As one of the “historical accuracy nerds” I would like to reply that former Battlefields managed to get along (financially) without silly cosmetics. Microtransactions are not the solution, they are part of the problem!
Instead of forcing questionable content on us (silly skin), EA should return to “pay for additional content”. In BF2, this concept was called “booster packs”, and everybody I know happily payed the price (I think it way 15 or 25 EUR) for this additional content.
If not, what’s the next step? Ingame ads, real ads on house wall and vehicles? Would you still “quietly accept” this, if the ads look reasonably vintage? Where is the limit?
Booster pack or DLC are the same deal.
You are no longer just talking about cosmetic, booster offered maps, vehicles, weapons and gadgets. All restricted to 4 maps. If you did not have you could not play.
MTX does not stop you from playing with others.
You talk of details that is not what your after, you want every character to look the way you want. Yet WW2 was made up of many countries and many environments.
All I see from the historical want is a single colour and single look tired to a single faction. Yet you refuse to see different unit fought so your team faction would be tied to a single maps and even the years they fought would have different uniforms.
What if I wanted to play as an Australian in the pacific. Nope can’t have that must be a US Marine only dress in brand new 1942 jungle greens.
Youse talk of BF as an arcady feel because of custom cosmetics yet insist everyone must play BF as some kind of mil sim. Which seems strange because 64 guys wearing the same 1939 European uniform in North Africa with Tigers and bazooka in a 1941 battle seem just as arcady to me.
Nope it is the guy having mortars on he’s jacket destroyed BFV.
If BF is to be a sandbox, cosmetics should be part of that. You choose your uniform, your weapon, your gadgets or your vehicle.
The problem is that what was once deemed ‘financially’ successful in past Battlefields (with perhaps the exception of BF1) would probably be considered substandard if not an outright failure by todays standards.
Love them or hate them MTX transactions are huge and have massively increased, in terms of profit, what companies consider a successful game.
It would be interesting to see the net profit of Apex Legends, a game funded entirely by MTX.
I do think Dice should have introduced more ‘authentic’ uniforms at launch, purely because it would have made some people happy and it would have been another source of untapped revenue that might have gone into Dice actually investing the resources into fixing their game.
If an ‘off’ switch is possible without degrading the games performance then yeah stick it in the game. Everyone’s a winner.
Personally I think it’s a load of fuss over nothing. If peoples eyeballs and feelings are so precious then they’re probably too sensitive to be playing pew pew games in the first place. Perhaps try conkers, V has way bigger issues.
Why does forcing someone who doesn’t want to see your cosmetics bring you value/joy? That seems like textbook toxic behavior/ Cosmetics are not the primary feature of BF. It’s not Cosmeticsfield also featuring FPS. People paid for a full price game and cosmetics are an ancillary feature that should enhance but never interfere with the core product. What do you care that some 65 year old retiree turns your cosmetics off? Even if 50% (an enormous overestimate - I suspect only 10-15% will turn them off) of the player base turns them off there’s still hundreds of thousands of players who will see them. Even if this were an entirely F2P game that was driven by cosmetics I see no reason why having a small but significant number of players with cosmetics off would detract from a cosmetic buyer’s experience. To address your “bad faith” concern, DICE can have a small tutorial when players enter the marketplace for the first time that the option exists for other players to turn off or limit certain cosmetics. That way buyers are informed so if they object then they can refrain from making purchases.
WW2 presents a scenario where there’s a veritable goldmine of theme appropriate cosmetics to choose from. And moving forward into future titles the same will be true. If DICE can’t find cosmetics designers who can strike the right balance between desirability and theme appropriateness then that’s an entirely preventable failure on their part. I think DICE would also do well to augment Mtrans cosmetic sales with Mtrans vehicle/weapons sales. These would not be super weapons but rather unique variants that are balanced with the rest of the ecosystem. Maps and modes would always be free though so as not to fracture the community.
But NONE of this matters if they cannot fix the quality problem in game. You cannot have show stopping bugs like the vehicle ammo bug in the game for 3 mo before it gets fixed. You cannot release a complex game like this with a pathetic Practice Range that allows for zero loadout configuration and only 2 GV/AV each. Focus on making happy players first and then people will be more inclined to buy cosmetics and support the game.
DICE, if you are reading: Become OBSESSED with quality and value!
