No one that I have seen has yet been able to identify how this “undermines” the Live Service model. I keep hearing about these unicorns who will be so emotionally distraught that a small fraction of players can’t see their meticulously crafted “look” that they not only will refrain from purchasing digital threads, but will go so far as to abstain from buying the game at all. Yet, aside from one passionate forum goer here I’ve yet to see these enclaves of fanatical adherents to the cult of fashion. Perhaps they prefer to remain hidden lest they be mocked for their narcissism.
In any event, reasons why you would include such a “switch” include:
BF has traditionally been a more conservative game in terms of theme. Take the single player campaigns as an indicator of the feeling it is going for. There’s an undeniably stoic feeling to the games that is reinforced by the soundtrack. There already exists more over the top and fantasy like themed shooter games like Fortnite, Valorant, Overwatch and even EA’s own Apex Legends. That market is well served. Giving what I project to be a relatively small fraction of players the ability to turn off (or limit to a degree what customizations they see) doesn’t damage EA as these players likely would not have been huge microtransaction buyers to begin with but it could prevent some potential customers from buying if they are forced to view customizations that effectively (for them at least) destroy/distort the theme.
Just because a particular player is inclined to pick the option for cosmetics off doesn’t mean they will always have it turned off. Perhaps they just like to be able to switch between the two worlds and appreciate being given the option. And perhaps there are people who start with a negative perception, but through seeing youtube/twitch streams with players wearing cosmetics they are won over to the idea and become cosmetic buyers. By making the experience more organic and inclusive you create opportunities for those players to gradually convert to the model and those, once ardently opposed to ever buying, turn into loyal participants in the microtransaction market. And even the players who never buy a single cosmetic, are staunchly anti-cosmetic and only play because they have the option to turn them off are potentially “good” customers in that they may have friends that they influence to buy the game who themselves ARE inclined to buy cosmetics.
It was mentioned that perception that players can turn them off would be more detrimental to buyers than the actual amounts of players with “cos off” enabled. But I would counter that more important than that is whether the game is still popular or not and if a poorly implemented cosmetic system prevents some players from buying or shortens their play lifespan then that would be the bigger psychological determinant as at least if there are people playing there is a chance they have cosmetics turned on while if they are not playing at all then there is zero chance of them seeing your customizations.
I am a proponent of the Live Service model despite this disastrous initial effort. It failed not because Live Service is doomed but because the game suffered from atrocious quality problems and the content was rolled out far too slowly. Theoretically, if they apply the lessons learned to the next campaign they should be much better off but they should also augment the market to include paid vehicles/weapons and gadgets (balanced, not Pay For Advantage). Selling V/W/G also allows an opportunity to make sales to those customers who don’t find any interest in buying cosmetics but DO like practical items that have a major effect on gameplay. Maps should always be free though to prevent fragmentation and there should also be free weapons and vehicles released too, but nothing should prevent them from setting aside certain V/W/G for the marketplace.
Circling back to the unicorns, I find it unfathomable that some people would be kept up at night in cold sweats dwelling on the notion that a likely small minority players won’t be willing/able to see their outfits. No one wins the lottery and then refuses to accept the prize because they have to pay half in taxes. There’s still a huge audience for people to show off their purchases, especially with streams augmenting those views, and having an “off” option should only serve to increase player count AND player engagement time. Both of which should ultimately have positive effects on microtransaction sales.
Sort of reminds me of how many in this community seem to be kept up at night in cold sweats because they see inaccuracies in a ww2 game and can’t handle a game not being exactly what they want it to be.
All this arguement about cosmetics should be immaterial for the next game as SURELY dice will choose a setting where they can easily be more free and easy with the cosmetics and have less, if any, historical constraints. For whatever reason I think people seem to care less about the appeareance of some near future or modern day squaddie or GI than they do when trying to portray a WW2 game. I wouldn’t be surprised if we have some fictional multinational forces, or NATO v Warsaw Pact kind of situation, that way you could easily incorporate a wide range of uniforms, helmets, and other gear, Rather than being constrained to just a stahlhelm, or Brodie for the most part. Though Iike much of the rest of the game, the cosmetic mtx side of BFV seems rushed and not fully thought through. The possibilities were almost endless, yet we ended up with overpriced cartoony elites.
There absolutely should be a lot more latitude in what they can do for modern day/future/or alt history but there are still limits they should stay within to maintain theme discipline or if they do want to do some really over the top stuff then that’s fine so long as they have a cosmetics toggle that will allow players to only see conventional cosmetics.
