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I never said they were good or bad. I never passed a value judgement.
I simply asked why they were being implemented, to understand the motives behind them and act accordingly. Like you, I don't particularly like them, so I generally don't do microtransactions.
Note that your comment could be construed to say that gating content of any sort behind a paywall is anti-consumer...which means consumers ideally shouldn't pay for games at all. Clearly, it's more proper to have a reasonable, practical solution, and I'm willing to look at each solution, and express my opinion on them using my own choice of purchases, rather than simply labeling something as "good"/"pro-consumer" vs. "bad"/"anti-consumer".
Nothing appeals to everyone; there are a number of us who accept that we might not get 100% completion out of this anytime soon, and are okay with that.
Let's say they remove marketability. Why remove tradeability?
1. What about simply playing the pet catcher until you get it? Remember that you literally get tokens for logging into the game. You don't even need to play to get them.
2. What about trading for it?
Essentially you're saying that this particular part of the game isn't designed in such a way that appeals to your tastes.
This is a fair opinion. However, if you expect games to do everything to appeal to your tastes all the time, you're setting yourself up for disappointment.
Again, I can just keep logging in, and keep getting tokens, indefinitely.
And if that's the case it's something that should be treated by a psychologist, not pandered to by a game designer.
Dude, just the other day I had my first OJ pet trade. I offered a Robo Ball and got a Chicken for it.
...you can't even get money from trades.
Then simply don't partake in it, and ignore it.
Besides, the same can be said for all these cosmetics -- they're both tied to your Steam account, and also largely luck-based as to whether you get them.
So...you've been upset about this ever since the orange system itself was created? Since that requires multiplayer to get.
Technically, if you simply buy two copies of the game on two different Steam accounts, you can play yourself on two different computers and get the stuff that way.
But still. Yeah. The entire orange system.
And more stuff to collect which is always great.
I'm that kind of person that likes to test my luck and well, have fun in seeing what I get.
I mean, I understand that people will hate, it's gacha, not everyone likes gacha.
But this game even gives you the oppertunity to use the gacha, without even having to pay for the tokens
For example, take a look at other gacha games, most of them require you to spend real money into it, and it can cost alot of money (example: Sword Art Online: Memory Defrag, although you get said items used for purchasing through playing the game, it mostly depends on just being P2W.)
I'm glad there's an actual discussion thread for this, this time around.
Please do remember, this game doesn't make use of microtransactions whatsoever, the tokens you get are straight up free, even if you only get them on 3-day wait.
-I guess we can atleast agree on not liking the system very much, then.
-I suppose it could be taken as such but that would just be arguing in bad faith without applying logic and reason. The fact you need to (typically) buy games makes up for the fact they cost money to make, same thing for DLC. Nothing unreasonable about being given money for your efforts, or giving people money for their efforts.
But the fact you cannot attain certain items through gameplay (unless you're exeedingly lucky) is kinda the anti-consumer part, since you'd have to shell out money, otherwise. I'd certainly welcome some solution that doesn't involve real money payments though, one that doesn't rely on players/trading, ideally.
-Well, i suppose its not for everyone, but it's still kinda awful because it involves money, basically.
-If they remove marketability, but not tradability, i'm not sure if it would make a huge difference. People would just trade for other items of notable monetary value and then trade those items in for money. It all boils down to money, rare is the trader that's fine with a few regular pet-to-pet trades or anything remotely similar.
It would probably make it terribly complex to accuire a pet since you'd have to invest real money into some currency "item" to trade to the seller. One cannot underestimate the desire for money, the greed, they'll always find a way to request/earn actual money from it.
Hm, suppose there is no easy solution, on one side you got the devs and people who want to make pets sellable for a quick buck to buy DLC, on the other you got people who find that the tradable aspects intentionally cause artificial rarity on the item(s) and other unwanted side-effects.
-1. It could take months, or if really unlucky, YEARS before you get it! So many potential duplicates... There is no system to alleviate this, to give you a unique pity drop of sorts.
2. Trading is technically a option, but i have no trust in humanity to keep it to simple trades. No, like i said before, people want MONEY, profit, ka-ching!
-Sure, the game has it's reasons for not letting people grind, but i find them to be a tad silly and pointless. Grinders gonna grind! I suppose the fact the items can be sold for real money is a potential issue though, otherwise there really would've been no harm in removing the token limits. If they where grindable and tradable, but not marketable, perhaps that would make the situation less bleak for folks out there wanting a specific pet, or the collectors.
