Another thing that gets brought up again and again, but apparently TC hates money and would rather focus on ■■■■■■ with the Gnasher/Lancer in Versus.
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Unless TC decides to bring it back to the store (which they have done, but again it is for a limited time) you are just out of luck I’m afraid.
Yeah, it is an illogical model, this isn’t some free to pay that needs to continually entice people into buying more content just to turn a profit.
In a sensible world TC would be adding stuff to the store constanly and only when this gets unwieldy should they even think about ‘vaulting’ content. But that is very much not the world we live in.
I am very glad that I don’t really care about the cosmetics as tc’s system is balls.
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First, I don’t understand why everyone feels the need to single out TC, as to imply they are the only developer on the planet who uses this style of content release platform.
Secondly, at the end of OP 2 they had an entire week where everything that was available during that OP was available again. So they may continue doing this moving forward.
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I’m just going on the responses from TC staff on twitter justifying these excuses, and coming and saying Tour of Duty things, are, if you miss them tough luck.
But if it is any other force that is making TC do these things, f them too.
This is from the Senior Community Manager at The Coalition.
And the quotes I posted in my post are from Ryan Cleven, Design Director
My mistake, admittedly I didn’t read your entire post. I thought your were talking about the store content and not the TOD content.
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Both parts yeah, the Store and the Tour.
It’s alright man, I do tend to write long posts lol
This was all announced before the game launched. Timed exclusives, vaulted content, tour of duty (aka battle pass) etc.
Really?
Jesus
Hehe, everyone obviously doesn’t mean EA, who have had server issues for years and years.
Well, that’s kinda the reason everyone has gone away from the Season Pass idea. You have to pay an additional £20 to get everything. It splits the playerbase.
You use the example of Gears 3, but you forget that people hated Gears 3 and Gears 2 for this. It left people behind. And people didn’t like the payable weapon skin packs at the time. Ooh, how times change, and how quickly people forget. Suddenly people want it back.
People say TC aren’t listening to their playerbase. Well. Prices have been lowered, the Lancer has been nerfed, more maps are on the way in operation 4, and they are tuning the Gnasher, as well as making the ToD easier, and with less filler content.
That sounds to me like they are listening. 343 are releasing poor things as well. The CEA PC update broke more things than it fixed.
I do agree with your overall point, but the reasoning is a bit off.
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Well GOW4 did a similar thing but jn a different format (Gear Packs) which were time limited too and eventually all of it was craftable. Hopefully all past items will reappear again in whatever format they were originally released in (as in, store items will be back in the store etc). Some older Op 2 store items did return at one point toward the very end of Op 2 but that was only for a week.
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I don’t think I named Gears 2 or 3 with the cosmetics that they did, but I will for this reply.
Gears 2 only had the Gold Hammer Burts and the Gold Lancer, one was through the Collectors edition and the other was through pre-ordering, sort of a high cry from todays standards.
I don’t think I ever saw anyone say anything about them, if they did, I did not see it, so can’t be held over a difference on that because I did not see it and or, it was never a thing I had an issue with.
As for Gears 3, that got some flak, but that was mainly weapon skins, I have never been a fan of weapons skins they do nothing for me, I’m only talking about Characters that you play as, so that’s the front I focus on.
In Gears 3 you unlocked characters via completing challanges and ranking up in game, play previous Gears games, and then DLC gave you new characters that they added tot he game, again, a far better system than what it is now,
Now it’s you pay per item, and again, I’m not gunning for them on that, but they need to fix how they are doing it and again, not with holding so much back, i.e, Winter variants of characters that are int he campaign etc, but what peeves me off the most is, even Items on the Item Store get vaulted, and to me, the Item Store is a short term solution to getting money from the customers. You want as much money as you can get, so why vault or put out only a few items.
The thing what people want back from Gears 3 from what I understood is the challanges and unlock that you got in-game, no money or RNG crates, but you get given a challange, “Kill 600 enemies” etc and you get a character etc, or a weapon skin if people are predisposed to that kind of thing (I must also state that, when you was saying people want the way things where back in Gears 3, yet they complained about it. I never had any of these issues, but as somone who is an outsider on that fallout, I thinks it’s more along the lines of, you have a bad system that people had an issue with, then you create another system that is even worse, it is to be expected that people will prefer the lesser of the two evils, and I would say that is pretty common in all aspects of just life).
I have not seen anything about money issues being reported for Gears 3, again relating to the latter. I am not sure if that has already been raised by others, but I have personally not seen that, but again, it’s not something that I brought into my post to begin with, so I can’t answer that.
You need people to keep buying these things to make moneythat TC keeps saying they desperately need, but when you vault things and don’t bring them back, not everyone might like the news items on offer, or they might have only wanted a singular, like for example me, I only wanted one thing, and I am sure there are people that may have wanted the same with another item. I mean, if we did the same system in our stores in out home towns how would people feel, and it makes no sense to through out a tried and true system for vaulting goods, there should always be an option, more options are good, rather than less and that is the thing I don’t understand, and them doing that.
