Author Topic: Early Access, gift or plague?  (Read 15768 times)

Offline eRe4s3r

  • Core Member Mark II
  • *****
  • Posts: 2,825
Re: Early Access, gift or plague?
« Reply #15 on: July 18, 2017, 01:48:07 pm »
ARK Evolved and that 60€ price +20€ DLC is a WHOLE nother can of worms..... that was in gaming news recently too.... it's just one of many things that caused me to regard EA as a plague. And yeah, technically I regard BOTH EA's as a plague ;P
Proud member of the Initiative for Bigger Weapons EV. - Bringer of Additive Blended Doom - Vote for Lore, get free cookie

Offline TheVampire100

  • Master Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 1,382
  • Ordinary Vampire
Re: Early Access, gift or plague?
« Reply #16 on: July 18, 2017, 02:00:37 pm »
Can you link me to the news? Enjoying the drama is the only fun I can have from the game.

Offline eRe4s3r

  • Core Member Mark II
  • *****
  • Posts: 2,825
Re: Early Access, gift or plague?
« Reply #17 on: July 18, 2017, 02:27:15 pm »
Can you link me to the news? Enjoying the drama is the only fun I can have from the game.

to youtube ye shall be sent
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhP_0l3OBso

Ps.: there is a lot more drama involving this, but whatever... .. the reason for the existence of the DLC is actually another one for the history books.

PPs.: Being used as mule for buying games is why I unfriended everyone (except 1) on Steam ;P bonus result: Clean activity feed.
« Last Edit: July 18, 2017, 03:07:52 pm by eRe4s3r »
Proud member of the Initiative for Bigger Weapons EV. - Bringer of Additive Blended Doom - Vote for Lore, get free cookie

Offline Misery

  • Arcen Volunteer
  • Core Member Mark V
  • *****
  • Posts: 4,109
Re: Early Access, gift or plague?
« Reply #18 on: July 18, 2017, 07:24:36 pm »
However, his endless rants about a game he is currently obsessed with can get tiresome from time to time.

So, I should do it more often, is what you're saying :D

In all seriousness though, the reason I do that is because a good number of people on my friends list play the same games I do but also are the sort that like to constantly talk about them a lot.  Instead of just always responding to questions about such-and-such game (which is what was happening, and I'm not so good with direct conversation), I started just rambling about them.  Particularly when it comes to any game that I'm playing yet others cant play (currently the SF version of 20XX).

Something that's occurred to me though:  Those long posts are always displayed AS long posts.  I've gotten used to this on my end, because ALOT of people on my list post frequent (very, very frequent) and long reviews of various games, but you'd think Steam would have been set up to display them in a smaller box with "read more" at the bottom, rather than in this giant, rambling heap.   I don't understand why they didn't do this.  As much as the stuff in my feed can be interesting, it can be obnoxious to scroll through it at a decent pace because Steam cant be bothered to just set it up in a non-stupid way.   At least screenshots are organized a bit better.  EVERYONE on my friends list tends to produce about 10 zillion screenshots per second.

At least the damn thing is useful though even if it's got a few screwball issues.  Unlike the freaking store.  Ugh.   Remember when it used to not suck?  Those were the days....




As for the Factorio / FCE bit, that's an interesting distinction between the types of grind each game uses.   Factorio sounds a lot more like the Minecraft/Terraria sort of grind:  You CAN do this thing here in this way, but hey, if you want to build this gizmo over here, you'll have another option for doing it.  Or here's another option over in this other direction.  Or just go punch skeletons for 20 minutes.

FCE though.... I tried that, and honestly, I just couldn't get into it.  It didn't have that sort of "freedom" that I rather expected of it.  Which sounds pretty much exactly like what you're saying there.  I don't know why they'd do things to artificially lengthen the game, really.   Games like that one, you don't NEED to do that to.  The freeform gameplay extends the length indefinitely, for many of these.   

I really need to get around to playing Factorio myself.  I bought it awhile ago but then totally forgot it was there.  Be nice if that'd stop happening.

Offline Cyborg

  • Master Member Mark III
  • *****
  • Posts: 1,957
Re: Early Access, gift or plague?
« Reply #19 on: July 18, 2017, 10:11:09 pm »
Can you link me to the news? Enjoying the drama is the only fun I can have from the game.

to youtube ye shall be sent
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhP_0l3OBso

Ps.: there is a lot more drama involving this, but whatever... .. the reason for the existence of the DLC is actually another one for the history books.

