No it isn't. While I'm not defending their decisions, players need to understand what is actually going on that drives these marketing and development decisions. Regardless of what many think, most of us are not and have never been the target demographic for selling Bit Store items.Originally Posted by hiban
There does, in fact, exist a player demographic for this game, just as it does for every game with a micro transaction store that, for whatever reason, not only spends money on Bit Store items that we feel aren't even remotely worth the money, but spends it in amounts that vastly exceed what we would spend even if we did deem the items worth it.
~$40 gets you 8 Tier 4 lock boxes with very little chance of getting a Legendary item and even less chance that it will have all good or at least useful stats. ~$40 also can get you 1000 Arkforge which guarantees an upgrade of a good Blue to a potentially good Orange item along with the ability to upgrade it for the next 600 EGO levels. It was pretty much a no brainer for these players to switch their buying patterns which resulted in a drop in lock box sales and a net loss in bit store revenue because they were reaching their same objectives better and cheaper by buying Arkforge. (they would have had to have spent as much as four times or more the money on lock boxes to even approach the results they were getting with Arkforge and rarity upgrades).
Encryption is being implemented to drive these players back to their old spending patterns and every development decision that impedes in game progression is based on influencing these players' spending decisions not ours. This is simply how many game developers think and act in today's gaming industry and especially with free-to-play business models. There are more and more panels at events like GDC that host speakers that discuss how to best monetize these players instead of the rest of us, and don't even try to hide the lack of basic human respect that they have for the player community in general and these players in particular as they refer to them with the extremely dehumanizing nomenclature as "whales".
There's really not a lot you can do to influence their actions, and it's extremely unlikely that you'll do it by closing up your wallet, which had very limited value to them in the first place. The most powerful thing you can do is to vote with your feet so to speak and simply stop playing the game, but when it doesn't cost you anything more than your time, some bandwidth and some electricity things have to get pretty awful before a player is willing to do that so the thing you need to ask yourself is is it bad enough for you yet to do just that? (Some of us have already made that decision and simply post and read on the forums to see if the game changes direction enough to invest the time to play it again.) If it is and enough players make that decision, a company may change direction regarding development decisions but the window of opportunity to do so is finite before the shutdown of the game becomes inevitable.
Free-to-play is Defiance's last chance. There is nothing for the game if they implode this market the way they did with the buy-to-play market, but that implosion will come if they continue to move in a direction where it's becoming painfully obvious that major development decisions are being entirely driven by the motivation to increase micro transaction revenues from "whales".
Reply With Quote
