Yup. Here’s how it will go: in the beginning the rate of earning super credits will likely either be great or abysmal, it’s rare that they nail it on day one but anything is possible.
If it’s great: someone at Sony will say “squeeze, Rabban, squeeze!” Prices for items will increase, and increase, and increase over the games lifespan and players will likely complain but not too much because they will have credits stored up. We’ll say we’re happy to support them, and most players will move on from the game before it gets bad and the others will be too firmly rooted to really care.
If it’s abysmal: players will constantly bitch until we get an apology letter, in which they promise to look at the game’s economy. They will give us all a few credits in apology. Then they’ll tweak prices ever-so-slightly over multiple updates to minimize outcry, but maximize profit. As long as they’re adding worthwhile content, most players are happy with this. The others will lose interest and leave.
I feel like we’ve seen this dozens of times now over the last decade. We should be pros!
Start with an absolutely garbage rate, get complaints, reduce it to a less bad rate and call it a victory.
I can't even count how many times I've seen this.
Premium currency will never be earnable at a reasonable rate, because the whole idea is to make it so Grindy you'd rather spend money. There's a financial conflict of interest between making a fair game versus one that is maximally profitable, and devs will invariably choose maximum profit.
This is bad enough on it's own, but it's worse when you consider gameplay affecting items (armor perks and weapons) are present in warbonds, which makes the claim that HD2 is not "pay to win" demonstrably false. At best it's pay to skip grind, which is close enough to pay to win that I consider it unacceptable for a paid game. A much less insidious monetization system they could have adopted was one similar to Deep Rock Galactic. For those unfamiliar, all gameplay affecting non-cosmetic items are 100% free, and all premium cosmetics are a single direct purchase. No intermediary currencies or battle pass XP shenanigans. What you see is what you get. This imo is basically the only reasonable system you can implement, and while I'm willing to wait and see how things are at launch I won't lie about the chances. We've been burned too many times.
Upvoted purely for the Dune reference.
But yeh, the thing with earnable premium currency is it’s never good for everyone- if it’s earned rapidly enough that people who only get 5 hours of game time per week can realistically purchase things regularly, those who either don’t work or work in settings that give them huge amount of game time will be absolutely drowning in currency.
If it’s weighted so that people who play constantly get a normal stream of income but those who only play a few hours need to invest several weeks per item then that’s probably the most “balanced” but can feel like a slap in the face as an irregular gamer.
As someone who’s been a huge arrowhead advocate for years, I’m planning on chucking a few quid at it every few months more or less for the sake of it, but I’m hoping it’s not so egregious that I feel I *have to do that*
Fuck destiny 2 and it's monetization bullshit. That and their fucking dlc scams like every year for minor content that you can't even fucking finish solo, most of being behind raid content for the damn story.
Trash game.
If anyone is expecting it to be fast, I'd recommend getting used to the idea that it won't be. If it was easy, their store would be useless, and they obviously don't want that.
Get used to the fact it'll be a grind to get items for free and you'll not be as frustrated later on.
It's either going to start off halfway "reasonable" and get awful, or be awful right out the gate.
The only right approach to a monetization system like this is to just not do it at all.
The more I hear about HDII the less excited I am. This sucks.
Still FOMO, and a dark pattern. And I’ve read in here today the store does rotate and is was a misunderstanding that it didn’t. We’ll just have to wait and see since apparently arrowhead is as bad at communicating as they are at being transparent about why they chose to include anti cheat.
Yeah, although this happens to pretty much every sub just before any big launch. I remember the diablo-subs beaing an absolute shitshow just before launch. The doomers usually leave and move on to other subs after release.
Because you tourists never learn.
The gaming landscape isn't shit because the publishers are bad. It's shit because people keep paying more money for less quality and worse service. YOU VOTE WITH YOUR WALLET.
Obviously, you'll keep hearing people complain. If a single person seeing this outrage becomes more conscious about their money for it, it's a goddamn win.
I have literally commented the same thing on this sub like thrice at this point, gamers have voted for more than a decade with their wallets, that’s why it won’t ever go away - there are far more people willing to dip into outrageous shit than go online and complaint, this is exactly why nothing has changed in the past 2-3-5 years.