PPs.: Being used as mule for buying games is why I unfriended everyone (except 1) on Steam ;P bonus result: Clean activity feed.

What do you mean by being used as a mule? I thought they made currency fair worldwide.
Kahuna strategy guide:
http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,13369.0.html

Suggestions, bugs? Don't be lazy, give back:
http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/

Planetcracker. Believe it.

The stigma of hunger. http://wayw.re/Vi12BK

Offline eRe4s3r

  • Core Member Mark II
  • *****
  • Posts: 2,825
Re: Early Access, gift or plague?
« Reply #20 on: July 18, 2017, 11:43:44 pm »
Can you link me to the news? Enjoying the drama is the only fun I can have from the game.

to youtube ye shall be sent
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhP_0l3OBso

Ps.: there is a lot more drama involving this, but whatever... .. the reason for the existence of the DLC is actually another one for the history books.

PPs.: Being used as mule for buying games is why I unfriended everyone (except 1) on Steam ;P bonus result: Clean activity feed.

What do you mean by being used as a mule? I thought they made currency fair worldwide.

Meant as using me as a guide what they should buy....  or using "steam" friends for such purposes... find that kinda goes against the uses of the activity feeds (which is already spammy enough with announcements from curators etc.)
Proud member of the Initiative for Bigger Weapons EV. - Bringer of Additive Blended Doom - Vote for Lore, get free cookie

Offline Cyborg

  • Master Member Mark III
  • *****
  • Posts: 1,957
Re: Early Access, gift or plague?
« Reply #21 on: July 18, 2017, 11:49:24 pm »
I see, your objection is that you are being used to sell games? So you unfriended everyone because you feel your game activity is being exploited for sales purposes?

My friends list is quite small, but it's filled with people I actually play games with.
Kahuna strategy guide:
http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,13369.0.html

Suggestions, bugs? Don't be lazy, give back:
http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/

Planetcracker. Believe it.

The stigma of hunger. http://wayw.re/Vi12BK

Offline eRe4s3r

  • Core Member Mark II
  • *****
  • Posts: 2,825
Re: Early Access, gift or plague?
« Reply #22 on: July 19, 2017, 12:05:36 pm »
I see, your objection is that you are being used to sell games? So you unfriended everyone because you feel your game activity is being exploited for sales purposes?

My friends list is quite small, but it's filled with people I actually play games with.

I guess that's my core problem, I don't play anything that's on Steam in MP, and I am hardcore NOT coop player. I dislike binding my own enjoyment of a game to someones else playstyle HUGELY. Add to that I worked on a few games and uploaded to workshop and you get a true first world problem. ^^
Proud member of the Initiative for Bigger Weapons EV. - Bringer of Additive Blended Doom - Vote for Lore, get free cookie

Offline x4000

  • Chris McElligott Park, Arcen Founder and Lead Dev
  • Arcen Staff
  • Zenith Council Member Mark III
  • *****
  • Posts: 31,651
Re: Early Access, gift or plague?
« Reply #23 on: July 19, 2017, 01:00:38 pm »
I see, your objection is that you are being used to sell games? So you unfriended everyone because you feel your game activity is being exploited for sales purposes?

My friends list is quite small, but it's filled with people I actually play games with.

I guess that's my core problem, I don't play anything that's on Steam in MP, and I am hardcore NOT coop player. I dislike binding my own enjoyment of a game to someones else playstyle HUGELY. Add to that I worked on a few games and uploaded to workshop and you get a true first world problem. ^^

And see, as a consumer and as a developer, I have to say I side with Steam on this one.  Obviously I agree that people should be able to opt out, since involuntary-anything tends to be bad, but:

- As a consumer, I have various people I know (like you guys) with tastes that are varying degrees of similarity to mine.  Having your opinions front and center, and/or non-opinion things like "he played a lot of this" is something that would make my "job" as a consumer trying to find stuff in a cluttered store/world a lot easier.  One way or another, even if the store was better curated, it's word of mouth that would help me to find the hidden gems that I might enjoy.