Your problem isn’t with me so much as it is with basic economics and perhaps reality. Historically, the bulk of microtransactions come from a small percentage of players. I suspect that out of that small portion a very high percentage of them have a healthy amount of disposable income which would make sense in that wealth distribution, as it is currently across the world, means that most gamers are not particularly affluent and therefore need to maximize their gaming dollars by adopting a strategy of frugality. Purchasing cosmetics would not generally be part of such a strategy. Therefore, all you need to do is make something reasonably cool looking and then plop that Limited Edition logo on it and presto it will be sold out in short order. History has often shown that people WITH money are predisposed towards flaunting their wealth to others. In real life they can do that with expensive trendy brands whereas in BF they could do it with expensive and rare cosmetics.
With regard to reasonableness, it’s not my job to go through the entire encyclopedia of military gear and determine what is appropriate and what is not. A DICE employee should be able to exercise good judgment and tag cosmetics into one of my 3 proposed categories within an acceptable margin of error. Among the many difficult tasks in creating a BF game this should reside near the bottom. By your fatally flawed logic no one should ever submit a bug report unless they know how to code the fix since to do otherwise would be “lazy”. To be clear, I haven’t played the game in well over a year so my suggestion is based from a zoomed out view and directed at the series in general now and moving forward. I was around long enough to see the direction they seemed to be headed towards and my understanding is that they reevaluated and scaled back the craziness. I fear if Firestorm were a larger success then we’d have seen a lot more wacky stuff introduced so it’s failure was most welcome. Especially as age demographics widen it is important that DICE institutes a solution that is able to satisfy the widest swath of people as possible.
“The degradation is not dependent on how many people would actually disable it as players don’t know if others have it on or not, due to the valuation being purely subjective.”
This is true, but I doubt that many people would be under the impression that the people with “no cosmetics” turned on would be significant enough to dissuade them from a purchase. I reckon most would just care what settings their friends had. Others who post their games online don’t really care much as they get to show their cosmetics in their highlight reels regardless. In my estimation, the main factors in determining whether they buy or not will be:
How cool does this look?
How much does it cost? (Good value Y/N)
Does it mesh with my character type and other cosmetics?
How invested in this game am I?
How invested are my friends?
How many friends do I have playing the game?
How many total people are playing the game?
Is this a semi exclusive item or somehow give me prestige?
I personally think they should make default models for low end computer specs and consoles especially. having a toggle for cosmetics would be so nice. for me it’s not even about the immersion. For me it’s about the frame rate. And 64 players all with particle effects unique to their own characters makes for a messy rendering process. if there’s no strategic advantage to wearing a cosmetic then I see no reason why I shouldn’t be able to just toggle off cosmetics.
That’s the thing about exorbitantly priced stuff. You don’t need many people to buy it because the price itself represents potentially hundreds of regular buyers making a more modest purchase. And the guy who wants to buy a jacket can still buy a jacket. Extreme scarcity would exists only for a few items. Then rare scarcity for a few more, then moderate for a somewhat larger amount and then the rest of the items would have no scarcity at all. Properly implemented, there would still be plenty of attractive and unique items for players to buy at reasonable rates. And the thing about people with large disposable incomes (wealth gap being as it is) is that they don’t really don’t care that their item won’t be tradable or transferrable to a new game or that the game itself will have a relatively short lifespan. This is because $300 to them is not the same to them as it is to most people. They spend it without second thought as it they have such large reserves that it doesn’t even show as a blip in their expenditures.
It is not the consumers job to dictate how the AR is supposed to be balanced. In fact, providing specifics can be counterproductive as if the devs implement it then they risk looking like they are favoring a player and/or unable to manage the balancing themselves (obstinately refusing to implement changes in an effort to save face). Our job is to identify a problem and then it is the devs (the people responsible for satisfying and entertaining us) to come up with a solution. If a dev can’t understand that we don’t want to see these monstrosities:
then that’s their failing. I’ve already outlined what I feel is a very sensible setup where you can have 3 settings. Something like “Conventional” that has very limited cosmetics. “Normal” where you have more assortment but the more exotic ones and combinations are left out and then “Full” where anything goes.
