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And I know terrible opinions, I have hundreds of them
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Oct 11, 2022 14:19
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Sammus posted:Statistically, they probably are worthless to Activision. So why pander to people who aren’t going to pay for their product? I never really thought about the value of the customer this way so yeah makes sense.
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Oct 11, 2022 14:21
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History Comes Inside! posted:This opinion is terrible They are right in the 1st paragraph, but the 2nd lmao
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Oct 11, 2022 14:24
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Requiring cell phone numbers is pretty extreme given that they're a very high monthly cost especially in places with poo poo mobile plans like Canada, where the cheapest non-prepaid plans are like $40 a month which is an awful lot to pay for something that a person hasn't required until now. Even if you lucked out with a non-prepaid, the cheapest phone lines in Canada are still like $15 a month which is, again, a tremendous amount to pay for something that you might not actually need. Canadian cell plans are in fact so notoriously expensive that there are people who just get a US plan with Canada roaming because that's cheaper.
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Oct 11, 2022 14:24
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I just installed Overwatch 2 to try and see if my (Canadian) prepaid phone plan would let me activate and it didn't even ask me, it just queued me up for Quick Play. Did I miss something or get grandfathered in since I bought Overwatch at launch or something? I haven't installed or played in like five years.univbee posted:Requiring cell phone numbers is pretty extreme given that they're a very high monthly cost especially in places with poo poo mobile plans like Canada, where the cheapest non-prepaid plans are like $40 a month which is an awful lot to pay for something that a person hasn't required until now. Even if you lucked out with a non-prepaid, the cheapest phone lines in Canada are still like $15 a month which is, again, a tremendous amount to pay for something that you might not actually need. Canadian cell plans are in fact so notoriously expensive that there are people who just get a US plan with Canada roaming because that's cheaper.
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Oct 11, 2022 14:28
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Volte posted:I just installed Overwatch 2 to try and see if my (Canadian) prepaid phone plan would let me activate and it didn't even ask me, it just queued me up for Quick Play. Did I miss something or get grandfathered in since I bought Overwatch at launch or something? I haven't installed or played in like five years. Yeah they grandfathered in a bunch of original overwatch players after the poo poo hit the fan
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Oct 11, 2022 14:32
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To make it clear I don’t even play calladoody and I have a phone plan I just think it’s extremely bullshit and isn’t going to stop cheaters at all tbh
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Oct 11, 2022 14:32
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Sammus posted:Statistically, they probably are worthless to Activision. So why pander to people who aren’t going to pay for their product? This is a classic position of someone who thinks that anything that can't be easily quantified must necessarily not matter.
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Oct 11, 2022 14:33
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History Comes Inside! posted:To make it clear I don’t even play calladoody and I have a phone plan I just think it’s extremely bullshit and isn’t going to stop cheaters at all tbh holy poo poo you are showing empathy for someone who is not you no wonder you are getting pushback
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Oct 11, 2022 14:34
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I do play the occasional calladooty and have a prepaid plan so I'm hoping this doesn't cut me off. My number is my old number that used to be on a plan though so hopefully they can't tell that it's prepaid.
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Oct 11, 2022 14:34
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My phone number can't be a cell phone since I'm grandfathered from two overlay area codes ago at least. Wonder how it'd fit.
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Oct 11, 2022 14:37
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Many non prepaid plans are expensive as anything, especially in the states and canada. It seems horrid to want to prevent people from playing a video game, just because they could not afford a monthly handset and data plan. Double so when you have prepaid plans over here that are unlimited minutes and calls and 5GB of data for only £10 a month - which is all some can afford.
