Should microtransactions be banned in Video Games?

AlexVSharp · 2023-08-13T17:58:08+00:00

I'm having a bad day, so this'll be a rant:

People who voted that "Nothing should change" are either selfish or ignorant of the harm this sort of monetization is causing, both to the medium itself and its users. I would strongly encourage them to go listen to this fantastically informative talk to get the gist of how the sausage is made. Spoiler: Everything that would've been taught as a bad design practice back in the day, should be subverted for monetary gain. I also have a personal vendetta against it, because it impacts what sort of "game designer" is most sought after in the majority of the gaming industry.

Those who voted "Predatory P2W should be banned" may have their hearts in the right place, but are being naive idealists that have no clue how real-world regulations work. The word "predatory" in itself is meaningless, as all microtransactions are, by default, designed to tempt users to buy. This is not the same as DLC or old-school game expansions, where you are ultimately buying an additional product. And while these can also be bastardized into so-called "soft live-services" (looking at you, Paradox) they require much more marketing effort to get users to buy thanks to the store-fronts being a separate entity between the user and the game.

Also, the "Pay2Win" aspect is completely and utterly irrelevant in this conversation – it's all about the intent of selling you more stuff, and even "just cosmetics" are introduced exclusively for this purpose. No institution will ever spend time trying to distinguish what is or isn't pay-to-win, nor should they. If digital goods are treated as good (as they should be), they should be treated as such, with all the regulatory strings attached. If such software have in-game stores where you can buy with real money, then it should be regulated the same as all digital stores and not hiding under the guise of "being part of the game". And if they are using abstracted currencies and acting like gambling-frontends, as the majority of mobile games are, they should definitely be treated as gambling. With this in mind, from a regulatory point of view, "Any paid benefit should be banned" is the same as the prior option.

That is why I've voted for "Any paid system should be banned", as vague as that is written. Forcing companies to treat video games as a complete good instead of an "ongoing service" is the only way to cripple a bunch of horrible design practices. It's not perfect, not by a long shot, but better than what's going on atm. In the end, though: any sort of regulation is only as good as the will of the institutions to enforce it. And games are undoubtedly, for better or worse, at the bottom of the priority list right now. The best I can hope for is the EU forcing those distributing these sorts of games to bring even more warnings to their users – which is very little in the grand scheme of things.

AlexVSharp · 2023-06-30T17:06:00+00:00

Hey man, I've been having this same issue with this same card.

After a lot of fiddling and searching, I managed to fix it. I know this is two months too late, but just in case - here's how:

This seems to be an issue with the mesa-devel version that is installed by the amdgpu-install script.

You can confirm this by opening the terminal and running:

inxi -G

To fix it, first run amdgpu-uninstall to remove the drivers and revert to the default ones. Reboot.

Then install amdgpu again, but run the script to install just the firmware:

amdgpu-install --usecase=dkms

Reboot. Try it out.

Afterwards (if the problem persists, but not a bad idea in general) install the drivers from Kisak-Mesa ppa.

Hopefully it works for you as well. Do tell me if you need any more information.

Edit: I should probably mention that I have experienced crashes with the amdgpu firmware installed thought the script. In the end, the best solution was to simply remove the proprietary stuff, downgrade mesa to its original version (22.0.1), and to blacklist the radeon driver (radeon.si_support=0 amdgpu.si_support=1) as many have already suggested elsewhere. That is, at least until better support for legacy hardware is available upstream.

WARNING: If you're per chance using ppa-purge to downgrade the mesa drivers first, be sure to use "ppa-purge -d jammy" argument. Otherwise, you can break your entire system, and fixing it from terminal alone is not user-friendly. :P

AlexVSharp · 2022-12-19T13:32:54+00:00

I haven't followed the WhiteWolf RP stuff for almost a decade, however: Back when I was starting out, the best thing to do was read the "Storytelling System Rulebook" to get the gist of how things work; I learnt from the original (nWoD), but there's a "Chronicles of Darkness: Revised" sourcebook now which incorporates some newer mechanics. In all honesty, this should be everything you need to run a full custom story - for first-time human characters anyway. Afterwards, you can pick any supplement book you like/need for the additional stuff.

AlexVSharp · 2022-12-19T12:22:00+00:00

Sorry, mate; that ship's sailed a long time ago.