They have in the past done this themselves with the Driver Mac, now they say, due to popular demand which has became a meme In & of Itself,but they brought him back because they needed to make a certain amount of money per skin, per item, so again I don’t understand why they just dont put it all on a store page and let people buy them because they can not say, “Oh we have these microtransactions because we need the money to run the servers, create new content etc”, when you vault all of it and create this artificial supply and demand. It’s pixels on a screen, not a physical item that is going to run out of stock, so they create this false sense of, quick get it while it hot, and I think just with a large portion of people, (I won’t say all because all is never the case), feel as if the is bare bones as it is, so for them treat the Item Store like their is some finite supply of this content is, to me, is hatfull.
Again with the point of you mentioning about Prices being lowered, all I can say is I am in the position of, I am a hard worker so I have enough disposable income were generally if I see an item I want, I will buy it , I don’t tend to really focus on the price, so again, that’s not something I brought up in my post, I brought up, them seemily wanting to get money from the shop, yet removing the items from the shop, thus, you are not going to make as much money because, like in this example, you sound as if you like weapon skins, but me personally I don’t like, I like character models.
So let’s say they removed all of the character models, well, I won’t buy anything then so, they have just lost some income, so that is what I am talking about. They say they need this money and all that, but yet, are quite happy to cut off people wanting to spend money?
If TC are fixing bugs and balance issues, great, but as someone myself that has worked some popular mods (Not pretending I know as much as them and the hard work, but fixing code for over 4k hours is never fun but I have some understanding on how this work takes time, and how tedious it is) for the game Men of War, and the mods Galaxy at War, Robz realisim etc fixing and balancing.
But I must say the notion of, doing something that is expected of you, and then to be praised for it, because it is their game, and they do want more people playing it and spending the money, to me it’s becoming almost like Gratuity, and I don’t agree with it. But it if it is big things that TC is fixing, to keep that flow of new and old people coming and going, awesome, I hope they continue to do that and listen, but this situation, their has been no sign of it changing, and that is actually going against them because they are loosing money. I think I have more of an issue with them actually not going through with their idea of, we are out to make money, because they are doing such a bad job of it.
343 as you have stated, again I’m in a smiliar situation, I grew up with Halo CE, and playing up to Halo 4 and then I stopped, and seeing what people have seen with the way things were going, it seems that 343 again is one of many studios these day just seem to be batting heads with what’s going on. I think their is a degree of people not knowing (gamers) what a buisness entails and how long these things take, but from my standpoint in a pure economics capacity, which is something I major in, which allows me to spend my income on this hobby, because it is a hobby, the examples and reason we are given, don’t add up on a pure numbers basis, and that is what I am targetting, not so much, get rid of the Item store etc, it’s more along the lines of, if you are going down this route, do it right.
Stick to what you are wanting to do, don’t botch it and cost yourself money, and piss us off because not only do we now have to pay for all this stuff, you are vaulting content that people believe should have been in the game free, or removing content when people think the game has little of that anyway.
So that’s what I am going on about yeah.
(Sorry for the very long response, I do try to go into as much depth as I can when explaining my madness xD)
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I just wanna point out that 90% of the costs involved in the server are redundent when your parent company owns them. MS probably aren’t renting the servers to tc in the traditional sense anyway.
Using it as a justification for the store seems odd at the very least.
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But the way accounting works within a conglomerate like Microsoft, Xbox Game Studios and therefore The Coalition still have to rent the servers.
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They do pay for them but as a studio of Xbox Game Studios which in tern is a division of Microsoft it would be minute to the fact of, the difference would be financially irrelevant.
The interesting fact though is that they have come out and stated, “Look we are making a loss on each game we sell”, I say to that is, ok, one reason could be why you are making a loss is, why did you decide to go down the Game Pass route then because that clearly has not helped if you are making a loss, and if Xbox Game Studios has made that memorandum to The Colaition, well then, the finances from that should fall onto Xbox Game Studios, and that more than likely probably has.
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I won’t pretend to know how the in’s and outs on internal/parent company accounting works, but talking about it in a manner that sounds like “we need this money or we can’t afford servers” seems dishonest to me.
@xMini_Wazx Exaclty. I don’t think it is costing tc much however it is budgeted and paid for.
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I thinks that’s pretty much how it’s going to be. Wait until the next Gears game comes out, then you will be able to either craft or buy everything.
Well, GOW4 didn’t exactly do that. There was around 12 months before they started making things craftable and it was a gradual process.
Unfortunately that’s exactly how it works.
I worked at a large vertically integrated corporation for a year. Each part of the company is treated as a separate entity for accounting. If one entity provides services to another entity, they bill them and must be paid by the entity receiving the service. They’re all treated as separate little companies.
Each entity has its own costs and revenue and is treated essentially as a separate company by every other entity owned by the parent.
They all do the same things like Google and Amazon do don’t they.
They “Pay” these payments, and then internally they just give it back as another payment as a return for services rendered, stuff like that.
No they don’t.
The entities within a parent are accounted as separate cost centers, so each entity’s performance in terms of revenue and net income is tracked separately. An entity within a parent can become insolvent, unable to pay its financial obligations. A parent will usually step in and change management before it gets that bad but that’s how it is.
There’s no “wink wink nudge nudge we’ll write off your cost to rent the server.”