As for the knowledge of people being able to turn them off I really can’t see that affecting more than a relative handful of buyers. There’s a global pandemic and large swaths of the population are congregating in large groups and not wearing masks despite the consequences. Some people just don’t give a damn - they do as they please. Most cosmetics people just want to be able to look at their character in the config screen and end of round and that’s all they care about. And the people who want to force power on me and others can get bent. Cosmetics should be about expressing yourself responsibly, not exerting power by effectively trolling others with the most outlandish arrangement possible. But yet again if they want to do that then they can do that to each other while I an others have the option to opt out - more power to them in that scenario so long as their power doesn’t extend into my gameplay experience.
What I’ve always said…
They’re turning Bf into a town fair…
“the more people enter… the more animals you see”
And it’s not a question of “personal ’ freedom”..
Your freedom '…stops in the moment that bothers my freedom ', and ’ one of the fundamental principles.
well your argument was that you suspect a very high percentage of people that buy them have large amounts of disposable income and that those are predisposed to flaunting their income, which would mean that a high percentage of those that buy skins are predisposed to flaunting their income. This is what i disagreed with. But i guess we actually agree that its rather a very small amount of players that fall into this category (also in relation to the amount of players that buy skins in the first place).
Yeah if its implemented “well”, which brings us back to the start of this conversation. What is well for you, for me, for any other random individual? i simply suspect that average joe would only find highly rare stuff to be worthy of purchasing in the first place, at least when applying the system in a way that would make the game “tasteful” or whatever for you as a whole. I’d claim that the vast majority of stuff one can buy now doesnt look cool enough for the average joe to pay any money for. The exceptions here would be the elites but those, according to your preferences, are probably to be implemented as highly rare items considering we have this conversation in the first place.
not at all. The devs have no obligations to listen to any individual players in the first place. The point is that if there is actually an almost uniform opinion amongst the community about a topic concerning the game AND a vision of how it should be, yet the devs don’t make it happen despite them being able to, THEN you have the right to complain and say that “i told you” and things like that. However, when you just say things like “i want more tasteful customisation” you have absolutely no right to complain that they don’t adjust the game to your liking in this regard, even if there is a large number of people using the exact same words. Tasteful can mean so many things and hence a complaint that seems uniform at first glance, itsn’t at all when investigating further what people ACTUALLY want to be changed in particular.
As i said, go ahead and make as many complaints with spongy terms expressing only a very simplified and general idea of what you actually want. but if you do, you have no right to act like you made your point clear and its all obvious what should be changed afterwards.
well you defined one thing that you don’t like but that doesnt mean that its now perfectly clear what exactly you want.
Anyways this example was clearly just generated to make something look as stupid as possible. The jacket and the pants look stupid in combination, but aren’t an issue as individual pieces. You can’t stop people from mismatching on purpose when having customisation separated in singe pieces. if this is an issue then people should complain about how the appearance of a player is defined by four components rather than complaining about the pieces not being tasteful.
The only part of this soldier that could be called “controversial” individually is the face paint. However, you would be surprised by how many people are actually using this exact facepaint, now that its available to alomost everyone, which brings me to another point:
I wanna ask you, who is “we” ("… we don’t want to see these monstrosities)? apparently a lot of players like that particular facepaint even though the historical accuracy brigade was vocal as always giving the impression that people were generally opposed to it. The in game reality tells a different story though. So who are you (as in “we”) to dictate that this facepaint shouldn’t be there? although i personally don’t use it i see why people do its. its the first facepaint that actually looks special. everything previously was just one stripe of some subtle colour somewhere in your characters face. it all looked shallow and boring.
Now, imo almost all the individual pieces are “tasteful”, so what makes your tasteful better than mine? And what makes you think that your tasteful is more representative of the communities opinion than mine? The handful individuals that keep posting over and over again on twitter and reddit?
Its not about forcing stupid looking stuff onto you to assert a powerful position. its about letting people know that you have the money that you have and them not being able to just ignore it. its about money being power, essentially. Anyways, im just saying it devalues the items in this sense.
also what you should consider regarding your three options model:
as i said, it has a lot to do with self-representation. People are NOT just customising to look at it in the customisation screen or end game screens THEMSELVES. Also people still use their customisation as camo sometimes. if a player can’t rely on his character being represented in a specific way then this is impossible to do. it can also generate inconsistencies between players when an enemy is barely visible for one while he’s sticking out like a christmas tree for others.
