Max bag and bank space is large enough to store stuff, without being so large that the player never has to decide what to keep and what to throw out. I have more inventory problems in games like Skyrim and Fallout than I do in ESO. ESO is easy.

Every inventory management problem that has been described in this forum (that I can remember) can be solved with gold, money, or just getting rid of things that are not really needed.

What prevents "big IP" games from becoming a hit is over dependence on the IP. The IP name gets people in the door. If there is nothing to keep them there, the IP won't help. The game has to provide something more than just the name on the sign out front. ESO provides that. They have managed to hold the attention of gamers, and build upon that. ESO is not an exceptional game, and ZOS is not an exceptional studio, but they are both at least the minimum required to do that.

The current gaming market is flooded with average MMO games, and I feel that ZOS is barely holding the game above that. But, I think they are holding it above that. I see loot boxes as the last funding refuge of the average and below average games. My hope with ESO is that they are "profit taking" and that the loot boxes are not already life support.

Beardimus

Yes [ESO stays up and running]

No need for the hyoertherical question, they ARE needed already.

The company needs to turn a profit from the game. They are profitable. The end.

Glurin

Yes [ESO stays up and running]

As long as they don't turn pay to win, then I'm ok with it.

Ankael07

That depends on how the game is going to run. We already have a ton of crate items, radiant mounts and all that and the game runs as smooth as a cat's tongue.

JamilaRaj

No [ESO shuts down and you can no longer play]

lordrichter wrote: »

Nerouyn wrote: »

JamilaRaj wrote: »

Scam crates have to die. So do microtransactions. If videogambling companies can not make games without them, then they have to die too.

It's an over-saturated market desperately trying to recoup its pipe dream expenditures.

Post World of Warcraft's phenomenal success, every programmer and his donkey shuffled foward to stick their hand in the money bin. WOW would have been profitable with half a million players. With a well made and polished game, good timing and excellent marketing they ended up with twenty times that.

Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent developing new MMOs all keen to eat into WOW's playerbase. But they typically failed. Even the big IPs like Lord of the Rings. ESO seems to also be in that category. I think they came really close to being a hit but some bad design decisions (eg. its hellish inventory management) severely detracted from its great story, world, armours and weapons and combat.

Inventory management? Really?

ESO has some pretty decent inventory management for an RPG game. It is item count based, with stacking, rather than weight based. It has reasonable limits that can be expanded using in-game gold. The expansions are on the expensive side, but gold really isn't an issue in this game like it is in other games. Max bag and bank space is large enough to store stuff, without being so large that the player never has to decide what to keep and what to throw out. I have more inventory problems in games like Skyrim and Fallout than I do in ESO. ESO is easy.

Without addons, inventory management is horrible mess, whose capacity is effectively shrinking as amount of clutter introduced to the game increases over time, while capacity does not.
However, it is not result of bad design. ZOS may have criminal programmers and QA, but its designers and monetization experts are top notch. Low capacity makes crafting bag very useful, which in turn makes "optional" subscription much less optional. Also, as players are forced to throw away perfectly usable items some other players, or they themselves at some future point, will have to grind, it is possible to throw rewards at player at high rate (apparently some psychologists as ZOS concluded it is necessary) without putting basic treadmill game loop to stop (though inventory is only one part of dark triade; BoP/BoE and guild trade are the other two).

Glurin

Yes [ESO stays up and running]

Belegnole wrote: »

Just about everything costs money,and I'm willing to pay a fee to play a game. However I'm not willing to pay large amounts for nothing. Virtual items are generally worthless, in fact they're not even yours. We just have been duped into thinking that they have value. Tricked into thinking they're ours, and they keep rolling in the dough because we're too blind to see it.

I'm just gonna put this out there as some food for thought:

Pay a fee just to be able to log in and still have to make separate purchases for specific items.

v.s.

Log in and play for free, make separate purchases for specific items, donate some cash and as a thank you you get a random assortment of items, some of them really cool looking to encourage people to donate.

Elsonso

No [ESO shuts down and you can no longer play]

JamilaRaj wrote: »

lordrichter wrote: »

Nerouyn wrote: »

JamilaRaj wrote: »

Scam crates have to die. So do microtransactions. If videogambling companies can not make games without them, then they have to die too.

It's an over-saturated market desperately trying to recoup its pipe dream expenditures.

Post World of Warcraft's phenomenal success, every programmer and his donkey shuffled foward to stick their hand in the money bin. WOW would have been profitable with half a million players. With a well made and polished game, good timing and excellent marketing they ended up with twenty times that.

Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent developing new MMOs all keen to eat into WOW's playerbase. But they typically failed. Even the big IPs like Lord of the Rings. ESO seems to also be in that category. I think they came really close to being a hit but some bad design decisions (eg. its hellish inventory management) severely detracted from its great story, world, armours and weapons and combat.

Inventory management? Really?