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Oct 11, 2022 14:44
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Casnorf posted:holy poo poo you are showing empathy for someone who is not you no wonder you are getting pushback 
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Oct 11, 2022 14:44
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VideoGames posted:Many non prepaid plans are expensive as anything, especially in the states and canada. My understanding is that our plans are good compared to the US and Canada too. A friend was tweeting about how the price of a 100gb+ monthly contract here is like, only about 10gb in the US
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Oct 11, 2022 14:46
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What’s the overlap in the Venn diagram of people who have a modern gaming console with broadband internet but no cell plan Like, I do not want to white knight this phone number plan because I don’t think it’s particularly good, but I’m having trouble dismissing it out of hand solely because it’s gatekeeping considering what all else is required to Call My Duties.
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Oct 11, 2022 14:53
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Escobarbarian posted:My understanding is that our plans are good compared to the US and Canada too. A friend was tweeting about how the price of a 100gb+ monthly contract here is like, only about 10gb in the US Exactly. When I was in the states back in 2009 I got given a phone by my company with $300 worth of credit on it. I discovered that where I was, they taken money off your credit for calls you receive - which did not happen in the UK. This was a big shock. No idea if things have changed now but it would not surprise me if it was still the case. Cheaters will find a way to cheat. Phone numbers is the same thing as endless piracy ads in front of DVDs or Denuvo style software blocking installs on PC for unknown reasons - cheaters do not care and regular customers will get affected.
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Oct 11, 2022 14:53
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Soul Glo posted:What’s the overlap in the Venn diagram of people who have a modern gaming console with broadband internet but no cell plan Me, I'm the guy with Straight Talk for my carrier and I have a ps5. Prepaid got me thru my homeless years and Ive never had an issue with it.
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Oct 11, 2022 15:06
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Soul Glo posted:What’s the overlap in the Venn diagram of people who have a modern gaming console with broadband internet but no cell plan Kids have games consoles Whether or not you think little Timmy should be out there doing sick 360 no scopes with the grown ups is another matter entirely, but imagine the absolute shitstorm that would ensue if they locked every E-number fuelled preteen in the world out of Fortnite or Roblox for not having a contract phone number
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Oct 11, 2022 15:09
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VideoGames posted:Exactly. When I was in the states back in 2009 I got given a phone by my company with $300 worth of credit on it. I discovered that where I was, they taken money off your credit for calls you receive - which did not happen in the UK. This was a big shock. No idea if things have changed now but it would not surprise me if it was still the case. Sure, the hard core cheaters will always cheat. But for most, I believe cheating is a matter of convenience. If you raise the bar high enough that cheating becomes inconvenient then the majority of it stops. Tying your account to an expensive personal identifying device that 98% of their player base already has is an excellent solution. No one is going to want to have to change their cell number to play CoD with their friends because they spent a weekend cheating. This will essential kill cheating from anyone under 18 because getting your cell number changed as a minor is even more annoying. Activision has to do something drastic. Even the beta for Modern Warfare 2 was besieged with cheaters the moment it went live on PC. Since PC/Console crossplay isn’t going away anytime soon, this is a decent start.
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Oct 11, 2022 15:12
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Soul Glo posted:What’s the overlap in the Venn diagram of people who have a modern gaming console with broadband internet but no cell plan This was more of an issue for Overwatch because you legit had younger players who frequently would not have the set of circumstances to justify getting an actual cell plan for. (You do for CoD as well but at least that's M-rated and theoretically shouldn't have people that young playing). And having a cell phone plan at least in Canada is going in directions not dissimilar from the way cable cutting and land lines were going several years ago, it's just waaay too expensive and trivially easy to work around. You only need a cell phone plan to be reachable with a normal phone number (which is becoming less and less necessary with things like email, Teams/Zoom, iMessage etc.), and to have internet connectivity when you're in locations where you don't have Wi-Fi connectivity, which is also becoming less of an issue because Wi-Fi is available at most people's work places and there are a lot of ways it can be bypassed, or even not actually useable anyway, when commuting. If you're in a civilized country where you can get a great cell phone plan for $15ish a month that's one thing, but Canadian cell plan rates are insane especially if you want something actually usable (it's like $80+ a month to get a plan that has a monthly data allowance that doesn't immediately result in a $50 charge the second your wi-fi hiccups), so it'd be in the neighborhood of $200 a month for a family of three to have cell phone plans when you can very easily just have one plan where the other family members just use Wi-Fi and save like $120+ a month. It is easy to justify spending $650cad on a PS5 that will last a few years at least but a lot harder to justify spending that much on like 8 months of cell service when no one other than scammers are actually calling your phone number anyway. If it was a one-and-done purchase that's one thing, but this is a subscription and an exorbitantly expensive one for Canadians. Cancelling a cell phone plan would be easier in terms of working around it and save more money than cancelling all my streaming accounts. univbee fucked around with this message at 15:29 on Oct 11, 2022 |
