Author Topic: Endless Legend?  (Read 6736 times)

Offline KingIsaacLinksr

  • Master Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 1,332
  • A Paladin Without A Crusade...
Re: Endless Legend?
« Reply #15 on: November 28, 2015, 10:47:58 pm »
Quote
These days I'm too poor to just buy a game on impulse and see if it works

Gee, almost as if Steam implemented a refund policy recently to deal with this situation. As someone who's lived on a limited budget for a very long time, I make do with Steam sales at the end of the year to get by. There is a breadth and width of games out there to choose from, from a variety of different price points. There's even free-to-play, but its a bit toxic sometimes so I can understand not wanting to deal with that. And yeah, that does mean not playing some games. Though I just have to wonder how anyone has time for piracy these days. Even if I wanted to pirate, I couldn't because I've got a list a mile long of games I want to play.

If you don't like the company, simply ban them and move on. After multiple game fiascos, I did the same with EA and Ubisoft and haven't looked back. I haven't played a game from either since Assassin's Creed 2/Mass Effect 2. Frankly, you want to support developers that deserve it? Play their games to the exclusion of everyone else. Companies don't look at pirates and go "Oh crap, he pirated our game, we need to change now!". They will only change from a concerted effort of consistent public conversation or where the money flows.

Piracy arguably hurts us all because Publishers use it to justify wholly unnecessary forms of DRM. It certainly keeps some publishers away from alternatives like GOG.com.

Quote
because it's not really stealing - in a world with perfectly accurate game reviewers or demos

Perfectly accurate game reviewers. o_o. Yeah, I don't get why you think these can possibly exist. Reviews are based on people with varied tastes and priorities. If you don't agree with their overall priorities, my suggestion is to find new ones. Quite frankly, I get really irritated when people paint all reviewers with the same brush as being corrupted. Especially when their only evidence are the reviews for Star Wars: Battlefront, or whatever other popular-but-not-great game got released recently. Even more so if they only use the reviewers that show up on Metacritic. Yea, those reviewers that gave Star Wars: Battlefront a 9/10 or 10/10 are possibly questionable. But there are a wide range of reviewers out there that bust their asses and aren't on Metacritic giving Star Wars a 9/10. They actually wait, do the honest work and give a much more reasonable assessment. If you don't agree with the "mainstream" reviewers, fine, that's your deal. However, there is no such thing of a completely 100% objective or accurate review or reviewer.

Find the reviewers whose priorities you agree with. And don't always expect to agree with them 100% of the time. Really, you shouldn't be. If everyone who read my reviews agreed with me all of the time, I would be extremely concerned I'm doing something wrong. There is just no way that I'm always right.
« Last Edit: November 28, 2015, 11:06:46 pm by KingIsaacLinksr »
Casual reviewer with a sense of justice.
Visit the Arcen Mantis to help: https://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/
A Paladin's Blog. Long form videogame reviews focusing on mechanics and narrative analyzing. Plus other stuff. www.kingisaaclinksr.com

Offline Shrugging Khan

  • Hero Member Mark III
  • *****
  • Posts: 1,217
  • Neinzul Y PzKpfw Tiger!
Re: Endless Legend?
« Reply #16 on: November 29, 2015, 06:06:19 am »
Quote
The difference is that you are keeping up playing their games, thus stealing from them. I used to pirate games to see if they were any good, then buy them. These days, I barely see the point in even pirating first as there are several review sites and places to research games prior to buying, not to mention friends. In addition, games are stupidly cheap these days. The age of $60 AAA releases is coming to an end, and only a few companies still desperately try it and fail over and over (Hello EA).
On stealing: Equating piracy with theft is a bit wonky IMO. Theft is taking advantage of a service without recompense? Then the service I'm expecting is the game as advertised by the devs, not just the game as-is. If the game isn't as good as advertised, the service wasn't provided - and yet I'd have no way to get my money back. (I don't trust steam refund etc. very much; might have to get more used to that.)

Quote
keeping up playing their games, thus stealing from them
I'm not really playing pirated games for very long. That's not really the point, for me - it's meant to serve as a sort of demo; and if I keep playing for longer then yes I'm supposed to pay already.