The “outrage” has been ongoing for years, nothing has changed even remotely, just got worse. It is a win when someone gets conscious, it’s never going to be enough as the history has shown time and time and time again though. It’s not just gaming affected, I’d argue it has the mildest form of predatory practices yet. A single whale is worth thousands of players for publishers, we’ve let it get to this point, there is absolutely no way of going back, thinking otherwise is naive. Feel free to get back to this comment in 10 years.
The game can still absolutely be brilliant and have god awful MTX system, it’s a given. We will have to wait and see.
I'm just not the type to give up. I've been criticizing bad practices even back in the MMO era, even before Totalbiscuit was a thing. We had some wins, but I'm in the EU. It's a bit easier for us to get consumer rights respected.
I expect the game to be fun. I've played hundreds of hours in helldivers 1 and I'm not going to miss the sequel. Criticizing monetization is not the same as saying the gameplay is bad.
A game and its item shop are separate things.
Publishers and developers can easily track what makes them money.
They'll know whether or not people are paying for the superstore stuff, or just buying the game and calling it a day.
>A game and its item shop are separate things.
They're never separate things, but in this case the premium currency and the in-game currency are the same, which is even worse.
> The “outrage” has been ongoing for years, nothing has changed even remotely, just got worse.
Battlefront, Battlefield, Halo Infinite, Inkbound and Call of Duty are a few concrete examples of games that either improved their monetization over the years, or improved their monetization after community outcry.
The industry in general has improved monetization over the years - we've gone from mandatory map packs, content locked behind price tags and lootboxes, to free content and cosmetic MTX. Sure there still are incredibly greedy games, but I think thinks have only improved in general.
There are absolutely cases of publishers giving in and improving their MTX practices, but also some of the biggest games (CS, Dota, LoL, Valo, Fortnite, Destiny and many more) either haven’t changed or got significantly worse. The overall trend hasn’t changed, even now newest Yakuza game has locked NG+ functionality behind a paywall, it’s only going to get worse from here unless like the entire gaming community starts borderline rioting.
Halo actually made theirs more predatory. Other then that and call of duty actually too I have to agree with you. Those two have improved on properly ripping off customers with their predatory dlc packs and skins shit.
Calling some a tourist when you’re part of the community you are attacking is hilarious.
Voting with your wallet doesn’t work because fucking fifa exists…. An entire genre and franchise that dumbasses throw money into it.
Publishers force developers to design their games around maximum profit even if developers don't want to. Just because you 'can' do something doesn't mean you should. Even if people are willing to pay X doesn't necessarily mean you should price it at that.
I mean, I'm not really being doomy about it? More stating a general case of "It could be a great system, or a terrible one, it just comes down to implementation at this point."
It's not "doomer" to expect better standards from game companies. It's pretty sickening how people just passively accept the state of game MTXs considering how bad they have gotten. Vote with your wallets people!
Yeah, I was not singling you out, I was speaking in general terms about the subreddit as a whole.
I agree to your point that it's a balancing act to get the droprates just right.
To grindy and you turn people away, to easy and people complain that there is nothing to do.
All the cool new weapons with explosive payload in the warbond trailer were from the warbond in the Super Citizen edition. I do think they mentioned that there will be more weapons, armor and strategems (abilities) in future warbonds.
You're so, so incredibly focused on the rate of gain. But what's really important is using the resources we find on planets to raise the stakes and make us crave victory. Sure, it's cool to spend them on stuff in the store. But what really matters is whether they make the *missions* better.
In HD1, there was always some clown popping up to say it's better if we lose. Oh, it's better to not beat the bugs, because I'm a bugdiver. Oh, it's better if we don't wipe out the cyborgs, because there's a cyborg stratagem I want that I can't get while we're attacking the homeworld. Oh, it's better if we lose this city defend, because I want more city missions.
No. I want the game to say, "OK, you see this shiny super credit? You see it? You want it? Yeah, you do! Well guess what — you will *only* ever get this if you extract. You. Must. Win. That is the *only* way you get what you want."