ESO has some pretty decent inventory management for an RPG game. It is item count based, with stacking, rather than weight based. It has reasonable limits that can be expanded using in-game gold. The expansions are on the expensive side, but gold really isn't an issue in this game like it is in other games. Max bag and bank space is large enough to store stuff, without being so large that the player never has to decide what to keep and what to throw out. I have more inventory problems in games like Skyrim and Fallout than I do in ESO. ESO is easy.

Without addons, inventory management is horrible mess, whose capacity is effectively shrinking as amount of clutter introduced to the game increases over time, while capacity does not.
However, it is not result of bad design. ZOS may have criminal programmes and QA, but its designers and monetization experts are top notch. Low capacity makes crafting bag very useful, which in turn makes "optional" subscription much less optional. Also, as players are forced to throw away perfectly usable items some other players, or they themselves at some future point, will have to grind, it is possible to throw rewards at player at high rate (apparently some psychologists as ZOS concluded it is necessary) without putting basic treadmill game loop to stop (though inventory is only one part of dark triade; BoP/BoE and guild trade are the other two).

I would not call it a horrible mess. Maybe on console, but most things on console are a horrible mess to start with. Most of the stuff that add-ons are used for fix bugs in the game, in my opinion.

There are definitely some UI issues related to inventory, and for that reason, I have a couple add-ons that I use on PC. Obviously, I use none on PS4. Telling when the character is out of bag space before putting N+1 into the bag is critical to not leaving junk behind in resource nodes and chests. The ZOS UI gives no indication. I use Bag Space Indicator for that.

I have no idea what ZOS was thinking with guild banks and the lack of auto-stacking. No matter what ZOS thinks of this, it is a defect in the game (a BUG) that the guild bank does not auto-stack. It should do that. They should have designed it to do that. Until they fix it, I use Roomba.

The whole "pushing people to the Crafting Bag" thing is getting a little old. The inventory management methodology that they are using pre-dates the Crown Store. It worked before the Crown Store and before B2P. It works with or without the Crafting Bag. I use it without any Crafting Bag on a daily basis.

Like I said, and I am serious about this, I have more problems with inventory management in Fallout 4 and Skyrim than I do in ESO. Those games use a weight-based system instead of an item count. Stacking items in Fallout 4 doesn't do a thing. In ESO, it allows me to carry more. ESO just stops adding stuff when I run out of space. Skyrim makes me walk until I drop stuff, and places fast travel blocks. There is no bank in Fallout 4 or Skyrim, so if I want something, I have to find the container I put it into. We may get that particular enjoyment with the new ESO Housing storage.

Geroken777

Yes [ESO stays up and running]

ThePrinceOfBargains wrote: »

agegarton wrote: »

I have a lot of fun with Crown Crates and the associated content. I really don’t understand why the subject gets so much air time: no-one is holding a gun to your head. You don’t have to buy them.

Obviously because people want the stuff that’s in them, but don’t want to participate in this crappy, exploitative business model. What is so difficult about that concept? I don’t get why that’s confusing to you and people that continue to defend this BS.

So you just want to follow the main stream? Pffffft, go ahead and buy a supreme shirt as well.

Nerouyn

No [ESO shuts down and you can no longer play]

lordrichter wrote: »

Inventory management? Really?

Yes. ESO is infamous for its awful inventory management experience.

It was worse at launch when there were more crafting ingredients and recipes but I still regard the game as unplayable without addons like bank manager revived. But new players coming to the game typically don't know about addons and any of them trying to take up crafting get an experience you won't find in any other game.

JamilaRaj wrote: »

However, it is not result of bad design. ZOS may have criminal programmers and QA, but its designers and monetization experts are top notch. Low capacity makes crafting bag very useful, which in turn makes "optional" subscription much less optional. Also, as players are forced to throw away perfectly usable items some other players, or they themselves at some future point, will have to grind, it is possible to throw rewards at player at high rate (apparently some psychologists as ZOS concluded it is necessary) without putting basic treadmill game loop to stop (though inventory is only one part of dark triade; BoP/BoE and guild trade are the other two).

Pre the crafting bag I believe it was intended to force players into guilds to make use of guild banks to store things like crafting materials. Players being members of a guild improves retention but irritating people into joining guilds was a foolish endeavour which I suspect backfired spectacularly and simply resulted in driving players away. It did me. First time I cancelled my sub it was because I quickly came to despise having to spend twenty minutes at the end of every play session tediously shuffling stuff around between alts.

Coolits

No [ESO shuts down and you can no longer play]

No.

Crown Crates aka loot boxes are one of the worst things to have happened to the gaming industry in recent years, they are predatory in nature relying on the same physiological tactics used by gambling.

It's become clear over the last several weeks that if publishers won't do the responsible thing their hand is going to be forced through legislation.