On cheapness: True enough. These days it usually takes 0.5-2 years for a game to drop in price by some 95%, making piracy rather redundant in the majority of cases.

Quote from: KingIsaacLinksr
On piracy
I suspect we're really just very different kinds of player. I don't play a lot of games, and the mainstream EA/Ubisoft/Whatnot devs really are entirely not interesting to me - the AssCreeds, MassEffects and other big budget games bore me by their concept alone. What I'm interested in are usually lesser-known indie games, which in turn usually turn out to be pretty shoddy because the most interesting concepts tend to be fairly hard to implement. If those games come for 5€ a pop, I'll just buy them and consider it a donation to the good cause of making interesting games. If they ask full prices in the 20€-60€ range though...yes, I could just skip that game. But I really would want to support them if they deliver on what they promise; which leads us to the issue of reviews.

Quote from: KingIsaacLinksr
On reviews
I'm not saying all reviewers are bad, untrustworthy, crooks, hacks or shills - many may be, but that's not the main issue: I don't know any that are on the same wavelength as me and happen to frequently review games I'm interested in. Reviews just don't work for me, practically speaking. The things I like or dislike about games are too specific and are often completely ignored by reviewers, my priorities are very particular, and the games I'm interested in are very niche and often don't even get reviewed a lot.

I'm not arguing for piracy as a political or ethical act; to me at least it's just a pragmatic way of better knowing what I'm spending my money on. I realise this may be abused as an excuse by people who really do just steal, and that I don't have much of a way of proving how I really do end up paying for all those games that I also play (or just like), other than recounting the long history of what I pirated and yet paid for afterwards - and I doubt anyone would care.

Maybe it really is a matter of philosophy, though? Speaking purely of digital wares, I really do feel that giving money directly to good devs is more beneficial to the whole than just waiting for games to become dirt cheap or free; even if there is an intermediate step of piracy involved.

This obviously doesn't work for non-digital goods and services, and I wouldn't propose stealing those in any case.
The beatings shall continue
until morale improves!

Offline Misery

  • Arcen Volunteer
  • Core Member Mark V
  • *****
  • Posts: 4,109
Re: Endless Legend?
« Reply #17 on: November 29, 2015, 11:36:50 am »
Quote
On reviews
I'm not saying all reviewers are bad, untrustworthy, crooks, hacks or shills - many may be, but that's not the main issue: I don't know any that are on the same wavelength as me and happen to frequently review games I'm interested in. Reviews just don't work for me, practically speaking. The things I like or dislike about games are too specific and are often completely ignored by reviewers, my priorities are very particular, and the games I'm interested in are very niche and often don't even get reviewed a lot.

I'll just chime in and say that I totally agree with this one.  I just dont really trust many reviewers these days to give me anything useful.  On the rare occaision that they're reviewing something I care about, they're never focusing on the elements of it that I think are truly important.  Things like graphics, sound, story, those come to the forefront, while the bits I consider actually IMPORTANT, like the actual gameplay, balance, and stuff like that.... gets shoved off to the side.  They happily forgive loads of major balance issues and things of that nature if the game in question has enough pretty cutscenes.  All it does is anger me, so.... yeah, not very useful. 

There's only two reviewers I really listen to nowadays:  one is Classic Game Room, who does console games from literally every era with extreme randomness (one day he's reviewing a popular game like Arkham Knight, the next he's reviewing some downright ancient and very obscure machine from the 70s that just plays a clone of Pong), and the other is Lazy Game Reviews (yes, not the best name) who is similar in choosing from many eras but does PC games instead.  Both of them tend to focus on fun and gameplay and that stuff absolutely above all else; graphics and such arent counted for much.  Which makes sense, as if you're into retro games at all, which can look like gibberish made up of pixels the size of cats, you probably arent bothered by iffy graphics or something like that.  

And I like that... that review focus on wether the game is fun or not, wether it's well-made or not. With the games that are good, they always look like they genuinely are enjoying them.That's what I want to see in reviews.  But that's what I almost never do see in them, certainly not from the big guys.   I just.... ugh.  Even with games that are given good scores, so many reviewers just LOOK like they're not actually all that interested.  It makes it very hard to trust what they say, really, provided they're talking about anything important at all.

