196000 Credits… 1568 Matches… 392 Hours…
Is the potential cost of a single gold loadout card, a loadout card I may or may not like. So to be clear, Splash Damages defence against the idea of “Pay 2 Win” revolves around the idea that the people that pay simply have more chances to be lucky? The design practically strong arms its players that don’t pay into partaking in a system they have absolutely no desire to use and be frustrated by seeing their hard earned credits spew out cards they have absolutely no use for which in turn forces more interaction with the system and additional cost. Having to get your cards up to bronze level to even reach a potentially even playing field. What makes this even worse is the simple fact that we know what the possible augments for each Merc are, meaning we have a pretty good idea of a cards strength that results in a negative vibe because almost every single card has a less than ideal combination. When you start taking into consideration the Mercs that have vastly different weapon options means you could get Aura for example all the way up to gold and end up with a SMG when you wanted a Shotgun and visa versa. Couple this with not being able to select even your cosmetics and you end up with a system that provides huge frustration and very little pleasure.
Even the design on a emotional level is exploitative beyond belief! On first glance the ability to purchase cases using earned credits appears to be a small positive, however it soon becomes apparent that the real reason for this is to ensure that players are tempted into buying them, that ends up leaving them short on credits when a new Merc is launched meaning they are much more likely to spend real money rather then saved credits to get their hands with the new Merc.
When it comes to competitive play, this system effectively guarantees a rule set that will force all players to use the default cards with no augments or weapon variation. This would also mean zero variation on the weapons once the weapon cards become available to the public (Yes guys, “Weapon Cards” are a thing we learned about during the press event). Now, don’t get me wrong, even with a better system this would be a risk but right here and now its not a risk its basically a guarantee. This would force serious competitive players to practice as much as possible with the default cards, not only giving themselves a disadvantage in public but also massively reducing their participation in the monetisation system that is actually worse then it would first appear. These players are trend setters and soon after comp play starts, a divide will appear at the top end of competitive matchmaking between players that do use and those that do not use the system. This will likely result in higher levels of toxicity then you would normally see at higher levels of play.
I would also like to quickly point out that in order to avoid breaking their current view on what is and what is not “Pay 2 Win” the steam marketplace style trading is very unlikely to happen. If it does we end up in a true “Pay 2 Win” situation like that caused by the real money auction house in Diablo 3. All this really baffles my mind because I am trying to imagine if CS:GO decided tomorrow that they was going to add perks to the weapon skins but in return make it so you get a crate every few games, how would that community react? Imagine an AK47 with -33% reload time or +20% RoF, would the ability for everyone to get lucky make this fair?
Now, if all this does not bother you… Think about this…
The current system has absolutely nothing to offer me other then power. I will never choose to rock a card with wicked skins over one that offers me more power. You may as well have gone all out and saved skins exclusively for obsidian cards because the amount of time and effort you seem to be putting into skins is almost completely wasted. Not only does other aspects of design such as, poor texture resolution, tinted players, speed/fov/distance, TTK, no weapon pick up, aggressive use of post processing and incapacitated camera placement mean my ability to see the skins is vastly reduced over other games in the genre but its not like I ever have the ability to pick my skin without effecting my performance in the game. Obsidian cards only just avoid this by having a slightly higher sentimental value due to their limited edition nature and higher fidelity models (in the case of founders cards).
While I don’t know, I think its safe to guess that U-Turns in development are very costly… I still think you need to pull one right about now. I would consider it lucky that the publicity gained from the last event was smaller than I assume everyone expected as changes now could really go unnoticed by the vast majority of people that hopefully in future will be your player base.
In short, after watching as much of the coverage from the events and after the events as possible. I have not seen a single large media outlet show their support for the system but have seen many show major concerns, PC Gamer, Game Trailers and MMORPG.com being a few examples. Not to mention the community that has been voicing these concerns since the loadout cards birth. Yes, we could just be the vocal minority so I would be interested in seeing if anyone has anything they would like to add?
Thanks.