- As a developer, one of the biggest things is that there's so much noise in the system right now that it's hard for players to even talk about things with one another if they aren't actively trying to promote something.  I don't go around telling all the people how much I've been enjoying Everything, or The Turing Test, or whatever.  But people in my friends feed will see that I've been playing it, and that at least can give them an idea to look at them more carefully if they know they enjoy things similar to me.  This is basically "passive word of mouth," and let's face it -- in a world that is as overwhelmed with content as the world is, that's the only way that people will hear about all the various things.

From another vantage, I much prefer that approach to Amazon's "we saw you bought a fridge, so let us try to sell you refrigerators for the next year."  Or google's "we're watching everything and trying to match you to stuff."

Those are much more inhuman, much more intrusive, and much more algorithm-based.  I dunno, that's just me.
Have ideas or bug reports for one of our games?  Mantis for Suggestions and Bug Reports. Thanks for helping to make our games better!

Offline eRe4s3r

  • Core Member Mark II
  • *****
  • Posts: 2,825
Re: Early Access, gift or plague?
« Reply #24 on: July 19, 2017, 01:59:03 pm »
I guess my real problem is easily defined, friends on steam, meatworld interactions aside, come from PVP or COOP, they don't come from games I want (offline SP) or for the reasons I care about games (progression, story, emergent gameplay (ie, KSP, Factorio, and to some extend AI War). So this put me in the odd position that nothing anyone on my friends list plays (except 1 person) interested me in the slightest. And I don't need a steam friends list to find gems like Factorio or KSP, what I need is a way to discover games that interest me for the above mentioned things, STORY and PROGRESSION ;P

I wouldn't have purged my friends list if the recommendation (and activity feed spam) had been useful to me.

If someone is hardcore focused on SP experiences, the chances of meeting that person in a MP game are ZERO. And so they will never be in your activity feed on Steam unless you have some absurd luck. It's another good example of a "filter bubble" imo. Only this filter bubble is ruining developers, because when you built your buying habbits on this, you are buying based on meta-filter-bubbles.

As a developer this should imo scare you, as it means that if your game doesn't cater to the MP/COOP crowd it will most likely not be included into that filter bubble.
Proud member of the Initiative for Bigger Weapons EV. - Bringer of Additive Blended Doom - Vote for Lore, get free cookie

Offline x4000

  • Chris McElligott Park, Arcen Founder and Lead Dev
  • Arcen Staff
  • Zenith Council Member Mark III
  • *****
  • Posts: 31,651
Re: Early Access, gift or plague?
« Reply #25 on: July 19, 2017, 02:37:37 pm »
Got it, that makes sense.  Most of my friends come from people who I've encountered on forums and whatnot.  I've played multiplayer with only one of my non-meatspace steam friends.

There's a whole lot about how people do or do not find games that scares me, for sure.  How things are being surfaced to people is broken on a ton of levels.
Have ideas or bug reports for one of our games?  Mantis for Suggestions and Bug Reports. Thanks for helping to make our games better!

Offline TheVampire100

  • Master Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 1,382
  • Ordinary Vampire
Re: Early Access, gift or plague?
« Reply #26 on: July 19, 2017, 10:13:04 pm »
I actually like to play more Multiplayer games than I do. More in the direction of "co-op". I do play a lot of Multiplayer games but one is Dota 2, which none of my friends want to play with me anymore (I'm a terrible person) and the other is Mabinogi, which none of my friends wants to play with me anymore (have I mentioned that I'm a terrible person?). well, in terms of mabinogi it's more of "We are not interested in it currently/anymore". Bah, and when it finally got new interesting stuff, can't beat that new dungeon alone.

Anyway, I like to team up with someone and, considering what types of games I play, most of the time I like to plan ahead with them, discuss about the game etc. As you mentioned, there are people that want to do their thing and don't like to play the game another way. had these moments too, many of them, these types of Steam friends didn't last long honestly. I'm the same as you in that term, I don't like to pushed in one direction. Ironically I can be really pushy in many cases. The friends I have now, that soemtimes still play with me (really rarely) however are more of the "Just do the planning and we follow" stuff, so, I have to do all the planning myself mostly. I'm a little straneg in that regard, I want others to contribute to plannign but I also want it to have my own ideas in it. Which soemtimes does not work in specific games.
I stopped playing Dungeon Defenders 2 multiplayer, because evry time you go there, there is always that one guy who builds everything himself and if you try to add your own stuff, he will quickly spam the chat or ping you to remove it and also demand to hand him all your building mana. In that regard, DD2 is really toxic and it kind of ruined the game for me. Sanctum is more open minded about this.

