All games are just cosmetic crap, they're all made of pixels.
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Riot Games is introducing unlock achievements with real money system in League of Legends called Eternals
- Thread starter Becks'
- Start date
All games are just cosmetic crap, they're all made of pixels.
It adds zero gameplay. It's not even a skin for your character.
To some people, achievements are 100% gameplay. Why would they be one of the oldest bastions of gaming if they didn't add to the experience?
This happens with my game as well and I would really like you to consider not everything in F2P games is a giant pyramid scheme. Not every decision is made to rob peoples money and not everytime an employee posts online (to zero benefit to themselves, btw) is a lie. I dont like this feature any more than you do (and I dont play the game so it doesnt impact me at all) but if people with experience take time out of their day to engage with you on a random forum,. they probably mean what they say and shouldn't be a target for your cynicism.
I enjoy unlocking achievements. Achievements for doing (sometimes) remarkable things by playing a game.
This is different, it's literally just a badge saying you bought something. That is not gameplay. Being called achievements doesn't make it gameplay.
I'm sorry but this is not my job as a consumer. I'm not just going to change my opinion because someone from a corporation chimes in, if anything they are the last people that will influence my feelings because they have the most reason to spin the message in their favor.
If a company has built up good will then I'm more willing to listen, but certainly not Riot/Tencent.
I don't understand how it's different besides being paid. It functions the exact same way an achievement does except now it has a pricetag.
here was a comment I posted with my take on the matter
This feels like a double-down on the community already beyond dedicated to playing this game, almost exclusively. Instead of trying to find ways to improve the community and draw in new players, you're going to focus on more hooks for the people already playing. This year alone, the introduction of things to pay for has reached ridiculous heights. Favorite champ? Pay for their skins, their prestige skins, their borders, their icons, their battle pass, and now pay for achievements. Grind those mastery points, play those ranked matches, but please spend money on the ideation of a champ being to your liking through thick (buffs) or thin (debuffs).
Can't uninstall a game if you've put over $1000 into it, right? Let alone risk it all being for nil. So many hooks.
This feels like a double-down on the community already beyond dedicated to playing this game, almost exclusively. Instead of trying to find ways to improve the community and draw in new players, you're going to focus on more hooks for the people already playing. This year alone, the introduction of things to pay for has reached ridiculous heights. Favorite champ? Pay for their skins, their prestige skins, their borders, their icons, their battle pass, and now pay for achievements. Grind those mastery points, play those ranked matches, but please spend money on the ideation of a champ being to your liking through thick (buffs) or thin (debuffs).
Can't uninstall a game if you've put over $1000 into it, right? Let alone risk it all being for nil. So many hooks.
You should be sorry for making game balancing sound so reductive, that statement was really offensive to actual designers
Its nobodies job to do any of this, its not a random designers job to engage with you on a forum either. Just trying to give you some perspective, if you want to dig deeper on conspiracy theories you go right ahead but Im here to tell you that this is the kind of stuff people that work in the game look at and go "can you believe this is how they think this works?"
Fans do this all the time, theres a thing in the game they dont like and cook up a theory of why it happened, then they take that theory as fact, then the next thing they dont like happens and they built a theory on top of the previous unproven theory and give it a few years and its a giant pile of made up nonsense that the community has convinced itself is true. Then when you get access to someone with actual information and actual expertise you discredit them in favor of the latest idea that popped in your head eventhough it has zero sourcing behind it.
Thanks for the engagement and information despite the skepticism.
Star Guardian Urgot when though?
We're staunchly against "pay for power", especially in skins, so my guess is probably never. But maybe one day the art team will figure it out!
They already do it in a way, theres these events they do once in a while (now is the project event), when the event starts you get some missions to do, these missions are finite and they give you barely any event tokens (needed to buy the rewards of the events), if you want to get the good prices you need to buy the event pass wich costs money, so yeah...nothing new, Riot makes a hell lot of money from these micro transactions
I haven't touched League in years, are there any kind of rewards available to get by just playing? Last thing I remember there was some other currency besides Riot Points that you could use to unlock champs (at insane high prizes, you needed to grind like crazy) or get cheap stuff live avatars. Also saw that you can get fragments of boxes/keys free, but those also needed some heavy time investment.
There is a champion progression system that you can max out and you get a special taunt to brag about maxing out your champion.
I didn't say that. Obviously analytics are a big part of game balance and design.
I was refuting the idea that developers balance the game to sell more stuff. It's a very roundabout way of doing things and diminishes the difficulty and effect of proper balance design.
Fun anecdote: there's an age-old conspiracy theory that Riot released new champions overpowered so players buy them.
The reality is that their playtesting procedures were flawed. They had "inhouse rules" that altered the conditions of gameplay enough from the live environment that real-world balance issues were hard to detect (among other flaws and biases).