Yeah, sure. It totally wasn’t outlandish to see a US soldier, clad in tacticool gear, wearing blue/black or bright white camo patterns in the desert, with a bright blue and green bow weapon. Or to see a bright yellow and black Abrams tank riding gracefully across the fields of Golmud. Or getting killed by a guy who melee’d you with a knife that has a bipod on it. That stuff wasn’t wacky at all. /s
By your logic we shouldn’t have moderators, assessors, appraisers, critics, judges, censors, examiners, or arbitrators because they would not be able to satisfy everyone. I beginning to suspect you may suffer from a defect or disability as you seem to have trouble grasping the concept that a person or small group of people can make sound and consistent judgements with regards to categorization. All you need to do is go to a name brand clothing website and see that there is a look and feel to their line that makes them gel together. You keep using the word taste, but this is not about taste. It’s about classification and organization the likes of which have existed for thousands of years.
I don’t know if you are employed or not or if you are owner or manager in your work life but I can tell you from my personal experience the many jobs require you to exercise judgement. They give employee x an objective, some background and examples but other than that they are left to their own devices. This can be done because they’ve had some training and demonstrated proficiency. But if they come back flummoxed or with poor results then they are given their choice of 1 color of brown box to pack their things into and wished well at their next job. There’s an absolute wealth of images on WW2 uniforms available on the web and elsewhere so an employee would not need extensive training. You wouldn’t even need to consult a history expert as that is not the level of accuracy most are looking for. They just want something in the ballpark.
In response to you implying that people won’t pay for the more conservative styles I submit this reddit post: Reddit
Now how that translates into cos sales I profess not to know, but it is indicative that there is a significant base of players interested in these styles
You can’t stop people from mismatching on purpose when having customisation separated in singe pieces.
Of course you can. You tag items that can be used together. It’s not like this hasn’t been done before. You create items that have certain compatibility attributes with one another to prevent stuff like that. Now in full cosmetic mode, by all means, if what’s in that picture is what you want then go for it.
I never said anything about facepaint either. I showed an entire picture so for you to just arbitrarily choose the facepaint and say that’s what I was complaining about is dishonest and false.
*Its not about forcing stupid looking stuff onto you to assert a powerful position. its about letting people know that you have the money that you have and them not being able to just ignore it. its about money being power
*
Fantastic! So if EA is a company that is against bigotry, hatred and discrimination why would they want to incorporate a system that forces players (often at young ages) to subject themselves to messages that their lack of money diminishes their self worth *in a game about WW2? *If you truly embrace a policy of diversity then it makes all the sense in the world to allow space both for those who want free reign to express themselves in a more outlandish fashion AND those who want more conventional aesthetic. *
*With regards to players using customizations for camo, great! They can do that on the full cosmetics servers. On the “medium” level cosmetics servers they’ll have to choose which is more important: Looking good or playing good. And on the no/little cosmetics servers they won’t have the option.
*
*The devs don’t have to listen to individual players, groups of players or even all players. But, EA is accountable to their shareholders so unless they want more of this:
*
*then it behooves them to start listening to those voices espousing wisdom.
I’ll end on this note. I’d love to see examples of players, in this game or elsewhere, saying they won’t buy or will limit their cosmetics purchases if there is an option for other players to turn them off. Feel free to submit forum posts, tweets, youtubes whatever. I want to see this sentiment out in the wild as I have genuinely never encountered it before.
Engineers always have launchers on their view models, Recons always have masks and no combat flak wear and supports always have belts of ammo on them. So no you’re entirely wrong. Equating camo with garbage like the picture above is a complete false equivalence. Hardline would have been a better example if you really had to reach for something, but even that was exclusive to gun bench customization.
No, I’m not entirely wrong. Your subjective stance doesn’t somehow nullify my subjective stance that running around with ridiculous looking camo patterns and nonsensical weaponry is the same as having a guy running around as phantom of the opera (which is a period authentic mixed ww1/ww2 era skin if I’ve ever seen one). Both are starkly, blatantly, glaringly inaccurate. If we’re being objective about whether or not things “fit” the setting and look ridiculous, you don’t get to pick and choose based on your own whim. It’s either accurate or it’s not.
I didn’t say a damn thing about the nonsensical “class differentials”. I was pointing out that your picking and choosing what you deem acceptable based on your own subjective viewpoint is ridiculous. It’s either inaccurate and looks wrong, or it’s not - you can’t have and argue for both without either looking hypocritical or looking like you want DICE to develop games around your own personal preference.