And if the option to piece together outfits is included in future titles they should be properly tagged so you don’t get someone throwing together some hideous combination of parts just for lulz..
Personally - I could give two shakes less about cosmetics. I think they’re a waste of time for DICE when there’s so many other issues with the game, and the fact that they keep taking features away instead of enhancing / improving. Instead, they waste their time creating all of these ridiculous cosmetics.
I liked it back in the early days when you would earn patches, and those patches might be on your uniform, but otherwise they were uniforms.
BF1 forward has turned this into a modern-day Barbie game.
I’d rather see them fix issues, improve the game, and bring back the features they’ve taken away.
They are revenue drivers and EA needs that revenue to fund future development. These games are only getting more complex and intricate both from a feature standpoint (e.g. dynamic destruction, fortifications) and from a graphical fidelity standpoint which in turn drives up costs. Marketing costs also are constantly on the rise so EA needs revenue streams to offset these and if you aren’t going to charge for full DLC packs then you need some way to pay for development costs.
And it’s not like the people working on cosmetics are the same people in charge coding and gameplay.
The hope is that the revenue brought in can help fund the fix for whatever deficiency DICE is suffering from whether that be manpower, talent, leadership or technology. And a cosmetics marketplace certainly can add value to the game and the player’s experience when done correctly.
The fear is that the DICE uses the revenue to focus on further making the game look and sound pretty (which it already does exceedingly well) instead allocating it towards fixing core gameplay and increasing quality.
That excuse is lame. They’ve been making games without microtransactions for decades. I don’t buy it for a hot second. I remember when you’d be able to go buy a disk for $5 and get 10 games on it that the first four levels or whatever were free. Now you’re telling me that they can’t develop a $70 (base cost) game without microtransactions with ridiculous looking cosmetics that add absolutely NOTHING to the game? I call BS on that one.
No - possibly not. But the BUDGET that is spent on those knobs doing cosmetics could be spent on fixing things like the death bug, or investing in securing the games against those that want to bypass the rules, etc. I feel the exact same way about cosmetics as I do the word filter. I think it’s a ridiculous thing to be focused on when there’s so many other issues.
The “hope” of the revenue actually contributing to overall fixing of the game is a false one. EA is more about appeasing the shareholders than they are about winning, satisfying, and retaining fans. EA has made their footprint so big in the gaming world that they don’t have to care about how gamers feel about them.
They’re not using those funds as you hope. I can guarantee it. Look at the history of Battlefield (and every other franchise other than BR games that micro transactions are in) and tell me that, when you have bugs that have been there since launch day, that have never been resolved, yet they’re cranking out cosmetics one after the other, that the microtransactions are funding the fixing of the games.
I get the theory, I get the hopes, but the reality is that all they do is use cosmetics to generate revenue. That’s it. Period. They don’t contribute to the game, they don’t help them use the funds to fix bugs or dev on future games. At least that hasn’t been the case yet.
Some of the models are not too bad, Dice tried their hardest to keep ¯_(ツ)/¯'s out of a ww2 game and you can see that in how they did the cosmetics. Seems a bit of a stretch to call your game a ww2 but keep the main villain out of the picture. In the end they did at some maps with the ¯_(ツ)/¯ cross and some models with ¯_(ツ)_/¯ cross. They went wrong with the cosmetics when they added all the women and weird face painting. They should have kept it sensible but then the whole thing was to be as historically inaccurate as possible as we all knew that from the trailer already. Personally I don’t mind the cosmetics if they are done where it makes sense but wouldn’t miss them if they were gone. Even counter strike has cosmetics now and they have a whole market for them. People paying a lot of money for stupid gun cosmetics. End of day they need a way to charge £80-90 for the game it seems and they either going to do that with premium which divides the map lists or some other method. They shot themselves in the foot with this game in how they went full woke on ww2.
Once again you’re deciding what the parameters of my original comment were. They were left pretty closed off, because e basis of my argument has still not even been remotely addressed by you. If the camo in BF4 is half as egregious as you claim go on and post an example. Find me a thread that whines about something camo related other than DC LA being extremely annoying to obtain. You can’t because this comparison is completely out of touch with reality. It is not even remotely the same thing as face paints, opera masks, ghillie suit pants and dozens of other examples. This is exactly how and why you failed. There was no room for you to insert nonsense about how it doesn’t ‘feel’ that bad or whatever, it was literally a direct comparison you never went the distance and actually did because you realized you’d be wrong. Go get unnecessarily heated in your response and get yourself banned for another year already, tired of your page stretching nonsense.
don’t see why they should get you monetary compensation when its YOU having the issue, not them. they don’t need your help, but you want them to change something. If you want to do so then go ahead and prepare your presentation. OR you don’t but then your interests aren’t entirely clear and you hence shouldn’t be surprised if they aren’t understood properly (no amount of good judgment will make one able to read your mind and see threw spongy terminology). This whole thing about payment is completely ridiculous. asking for money to represent your own interests.