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Oct 11, 2022 15:15
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Sammus posted:Sure, the hard core cheaters will always cheat. But for most, I believe cheating is a matter of convenience. If you raise the bar high enough that cheating becomes inconvenient then the majority of it stops. Tying your account to an expensive personal identifying device that 98% of their player base already has is an excellent solution. No one is going to want to have to change their cell number to play CoD with their friends because they spent a weekend cheating. This will essential kill cheating from anyone under 18 because getting your cell number changed as a minor is even more annoying. I just cannot accept locking a group of people out of playing a game for the crime of being poor as a decent start to combat cheaters. They could do something else. I also cannot justify giving Activision, the incredibly terrible company, my phone number. I do not play Call of Duty or any of their blizzard games so this does not affect me. This is not something I can give any applause to.
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Oct 11, 2022 15:33
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Instead of a phone number the CoD authentication servers should ask the player to compose a short essay on a randomly selected American military intervention in the past half century for each login attempt.
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Oct 11, 2022 16:22
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Escobarbarian posted:My understanding is that our plans are good compared to the US and Canada too. A friend was tweeting about how the price of a 100gb+ monthly contract here is like, only about 10gb in the US lol. goddamn.
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Oct 11, 2022 16:26
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I never finished act 3 of DQXI, not because I got bored but more because I hated the feeling that it was undoing everything I loved about the story. Pretty much when act 2 ended I was like “man I’m so happy they never like went back in time and undid what happened, the story actually had real stakes” only for act 3 to literally do that lol. Left a sour taste on an otherwise awesome game.
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Oct 11, 2022 16:35
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Maybe finish it so you can see the actual end of the story then
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Oct 11, 2022 16:36
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History Comes Inside! posted:Kids have games consoles wait do you think i could survive more than a quarter of a second if lil timmy is verboten
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Oct 11, 2022 16:39
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the end is just as saccharine as the rest of the chapter DQXI was good overall but it did get wearisome how determined it was to prevent anything interesting from ever happening
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Oct 11, 2022 16:39
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hahaha no
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Oct 11, 2022 16:39
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A wealth gate, to play a game, I don't fundamentally have a problem with. I mean, that's literally my day job, right? Where my issue lies is the blatant shittiness of having a wealth gate on a game that's driven by microtransactions. At least lie to me, give me something to work with, you know? We know MTX-fueled games are whale bait, but the incidental benefit to not-whales is a necessary component of actively not seeing that it's lovely. Benefits outweigh evil. That's fine! That's a choice you can make. Here, between Overwatch 2 and Call of Duty they're stripping the benefits...it's a lot harder to overlook the evil when the evil is all there is.
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Oct 11, 2022 16:43
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Escobarbarian posted:My understanding is that our plans are good compared to the US and Canada too. A friend was tweeting about how the price of a 100gb+ monthly contract here is like, only about 10gb in the US
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Oct 11, 2022 16:48
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History Comes Inside! posted:To make it clear I don’t even play calladoody and I have a phone plan I just think it’s extremely bullshit and isn’t going to stop cheaters at all tbh I'm not wild about it either, but it's easy to see how it puts significant drag on signing up a new account, so it's going to do a lot to deter cheating and ban evasion. We're currently posting on a forum that charges a small fee to register for pretty much the same reason, and it works. The economics of offering free games where you can interact with other players and potentially ruin their fun isn't going to work out without some sort of lever to mitigate abuse in a cost effective way. I'm not sure what the answer is here, except for dropping f2p and going back to charging money up front. Or dropping PC support, though that means forcing some of your playerbase to purchase consoles to play, and it's a bet that those consoles won't get hacked. My takeaway is that the economics of f2p games generally leads to gross unnatural things, and this phone debacle is another example to put next to microtransactions and addiction-inducing mechanics.
