|
Oh God, Perfect World bought DE? Well... unless DE is given 100% free reign on their game, this is finally a "sky is falling" scenario. PW has the most mercenary F2P business model in the industry, and they'll make sure that the vast majority of dev time is spent on making freemium crap in lockboxes. To everyone that hates on DE's well-intentioned but often short-sighted updates to the game, if we get the worst case scenario as an outcome of this merger, you'll be begging to have the old Warframe back. I'm sincerely hoping that history doesn't repeat itself.
|
# ? Jul 2, 2014 20:44 |
|
|
# ? May 27, 2024 23:29 |
|
Sophism posted:Oh God, Perfect World bought DE? Well... unless DE is given 100% free reign on their game, this is finally a "sky is falling" scenario. So I have no idea about any of this stuff, can someone give me the footnotes of why this company is poo poo?
|
# ? Jul 2, 2014 21:05 |
|
Sprecherscrow posted:So I have no idea about any of this stuff, can someone give me the footnotes of why this company is poo poo? Basically what he said. Unless you're eager to buy gambling boxes to get any interesting drops, it's worrying.
|
# ? Jul 2, 2014 21:19 |
|
Cease to Hope posted:Basically what he said. Unless you're eager to buy gambling boxes to get any interesting drops, it's worrying. I meant more specifically. What game was it they hosed up and what did they introduce to do so?
|
# ? Jul 2, 2014 21:20 |
|
Sprecherscrow posted:I meant more specifically. What game was it they hosed up and what did they introduce to do so? Champions Online and Star Trek Online most recently. Development basically ceased except for new gambling boxes and their contents. They're not the only publishers to go down that road (EA and SWTOR, NCSoft in general). Picture a WF where all prime parts were sold in randomized booster packs, and tower keys required one per player and had to be crafted in a Vay Hek-like grind. Maybe discontinue old tower rewards, to keep demand high. This is the doomsday scenario, but it's not unprecedented. PW has a record of turning MMOs into slot machines. Cease to Hope fucked around with this message at 21:36 on Jul 2, 2014 |
# ? Jul 2, 2014 21:30 |
|
Cease to Hope posted:Champions Online and Star Trek Online most recently. Development basically ceased except for new gambling boxes and their contents. They're not the only publishers to go down that road (EA and SWTOR, NCSoft in general). Excellent username/post combo right there. There's a lot of bitching and moaning happening on the official forums, but so far all we know for certain is that PWE purchased a certain undisclosed number of DE shares via non-binding agreement. I'm not very good at legalese, but that doesn't sound like a merger or a buyout yet.
|
# ? Jul 2, 2014 21:37 |
|
Personally, I have a hard time ranking most frames, since so many of them are situationally awesome, and situationally dogshit. Couple examples: Nyx: King of infested defense, mediocre to passable against corpus and grineer or in other mission types. Mag: Amazing vs Corpus, decent vs grineer and infested Valkyr: Awesome in nightmare missions and survival missions due to unbeatable survivability, kind of poo poo on defense since she lacks any big AOE CC or nuke. Saryn: Great all around on defense due to huge AOE on Miasma coupled with really high damage. Rhino is especially good against bosses, since he is the only frame that can basically stun any boss, plus he has great survivability. I wouldn't really take Rhino on missions where speed is important, since he's slow as gently caress. (excepting Rhino Prime with Arcane Vanguard helmet, he's basically a god) Nova is also equally amazing at everything since he's reasonably fast and has the best ability in the game, especially now that he can speed as well as slow.
|
# ? Jul 2, 2014 21:38 |
|
If the stuff I read is correct PWE introduced lockboxes within six months of purchasing the makers of Star Trek Online.
|
# ? Jul 2, 2014 21:38 |
|
Nyx wrecks Corpus, because Absorb is magnetic damage. I find her absurd survivability and near immunity to debuffs that are not hard stuns/knockdowns very useful in Survival, too.
|
# ? Jul 2, 2014 21:47 |
|
The best part about the Perfect World acquisition and the whole gambleboxes thing is that gambling boxes are already there for Warframe, they're just not worth mentioning; it's those mod card and fusion-core bundles where buying better ones guarantees that some of the contents are a higher rarity. I guess what people don't want happening is a bundle that's a guaranteed Banshee BP with a small chance of getting the BP for the latest Prime frame? You buy the bundle with plat or craft it for a crapton of materials and then buy or craft a key. That's my guess on how it would work, at least, if it happened.