Secondly, essentially every BF game in the past near decade is an example I can use. Bf4 had wacky customization, BF Hardline had more than just gunbench customization and you could literally run around in dinosaur and wolf masks, BF1 had entire factions that had clearly wrong uniforms that were literally copied, pasted, and recolored from the German faction, multiple factions were forced to have a quarter to half of their soldiers as black guys that couldn’t be changed, and soldiers were covered head to toe in unused and prototype gear - a lot of which was not even in use after ww1. It doesn’t matter one bit if you or anyone else thinks it “looks” authentic - its not, objectively.
As someone said to you in this thread in response to the same comment - cosmetic is cosmetic. If it looks outlandish then it’s outlandish whether you personally deem it acceptable or not. They both have the same affect on the setting of the game. You’re sitting here essentially implying that crazy bright colored player camos and ridiculous made up weapons are acceptable, while simultaneously calling an obvious ww1 veteran elite character clad in authentic ww2 and ww1 era clothing “phantom of the opera” SOLELY because the guy has a ww1 era porcelain prosthetic eye cover, which is explained via his backstory - all because of something as subjectively important as the sillouhettes of classes.
I mean, really - you just outright calling my opinion wrong is just nonsense in itself. Calling it “false equivalence” to equate two things that are both blatantly and objectively inauthentic and which both have the same affect on the setting of the said games and how they’re portrayed is a joke. They’re both directly comparable, you’re just bleeting “false equivalence” because you subjectively find one acceptable and the other not so acceptable based entirely on your own completely personal, completely subjective opinion.
At the end of the day, inaccuracy is inaccuracy, inauthenticity is inauthenticity - and DICE doesn’t design games based on whether or not random people on the internet, who belong to the online BF “community” that amounts to MAYBE 1% of the total number of copies of this game sold, deem things personally acceptable. Especially after those same people praised the hell out of the most inaccurate, inauthentic, fantastical, ridiculous, over the top, outlandish, farcical joke of a ww1 game that has ever existed - a game that included all of the same inaccuracies BF5 does, and then some.
Oh - but it’s alright in that game - because we have class sillouhettes. /s
you are still misunderstanding me. I said three times already (i think), that you can go ahead and make as many imprecise claims as you like. you simply don’t have the right to complain if the changes made based on such complaints will not fit your preferences. The issue is that such imprecise formulations can mean so many different things, which are often not compatible with each other in terms of realisation. good judgement is in deed important, never doubted that. Although it highly depends on the kind of job, how important it is.
Anyways, the point is that just because there is (or should be) someone with those skills that (in this case) compiles the communities opinion, doesnt mean that there is someone who understand YOU as an individual. Hence its in your own best interest to make your intentions as clear as possible. What such a person should be able to do, is getting a feeling for what the AVERAGE player wants. However, that is dependent on what you are saying and how you are saying it. you can now lean back and just rely on this person to figure it out correctly OR you do your best to explain your point of view as precisely as possible to eliminate possible misunderstandings. The existence of good judgment does NOT give you a free pass to be as lazy as you want with your complaints whilst simultaneously feeling entitled that things will get adjusted to your preference.
To explain this more precisely:
People are making very good complaints and propositions all the time. If those ideas find significant enough support yet aren’t considered by dice, they have every right to complain. the problem with imprecise terminology is that it gives people a vastly blown up sense of how many others share their own views. Imprecise and spongy terminology is, naturally, usable for a wide variety of opinions and hence is also used by people with a wide variety of opinions. Yet on the surface it looks like they all want the same thing (for example more “tasteful” customisation), while in reality they might mean completely different things with. This then generates this notion of “they don’t listen to us” implying ignorance, but its not that simple at all. If someone applies good judgement when reading such complaints he may find out what has to change for the average guy complaining to be satisfied, however, the spongier the terminology, the more people that mentioned the complaint will remain unsatisfied with the changes cause their opinion differes significantly from the average guy complaining. And exactly THAT is the issue and why i say that if you are in this group you have no right to complain that “they don’t listen to us”. they might have listened but you don’t realise because you get a false impression of how many people share your exact views.
now we can extend on this based on what you are saying about the ww2 images. yes there is a load of them in deed and im sure loads of them were actually taken into consideration. but how do you arrive at the conclusion that it was NOT good judgement? because you personally don’t like it? because there is others that also find them “not fitting” or “not tasteful”? i guess you see where im going with this…
i said average joe wouldn’t be willing to spend money for such skins, not NOBODY.
i personally have never seen that done before in terms of cosmetics. There are such mechanics to prevent gameplay balance in certain games, but i have never customised a character and seen a “you can’t use these two items together because they are visually displeasing”.
i talked about ALL the individual parts. i simply said that the only one that could be considered not tasteful individually would be the facepaint and proceeded to defend its existence as well. so it all boiled down to it intentionally being mismatched and not to a problem of the individual pieces existence. if you have no problem with the facepaint individually, ok. But my point wasn’t dishonest cause i didnt JUST adress that. that was just one part of my adressing the picture as a whole.