-That won't get you the item you desire. Only buying it will, unless you're one of the really lucky people. (That or getting really lucky in finding someone willing to trade pets.) Logging in for more tokens won't mean anything if it takes you years to accuire the one thing you want.
-Irrelevant.
-I guess pet trades happen, but i'm not counting on getting any GOOD pets from a trade without shelling out some major dosh.
-I'd imagine you can sell any items accuired from a trade on the marketplace (ussually), so, if they're asking for your sellable TF2 items in trade for a pet they own, and then sell the TF2 items on the marketplace, they'd get money.
-I am actively punished for not wanting to participate in the marketplace microtransactions. Great. Veeeeery pro-consumer. Very nice system. Can't cough-up the dough because of principles (and valuing my money), so i HAVE to wait months, nay, years, for some pets (especially as the pool grows ever larger and duplicates increase).
-Playing with other players is the whole point. What hasn't been up to this point, though, is being forced to trade from them or buy from them to accuire certain items. You're better then this, than to arguing in bad faith with something so shoddy.
This is the first month of trying something new so it's going to be super jank as usual when big updates like this hit OJ so just give it time and see what happens, If anything actually shady shows it's face or the gacha system gets incredibly worse over time then we can all be angry and make a million posts about it or something.
And the two tokens i got now got me to 14 times nothing in a row, minimally. Possibly one or two more tries that i forgot about amounting to a total of 15-16 times i recieved absolutely nothing. Uh, yay...? Ah well... Just shows that they need to make some improvements, i guess.
Guess this is a sign i should hold onto my tokens until they've reworked the drop rates or added a pity system of sorts. (Could've sworn the two tokens come once a week... Has it been a week already??)
Oh, and you do know you can save pets along with your accessories into the same slots, right? Like with the colour and accessory slots, it also remembers what pet you've picked. Quite a nice extra, otherwise we'd have to click a LOT. :P
...how exactly does it demands real money?
You don't pay for the tokens
You don't pay for anything
The only thing you could pay for are pets, but that is your own choice
But it still doesn't demand real money in a sense.
Also, please stop blaming your bad luck on the developers.
This line makes you really sound like you blame the developers for your crappy luck:
They don't need to make any improvements whatsoever.
They literally don't.
It's supposed to be luck-based.
This game is all about luck, but we don't see you having problems about that type of luck, do we?
The best they could do at times is probbaly have a up-rate event for the gacha for like a certain amount of time.
Even that I feel is not nessecary, but would help for people that have the crappiest of luck I guess..
Well, it doesn't, unless you absolutely have to have a certain pet of a certain color, and at the same time are exceedingly unlucky.
Well, you're looking at one right now. :)
Though, knowing my own habits, I'm definitely not the same kind of person as the folks who'd shell out fifty million dollars on fancy knives in CS:GO.
The best cure to the problem of money, though, is to see through a situation and decide what it is you feel is actually worth the money for you, and only spend it on that.
Except you actually don't? You can trade them a variety of other things, including other pets, fireworks, Steam trading cards, emoticons, backgrounds, TF2 metal, and much more.
You are severely oversimplifying people's relationship with money.
Okay, so think about this from the perspective of the devs for a moment.
Let's say you develop a pity drop. Someone gets it. Then they demand another pity drop.
As a dev I would see that you have basically a problem that there's only a finite number of trinkets to incentivize people to keep playing a game. I'd try to spread them out as much as I can (I wouldn't have introduced quite as many cosmetics as quickly early on, for example), but the number is still finite.
This seems to be more like your problem than someone else's.
It's standard to have trades for the same rarity. In fact, you can easily conceptualize the trading "levels" for each pet type:
* Uncommon Standard Color for Uncommon Standard Color
* Uncommon Special Color for Uncommon Special Color
* Rare Standard Color for Rare Standard Color
* Rare Special Color for Rare Special Color
* Super Rare Standard Color for Super Rare Standard Color
* Super Rare Special Color for Super Rare Special Color
So let's say you really really want a white Shiba Inu. So you propose a trade using, say, your blue Red Barrel. It's another Super Rare Special Color pet.
