The Unreward System

Are we <em>sure</em> these aren't online casinos?

<i>"No one knows for what reason, because no one knows anything, and the sand swallows those with banners as it swallows those without. And the sand covers everything: my life, my prose, my eternity. I carry my awareness of defeat like a banner of victory.”</i> ~<b>Fernando Pessoa, <i>The Book of Disquiet</i></b> P.S. (did I successfully disguise my overwhelming sense of hopeless frustration at the games industry with enough literary panache?)

Pretty well why I gave up on video games. I play them for free at someone's house or when they give them to me because they aren't using them anymore, or I don't bother.

I spent about 5 years with League of Legends as my go-to obsession. Say what you want about how League works (and I do) but to this day it has the best monetisation model of any game I've played: It was free, and if you wanted skins for your character, you could pick up some RP and buy exactly which one you wanted, with the nicer looking ones costing more. Yes they used a bullshit fake currency and yes they badly implemented lootboxes after Overwatch made them big, but for 5 years if I liked a skin I could wait for a sale or pick one up for about 5-15 bucks and buying actual in-game advantages was restricted to earning them through gameplay (the old rune system). All this to say that I love Overwatch and Apex both, but its insane to me that in OW I can only buy the thing I want by opening lootboxes and hoping I get coins or duplicates - and if I get a duplicate, it gives a 5th of the coins that duplicate is worth, punishing me for having opened lootboxes before?? I couldn't express my disappointment that Apex caps lootboxes so after you hit that level 100 you've gotten all the free shit you ever will, end of story. I won't be buying the founders pack or anything else until they remove that bullshit Unreward System.

More longboi Jim? Awww yisss!

I remember long ago playing Vanilla WoW and thinking it was using predatory tactics. It makes the first ten levels happen in an hour of play and the increase in ability be extremely vast only to then see it taper off as you got to higher levels. I watched friends chase the high of leveling up because we’re all addicted to the “sense of pride and accomplishment.” I remember thinking WoW does this so we keep paying for the monthly subscription. They were raking in the money then. As a casual gamer now I wonder how gamers today afford to even play with all they ways the “itch” is applied these days?

More longform Jim? I haven't been THAT good lately, but I'll take it. The Overwatch "tag" thing reminds me how custom tags were a standard feature in early Source-engine games like HL:DM, CS:S, and TF2. (I think the feature may have been introduced even earlier in the QuakeWorld days, but I'm not 100% sure) You'd just drop in a GIF in a settings screen and press whatever key you had bound. Obviously, lots of people abused the tags for vile shit, but my point here is that this was a free feature that was driven purely by player creativity that now is a locked-down monetization vector.

The last online shooter I played was Quake Wars, which had a leveling system, but the only thing that affected was the rank that appeared in front of your name. All gameplay unlocks were for the specific 3-match "campaign" you were currently on, so if you saw someone running around with akimbo silenced SMGs it wasn't because they bought a crapton of boxes, it meant they were absolutely killing it that game. And then Activision demanded they shut down the tracking servers to focus on building a console port nobody bought.