This week in /saved

Here are some articles published this week that i found worth a read.

This week, there are a lot of posts. Many of them cover the topic of Massively’s closure, but there were many other interesting posts, as well. So many, in fact, that i had to leave some out. I don’t even touch the subject of SOE becoming Daybreak, but that’s mostly because i didn’t read (but /saved some) posts concerning this topic and i…don’t have an opinion, yet.

General

J3w3l from Healing the Masses takes a dive into why and how permadeath mechanics influence her enjoyment of games.

While short, Belghast gives a quick view on Albion. I haven’t read anything about it that didn’t come from the official website, so i found it interesting to read, even if it’s just two paragraphs.

The discussions

There was one discussion going on about…..payment models! It’s great to see new topics coming up all the time, isn’t it? But i found this one to be quite interesting.

Payment models

I don’t really know who started this round; the first post that i noticed and /saved was from the lovely Free-to-play Fuckery series from J3w3l, in this case concerning Trion and lockboxes. It wasn’t all said and done on her site, though, as Murf continued the series on her blog with The mobile Menace. In the meantime, Tobold also had his say, beginning with a post about how “it’s your fault” that games close when you don’t spend money and goes on to say that Grind2win isn’t particularly better than pay2win. He then continues and picks up on J3w3ls lovingly titled series by arguing that f2p games, in his opinion, aren’t subsidized by people who have no money, but spend it anyway but instead by people who do have enough money to burn. Which, brought up another post by J3w3l in response, arguing, well, that it aren’t really the highly educated wealthy people funding f2p.

All in all, very entertaining, especially J3w3l’s rants. But others chimed in, as well. I can’t say who posted her’s first (i think both are female, pls. correct me if i’m wrong), but i’m with Syl on this topic– i don’t care, just make a good game and i’m fine (although i won’t spend money for lockboxes). I’ll have to close this chapter with Liore‘s short post, however. Very concise!

Time vs. Money

Off of this discussion, something branched out- the topic being whether it’s fair to value time spent higher than money spent (or vice versa) in MMORPGs. Azuriel was first, declaring time as a fair measure for progression since everybody gets 24 hours a day. Syl, again, makes the point that, first, addiction is a bad thing, whether you spend way too much time or money on something- and it isn’t depending on payment models.

To put down my own opinion, and be quick about it, i’ll say that there is no fair payment model and neither a fair progression model. That’s coming from someone who doesn’t have the time to play as much as most others, even if i’m concentrating on one MMO. I’ve seen people burn through an MMOs content in two weeks, barely sleeping. They bought the box, played 200 hours and were done with the game. In the meantime i bought the box and 3 months of sub, played maybe 150 hours in that time, but spent twice the amount of money.

Replacing Massively

Scree thought about the possibility of bloggers taking the spot of Massively– in my reply i tried to think about that, as well, and concluded it wouldn’t be easy. Aywren wrote a better post on the subject, with clearer implications on why it might not work. And then there was Liore, asking an important question- even if we were able, would we want to do it?

Massively’s shutdown

Of course, there were many posts about Massively shutting down. Some of them were mentioned in the last post on Massively, but really, this post went on longer than i thought and Wilhelm Arcturus has an excellent overview of blogs covering the topic.