And heck, given that Rares are three times as likely as Super Rares, you can try offering a black Rbit, a purple Rabbit Plushie, and a green Navi, to get the white Shiba Inu.
Just an example.
Actually, if you want to grind, you can grind all you want. I've played five matches today and that's actually four more than I really needed to, to finish my dailies. And I could still grind more to get more wreaths to buy up all the remaining Rein colors and Arthur's Christmas coat which I haven't bought yet.
That said, as for pets, specifically, the way to "grind" for tokens is to simply log in once every few days and play six matches every time in order to get the maximum possible number of tokens. You wanna grind, there's how to grind.
I've already told you that I've already done one trade (a Robo Ball for someone's Chicken) and such trades really aren't all that much of an oddity -- especially as more people accumulate pets and want to trade them with each other. This is basically the same damn thing as Steam's winter/summer sale trading cards anyway.
Trade comparable value, as based on rarity.
You shouldn't expect someone to give you a super rare for your fireworks. However, you can reasonably expect someone to give you a super rare for your super rare.
Steam Wallet credit, and if you call that money, then whatever. It can't be used at a supermarket to buy food.
People do non-legitly sell accounts, and pawn off Steam items for real-world money, but if non-legit things are considered, then basically anything goes, including selling entire accounts.
No, you're not "actively punished", unless you're "actively punished" by not being guaranteed your personally-desired Ferrari after working for 20 years.
Hell, this system is *better* than real life because your chance of pulling on your own a specific special color of a Super Rare pet is 0.0000016, which is actually far BETTER than 0.0000000039, the probability of winning the Mega Millions jackpot. And tokens don't cost you money, unlike lottery tickets.
And this assumes you're incredibly picky about only wanting a specific pet and declaring everything else to be a failure state...and also obstinate about not ever trading.
People have asked over and over again to be able to exchange stars into oranges. What would that do? Turn something that can be obtained in single-player into something that so far can only be obtained in multiplayer.
Right now, you still need to make a lobby, or search for a lobby, and wait for people to join/start, and play games, and wait for people to take their turns, and wait for games to finish, in order to get oranges. (Why do you think people love speed 4 so much? Because it gets the job done faster.)
Unless you're some sort of super-intense day-trader type, this gameplay actually takes a LOT longer than writing up a few trading threads.
source: https://100orangejuice.gamepedia.com/Version_1.31
The "up to 18 arcade tokens" is the 6 exchange tokens you get for logging in every 3 days. That's six spins every three days. Plus two free spins (6 tokens) every week.
(Also by your own admission you had great luck before this bad luck streak.)
In any case, I find the pet gacha system vastly less egregious than the orange system. Mainly because players are allowed to trade pets and outright sell them on the Steam marketplace. Comparatively, this slashes their scarcity extremely and I expect every pet to have a more or less consistent and declining price a few months from now at the current rate. OJ's playerbase does not increase fast enough to offset the constant dumping of pets into the market and there will assuredly be a class of players currently buying pets who will complete their collections and will only every acquire extras to sell off afterwards. The fact you're allowed to trade is almost 100% unheard of in true gacha games which may literally take thousands of dollars for a specific roll. I am not kidding when I say thousands.
OJ doesn't have a gacha system, it has a market system which are by design supposed to benefit all willful participants. There's a perception of loss on the person who spends money, but in economics there's a rule that your demand must be greater for the item than your cash to ever spend money in the first place. Buyers are in full faithfulness benefitting even if people on the sidelines do not consider them to be. This rule doesn't apply to the case of gambling, but if we're considering money, the OJ market system is past the gambling part. So we have the devs who make a bit more money from the transactions, people who don't care about pets or sellers who get a bit of Steam Credit just for playing OJ, and people willing to actually buy the pets(the luxury class).
Arguing that it is anti-consumer is straight out illogical. Consumers have more power over their ownership regarding pets than anything else in 100% OJ by the simple fact they are allowed to trade, buy, or sell them. It is because consumers have power over their own money. Rather, it's a moral outrage or perception of entitlement that would motivate someone to opt out of the system. Opting out is also a decision. Saying you are forced to do or not do anything is a disingenous constraint/claim.
Money as a concept is the most primary reason for all economic development, good or bad. It's primary function giving people the ability vastly more control and finesse over acquiring their wants and needs. It is the fact it replaces bartering and makes valuation consistent. Saying the inclusion a system that gives people control over their use of it or the ability to attain credit is something I will argue against you on.