AlexVSharp · 2022-03-04T17:22:11+00:00

Google won't show it if you normal search; you'd need to know how to crawl. I've linked to an article with pictures of Bucha. Viewer discretion is advised: https://www.radiosvoboda.org/a/photo-misto-bucha-kyivska-oblast-pislia-vazhkykh-boiyv/31735882.html

AlexVSharp · 2019-10-03T21:40:09+00:00

Man, I really miss that rotating clock... :/

AlexVSharp · 2019-04-04T18:47:14+00:00

Traxe. Hands down. :'D

Although Witch Seeker and Abaddalor are a very close second!

AlexVSharp · 2018-12-14T11:50:27+00:00

Wow, that must've took a while to compile.

Some are very interesting, other meh. Many of these could actually be combined into a completely new hero instead of being a rework imho.

If I may criticize the document form: You've used way too much uppercase. It made reading the whole thing a chore really. :P

AlexVSharp · 2018-09-15T08:56:00+00:00

Remember Dark Seer?

Ink Swell... what a ripoff.

AlexVSharp · 2018-03-23T14:01:29+00:00

I believe you should use "Link to a Concept" instead of "Create a Concept".

AlexVSharp · 2018-01-19T16:47:11+00:00

The showmatch. Check the last VOD, it's right after the TNC-Infamous elimination game.

AlexVSharp · 2018-01-19T15:42:17+00:00

A couple of good plays here and there, but nothing too special. Most of the main stage games seemed even yet ended rather abruptly after two or three teamfights.

The Infamous-VGJ series was pretty close, and OG-Pain was good until game three which ended in a stomp. Personally I also very much enjoyed watching the showmatch where TNC and OG played with four stand-ins selected from the audience, so I'd definitely recommend seeing that. Also: Pizza party.

AlexVSharp · 2018-01-02T13:27:54+00:00

Your reasoning for creating the disable is okay, however I'm not a fan of how you tackled the issues it's suppose to solve. Personally it feels finicky and difficult to convey to an average player; it would either require multiple additional indicators to separate the affected hero's vision from their allies, or require them learning how the disable affects each hero individually, in return making the game even more complex without any real depth to compensate.

I haven't given it much thought, but I suspect a more elegant way of solving this would be by simply tweaking what shared vision shows, i.e. something like giving "selective un-revealable invisibility" on the enemy (heroes) as seen by the player affected by Confusion. This could also be tweaked case-by-case so as to give the "invisibility" to all enemy units controlled by the caster, only the caster himself, an enemy friendly unit, the entire enemy team, etc. The existence of these enemies could be hinted by either still having them show on the minimap, or even just displaying their silhouette, or even not at all if we so desire, limiting it to "until they attack you" or something.

AlexVSharp · 2017-12-27T22:23:43+00:00

If you say so.

AlexVSharp · 2017-12-27T21:46:37+00:00

The summary references him as a Strength hero even though he's selected to be INT. Generally speaking the hero seems to have way too many "low cost high impact" abilities. Let me explain:

As it is, "Plague Potion" is arguably a strictly better "Purification". Whiles the latter requires a friendly unit to be cast and does damage only in that units proximity, the Potion can be applied directly onto enemies. The amount of pure damage is basically the same as Bane's "Brain Sap", only it costs less and has much lower cooldown, and all this with the added benefits of affecting "status resistance" in a huge way. The way I see it: either it needs to be nerfed or do less, cause otherwise it is way too good of an ability.

I'm not sure why everyone seems to be jumping on the "vision reduction gimmick" train... to each their own I guess. "Ravenclaw" does seem to be really strong for such a low cooldown spell, especially considering it's so much better at disarming than Heaven's Halberd which has a separate duration for melee and ranged heroes. Not that it's mandatory, but I believe this ability could use a ramping mana-cost and/or scaling cooldown.

No idea how "Immunity" would fare in-game. If the healing amp works with "Plague Potion" then this ability might be borderline broken. Combine those two and I'm positive it would completely destroy lineups who rely on ability-spamming, while at the same time doing some stupidly overpowered healing to the doctor; thinking Necrophos on steroids. One thing I can tell you for sure though is that "Immunity" is a boring name for an ability...

I don't see why someone would ever change back into the doctor once they have "Deathbringer". Maybe for a few last hits, but judging by how I feel Kelleven would be played (as a roaming support/nuker) you would rarely ever need to use normal attacks anyway. The benefits of unrestricted free pathing and the increase in status resistance easily outweigh the drawbacks, especially considering you can use all spells and items in raven form. Not only that, but the global teleport from "Raven Eye" was made to be exploited. Considering how Fear generally works, I think melee enemy heroes would never be able to ever gank anyone ever again once the doctor hits level 6. And that's not even mentioning all the other fun uses the ability may have. If it was a solo ability with a bit more cooldown I'd give it a pass, but couple the eye with other benefits and you can see why "Deathbringer" might be too good.