Its about the people that want to SHOWCASE their wealth, which are essential in your scarcity model. just because they do so doesnt mean its diminishing the self worth of people with lower financial power.
Also, this is something that is done in real life all the time. Like the new rich guy passing by in his supercar making loud noise to attract attention. Not having such a system in order to make bf some sort of safe space that prevents wealth flexing to protect kids from feeling less worthy is ridiculous. Almost all kids will have to learn that there are other people that are significantly wealthier than their parents or eventually themselves. no reason for bf to be a safe space in this regard.
ah so the three are separated? i was of the impression that each player could individually chose his setting, not affecting where of with whom he plays. Seems a little extreme and honestly unrealistic to me to separate the community into three parts simply because some people don’t want to see customisation. i think one has to draw a line somewhere. A game can’t be for everyone and shouldn’t be for everyone. Which path dice should follow with BF is something i can’t judge about though.
absolutely, if its actual wisdom. My problem is more with those that think that their whole opinion is perfectly explained by one very broad statement, which can hardly be considered “wisdom”.
i myself am an example. knowing that the option exists degrades the value of cosmetics to me. Also this exact discussion was held two years ago: forums.battlefield.com/en-us/discussion/144571/option-to-disable-cosmetics-yeah-hardline-had-that-option-hardline
other in this thread mention the same concern as i do and i will just make the bold claim that this is mostly due to them having the same sentiment or knowing of people with this sentiment. i don’t think people would raise this concern while never having been in contact with a similar mindset.
I notice that you still haven’t found a means of being brief and to the point, not going to read like usual. I will reiterate that my complaint was about changing visuals of the classes such that their clear identifiers are blurred and that there are no gawdy or ridiculous recolours in the soldier camouflages in BF4 which was also my argument before you decided to interpret that freely to mean something completely different. Did you waste money on these abortions by chance? You seem very defensive of something completely ugly and disgusting, far more than is normal. Like I said Hardline is a better example of something being similar to the disgusting not-art style of this game, but even then we at least had 15 months of normalcy before they threw it out the window with gunbench and bright pink player paint and the like. Seriously though learn how to write, nobody reads your posts because they say nothing repeatedly into a wall of nothing.
*The existence of good judgment does NOT give you a free pass to be as lazy as you want with your complaints whilst simultaneously feeling entitled that things will get adjusted to your preference.
* If DICE would like to send me a paycheck to compensate me for the time it would take to prepare a presentation and go into explicit details as to what constitutes a conventional aesthetic vs. what is unconventional but still somewhat associated with the theme vs. what is clearly over the top then I would be happy to entertain their proposal. However, I don’t work for free so if that is what constitutes laziness in your mind then I’ll concede that I boldly and unapologetically lazy by that definition. I feel very confident that the stated objective should be lucid enough that it does not require in depth and exhaustive explanation and as I am not expecting pinpoint precision in its execution there is little motivation for me to invest further time and effort. To be clear I don’t need DICE to understand ME specifically, I need them to understand in terms that are already commonly known, understood and shared among a large portion of the populace. You and I may have huge deltas in what constitutes conventional vs non BUT one of us may have a view that is widely shared and it is THAT view that should be adopted.
I have no sense of entitlement with games beyond what I deem the quality aspect. That is to say that games should be bug minimal, the network should be largely reliable and features that are marketed should be in the game as advertised (e.g. Game X explicitly advertises 100vs100 player multiplayer and the actual multiplayer is 20v20 then that is clearly false advertising). Outside of that I recognize that game companies have a wide berth to create and deliver their products as they see fit. What I do have is an expectation that as a purported AAA studio with all the resources that come along with that, DICE will have in its employ staff who can execute and deliver something in line with my suggestions (should they opt to pursue that course).