|
# ? Jul 2, 2014 22:05 |
|
Sprecherscrow posted:I meant more specifically. What game was it they hosed up and what did they introduce to do so? The last game they published that I played was Neverwinter. While the game being buggy was mostly Cryptic's fault, here are some things that were definitely arranged by the publishers: - Weapon/Armor Upgrades worked like gems in Diablo. You got a couple of tier 1 runes which you would merge into a tier 2 rune, and so forth and so on. The success rate on this lowered every tier. After tier 7 or so, the chance of failure was 99%. But there was a cash shop item that would guarantee the success of that one upgrade. Now, keep in mind you'd want to do this for every piece of gear with rune sockets. And that tier 7 wasn't even the best. IIRC it went up to tier 10. - Weapon/Armor Enchantments. Same rules applied to these, but on top of that, unlike the runes that were just monster drops, the best enchantments, (Which gave you a humongous lead in both PvP and PvE.) were an exclusive "lockbox" reward. - Lockboxes were things you got as monster drops by the bucket load. The cash shop had the keys for those and I think they cost 2 bucks each. The lockboxes had mostly junk of course, and much like real world lottery, the odds of you getting something decent - like say those enchantments I mentioned, or a mount - were astronomically low. That didn't stop them from making a server-wide announcement plastered on the middle of your screen every time a mount was awarded though. - Buying a mount over the most basic one cost around 20 bucks. These were convenient in PvE but downright mandatory in PvP. Your team would have a serious disadvantage if you couldn't cap a control point as fast as the team with the slower mounts. - The simple act of using a respec on your character cost 6 bucks. As far as I know they didn't hand out free tokens either unless they completely redesigned a class' talent trees. - The best crafting assistants, which could reduce the time to complete a task from a whopping 8 hours to a mere 1 hour all worked like the runes and enchantments, although these mercifully didn't have a chance of failure. But guess what? While you could get a tier 1 assistant to combine with another into tier 2 and whatnot, there was a gap built into the system: You couldn't combine tier 3 into tier 4, only tier 4 into tier 5. Where did the tier 4 assistants come from? Yep, lockboxes. And even if you did get one, it could be for any of the professions you didn't work on. There's way more to their awful business model, but let me finish this wall of text by addressing their atrocious CS. At some point, a bug afflicted my character, removing one of her class-defining abilities from her slots. And because it was one of these "class-defining" skills, it couldn't be dragged back to that slot, as it wasn't meant to be removed in the first place. I filed a ticket in-game, (Because their CS website had a redirect loop which made it impossible for the entire community to access it, regardless of browser, ISP or DNS. This lasted for at least two months.) I then waited. One week later, I got a response, telling me to file a bug report. I did, and reopened the closed ticket, asking for a resolution. Another week goes by, during which I opened a thread on their forums, detailing the issue with screenshots. It was ignored by PWE but bumped up by random posters. Then I logged in one day to find out my ticket had just been deleted. I opened another, added all the extra information and links to the screenshots. I wad told by people that had the same bug that the only way to fix this was with a respec, so I made sure to suggest that in the support ticket as well. Another week passed, and I got another response, telling me to drag the spell back into the slot, despite the description and screenshots detailing how that wasn't possible. I replied once more, but a few days later finally broke down and got a respec, which sure enough did fix the issue. The whole ordeal left a really bad taste in my mouth though and I quit playing in disgust after this huge exploit came to light shortly afterwards. (That would require another wall of to explain, so let's not do that.) Oh yeah, several months later I reinstalled the game on a whim, just to check if they had ever responded to that ticket. They had not, but they sure as hell had removed it from their system. TL;DR: PWE is literally Hitler, and I'll take DE's misguided good intentions any day over PWE's MO.
|
# ? Jul 2, 2014 22:13 |
|
Sophism posted:Oh God, Perfect World bought DE? Well... unless DE is given 100% free reign on their game, this is finally a "sky is falling" scenario. I'm honestly not a big fan of DE's updates and think that the current model works just fine for Perfect World. Expensive Prime Access bs, grind keys... I don't think lockboxes are any worse than what exists.