And of course with the big guys it's super rare that they review anything I give a crap about to begin with.  If it's not the newest Assassin's Creed or Halo, they dont care about it.  Bah.


There, mini-rant over.

On the note of the original topic... I'd been wondering about this particular game as well.   Though, I think it loses me at the "AI is totally braindead" bit.  I haaaaaaaaaaaaate having that problem in a 4X game, since 4X games tend to be all ABOUT going up against the AI, right?  Or at least that's how it seems.

Looks like this isnt a game I should bother with, then.

Offline Wingflier

  • Core Member Mark II
  • *****
  • Posts: 2,753
  • To add me on Steam, click the little Steam icon ^
Re: Endless Legend?
« Reply #18 on: November 29, 2015, 01:02:09 pm »
Quote
On stealing: Equating piracy with theft is a bit wonky IMO. Theft is taking advantage of a service without recompense? Then the service I'm expecting is the game as advertised by the devs, not just the game as-is. If the game isn't as good as advertised, the service wasn't provided - and yet I'd have no way to get my money back.
Let me just throw this in there. If "trying before you buy it" didn't work within the PC gaming world, then the Free to Play model would be a miserable failure. Yet we find the most successful games on the market (DotA, LoL, Smite) are inevitably free to play. People are willing to spend more on a game, or pay what they think it's worth, when you give them a chance to enjoy it. This is why you take a car on a test drive (or several test drives) before you buy it. This is why a real estate agent gives you a tour of a home before you purchase it. No rational person would simply *LOOK* at pictures of the house online or read REVIEWS of people who have lived there. That's a totally unacceptable business practice.

Furthermore, back in the '90s most developers provided demos of the game online so that people who were interested could get a taste first. Most companies don't do that anymore, even though Steam is the perfect platform for it, because the "download demo" button is literally 2 inches away from the "buy now" feature. Well, if you don't want to provide a demo, don't complain when people pirate your game first to see if it's worth paying for because they didn't trust their own tastes to be accurately represented by thousands of people they've never met.

Quote
(I don't trust steam refund etc. very much; might have to get more used to that.)
And rightly you shouldn't. Steam's official policy is that you can only refund the game if it's been played for 2 or less hours. Good luck getting any kind of accurate feel for Fallout 4 after only 2 hours lol...
« Last Edit: November 29, 2015, 01:09:43 pm by Wingflier »
"Inner peace is the void of expectation. It is the absence of our shared desperation to feel a certain way."

Offline Cyborg

  • Master Member Mark III
  • *****
  • Posts: 1,957
Re: Endless Legend?
« Reply #19 on: November 29, 2015, 03:58:48 pm »
Kind of baffles me that we are on an independent game developer's website actually participating in a discussion where people are attempting to justify making up their own rules on why stealing games is okay. Just total lack of awareness and a example of cognitive dissonance. You all know that taking things that aren't yours isn't okay, so just own up to it if that's your truth. 
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 Shrugging Khan

  • Hero Member Mark III
  • *****
  • Posts: 1,217
  • Neinzul Y PzKpfw Tiger!
Re: Endless Legend?
« Reply #20 on: November 29, 2015, 04:26:58 pm »
Kind of baffles me that we are on an independent game developer's website actually participating in a discussion where people are attempting to justify making up their own rules on why stealing games is okay. Just total lack of awareness and a example of cognitive dissonance. You all know that taking things that aren't yours isn't okay, so just own up to it if that's your truth.

Well, I got started on Arcen by playing the AIW 3.0 demo, bouncing off of it because it looked fussy and incoherent in the limited time allowed, later pirating it, playing it for an extended campaign and falling in love with it. Now I have copies of AIW and all expansions on every digital distribution platform, plus ones obtained from the Arcen page, and I gave even more to every friend and family member who was even remotely interested. I also bought all other games Arcen ever made, only to support them, even though those never clicked with me.