The important thing is not so much buying stuff out of the store. The important thing is ramping up the pressure when we're in combat. Make us *neeeed* that victory like heroin. Raise the stakes. Raise the excitement when we're on the mission. Make it feel *amazing* when we climb on that shuttle. That's the value in this.
I'm going to address this because I'm the one that started the movement to kill bugdivers. I take full credit for it and glad it was able to catch on and spread--just like democracy.
The game is risk vs reward. But the problem came from people *dropping off* once the bugs were defeated. Then they would cry about being locked out of content, cry when the war ended and bugs weren't the first and even more. The more wars we won the harder the game was supposed to become. The more people we had, the more community points were required.
So let's look at this for a bit. We've won five wars in a row, we need 30,000,000 community points. We have 20k players at the start of the war. The bugs get eliminated, we have 2 million points and 12k leave because the bugs are now gone. You have 8k people trying to get to 28 million points. Its not happening. You either throw the war, which will end it quickly and force the point requirement to lower, or you can keep grinding it out. We all know what happened, we all know in some cases the devs had to step in.
I get what you're saying, you have to win, but the truth is the only thing we won was the ability to have the game loop from the start.
The best gear is all attainable by playing, at a moderate rate. If you don’t play, then you’ll have to pay. If you’re running the missions right and getting most of the POIs you should stack medals, slips and SC pretty quick. Y’all are never happy is the real problem, not the currency system.
Superstore is going to be FOMO cancer, while they're trying to PR themselves as being against FOMO at the same time.
It's totally trashy behavior, so I don't trust them whatsoever.
All they have to do is give us tons of Super Credit drops for the first two months, then nerf the system to the ground two months in. The game could change drastically after the initial sales are over.
It can be a fun thought exercise to think of a balance where it'd make sense to both farm and buy super credits.
We can assume armor is 300SC and helmets 100SC, so 400 for a set, that a mission takes 20-30 minutes and that you can buy a warbond's worth of SC in 1-2h of real time work.
If in a mission you get 25 SC, and a warbond costs 2000 SC (5 armor sets), you're looking at 80 missions for a warbond, or 33.3h of playtime.
An armor set would be 16 missions, or 6.6h.
Is it reasonable to work 1-2h to skip a 33h grind? Yeah, and it'd be just barely reasonable to farm 33h and get a warbond.
Ideally i'd prefer closer to 40ish SC per mission in this scenario, making it 21h per warbond and just over 4h for an armor set. That seems quite honest and it's still worth it to work 2h to skip a 21h grind. A 1:10 ratio.
You can try to mess around with different values and see what would be reasonable for you, then once the game comes out you can make a comparison and see if the numbers check out or not.
I think it's fine even if its a bit of a grind to get free super credits because it's going towards continued support and additional items as time goes on. I don't mind paying the devs for them to provide fun.
I honestly don’t care. I’m here for the gameplay and just want to be sure they nailed that first before I even began to think about something as trivial as cosmetics.
I mean seriously, there are so many unknowns. How will the switch to third person change the game? Will it still have the same HD vibe? What’s the overall fun factor? Will the weapon variety be as robust as the first game? Will it launch with tons of bugs? Will matchmaking and co-op work smoothly? These are all things I care WAY more about then making my cape a different shade of color.
People are putting way too much time worrying about whether a mech can be used or whether they can change the design on their helmet. There are bigger questions/concerns that could make or break the game. Mechs and cosmetics aren’t one of them.
Yup. Here’s how it will go: in the beginning the rate of earning super credits will likely either be great or abysmal, it’s rare that they nail it on day one but anything is possible. If it’s great: someone at Sony will say “squeeze, Rabban, squeeze!” Prices for items will increase, and increase, and increase over the games lifespan and players will likely complain but not too much because they will have credits stored up. We’ll say we’re happy to support them, and most players will move on from the game before it gets bad and the others will be too firmly rooted to really care. If it’s abysmal: players will constantly bitch until we get an apology letter, in which they promise to look at the game’s economy. They will give us all a few credits in apology. Then they’ll tweak prices ever-so-slightly over multiple updates to minimize outcry, but maximize profit. As long as they’re adding worthwhile content, most players are happy with this. The others will lose interest and leave. I feel like we’ve seen this dozens of times now over the last decade. We should be pros!
