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

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.

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.

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.

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

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).

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.

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 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/

I'm okay with them regardless.

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...

Absoluetly not. Period.

.