|
# ? Jul 2, 2014 22:41 |
|
Coming back to this game from a long hiatus, I'd like to know what are some good weapons to work towards. My current loadout is Branton/Kunai/dual zoren, I'd imagine that's a relic from a time past. It'd be pretty great to find out that kunai are still basically the best secondary though. I have Excal and Ember, but I'd also like a general rundown on the frames, just which ones are and aren't garbage currently as that was a serious problem when I played last. An invite on the PC would also be nice, my nick is "Beogh"
|
# ? Jul 2, 2014 22:44 |
|
Innerguard posted:Interestingly, there are a couple threads on the Warframe forums about the holding company that owns Perfect World and another company buying all outstanding shares in DE. I do wonder if this will have any kind of impact on development and such. Haven't seen a staffer respond to it yet.
|
# ? Jul 2, 2014 22:49 |
|
Damnit, now I have to explain to my friend how this is not a good thing just because they produced a decent WoW clone back in high school on top of this.
|
# ? Jul 2, 2014 22:54 |
|
Sighence posted:Damnit, now I have to explain to my friend how this is not a good thing just because they produced a decent WoW clone back in high school on top of this. Better content and marketing, but more lock boxes?
|
# ? Jul 2, 2014 23:09 |
|
Tezzeract posted:Better content and marketing, but more lock boxes? Marketing, maybe. But why would this mean an improvement content-wise?
|
# ? Jul 2, 2014 23:15 |
|
Tezzeract posted:I'm honestly not a big fan of DE's updates and think that the current model works just fine for Perfect World. Expensive Prime Access bs, grind keys... I don't think lockboxes are any worse than what exists. Prime Access isn't mandatory to enjoy the game. What if you could get the Redirection mod from drops, but it only had 5 pips of upgrades. Of course, Redirection Plus would be a lockbox only reward, and it would share the loot table with every other mod, (Including the 5-pips only Redirection.) Now let's take this a step further, and make it so every weapon above mastery rank 4 requires a "weapon permit" ticket, which would also be part of the lockbox loot table. This on top of having to get your Orokin Catalyst too, but what's that, the recipes for those, as well as Reactors and Formas are lockbox only too? Right now you can buy those directly from the store. In this hypothetical scenario, I'm willing to bet that the price of a lockbox would be around the same price of a Forma. Except it wouldn't be guaranteed. Prime parts? Oh those will still be tied to the void, of course. It's just that the BP to tie them all together is going to be lockbox only. And I'm sure that the keys you can get from normal missions would no longer be guaranteed and go back to being a percentage drop. (Only you know, way lower than it was before.) But don't worry, you'll still be able to buy a random pack of keys from the store. Maybe that still doesn't sound too bad, except that these lockboxes (If the ones in other PWE games are to be used as basis.) would also include all the junk consumables that DE got rid of because they were useless and bloated up the log-in rewards. Then add every single crafting mat to the table too. Because you probably didn't want those Orokin pieces, Prime blueprints or that Serration Plus mod right? So here, have a pack of Nano Spores. I don't want this to be all doom and gloom, but if you honestly think DE's current business model is as bad as say Star Trek Online's, Neverwinter or (God forbid.) Perfect World and Forsaken World, you probably haven't encountered PWE's brand of freemium before. Tezzeract posted:Better content and marketing, but more lock boxes? Hahah better content. No. Unless you mean even more syandanas and weapon skins, but a tenth of the actual new mission modes, enemy types, balance changes and other gameplay additions.
|
# ? Jul 2, 2014 23:18 |
|
You can go try out those lovely games right now, for free. Indeed, I'd encourage anyone who thinks this poo poo might be an improvement in any way to do just that.
|
# ? Jul 2, 2014 23:23 |
|
I'll just bail from the game the moment something that gives you a huge gameplay advantage is only accessible through the market. DE have been pretty good at only putting cosmetic stuff behind the Platinum wall.