The main crux of the matter for the DLC and microtransaction debate has been "does buying the game entitle you to everything in the game?" This hasn't been true for the vast majority of multiplayer games and not a single one that has its own economy. Even in OJ, it hasn't been true for the vast majority of players due to the existence of oranges and time-limited events. In many cases, a lot of players took a hard stance on every form of such a system being bad, but if you look at the games they've played, you'll always spot a few inconsistencies unless they vastly limit the games they play. While I believe there's merit to the argument in single player games, I do not believe multiplayer games should have the same constraints at all.
I believe gambling aspects are bad when they demand money to participate, but that is not the case for OJ. You only get the tokens through playing. Much like oranges. If one has an issue with the pet catcher system, then they 100% should have more issue with oranges which has even less freedom regarding luck-based item acquirement. It is the inclusion of the market system for pets which makes me believe it is a wholly better system than oranges which I have been slowly buying poses with over the course of hundreds of hours of game time.
Regarding pets, I already have 5 of the SSR pets, having bought 3 of them for under dollar prices by simply putting buy orders up and waiting and rolling the other 2. I do not mind the fact I am paying money for Steam credit and then paying the Steam credit to random people on the internet for fictitious pets. The person who is selling certainly does not mind. If one compares it to the money they spend on food or daily conveniences, most people would realize they're already far more wasteful in other parts of their life with vastly higher amounts of money.
-Well, demand is not the most accurate word but you're arguing semantics in bad faith here. To get a certain rare pet (or worse, a coloured rare), you're required to buy it. That's it. That's the problem. You don't see orange boxes costing real money, do you?
-Playing a game where winning or losing is based mainly on luck is vastly different from the pet system which encourages purchases from the market due to artificial rarity. I can't believe i have to explain this to you.
---
Quint:
-If you're asking me to think up some alternative, well, i dunno, its like, 02:00 in the evening/morning and i'm no game dev, it's not my job. I just call out BS design when i see it, and oh boy is it major BS.
Best i could think of in such short notice is making a system where everything is guaranteed through gameplay/grind (each pet and eventually each colour), but it's a slow burner unless you grind a LOT, with the option to trade, but not market things.
-Just getting a rare non-coloured pet could require money to quite some people out there, sadly... They're not gonna be cheap either since lvl 5 rares probably don't get duplicates very often to sell off.
-Maybe common/uncommon pets see some trading, but i don't see it to be remotely likely that you can attain rare/coloured pets via trading, no, people will want money for those.
-I... Don't see how that combats my point. You where talking about what if marketing was disabled, but trading was still enabled, and i mentioned people would just sell pets for sellable items such as TF2 weapons, skins, scrap, etc, and sell off those items for money. As for the buyer, they'd have to accuire the items the seller wants and can sell, which means in the end pets will still be sold for money despite there being no official marketplace.
-You may be underestimating how desperate kids are for online currency to buy DLC and games with. Or just people who have money problems in general (or lack acces to buying stuff online, perhaps). And that's the usual perpetrators, plenty of it are purely in it for a quick buck.
This reminds me, the devs explicitly mentioned one of it's purposes being to sell off pets, for OJ DLC or other low-price stuff. This means there's no way in hell you can get a rare pet/colour without buying it from the marketplace.
-Well, you gotta strike a good balance. Make it too frustrating and marketplace-dependant, and people will tune off or get frustrated with it, make it too easy and it would result in it being too easy... Right now it's too frustrating, i mean, seriously, 14-15 dead draws in a row is overkill.
But if you ask me? A game shouldn't rely on a shoddy system like this to try and retain players. You really think this would keep people playing? From what i think, at best, people are gonna play their mandatory 6 games quietly, do arcade stuff, and leave until a few days later. It's constantly happening with dailies, tons and tons of lobbies with nothing but silent orange grinders.
I try to have fun, play with chatty/fun people, but they make it very very hard, taking up space, being tryhards and bullies when they don't even need to, them generally just making the lobby a grind. Their presence is not desired. The way this game is built, it should run just fine on players who play for fun and the occassional update/DLC/event to revitalize interest.
Or perhaps better, make it easier for players who seek chatty/fun company to find oneanother in public lobbies, beats any grindy mechanic.