First of all, you're right about champ prices. The only way to 'earn' champs is to progress in the leveling system which gives you "champion shards", and despite the name the shards cannot be combined to unlock champions and must be used to turn into blue essence which is the new IP. Boxes/keys are not easily obtainable at first, as you're able to earn a chest every week (unless you have 4 available already then it's capped) and key fragments (3 = 1 key) for being honorable (which has a level system). There's a lot of intricacies and outright for anybody who has been away from the game, they've made it impossible to want to return.
Have you run away yet? Because this shouldn't be how a game should be 'played'.
Riot does tend to overdesign. My humble opinion—it's because of their lack of budgetary restraint.
You're right about it being unapproachable to reactivations. I had the same experience jumping back in. A million currencies and confusing launcher UX.
All I can say is, I feel for the people who oversee the wiki for all this information. They're doing the work Riot really refuses to do.
I'm not really upset by the monetization so much as just how lame their implementation of achievements, especially after all this time, is.
What exactly are we regulating here? This isn't a random lootbox situation.
Yeah, was checking that you need shards for every single champ to unlock them and jesus christ, what a grind. Good thing I already escaped everything MOBA related some years ago lol.
I wish more people would take the Fortnite Battle Royale approach (no, seriously). I think Epic Games has made a good job in that regard. Fortnite could be a game riddled with MTX in the form of loot boxes and be showered in lil' kids and their parents' credit cards money, but they chose to just sell everything upfront with no luck-based boxes, I respect that. Yeah, it may be more expensive, but is far more transparent. Also they are gonna remove the llamas from Save The World, or at least letting you see what you are getting. I wish that was the rule for this kind of stuff, but gambling makes more money at the end of the day.
I play league of legends regularly and I have 0 complains about they monetization just because the game, the real game, is free. This makes 0 difference in game.
What bothers me is how difficult it became to unlock champions.
What bothers me is how difficult it became to unlock champions.
It was poorly worded. I should've been more specific in saying that I am familiar with their balancing process and business KPIs do not factor into it. I also know that directionally, Riot does not let business interfere with their game design, and in fact, tends to keep their business performance shielded from the company (aside from announcing major milestones) in order to keep development focused on giving players a good experience.
Now that I've spent a few years in the cutthroat mobile world, I'd say it's a curse and a blessing to not have to worry about business as a designer, but I'd expect most Era folks to be all on board with that.
The problem with the Fortnite approach is that it doesn't work for most games.
Same with the League of Legends or Dota 2 approach, both of which were imitated in the early MOBA boom and led to a lot of studio closures.
There's one big reason why Fortnite or LOL (with circa 2012 monetization) make bank: scale.
They can afford to make less money per user because they have a lot of users--and they are making less money than if they'd gone all-in with gacha-style monetization (in the sense of gacha games, not just loot boxes).
I highly disagree with you. A verified person mentioning that has experience at a certain game company and saying something about it should be accepted as a truth unless there are some real good points for doubting that person. Your comment should be enough for everyone to think twice before accusing you of "lying".
I imagine most people on ERA, I included, don't work in VG industry as such we should take the words from those that do as important; they give perspective inside an industry that most of the time prefers to not show how it works.
There is 0 excuse to be cynic (or aggressive) towards someone that is verified and is civilly explaining something.
I'm glad mods have 0 tolerance for this behavior. it stifles discussion.
Scumbag company pulls scumbag move that's anti-consumer. The bullshit riot pulls never ceases to amaze me. I'm so glad I quit league not too long ago.
I figured, just covering myself in case it went in that direction. I've noticed an overall...tendency here of people to assume that every person in every company has full input and knowledge about everything going on, and everyone in every company should be held responsible for the worst single examples of anyone in said company.
Firstly you can buy any champ without getting their shard. Getting the shard allows you to either rent them for a couple days, purchase them with blue essence at a significant discount, upgrade them to mastery 6 or 7 without using Blue Essence, or disenchant them for blue essence. (Disenchanting shards is the main way you gain blue essence) The system is slightly faster than League's old system that didn't have shards in it if you just disenchant every shard you get and then buy the champ you want, but if you actually get a couple champ shards that you want it speeds things up quite a bit because using the shard gives you a 40% discount. Not saying that league's grind to unlock champs isn't pretty long, but it hasn't gotten any worse over the years.
League's cosmetic shop is literally strictly better than Fortnite's lol. Every single skin that isn't some sort of seasonal or limited-time event (which is probably around 85% of the skins Riot's ever made if not more) are always completely available to be directly purchased in the shop all the time, they don't do the false scarcity shit like Fortnite does with their revolving store. The lootbox stuff, similar to the champ shards, was something that was added on top of the previous monetization scheme and doesn't make it any worse than it was before it was introduced because you can earn the chests and keys in-game without having to buy anything while still having the option to buy a skin you want directly. Skin costs and RP prices haven't changed at all, so all it really does is give you a way to earn skins without having to pay money. (Although getting a skin you actually want for a champ you play is obviously a massive crapshoot)