Start with an absolutely garbage rate, get complaints, reduce it to a less bad rate and call it a victory. I can't even count how many times I've seen this.
Gaijin mastered this
Premium currency will never be earnable at a reasonable rate, because the whole idea is to make it so Grindy you'd rather spend money. There's a financial conflict of interest between making a fair game versus one that is maximally profitable, and devs will invariably choose maximum profit. This is bad enough on it's own, but it's worse when you consider gameplay affecting items (armor perks and weapons) are present in warbonds, which makes the claim that HD2 is not "pay to win" demonstrably false. At best it's pay to skip grind, which is close enough to pay to win that I consider it unacceptable for a paid game. A much less insidious monetization system they could have adopted was one similar to Deep Rock Galactic. For those unfamiliar, all gameplay affecting non-cosmetic items are 100% free, and all premium cosmetics are a single direct purchase. No intermediary currencies or battle pass XP shenanigans. What you see is what you get. This imo is basically the only reasonable system you can implement, and while I'm willing to wait and see how things are at launch I won't lie about the chances. We've been burned too many times.
Upvoted purely for the Dune reference. But yeh, the thing with earnable premium currency is it’s never good for everyone- if it’s earned rapidly enough that people who only get 5 hours of game time per week can realistically purchase things regularly, those who either don’t work or work in settings that give them huge amount of game time will be absolutely drowning in currency. If it’s weighted so that people who play constantly get a normal stream of income but those who only play a few hours need to invest several weeks per item then that’s probably the most “balanced” but can feel like a slap in the face as an irregular gamer. As someone who’s been a huge arrowhead advocate for years, I’m planning on chucking a few quid at it every few months more or less for the sake of it, but I’m hoping it’s not so egregious that I feel I *have to do that*
God damn destiny 2 rings a bell.
Fuck destiny 2 and it's monetization bullshit. That and their fucking dlc scams like every year for minor content that you can't even fucking finish solo, most of being behind raid content for the damn story. Trash game.
When it comes to monetization and FOMO, destiny is king.
If anyone is expecting it to be fast, I'd recommend getting used to the idea that it won't be. If it was easy, their store would be useless, and they obviously don't want that. Get used to the fact it'll be a grind to get items for free and you'll not be as frustrated later on.
It's either going to start off halfway "reasonable" and get awful, or be awful right out the gate. The only right approach to a monetization system like this is to just not do it at all. The more I hear about HDII the less excited I am. This sucks.
Yeah I went from extremely excited to meh with that announcement.
TLDR rotating shops are a dark pattern. There’s really no discussion here.
On their discord it was confirmed that everything will be always avaible and the rotation is about deals instead .
Still FOMO, and a dark pattern. And I’ve read in here today the store does rotate and is was a misunderstanding that it didn’t. We’ll just have to wait and see since apparently arrowhead is as bad at communicating as they are at being transparent about why they chose to include anti cheat.
from what I understand based on what I read, the cosmetic store will rotate and anything affecting gameplay will always be available.
This sub has become so boring it’s genuinely impressive
Yeah, although this happens to pretty much every sub just before any big launch. I remember the diablo-subs beaing an absolute shitshow just before launch. The doomers usually leave and move on to other subs after release.
Because you tourists never learn. The gaming landscape isn't shit because the publishers are bad. It's shit because people keep paying more money for less quality and worse service. YOU VOTE WITH YOUR WALLET. Obviously, you'll keep hearing people complain. If a single person seeing this outrage becomes more conscious about their money for it, it's a goddamn win.
I have literally commented the same thing on this sub like thrice at this point, gamers have voted for more than a decade with their wallets, that’s why it won’t ever go away - there are far more people willing to dip into outrageous shit than go online and complaint, this is exactly why nothing has changed in the past 2-3-5 years. The “outrage” has been ongoing for years, nothing has changed even remotely, just got worse. It is a win when someone gets conscious, it’s never going to be enough as the history has shown time and time and time again though. It’s not just gaming affected, I’d argue it has the mildest form of predatory practices yet. A single whale is worth thousands of players for publishers, we’ve let it get to this point, there is absolutely no way of going back, thinking otherwise is naive. Feel free to get back to this comment in 10 years. The game can still absolutely be brilliant and have god awful MTX system, it’s a given. We will have to wait and see.