As i said before, spongy terminilogy makes one overestimate the amount of people that share your own opinion. on top of that the amount of complaints about cosmetics are rather limited. Not a lot of threads going around about this topic, its just the people that are against it tend to be very vocal about it (withing these discussion or on announcements trailers and such). Considering this and the sheer amount of people running around using these skins and most recently the dragon facepaint (its literally everywhere at this point), i highly doubt that its your opinion on the matter that is more “widely shared”. don’t get me wrong, i don’t think that theres a lot of people out there that would define the exact same things “appropriate” and “inappropriate” for this game. however, i DO think that the vast majority of players, just like me, don’t really see an issue with them hence considering them for the most part “appropriate”.
Well yeah, people most likely won’t DISLIKE it, but that doesnt mean that they would pay money for “moderate” skins. Which is btw yet another of these spongy terms. I’d like to disagree with this but maybe we don’t even disagree at all. i simply don’t know what you mean exactly by “moderate” and hence my guess of your definition of “moderate” might be significantly different to what you actually mean by it. I guess if the two aren’t really compatible i just lack good judgment.
Anyways, leaving the sarcasm behind again, i highly doubt that average joe would pay money for something that is available for CC now for example. Every now and then there are soldier customisation items up for grab with CC which i would assume can be considered “moderate” by your definition. Normally i can’t even make out any distinct differences to the existing normal skins when looking threw them (while i would consider myself a players that is somewhat meticulous when it comes to customising his soldiers). Average joe won’t spend money to make his soldier have a jacket with one of these box radios on the back and an additional few pouches on the front in a different green or brown. These items are additional purchases, they need to be special and obviously different to the existing ones.
Just as it is in real life, one can still ignore such flexing or acknowledge it yet simply not care about it. If someone decides to drive by you walking down the street a couple of times in his supercar doesnt mean that he will diminish your selfworth. However for him, to value his car to its fullest, its important that you are there and that he knows you will see him. As i said before, its not important what you think or what impacts you, its important how he THINKS it will impact you.
well if it does then the person impacted will struggle in real life all the time. Then its rather an issue of the person not being compatible to our society rather than a problem of the game. as i said flexing is everywhere, in every activity that involves other people. Doing some sports? there will for sure be some other people that wear higher value/branded clothes or other sports equipment yet you will play with/against them for hours potentially. Thats how the world works… as i said no reason for bf to be a safespace
“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.” absolutely not. As i said already, its not the games responsibility to be a safe space. its its harmfull to an individual this individual will run into problems no matter what, so theres absolutely no reason to restrict stuff based on this argument.
then i ask myself what you meant by this "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. "
Terms like “full cosmetic SERVERS” aren’t the right ones to use to express this.
Not sure how this should be possible as there is literally no discussion about this specific point anywhere. People aren’t just gonna state that. However, as i said, as people raise this concern when confronted with this proposition (and not in small numbers) its rather obvious that they would most likely devalue them themselves as well. People have a strong bias to think that others act and think in the same way as they do themselves (im aware that im guilty of this myself). This is especially the case if its a topic which the person has never been in contact before. So naturally, when they mention this as a concern for the average buyer, its most likely because its a concern of themselves first and foremost.
Anyways, we got to a point where we basically just argue about how people would act in a certain situation and we’re not getting anywhere, but rather just repeating our stance.
I’ll therefore end my part in this now.
You introduce a product, you want to maximize the amount of people that see that product on the field. Same goes with cosmetics. This isn’t about a well served market. It’s about maximizing a games profit potential. Ask Activision to add an on/off switch to their more grounded modern warfare series, they’ll kick you out the door. Cosmetics are king, period. To say an on/off switch can’t do much harm is silly, and flies in the face of why live services models have basically killed off every other support model.
Another thing, this thread really isn’t about just cosmetics, it’s really about cosmetics that break the immersion or the historical accuracy of WW2. That’s the crux of the problem and an on/off switch won’t convince any EA executive of that being the solution.
Yet EA allowed a new Star Wars game, no less, to have a on/off switch so I guess someone in leadership capacity disagrees with your assessment.