*i said average joe wouldn’t be willing to spend money for such skins, not NOBODY.
I suspect given the acceptance of microtransactions that if the game is of good quality and the cosmetics are reasonably priced then there is a sizable market of average joes who will spend some money on conventional or moderate skins. Just because something is theme appropriate doesn’t mean it is undesirable. I mean people are buying military themed games so it stands to reason that they have some built in positive predisposition towards aesthetics aligned with the theme.
*Its about the people that want to SHOWCASE their wealth, which are essential in your scarcity model. just because they do so doesnt mean its diminishing the self worth of people with lower financial power.
*
But you were the one who said it was about power and about making sure others were powerless to ignore their displays:
*its about letting people know that you have the money that you have and them not being able to just ignore it. its about money being power
*
Its about the people that want to SHOWCASE their wealth, which are essential in your scarcity model. just because they do so doesnt mean its diminishing the self worth of people with lower financial power.
Showcasing is fine and is essential in the scarcity model we are agreed but it is not necessary to exclude the option that allows users so inclined to themselves customize which customizations (broadly speaking) they see. And are you saying that gratuitous displays of wealth that people are forced for potentially hours on end to view in an experience that is supposed to be for leisure can’t have a negative psychological effect? If so then that flies in the face of both logic and what I can recall seeing on the subject.
*Also, this is something that is done in real life all the time.
*
Fantastic! Then we can agree since there is already sufficient supply of these instances that forcing it on those opposed would be unnecessary, redundant, and harmful. We can certainly agree that learning about power dynamics is a necessary part of maturity but, just like a nutrient taken in excess, being constantly subjected to it is toxic.
ah so the three are separated? i was of the impression that each player could individually chose his setting, not affecting where of with whom he plays.*
*No, in my model all players play together but they see different cosmetics based on their settings. So if their camo is aligned with the most conventional setting then they are all good. If they are using cosmetics outside of that then they are opting for form over functionality. Just like when choosing a weapon/vehicle upgrade, you have to take into the considerations the positives and negatives of your choice.
*i don’t think people would raise this concern while never having been in contact with a similar mindset.
*All the same, given that you appear to be very passionate about the issue I’d like to ask again that you share some more specific examples of players (I appreciate you submitting yourself as an example but I think most had already concluded that you were in the camp you appeared to be arguing for) in this game or others stating that they will curtail or outright refuse to buy cosmetics because the option for others not to see them is present. *
*
Ah yes, the old tried and true “i didn’t read your argument, but your argument didn’t pertain to what I actually said and you seem defensive” fallback. A classic.
And no, I haven’t spent a dime on this game outside the base cost of the game itself when I bought it. The only Elite I own is Misaki, who I earned as a chapter tier reward, and whome I have not seen a single time in the company tab because I’m not interested in that skin at all.
I’m just not going to let subjectively disliked facets of the game ruin the entire experience for me, and have done well by doing so. I don’t sit here and act like cosmetic items I see in the game actually have a negative effect on gameplay or my overall experience. Because this game has been great fun from my experience and I’ve put more time into it than the past 4 BF titles despite playing a substantially larger amount and variety of games these days.
I’m not going to sit here and act as if my subjective personal preference is what video games should be designed around. Because I’m not one to act as if video games are custom, made-to-order products tailored to random individuals either, nor am I one that acts like every game in a franchise is supposed to be directly akin to my preferred title.
I like change. I like my BF experience not being so static and repetitive after not only playing every single one of these games for thousands of hours over the course of almost 20 years, but after getting 4 BF titles in a row in modern settings that felt like damn near clones of each other in terms of raw gameplay, and coming off the coat tails of a ww1 title that was a breath of fresh air to say the least.
And like I said above - your subjective opinion doesn’t somehow magically nullify my subjective opinion. Calling me entirely wrong for stating my own opinionated viewpoint in response to yours is just…childish.
Lastly, I’ve said it once and I’ll say it as many times as it comes up:
If you don’t like reading, don’t spend so much time on a social platform wherein legitimately the only action performed by users is reading and writing. Just as DICE shouldn’t morph their game design to fit your person whim, I’m not bastardizing my posts to compensate for your lack of a will to read.
Let me get this straight. You have a live service model which is supported by cosmetics and people want EA to undermine that by introducing an on/off switch. How the hell did this thread get past the first page?