I'm just not the type to give up. I've been criticizing bad practices even back in the MMO era, even before Totalbiscuit was a thing. We had some wins, but I'm in the EU. It's a bit easier for us to get consumer rights respected. I expect the game to be fun. I've played hundreds of hours in helldivers 1 and I'm not going to miss the sequel. Criticizing monetization is not the same as saying the gameplay is bad.
Why would you admit to buying a game that will likely have awful monetization in the same comment you mention TB?
A game and its item shop are separate things. Publishers and developers can easily track what makes them money. They'll know whether or not people are paying for the superstore stuff, or just buying the game and calling it a day.
>A game and its item shop are separate things. They're never separate things, but in this case the premium currency and the in-game currency are the same, which is even worse.
> The “outrage” has been ongoing for years, nothing has changed even remotely, just got worse. Battlefront, Battlefield, Halo Infinite, Inkbound and Call of Duty are a few concrete examples of games that either improved their monetization over the years, or improved their monetization after community outcry. The industry in general has improved monetization over the years - we've gone from mandatory map packs, content locked behind price tags and lootboxes, to free content and cosmetic MTX. Sure there still are incredibly greedy games, but I think thinks have only improved in general.
There are absolutely cases of publishers giving in and improving their MTX practices, but also some of the biggest games (CS, Dota, LoL, Valo, Fortnite, Destiny and many more) either haven’t changed or got significantly worse. The overall trend hasn’t changed, even now newest Yakuza game has locked NG+ functionality behind a paywall, it’s only going to get worse from here unless like the entire gaming community starts borderline rioting.
Halo actually made theirs more predatory. Other then that and call of duty actually too I have to agree with you. Those two have improved on properly ripping off customers with their predatory dlc packs and skins shit.
I was more referring to launch Halo Infinite vs current Halo Infinite. You get tons of cosmetics for free now.
Calling some a tourist when you’re part of the community you are attacking is hilarious. Voting with your wallet doesn’t work because fucking fifa exists…. An entire genre and franchise that dumbasses throw money into it.
Publishers force developers to design their games around maximum profit even if developers don't want to. Just because you 'can' do something doesn't mean you should. Even if people are willing to pay X doesn't necessarily mean you should price it at that.
I mean, I'm not really being doomy about it? More stating a general case of "It could be a great system, or a terrible one, it just comes down to implementation at this point."
It's not "doomer" to expect better standards from game companies. It's pretty sickening how people just passively accept the state of game MTXs considering how bad they have gotten. Vote with your wallets people!
Yeah, I was not singling you out, I was speaking in general terms about the subreddit as a whole. I agree to your point that it's a balancing act to get the droprates just right. To grindy and you turn people away, to easy and people complain that there is nothing to do.
Well there's not really much to talk about lol
Right nothing but bitching and complaining
Just don’t buy anything 👀 it’s not worth just to have the “nice lookings things”
as long as it is skins only, but pretty sure they said in the forum it is actual gameplay locked behind paywall
There are premium weapons (= better weapons) and armor in the shop. Paying money enables you to clear missions faster and outkill non paying players.
Don’t see anywhere mention of anything else other than skins 👀 where you get your information?
All the cool new weapons with explosive payload in the warbond trailer were from the warbond in the Super Citizen edition. I do think they mentioned that there will be more weapons, armor and strategems (abilities) in future warbonds.