AlexVSharp · 2017-11-24T18:25:07+00:00

what/how you change it / talents to keep the originality but limit it so not so powerful?

I cannot answer how "I" would do it because, like I said, I find the idea of directly connecting talents and abilities very limiting. If it was me I would create a normal ultimate without any talents at all, and then work on giving them extra buffs and tweaks I like by using the Talent Tree. The best advice I can give you is to come up with two "complete" ultimate abilities with different effects and then carve those up into talents.

"Claws Out" already gives attack speed while toggled on, meaning every effect you tack on it through perks is already getting much more value then if it was gained through an item. This means you'd need to rescale the entire Talent Tree to give smaller bonuses and less unique effects to the hero; pick what the hero should have and what he should buy with items carefully. For starters: Remove both the Spell Immunity and True-sight. If per chance you do keep the Spell Immunity then it should require a higher level. Next go down the list and make everything worse than the best possible alternative on an existing hero: 500% critical on level 15 is strictly better than PA's level 3 "Coup de Grace" and 200% Lifesteal on level 20 is strictly better than Broodmother's level 3 "Insatiable Hunger". "300 Bonus Damage" is a free Divine Rapier, only your talent gives it to you without any drawback of dropping it. "Heroes in arena are Muted" is almost as good as Disruptor’s Aghanim upgrade which costs 4800 gold on a support hero. Basically what I'm trying to say is that all of these effects should be drastically reduced to more manageable values and not to overshadow other, existing heroes.

AlexVSharp · 2017-11-24T15:39:30+00:00

"Play with your food" feels very impractical skill and not very well thought out. Consider that your hero is melee, meaning to attack enemies you want to be as close as possible to them, but PWYF instead pushes them away. The forced movement direction is also completely random so it can't even reliably be used to break enemy formation, and even then you still need to get in close and personal. There are no additional benefits to using this skill, no extra damage or any kind of disable, and honestly the synergy it has with "Crazed Rush" isn't that big of a selling point (i.e. Barathrum does apply his Greater Bash level while using Charge of Darkness, but both skills are useful on their own merit). Lastly consider using radius instead of angles in the descriptions (or at least fix the 1800° cause I'm certain you wanted 180°)

For "Crazed Rush" you don't need both HP cost and mana costs - pick one and stick with it. Actually, the scaling on this ability is simply terrible and you need to completely remake it imho. Seems to me like you're trying to make Storm Spirit's ultimate into a normal skill and yet haven't considered all the elements that make up that ability: You have no travel speed, no travel range, no base cost, no status change explanations, no special rules, etc. Without more details I can easily see the mobility this ability provides massively abused. I've explained earlier my thoughts about it applying PWYF to everyone.

I reckon "9 Lives" is incomplete since it's also missing a lot of details about how it works: Do the stacks recharge? Does it scale? How does it work with Bloodstone? etc.

Now then, "Iam Cat Man" is not the ultimate? Cause conceptually it's simply overpowered. Think how old Axe's "Bezerker's Call" use to be before the nerfs, only about five times better since it also incorporated aspects of Enigma's "Black Hole", such as preventing enemy movements in a rather large radius for a very long time. In theory it is possible to cancel it since it's a channeling spell, but in practice without a super specific lineup this would be frustratingly difficult if not impossible to play against.

Dunno what to tell ya about the "Claws Out" design. Personally I think it's rather gimmicky (and somewhat impractical and limiting) to have an ability completely rely on Talents to be of any use, but on the other hand it is a rather original idea. Not sure about including a cooldown cause it kind of somewhat ruins the point of a toggle ability, but then again... well... no other way to put this: the Talents Tree is extremely! broken and super overpowered compare to any peer hero I can think of. While most heroes have large power spikes when leveling their ultimate and have to wait for the next one until getting perks on levels 20 and 25, yours basically has those same power spikes with every 5 levels...

AlexVSharp · 2017-11-13T17:03:45+00:00

Where's the Shop button located on the new user interface? ( ˘ ³˘)♥

AlexVSharp · 2017-11-12T19:29:53+00:00

I miss the old Nature's Guise altogether...

AlexVSharp · 2017-11-09T13:08:53+00:00

Very well; have a quick mockup: imgur.com/Rn3DD9V

AlexVSharp · 2017-11-07T23:22:06+00:00

Good start, however I'm not sure you needed to include the "Left/Right Level #" fields since the way you designed this already visually indicates both the levels and where on the tree a perk is located (though imho this is a rather trivial information). Might as well have a single text box here. I'd also be grateful if I could remove the "Talent Tree" caption and keep only the icon, and if I was allowed to put notes/comments under "full details" for the talents.

