@SurfaceNerd @GrahamZ @nousername66 I might write a more substantial response to this if I could figure out what your point was. The only thing I can add is "huh?"
The entire purpose of a review is to describe one's personal bias towards a game or whatever it is that you are reviewing. If you are being objective, you are not writing a review, you are writing a description.
What the article is about is going beyond giving an opinion and being outright nasty. It's ok to disagree with a review and to state that disagreement. The problem comes when instead of talking about the disagreement, you start using insulting language and attacking people personally. If you can't tell the difference, you need to learn, or you are going to have to learn to live without a job, without friends and with a family that will likely stop talking to you.
Bad behavior did not originate with gaming communities -- it's always been around, but the internet is simply the latest technology to spread it around. The type of nastiness that you are talking about is celebrated in other media, such as politics, and celebrity gossip and talk shows, whether on the radio or television, even in magazines and so on. It's far to easy to be nasty about someone when they are not in your face, when you know you have an audience. in some communities (such as this one) there is an attitude that it has no place here. Which I agree with. But you have to understand that this is how people have been for as long as there's been gossip.
It's a kind of schizophrenia -- we want our world to be friendly, we all want to get along, but some people are fair game, because when we there is a separation, we don't actually view those people as being real with real feelings. Maybe intellectually we do, but as a general feeling, we don't. It's harder to be empathetic with someone who's just a name, than with someone we share the same physical space with. The more psychologically distant, the greater the chance that we'll not treat them like human beings worthy of common decency (let alone respect).
I didn't detect any kind of moral judgement, and I tend to prefer subscription games.
The phrase 'twist your brain' indicates to me that the moral judgement is all on you. There's a difference between smart marketing and dishonest marketing. There's no indication at all that the guy doing the video is talking about any kind of dishonest behavior, just smart marketing. There is a huge difference. Smart marketing, for example, is showing two items for sale next to one another, the first quite expensive and way overpriced. People then perceive that the second item is more of a bargain than they would normally. That's opposed to marketing techniques like 'Bait and Switch' which also exploit psychology, but are completely dishonest. The first is smart marketing, the second is a con game.
I'd say that the point of this isn't that the makers of F2P games have any kind of moral deficit, but that people who spend too much may on those games may want to examine their spending habits. Remember that it's a choice.
@Xpyder I played it way back before it went F2P, and I liked it well enough that I bought a lifetime sub. I haven't played it in a long time now, but I'm thinking I may come back when Helm's Deep is released.
I will say that the game will get boring without a decent guild with friendly like-minded people, so if you decide that you like it, your first goal should be to find a guild that fits your desired play style and temperament. But the good news is that it's one of the better MMO communities around. My guild may not be there any longer so I may end up having to find a new one myself.
@Lennotoecom @Moondrake Wow was more like Everquest than EQ 2 even tried to be (for both better and worse). I played WoW for about 2 months and was satisfied that there was nothing else in it for me. It's not the best MMO, it's not the worst (though the community does rank fairly low as MMO communities go). But what it did was to make everything, from the graphics to the questing, to the combat simpler and more user-friendly, so that virtually anyone could play it. But it succeeded mostly because it did not try to reinvent the wheel, in the way that EQ 2 did. It stayed a lot closer to its roots.
I've also spent money on F2P games on impulse, but then I've regretted it. I think my problem is that if I'm not having that much fun in a game, I'll think that the problem is that I need X to help me progress further, and once I do that, the game will become more fun. But it never actually does, and I end up quitting shortly thereafter.
In any case, I prefer games that have a flat subscription price to F2P games, because those are less apt to try to make the game extra grindy on purpose in order to encourage purchases to ease that grind.
And btw, yes, I love these topics also. Great show.
I finished the first Dragon Age and it was a bit disappointing. I felt like combat and the mazes and so on were tedious and I know there were DLCs and other ways to play, but I had absolutely no desire to go through that again, so I skipped the second one. They say it's not going to be like Elder Scrolls, but on the other hand, if it were, I'd be a lot more apt to purchase the game. If anyone mentions mods, I might be in.
I always did worse in exams if I drank coffee before an exam because I'd be all jittery. I'd actually do better in an exam after staying up late studying if I didn't drink cofee than if I'd woken myself up with it. I'd also tend to drive too fast on the road (only times I've gotten tickets as a youth was after a cup of coffee).
Nowadays, the caffeine from coffee stays in my body much longer so if I have too much or drink it in the afternoon, I have problems sleeping at night -- it tends to screw up my sleep hours badly.
@bennehftw As far as ESO is concerned, keep in mind that the devs are saying that they intend it to be less of an MMO (which I agree would be a horrible idea) and more of a single-player game that can be experienced with friends. They clearly intend to make it have the feel of the single-player games. Whether they will succeed or not is another story.
But this is not anything like the ESO situation. The devs have no intention of making it anything like Civilization, other than adding the trappings of the game. You aren't controlling a nation, you are playing an MMO. Is it POSSIBLE that this may turn out to be a game to appeal to civ fans? I'm doubtful, but I guess it's possible. What I see as more likely is that it will be a typical MMO with some Civ trappings. You'll get quests to go out and collect 20 iron instead of quests to collect bear claws or rat ears. Instead of rescuing the miller's daughter from evil orcs, you'll have to rescue the worker from barbarians. I haven't played any Korean MMOs, and it's my impression that most of them do not appeal to a western audience anyway, because they tend to be grindy. And remember that they are making this primarily for a Korean audience.
I could be wrong. I hope I'm wrong. And I don't doubt that in the right hands, there is a modicum of hope for this title. But I'm not holding my breath. As I've said elsewhere, it should be fun to watch what happens. I'm a skeptic, so until I see evidence otherwise, I'm going to extreme doubts. Skeptics always demand evidence. Show me something better than what I'm imagining and maybe I'll have a more positive feeling about it.
GrahamZ's comments