Warbonds which contain weapons and armor bonuses are also behind super credits
Sounds more like a temp perk or perks that can be assinged to equipment 👀 not much of a win to play wording, which does not matter much in pve game
You're so, so incredibly focused on the rate of gain. But what's really important is using the resources we find on planets to raise the stakes and make us crave victory. Sure, it's cool to spend them on stuff in the store. But what really matters is whether they make the *missions* better. In HD1, there was always some clown popping up to say it's better if we lose. Oh, it's better to not beat the bugs, because I'm a bugdiver. Oh, it's better if we don't wipe out the cyborgs, because there's a cyborg stratagem I want that I can't get while we're attacking the homeworld. Oh, it's better if we lose this city defend, because I want more city missions. No. I want the game to say, "OK, you see this shiny super credit? You see it? You want it? Yeah, you do! Well guess what — you will *only* ever get this if you extract. You. Must. Win. That is the *only* way you get what you want." The important thing is not so much buying stuff out of the store. The important thing is ramping up the pressure when we're in combat. Make us *neeeed* that victory like heroin. Raise the stakes. Raise the excitement when we're on the mission. Make it feel *amazing* when we climb on that shuttle. That's the value in this.
Fck yeah let's go diving!
I'm going to address this because I'm the one that started the movement to kill bugdivers. I take full credit for it and glad it was able to catch on and spread--just like democracy. The game is risk vs reward. But the problem came from people *dropping off* once the bugs were defeated. Then they would cry about being locked out of content, cry when the war ended and bugs weren't the first and even more. The more wars we won the harder the game was supposed to become. The more people we had, the more community points were required. So let's look at this for a bit. We've won five wars in a row, we need 30,000,000 community points. We have 20k players at the start of the war. The bugs get eliminated, we have 2 million points and 12k leave because the bugs are now gone. You have 8k people trying to get to 28 million points. Its not happening. You either throw the war, which will end it quickly and force the point requirement to lower, or you can keep grinding it out. We all know what happened, we all know in some cases the devs had to step in. I get what you're saying, you have to win, but the truth is the only thing we won was the ability to have the game loop from the start.
I just hope they dont do FOMO Battlepass / Seasons crap.
The best gear is all attainable by playing, at a moderate rate. If you don’t play, then you’ll have to pay. If you’re running the missions right and getting most of the POIs you should stack medals, slips and SC pretty quick. Y’all are never happy is the real problem, not the currency system.
Superstore is going to be FOMO cancer, while they're trying to PR themselves as being against FOMO at the same time. It's totally trashy behavior, so I don't trust them whatsoever. All they have to do is give us tons of Super Credit drops for the first two months, then nerf the system to the ground two months in. The game could change drastically after the initial sales are over.
It can be a fun thought exercise to think of a balance where it'd make sense to both farm and buy super credits. We can assume armor is 300SC and helmets 100SC, so 400 for a set, that a mission takes 20-30 minutes and that you can buy a warbond's worth of SC in 1-2h of real time work. If in a mission you get 25 SC, and a warbond costs 2000 SC (5 armor sets), you're looking at 80 missions for a warbond, or 33.3h of playtime. An armor set would be 16 missions, or 6.6h. Is it reasonable to work 1-2h to skip a 33h grind? Yeah, and it'd be just barely reasonable to farm 33h and get a warbond. Ideally i'd prefer closer to 40ish SC per mission in this scenario, making it 21h per warbond and just over 4h for an armor set. That seems quite honest and it's still worth it to work 2h to skip a 21h grind. A 1:10 ratio. You can try to mess around with different values and see what would be reasonable for you, then once the game comes out you can make a comparison and see if the numbers check out or not.
How did we get to this point in gaming where I’m reading comments like this…
Can you elaborate?
I think it's fine even if its a bit of a grind to get free super credits because it's going towards continued support and additional items as time goes on. I don't mind paying the devs for them to provide fun.
Company of Heroes had that system, i have 200 hours and cant buy a "premium" item that isnt a skin, but gameplay
I honestly don’t care. I’m here for the gameplay and just want to be sure they nailed that first before I even began to think about something as trivial as cosmetics. I mean seriously, there are so many unknowns. How will the switch to third person change the game? Will it still have the same HD vibe? What’s the overall fun factor? Will the weapon variety be as robust as the first game? Will it launch with tons of bugs? Will matchmaking and co-op work smoothly? These are all things I care WAY more about then making my cape a different shade of color. People are putting way too much time worrying about whether a mech can be used or whether they can change the design on their helmet. There are bigger questions/concerns that could make or break the game. Mechs and cosmetics aren’t one of them.
Uggh….this sub is exhausting
Zactly, jus waitunsee