|
# ? Jul 2, 2014 23:25 |
|
Prime Access is clearly targeting whales and has guaranteed results, and most of the actually useful stuff in them can be obtained without real money investment. What I'm getting from Sophism's post is that essentially anything remotely useful will require real money or putting up with a gambling system with worse odds than void drop tables, and in some cases both. We complain about 10 rank mods now, but consider those same mods with increasing chance of failure at each level of fusion, reaching 99% at only level 7. Such mods are uncommon or rare, so they'd have to go into lockboxes (two layers of RNG, versus the current one). Along with T2-4 keys, OD key blueprints, and Dragon key blueprints, which all go back to single use. And blueprints for anything that has a mastery requirement. In fact, any gun that can be obtained with credits gets put onto a rental system, and levels do not carry between rentals. Looks like TMC is already on the story: http://themittani.com/news/perfect-world-buy-warframe-developer But speaking of TMC, I think we should look at these: http://themittani.com/features/impressions-warframe http://themittani.com/features/warframe-preparation http://themittani.com/features/warframe-platinum-pound http://themittani.com/features/warframe-getting-most-modules EDIT: Okay yeah Sophism made a new post before I finished this one up and yeah that's even worse than what I came up with here. Fish Noise fucked around with this message at 23:29 on Jul 2, 2014 |
# ? Jul 2, 2014 23:25 |
|
Aw crap, I thought PWE only bought some of the shares, not all of the outstanding shares. Ugh, guess that means they've got full control now. I think we'll know that things are going badly when developers start quitting, that's the #1 thing to look for that the acquiring company has broken promises and expectations aren't being met. Nobody acquires someone going "we're going to change EVERYTHING and make what you worked on horseshit." I've been through about... 4 acquisitions in tech, they're unilaterally terrible when it's a large company that does it, Google not an exception really either. There's about 2-3 companies I know of that have phenomenal retention of the M&As but they're some seriously odd companies that probably get away with this because they make so much money / profit margins. I'd be asking PWE what their target $ / month / player number is over time at this point if I was over there in DE land. Because if it's more than $10, well gently caress them.
|
# ? Jul 2, 2014 23:52 |
|
Going to chime in as an owner of a lifetime account on Champions Online - when people say new content stopped happening when PWE purchased CO, that is absolutely the case. The acquisition of CO by PWE is honestly the point at which I stopped playing that game. I logged in the other day and didn't stay on at all. Word on other forums is that Rebecca's looking into it. It seems that DE people didn't know about this, either. Seems shady.
|
# ? Jul 3, 2014 00:18 |
|
quote:Introducing: Alad's Insidious Weapons Cache!
|
# ? Jul 3, 2014 02:30 |
|
Avynte posted:the stuff of nightmares I read this and Warframe started updating and I had a tiny panic attack.
|
# ? Jul 3, 2014 03:02 |
|
Find it in the "Non-fiction / Suspense" aisle!
|
# ? Jul 3, 2014 03:23 |
|
I guess I should try and get a Bo Prime before this all falls apart. At least I'll have a Kool Staff
|
# ? Jul 3, 2014 06:17 |
|
Just one-shotted Jackal with the Angstrum. There's no such thing as power creep in this game.
|
# ? Jul 3, 2014 06:51 |
|
OmegaGoo posted:Just one-shotted Jackal with the Angstrum. There's no such thing as power creep in this game. Nope. Considering how much you killed yourself, too.
|
# ? Jul 3, 2014 06:53 |
|
doomfunk posted:Going to chime in as an owner of a lifetime account on Champions Online - when people say new content stopped happening when PWE purchased CO, that is absolutely the case. The acquisition of CO by PWE is honestly the point at which I stopped playing that game. I logged in the other day and didn't stay on at all. On the other hand, they focused their efforts on Star Trek Online and it's kept up with content. CO's a bit unfortunate, but when a game bombs that badly, you're throwing good money after bad. Neverwinter isn't great but I don't think its connected to the monetization. It's also just not a very good game and the fans aren't really supporting it. Of course I hope the team at DE manage to continue their creative vision. Unless PWE just wants to slash and burn, I think Warframe will be fine. Tezzeract fucked around with this message at 11:53 on Jul 3, 2014 |
# ? Jul 3, 2014 11:50 |
|
Maybe if it burns the devs can make a new game in the same vein just without Serration
|
# ? Jul 3, 2014 12:08 |
|
DE_Steve posted:Dear Tenno, source
|
# ? Jul 3, 2014 12:09 |
|
Does anyone know who owns DE now? That's who will actually make the decision to sell. They probably aren't employee owned, given what he's saying.