Nerouyn

No [ESO shuts down and you can no longer play]

Coolits wrote: »

Crown Crates aka loot boxes are one of the worst things to have happened to the gaming industry in recent years, they are predatory in nature relying on the same physiological tactics used by gambling.

I'm completely with you in not loving these but the truth is that they've been in MMOs since nearly the beginning.

World of Warcraft had gamble mounts I believe from day one or very shortly thereafter. They didn't sell digital crates / boxes inside the game. But you could purchase gaming collector cards and some of the rarer cards rewarded you with a code you could use to obtain a mount in the game, which couldn't be acquired any other way.

Many players were blissfully unaware of it. I only know because I saw someone on a mount I'd never seen before when I played in 2004 / 05 and asked where they got it from.

http://www.wowlootcards.com/

Herelacfreahelm

No [ESO shuts down and you can no longer play]

This Poll is irrelevant, I have never liked crown crates and that business model where you buy them and everything in them is random and mostly useless junk. if they want to keep putting them in the game and crows store then just us random cosmetic stuff only. I prefer to go to the crown store and buy exactly what I want and should get exactly what I want.

Ohtimbar

I'm okay with them regardless.

Saturn

No [ESO shuts down and you can no longer play]

agegarton wrote: »

I have a lot of fun with Crown Crates and the associated content. I really don’t understand why the subject gets so much air time: no-one is holding a gun to your head. You don’t have to buy them.

You're neglecting the fact that MMOs are breeding grounds for completionists. Granted, ESO doesn't have achievements that are only completeable by buying all the mounts / pets in the store, like WoW used to have, but there are still many people who end up spending a lot of money to get everything in the crown crates because they can't help their OCD. There are also the gambling addicts, who get one taste of a nice reward and end up trapped in the system as well. I'd go as far as claiming that lootbox systems such as these might even be creating gambling addicts. Though saying that, it won't likely ever be recognised as gambling, despite the lootbox system in Battlefront 2 gathering a lot of attention, as the ESRB and PEGI haven't stated they would change the way they label "gambling" in games.

It's by default not a customer-friendly system and you gain literally nothing by protecting it other than greedy corporate hands digging into your pockets.

I think you might really enjoy slot machines and other forms of gambling if you believe the Crown Crates are "fun", but then, you are probably also the exact audience that ZOS is trying to gather into the game, since at the end of the day it doesn't matter if ESO ends up a [snip] game, if it's just profitable. At least I imagine that to be the mindset of whoever thought this was worth implementing into the game.

[Edited to remove profanity]

Yagorn

No [ESO shuts down and you can no longer play]

DoctorESO wrote: »

Hypothetically, academically, whatever your preferred term is for assuming the following is true for the purpose of this discussion - if crown crates were necessary to keep ESO up and running, would you be okay with them (this does not mean you have to buy them)? Or would you rather have the game shut down?

If you need to manipulate your audience to the point you need to gate you out of what you want with 2 different forms of currency, 3 if you count real life money, you doing something very wrong.

Not only that, instead of own for their incompetence in the very few months this game was released instead of finding ways to keep the game profitable (FF14 anyone ?) You wouldn't be seeing this zombie of a mmo up until now.

Speaking of MMO...what the hell this game had to be a MMO to begin with ? Why not Skyrim with Multiplatyer ? You know, the one they had to block out of steam because they were afraid of the competition ?

Realy sick of people not taking some actual responsibility...

Elsonso

No [ESO shuts down and you can no longer play]

Saturn wrote: »

at the end of the day it doesn't matter if ESO ends up a [snip] game, if it's just profitable. At least I imagine that to be the mindset of whoever thought this was worth implementing into the game.

This worries me about Crown Crates, and always has.

It is not good when loot boxes become necessary because that means the game cannot generate the necessary revenue. At that point, the game only needs to be good enough to maintain turnstile counts so people buy the loot boxes.

The reason for the game becomes keeping the loot boxes alive, and is only useful for as long as it can do that without costing more than the loot boxes generate.

Yagorn wrote: »

Speaking of MMO...what the hell this game had to be a MMO to begin with ? Why not Skyrim with Multiplatyer ? You know, the one they had to block out of steam because they were afraid of the competition ?

Because the MMO route was the right direction to take.

[Edited for quote]

ScardyFox

No [ESO shuts down and you can no longer play]

Absoluetly not. Period.

LadyAstrum

No [ESO shuts down and you can no longer play]

Took me a little time to ponder this, because I do like the game, and I don't blame the developers themselves for cash shop/loot box decisions, but if ESO had to rely on cray cray crates to survive, then it would be better it didn't. I really think there needs to be more integrity in big businesses.

DoctorESO

.

exiars10

Yes [ESO stays up and running]

Black-white voting.

As long as crates are not P2W, I don't care. I don't buy them, and will never.

Recremen wrote: »

If your business relies on exploitation then to hell with your business.

Said Karl Marx 140+ years ago, and guess what, most businesses do that if you believe in Marxist political economy which you seem.