It wouldn’t be a Trion Worlds launch if there wasn’t something bad that offset the good (like a stable launch without major downtime plus the free stuff they are making available for the next 2 weeks).
http://forums.archeagegame.com/showthread.php?324747-Rampage-Car-Discussion-B200-S200/
CM Celestrata posts details later in the thread which should have been made known well before PTS went live.
Trion Worlds controls the business side operations which includes the cash shop. This is their CEO stating in black and white (when they announced they were publishing Devilian) what parts of they are heavily involved in. Former CM Scapes was even more to the point when asked during the games launch (a forum poster dug up that post).
The above again tries to push it off to the developer but Trion Worlds chose the above options themselves in order to monetize something that was knowingly desired by players that put a lot of time into this game (I am not one of them since I have no need for such a vehicle given how I choose to play this).
No one should be surprised about the cash grab; it is something that Trion Worlds is good at doing because they know most players who are deep into any of their games, have a hard time stepping away from it. People have their own personal reasons for playing the games they do so it is impossible for me to delve into all of that except to point out some obvious ones.
There are those who really enjoy the game play and available content who don’t want to stop playing it. There are those who have managed to build up their own place in the game world and don’t want to let that go. And then there are those who feel they’ve put way too much money into the game to quit (sunk cost fallacy where people look at the money they spent as an investment). Obviously there are way more and none of these are mutually exclusive; I’m just using these to make a point.
So they often times are able to pull these cash grabs on their player base knowing it will create idle threats of quitting. An ArcheAge player that has been paying for Patron (required for being able to own property and thus utilizing all of the systems that are built on top of that design) for the most part is not going to be able to revert to playing this game Patron-less because the full enjoyment won’t be there for them.
For players that fall victim to the sunk cost fallacy, letting go is the most difficult because they have a hard time viewing the money spent as an entertainment expense as opposed to how they consider it an investment. The following goes off on a tangent to make a point.
The gaming industry knows and have had discussions about sticky subject matters like gaming addiction as well as the business models used by companies like Trion Worlds where there is an emphasis of making money at all costs regardless of quality of the product. With 3rd party published games like this (which is developed by an external developer; worse when it is a foreign one which in most cases are those developed in South Korea), that is normally asking for trouble because of how those games are designed to begin with.
I covered this in detail before so I am not going to rehash all of that again except to state that loot based games relate back to B.F. Skinner’s Skinner Box experiments. Effort versus rewards is a core element in game design. Fast forwarding to the free-2-play business model, that required designs which allowed the game to be monetized. Game companies looked at how the casino industry made money as one example (out of many others) in terms of how RNG (another core design element in loot based games) could be utilized.
This is where the RNG factor was utilized in loot boxes. All of this focuses on behavioral patterns associated with the pleasure center in the brain (negative/positive reinforcement, dopamine, etc). Casino slot machines are perfect examples since those utilize an RNG based algorithm with weighting for success/failure. And just as the casino industry had a term for the big spending high rollers (whales), the game industry unsurprisingly adopted the same term for that target market that spends a lot of disposable income on video games.
The gaming industry (as per the above linked article) often times has gotten blamed for being the root cause of things like promoting violence, addictive behavior, etc. The root cause of those issues are normally associated with the individual. However, one cannot deny that game designs in recent years, has utilized RNG lock boxes since it preys on the potential addictive behavior that tends to be inherent in many. That is why the most desirable things are at times chance based as opposed to guaranteed because the statistics show that more money can be made via lower priced boxes with that chance to get the item than having a higher priced guaranteed option. In this case, Trion Worlds decided to make a guaranteed option with the highest priced pack because they know based on past statistics how much a portion of their player base is willing to bear that cost despite the teeth gnashing.
South Korean developed MMO’s were designed from a domestic perspective and often times had to take into account the publishers demands which included the fact that many publishers had deals with Internet gaming cafes more commonly known as PC bangs there (other Asian countries have similar cafes while Japan has a large number of different types of net cafes catering to different interests; many are 24/7 and act as inexpensive accommodations as a result).
This is why short cut conveniences are inherent in many designs (XP and gold boosts), why there are rewards based on amount of time spent logged in, etc. Each MMO is designed to try and attract a player to then spend a large amount of time in that game where the hope is that the player will spend additional money to purchase more time saving consumables or on loot boxes which give some desirable rewards. Additionally, many Korean MMO’s provide the ability to purchase the best gear as the ultimate way to bypass the grind. For a player with that has addictive and obsessive tendencies (the root), that combination along with PC bangs can give any associated game a bad rap.
It is no easy feat to simply just bring these MMO’s over to North America or Europe since it is not just about localization. It is about trying to modify core game systems to do many things which they were simply not designed to do. And often times, those changes need to be performed by designers who don’t understand why.
The publishers in these countries are also out to make as much money as they can as quickly as possible which is why front loading (Founder’s pack promotions) tend to be popular (this also benefits the developer since they also get a negotiated cut). Some publishers push this to extremes though where they get tagged (often times rightfully) with the cash grab moniker.
Bringing this back to this post, players in that thread are rightfully upset with this blatant cash grab. But those who have been playing any Trion Worlds game for awhile (especially their two 3rd party ones) should already know the companies modus operandi and should not have been surprised. Players enable this type of poor business practice by continually spending money with that company. Idle threats of quitting mean nothing when many of the same individuals continue to begrudgingly play and spend non-trivial sums of money in the process.
Myself, I walk when the line is crossed and/or when the entertainment/fun value drops. I’ve done that with Blizzard where from the 90’s until 2015, you could say I was a core customer. And that wasn’t for cash grabbing but mainly due to games that no longer had game play that appealed to me. A company like Trion Worlds had literally no history with me and I was hesitant to be a customer to begin with due to all the things I had heard. I gave them the benefit of the doubt and learned that people weren’t exaggerating. Lesson learned.
I only spent around $1k with Trion Worlds (just $100 of that was for ArcheAge credits of which I have half left while I still have a few hundred dollars worth of credits remaining for Devilian). I would say that I got my entertainment value out of that money given the amount of time I spent playing Devilian. I would have gladly spent more if Trion gave a damn about the quality of their 3rd party published games as opposed to milking them but I refused to continue to be an enabler of supporting decisions made by managers and execs there that allows the company to have the reputation that it has (which sucks for the hard working front line people who try to do the right thing but are hamstrung by the folks higher up).