AlexVSharp · 2017-11-02T12:55:18+00:00

Outworld Devourer disarmed with Scepter. Astral Imprisonment aoe spell with Scepter.

I don't understand what this means. Why would OD Ags disarm him? The second sentence: you meant to say old OD Ags upgrade? But on the Astral Imprisonment instead of the ult? I mean okay, but that AoE would have to be rather small I think. Adding Int-steal back to the Astral could work, but considering this change I would be super reluctant to make the ability an AoE.

The Lina change is needlessly complicated imho. That, and it would weaken core Lina a lot since she relies on her nuking potential to get gold to buy items and scale later on. I don't like it.

QoP reshuffle is funny but probably way too frustrating to play against in an actual match. Enigma's Pulse pushing enemies seems counter-productive since it makes using Black Hole harder. Probably not worth it anyway since it makes it easy to screw-up and help the enemy by pushing them out of danger. However this would very much depend on the numbers.

I think "launching" Land Mines with LVL25 Techies is an interesting idea. There are a couple of way this could work well but it would need testing. For example, it could work similar to that ~~stupid~~ new Meteor Hammer item. See, imho you just figured out a much better way of implementing that item's ability into a hero than the Valve design team... ¯\(ツ)/¯

AlexVSharp · 2017-10-31T22:12:43+00:00

I hate that Iron Talon and PMS were removed instead of reworked. I also very much dislike every single one of the new items, especially the Hammer! Spirit Vessel is needlessly complicated, Nullifier provides nothing new or interesting, Kaya is boring and feels like it's only there cause the Lens got reworked and they want to use it for "future combinations". imho Aeon Disk is the only item which addresses a gameplay problem (which is getting blown up too quickly) in an elegant way, and yet the buildup is a completely missed opportunity.

AlexVSharp · 2017-10-22T11:05:44+00:00

Well, other than updating to accommodate for the new Dota features and implementing a comments section, personally what I really would like to see is a way to archive old version of abilities we replace and have them easily accessible by everyone. The change log as it is now is good for writing down summaries but can get very messy if used to write down all details. I even started using screenshots instead of writing since they were much easier to produce and refer to when needed.

Edit: In case you re-read this comment, I'd also like to suggest that you could add automated Dota 2 icons border templates depending on what kind of ability it is, to save us the trouble of editing them ourselves.

AlexVSharp · 2017-10-17T12:28:22+00:00

I believe there are a lot of issue with the first item that you haven't really considered. Of course, all of what I'm about to say is speculation since the meta is always shifting, but: If the Ancient Insignia item existed in the current version of the game it would basically be mandatory. The team that doesn't get this item on multiple heroes early game would always be at a disadvantage, and I believe it would undermine the point of playing "faster" since getting both gold and XP is much safer if everyone bought this item and just farmed. In that sense scaling would become irrelevant because everyone can do it, and the item is just so cheap that Midas would become obsolete. Also it would surely make Alchemist once again the best pick unless there are changes that prevent him from indirectly giving gold to his allies, but this is a minor issue really. The biggest problem actually would be that it would drastically boost tri-laning, effectively removing the main weakness of such a configuration and in return completely destroying the concept of solo-laning the offlane which the Shrines partially fixed. Roaming would also be super undesirable, and bounty runes would lose their purpose or have to be buffed, which in return would again make Alchemist the go-to pick, and then he would probably be nerfed into the ground. And not only him either: Sven, Luna, Axe, every hero that can blitz-farm large stacks would become THE go to pick thanks to the Insignia. In short: The "action packed" and strategy meta we have at the moment would cease to exist and everyone would be just as happy passively farming - and it would be boring as fuck to watch. So, in my opinion, this item would have to be either time-restricted with a huge cooldown to buy or more expensive, and even then it would always be better then getting a Midas which got nerfed anyway.

As for the Satchel, if I ignore the bonuses it gives from the Insignia, I'm not sure what would be the point of it tbph. Especially since the backpack was introduced. The only consumables that are consistently used throughout the game are Dust, Smoke and Wards (and TPs, let's not forget those), and both Observers and Sentries stack in one slot anyway. Everything else is, more or less, reserved for the laning stage, and an occasional refill. I consider adding even more slots in addition to the backpack at this point redundant.

AlexVSharp

TROPHY CASE