And even this mechanic can't retain players forever, players come and go, this is the nature of multiplayer games.
-Pet to pet trades seem like they won't be very popular, i mean, the whole point of trading/marketing was so they can be sold for money to buy games/DLC, but who knows. I got no duplicates to trade though, and while i'm not going for 100% collection, i don't want to get rid of any, either. This makes trading particularly useless, by nature of having nothing to offer that can be lost, especially if the system decides to be a ♥♥♥♥ and give you 15 dead draws.
-That's not grinding, well, not in the usual understanding of it. Why do i even bother if you're trying to twist meanings and argue in bad faith? To "grind" something you'd be busy playing to obtain something for extensive amounts of time, in order to get it more effeciently and more quickly then others (like say, "grinding" an event to complete it ASAP). You obviously cannot "grind" tokens since there's a limit to them.
-Yeah, so you say. Good luck trying to trade for a very rare pet without losing one you value. Not like you'd get a duplicate super-rare to trade off for another super-rare you want.
In the end, you gotta buy em. That, or trade and lose your own super-rare pet. Neither a very desirable outcome.
-As mentioned before, having an equivalent pet to trade with when seeking rare/super-rare pets is a luxury none but the most lucky of us have. Like hell the system wants to give us dupes of super-rare pets.
Only time it comes in handy is if you don't care for a specific pet and prefer to trade it for another certain one, sure... But those who prefer to keep their pets are royally screwed by this.
-Just because it's not paper money doesn't mean it has monetary value. Besides, steam wallet funds can buy games, DLC, and whatever else on steam. It's the sole reason people sell stuff, so they can buy stuff on steam. The devs even said so, that one of the functions was so people can sell off pets and buy DLC (or other things).
-Nothing you say really refutes my statement here. I don't wish to partake in wasting money on marketplace microtransactions, so i am left at the mercy of the gacha machine, whom has no mercy at all. I'd trade, but there is nothing i have i can trade away (not like i'm getting any spare pets i can trade with my dreadful luck of 15 dead draws). Not that i'd find a trader willing to do a 1:1 trade for anything (super) rare.
-Uh... This isn't relevant nor does it provide an argument to what i said, but... I guess it's a interesing discussion subject?
Honestly, i'd welcome an ability to change stars into oranges, heh. It would make it so all the orange-grinders would cease to be, make a SP/campaign game, hold down Shift and CTRL with something heavy and grind away, while us regular players can actually fit 3 to 4 chatty, active and fun members into one lobby and generally have an easier time finding one another!
Honestly, if i wanted to play against (slightly smarter) AI, i'd play singleplayer, not orange-grinding bots in online lobbies.
Hm, guess i remembered it right that it was a weekly log-in bonus. Guess time flies, that's vacations for ya... Pity they went to waste.
What would you define as a gacha system?
For example, is it required to not allow trading, in the way you mentioned above?
With regards to money, to be fair, there are also such things are market failures, but they are less relevant here as anything related to a videogame can be considered leisure/luxury spending on the part of a consumer anyway.
Agreed. I was trying to make this point to CarThief, though he/she argued that my point was improper, for reasons I'm not sure I understood.
There's a variety of entirely luck-based things, including all the poses -- most notably, a certain Suguri pose which I've wanted since the very beginning of the pose feature was in the fifth to last 40-orange crate that I bought.
Also, it's not a matter of whether you're forced to buy the pet which you aren't. It's a matter whether developers have a right to make these artificial scarcity markets which I believe they do. People will attach value to things and if they can sell it then let them sell it. OJ is a cheap dollar board game. The bells and whistles cost more. That some players can just sell pets to buy some of those bells and whistles is also a positive.When the hell did I ever equate the 2? I believe it's the developer's right to make such a system if that's how they want it and I think it's a damn better system than oranges.
Basically. I meant in a pure sort of fashion which is how most mobile games tend to operate. There is no guarantee system, there's simply rolling until you get what you want which is what I consider a pure gacha system. The sheer act of trading letting some people bypass the gacha altogether is why I cannot truly consider it a gacha system as it is supposed to be the most core component. In OJ, it is simply the one that starts things off. The market dictates the value in the end, not the gacha to sum the thought up. When the gacha does dictate the value, you basically get aggregrated prices upwards of hundreds of dollars simply going by the average rate. That is an exploitative system.