|
# ? Jul 3, 2014 12:28 |
|
I think the big thing is that nothing good will come of PWE getting a hold of any game. Yeah, they might not completely slam it into the dumpster, but they aren't going to do anything of value. In any case I've only been kind of watching WF from a distance since shortly after spectres were added, only logging in for a couple hours to get the event fire/status mods in the past few months. I kind of hope the upcoming ship/dog update gets me interested again, but I'm not going to hold my breath.
|
# ? Jul 3, 2014 16:58 |
|
Worst case scenario, PWE guts the game and everything is awful. Best case scenario, they mostly leave everything alone add their awful cash shop poo poo.
|
# ? Jul 3, 2014 17:06 |
|
Real worst case scenario: PWE upgrades game from Beta to release. All Beta players lose their items but are compensated in the new space dollar currency, which can then be exchanged for Tenno Keys. Tenno Keys can be used to open Tenno Munitions crates which have loot tables including everything ever. E: this is particularly awful timing on the PS4 considering Destiny is around the corner. Doji Sekushi fucked around with this message at 17:36 on Jul 3, 2014 |
# ? Jul 3, 2014 17:33 |
|
I'm not sure what keeps PWE games' players going because if even half of this is true, they'll have bought these companies, made some cash, crashed quickly... and then move onto the next game to ruin. I'm not sure how that's even good business for anything beyond just cash grabs for the short term, but you can't spin that kind of track record very well if 80%+ of the acquisitions you make turns to poo poo within a year or so (clearly it was your fault).
|
# ? Jul 3, 2014 17:55 |
|
Whelp. I reinstalled PWE owned F2P shooter Blacklight earlier this week and apparently that one has totally gone to poo poo on the PS4 despite having a very fair F2P pricing model previously. (Also server lists where hosed up to hell and back.) Combined with my PWE experiences in Neverwinter this might actually be the once in a lifetime moment where :panic: about video game developements might be appropiate. Somebody please tell me the IP laws in wherever DE is situated allow them to reclaim their stuff in cases of buyouts like this.
|
# ? Jul 3, 2014 17:59 |
|
Randler posted:Whelp. I reinstalled PWE owned F2P shooter Blacklight earlier this week and apparently that one has totally gone to poo poo on the PS4 despite having a very fair F2P pricing model previously. (Also server lists where hosed up to hell and back.) Combined with my PWE experiences in Neverwinter this might actually be the once in a lifetime moment where :panic: about video game developements might be appropiate. To be fair, that one just stopped updating content. They introduced bundle packs... and that's about it. No new heroes or weapon parts, no new maps. It sounded like that was due to the devs making some crappy Slender ripoff.
|
# ? Jul 3, 2014 18:16 |
|
|
# ? May 27, 2024 23:29 |
|
necrobobsledder posted:I'm not sure what keeps PWE games' players going because if even half of this is true, they'll have bought these companies, made some cash, crashed quickly... and then move onto the next game to ruin. I'm not sure how that's even good business for anything beyond just cash grabs for the short term, but you can't spin that kind of track record very well if 80%+ of the acquisitions you make turns to poo poo within a year or so (clearly it was your fault). Habit and investment. You and I aren't going to stop playing Warframe immediately once PWE asserts full control over it even though we drat well know what's going to go down, and there's a hell of a lot of dumber, richer people out there than us as well as actual children who just can't buy new games very often and are basically stuck with it. I'm sure we've all wasted more time than we should have on freeware and browser games back in the day. Randler posted:Whelp. I reinstalled PWE owned F2P shooter Blacklight earlier this week and apparently that one has totally gone to poo poo on the PS4 despite having a very fair F2P pricing model previously. (Also server lists where hosed up to hell and back.) Combined with my PWE experiences in Neverwinter this might actually be the once in a lifetime moment where :panic: about video game developements might be appropiate. They're based in Canada. Canada isn't much better than the USA as far as copyright goes. If they don't get away from PWE they're going to lose everything the company has the rights to.
|
# ? Jul 3, 2014 19:19 |