Yes, it is about maximizing profits and I already touched upon that in the post you quoted. By leaving out an option you potentially prevent sales to gamers who want that option and you may actually have a chilling effect on those who do buy the game but refuse to buy cosmetics because they feel like they’re forced to view aesthetically unpleasant characters and they don’t want to support that model. By being inclusive and roping those players in with the option to turn them off they can adapt to cosmetics at their own pace and ultimately get your MS sales you would not have gotten otherwise. You also make room for people who want to be able to transition between both worlds. Sometimes they want to see cosmetics and others they want a more conservative looking game. By having a “big tent” on this issue you make room for a larger playerbase (with virtually no drawbacks - very little overhead to implement and it doesn’t impact other players).
And for those players who don’t buy cosmetics you can still make money off of them through gun/vehicle/gadget sales (as long as these are balanced and not P2W/PFA)
Perhaps the fastest way to nose dive the BF franchise is for it to go full scumy mobile game style and turn into a algorithmic microtransaction machine. DICE’s biggest revenue opportunity isn’t cosmetics, it’s restoring the trust in its acumen that has eroded to virtually nothing after several releases where they’ve dropped the ball hard on quality. You can’t sell cosmetics to gamers who aren’t playing your game.
Lol it’s a $40 dollar game. EA willing to give more leeway by providing an on/off switch on smaller projects side with my reasoning for the most part. Even if the price point reflecting the scale of the game didn’t matter, it still doesn’t overturn the norm. We don’t even know if Squadrons is a live service model or how long it will be supported for. There really isn’t any purpose in arguing further. I give my reasoning on how things are, you give your reasoning how things should be. Your reasoning has very little significance because it does not reflect how a majority of live service models conduct business to this date, which is why your points will inherently have less merit than my own.
That’s impossible as it would mean my points had negative merit given that yours were completely devoid of any. Your own post was already checked by the quotations of me that you used. It’s not about what the majority of service models use, it’s about what works for your specific project. Copy and paste may pass for ingenuity in your world, but where people need to be competitive they take note of the nuances and adjust accordingly. Battlefield is not Fortnite, not Overwatch and not COD. It is Battlefield.
You haven’t bothered to acknowledge much less counter my points about gateway drugging and cosmetic alternative revenue sources so I’ll recognize your intention not “argue” anymore for what it is: unconditional surrender.
Perhaps, but I would wager that it was likely consensus. While there is no canon for ww2 there is a widely accepted interpretation about what passes for reasonably authentic and what is outlandish. Just because one guy went into battle with a broadsword in WW2 doesn’t mean everyone should be able to primary with broadswords (unless that is the theme of the game you’re trying to go for).
We’re living in a world where canon in Star Wars matters more than historical accuracy in a game based on a historical event. There were similar eyebrows being raised in BF1 before they cranked the nonsense generator to 11 in an attempt to appeal to Fortnite kiddies that just like looking as stupid as possible while playing games because lol get trolled breh. Now people are defending this as though having these items available for purchase somehow put quality back into this game by enabling a cash flow for the developers. Would still rather have premium and much more content but whatever.
The basis of your argument has definitely been addressed by myself. I insisted it was moot. Because the basis of your argument is your own subjective opinion being touted around as if it’s universally accepted truth and games are somehow supposed to be designed around that.
It doesn’t matter if you find one more acceptable - the point is when it comes to how inaccuracies and fantastical aspects objectively compare and effect gameplay, there is NO difference between a ridiculous soldier/gun/vehicle camo or entire faction with inaccurate tacticool uniforms in past games, and ridiculous looking cosmetics in BF5.
I mean, do you even hear yourself? You literally just tried to insist a ridiculous looking and inaccurate soldier camo in BF4 is not the same as a ridiculous looking face paint in BF5. Despite them both being ridiculous looking, both being purely cosmetic, both being just as inaccurate as one another, both having the exact same effect in-game, and both games being outwardly unrealistic, inaccurate, inauthentic, ridiculous, fantastical, and over the top.
It’s either ridiculous compared to actuality or its not. It’s either inaccurate or its not. You don’t get to pick and choose what you deem acceptable based on your own subjective, personal whim and then expect that a studio design their game around that - as if any given individual in this fanbase doesn’t feel differently about it and haven’t expressed a varied myriad of opinions on the topic.
At that point you’re complaining about BF5 including things that were also present in past BF games, solely based on the fact its ww2 and there’s BLATANTLY a bias toward ww2 as a setting being expressed by many here.
There’s no objective direct comparison when the entire argument from your side boils down to what amounts to “That looks worse imo”.
Lmao and get myself banned for another year? My extremely few bans here could barely add up to 7 months. You, on the other hand - that’s like the High King of Pots calling the kettle black.