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Oct 11, 2022 17:17
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acksplode posted:I'm not sure what the answer is here, except for dropping f2p and going back to charging money up front. Or dropping PC support, though that means forcing some of your playerbase to purchase consoles to play, and it's a bet that those consoles won't get hacked. My takeaway is that the economics of f2p games generally leads to gross unnatural things, and this phone debacle is another example to put next to microtransactions and addiction-inducing mechanics.
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Oct 11, 2022 17:20
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Volte posted:50GB of data is about $100/mo here in Canada, which is the most amount of data I can find available, and all the cellphones companies conspicuously have exactly the same plans at exactly the same price points. Lower amounts aren't really that much cheaper and it bottoms out at about $55/mo. There's no such thing as unlimited (although they market it as unlimited because technically after you exhaust your data cap, you can still browse at like 10KB/s). It's a real horror show. jesus! I pay £20 a month for 160GB data and unlimited everything else
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Oct 11, 2022 17:21
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Volte posted:MW2 isn't free to play, it's a full priced game Aren't they planning to go f2p with it or something? Overwatch 2 is f2p right?
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Oct 11, 2022 17:22
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acksplode posted:Aren't they planning to go f2p with it or something? Overwatch 2 is f2p right?
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Oct 11, 2022 17:25
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OW2 is F2P yes, but it's also a mandatory update for OW1 with the same executable, with the hilarious side effect of locking out people with prepaid phone plans who previously bought OW1 from playing either game.
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Oct 11, 2022 17:26
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Volte posted:OW2 is f2p so the phone thing at least has some justification however dubious, but MW2 isn't and won't be. Warzone (the battle royale COD) is free to play. I see, sounds like Warzone is fuckin things up here. I agree it's 100% stupid to impose SMS protect on a game where you're buying a copy or paying for a subscription.
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Oct 11, 2022 17:28
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Arist posted:OW2 is F2P yes, but it's also a mandatory update for OW1 with the same executable, with the hilarious side effect of locking out people with prepaid phone plans who previously bought OW1 from playing either game.
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Oct 11, 2022 17:30
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Volte posted:I bought OW1 and didn't get asked for any phone number, although I guess they might already consider me authenticated since I'm pretty sure that was a requirement years ago for the Diablo 3 RMAH. Someone said they walked back the requirement for existing OW players after the controversy so maybe that's what is going on. In any case it sounds like a real poo poo show. They did eventually rescind the need to verify for the overwhelming majority of OW1 players, yes.
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Oct 11, 2022 17:31
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Escobarbarian posted:jesus! I pay £20 a month for 160GB data and unlimited everything else The cheaper plans typically have extremely low data allowances (like 500 megs or a gig) and if you go over you start getting charged fifteen cents per megabytes so you have to make drat sure data-hungry apps like video streaming have strict settings to prevent them from grabbing data except over Wi-Fi. We once got a $50 overage charge because my wife had turned off Wi-Fi (I forget why) and our son watched YouTube for a few hours. There were also stories of people who live close enough to the US border that their phone can accidentally connect to a US cell tower and they wind up with roaming charges of like 6 figures, but I think the CRTC actually does mandate that they have to cut you off and require you to explicitly re-enable your connection once you hit like $50 in overages to prevent your bill from going up like a pinball score. Canada has by far the most expensive cell phone plans in the developed world and I think there are very very few countries which charge more for what you get, it's like North Korea and maybe a single-digit number of particularly isolated countries.
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Oct 11, 2022 17:32
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