I also like story about video games. A lot. I know there are some people here (calling out Misery again) that don't like stories at all in video games and just want the game for the game(play). I like to have both in games but I also liek to have games, that focus more on the story as on the actual gameplay. But I also don't want them to have only story, as Visual Novels for an example, because I could just read a book that way. Text based adventures are sometimes okay, like Sorcery, which is almost entirely story but features so many different decision paths, that you will barely notice that you just read a book.
The problem with friends, in terms of story is, spoilers. This is the one thing I hate the most. It doesn't even have to be somethign about the story, even stuff like important late gameplay elements cpuld go on my nerves. I rage on this stuff, when someones shows me somethign I didn't know before and wanted to find out myself. Screenshots are the worst in that regard, it's a literal picture that shows me what will happen int he game. There is a spoiler option for a reason!
Ugh!
So in that regard I have to be careful, what my friends play. Som of them don't even think about it, when they post this stuff.

Offline Misery

  • Arcen Volunteer
  • Core Member Mark V
  • *****
  • Posts: 4,109
Re: Early Access, gift or plague?
« Reply #27 on: July 19, 2017, 10:25:47 pm »
I know there are some people here (calling out Misery again) that don't like stories at all in video games and just want the game for the game(play).

At least this means you don't have to worry about me ruining storylines for you.  Games I play tend not to have any, after all.  Unless "Blast off and strike the evil Bydo Empire!!!!!" counts as a "story".

Well, technically 20XX has a story, but A: I have no idea what it is, and B: despite that, I made a point of not revealing a couple of really specific things during my general ranting.  Some things are super obvious as potential spoilers, even to me.



I stopped playing Dungeon Defenders 2 multiplayer, because evry time you go there, there is always that one guy who builds everything himself and if you try to add your own stuff, he will quickly spam the chat or ping you to remove it and also demand to hand him all your building mana. In that regard, DD2 is really toxic and it kind of ruined the game for me. Sanctum is more open minded about this.

This sounds more than a little annoying.

I used to play MMOs myself, actually, but stopped partly for this sort of reason.  There's too many commanding jerks out there.  Which becomes even worse if the person doesn't actually know what they're doing.

Though also, there's this reason:

Quote
I dislike binding my own enjoyment of a game to someones else playstyle HUGELY.

Yeah, cant freaking stand that.  Is why I don't do team games as a rule.  Fighting games, sure, because those are one-on-one... I don't need to rely on or work with anyone.

....or WAIT for anyone.  I hate that even more. 

Offline Draco18s

  • Resident Velociraptor
  • Core Member Mark V
  • *****
  • Posts: 4,251
Re: Early Access, gift or plague?
« Reply #28 on: July 19, 2017, 10:32:56 pm »
I stopped playing Dungeon Defenders 2 multiplayer, because evry time you go there, there is always that one guy who builds everything himself and if you try to add your own stuff, he will quickly spam the chat or ping you to remove it and also demand to hand him all your building mana. In that regard, DD2 is really toxic and it kind of ruined the game for me. Sanctum is more open minded about this.

Dungeon Defenders 1 was like that too. The community has always been ridiculously toxic.
I have a screenshot around somewhere where one of the forum global mods (not a Trendy employee, but a volunteer) intentionally misquoted me (an instant ban-level level TOS violation) in order to then insult my intelligence and/or observation skills.

Offline eRe4s3r

  • Core Member Mark II
  • *****
  • Posts: 2,825
Re: Early Access, gift or plague?
« Reply #29 on: July 19, 2017, 10:36:15 pm »
While we trail off into story, for me it's another reason that I dislike EA games... I made the colossal mistake of playing Divinity: Original Sins beta about 9 times (9 major beta releases) and when it finally released I was so sick and tired of everything in that starting area that it severely hampered my enjoyment... I feel like I made that same mistake with Subnautica btw...  and the same for progression based building games when the progression gets added piece by piece, I often lose any enjoyment out of being locked out of my previous progression again and again and again ~.~

Proud member of the Initiative for Bigger Weapons EV. - Bringer of Additive Blended Doom - Vote for Lore, get free cookie

 

SMF spam blocked by CleanTalk