Quote from: Google
cognitive dissonance: the state of having inconsistent thoughts, beliefs, or attitudes, especially as relating to behavioural decisions and attitude change.
For Arcen, I was both a pirate and a source of money and publicity. You may consider that inconsistent, but for me it's historical fact.
The beatings shall continue
until morale improves!

Offline TheVampire100

  • Master Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 1,382
  • Ordinary Vampire
Re: Endless Legend?
« Reply #21 on: November 29, 2015, 05:10:29 pm »
I pirated Plants vs Zombies once. I bought it however long after that. On PC, on Nintendo DS, on my iPhone. I think I paid more than enough for the pirating. And considering what they made out of the sequel I feel a little betrayed. Backstab once and you get backstabbed back I guess.
I don't encourage people that they should pirate games and I don't think that it's fair. It's really a bad excuse to say "Yeah, I don't have the money, so let me just download it for free". However I can understand when people just want really hard to test a game and there is no demo of the game aviable. Steam refunds made it  a little more easy to test games, however 2 hours of play time are way too short for some games to be considered "tested". Also, Steam refunds only in Steam Wallet, so they make sure the money belongs to them and not to ypu (Steam Wallet is and never was real money. It's an alternate currency to buy stuff on Steam). I prefer however to pay with Paypal. With money I own. Credit Cards are just a terrible idea of paying with money you don't have and I said already my thoughts to Steam Wallet.
This shouldn't encourage people to porate stuff ebcause it's "easier" or "cheaper" for them. But do what you want, but investing money into a terrible developer may give him the chance to improve.

Offline Wingflier

  • Core Member Mark II
  • *****
  • Posts: 2,753
  • To add me on Steam, click the little Steam icon ^
Re: Endless Legend?
« Reply #22 on: November 29, 2015, 05:14:57 pm »
Lol because Steam's policy of playing AI War for 2 hours would really give you a glimpse of what the game is even about? I mean in this case there's a demo, but apply this logic to any game without a demo and you can absolutely see why people would be hesitant to waste their money on something they may not even like.

Sorry Cyborg but I'm just not buying into your notion of "you all know it's wrong and you're rationalizing". Were that morality so cut and dry, and yet here we are, a nation that began as a result of pirating and smuggling and defying the common law because it was unjust. You could almost say we're good ol' fashioned Americans.
"Inner peace is the void of expectation. It is the absence of our shared desperation to feel a certain way."

Offline tombik

  • Full Member Mark II
  • ***
  • Posts: 172
Re: Endless Legend?
« Reply #23 on: November 29, 2015, 06:47:39 pm »
While I agree that stealing is inherently bad, since it makes someone worse off, not playing games which someone did not pay for is not inherently bad. We should assume some additional things.

I mostly wait until a game gets >%75 sale to get it, and get it afterwards. Did the value of game changed? No. Did my not pirating action made the developer better off? No. Assume that that sale has not ever happened, so I could not get it for less. Is the developer better off? No. Actually if it is a fact that I wont be paying for the game, my pirating will actually help the developer since I may unintentionally advertise for it to my "richer" or more "ethical" friends.

With copyrights, difference between stealing and notstealing is really vague. Yes, you cant stay at a home for 3 months for free just to make sure that it is a good house. Since staying in a house is exclusive, others will not be able to use it. While with copyrights, if you copy it, you produced before a non-existant good specifically for you.

This is not trying to justify piracy. This is just to point out some hidden assumptions that some anti-piracy guys are making. And reminding that even though others may share "stealing is bad" argument, they may not share "this is stealing"part.

Offline Draco18s

  • Resident Velociraptor
  • Core Member Mark V
  • *****
  • Posts: 4,251
Re: Endless Legend?
« Reply #24 on: November 29, 2015, 08:00:25 pm »
Let me just throw this in there. If "trying before you buy it" didn't work within the PC gaming world, then the Free to Play model would be a miserable failure. Yet we find the most successful games on the market (DotA, LoL, Smite) are inevitably free to play. People are willing to spend more on a game, or pay what they think it's worth, when you give them a chance to enjoy it. This is why you take a car on a test drive (or several test drives) before you buy it. This is why a real estate agent gives you a tour of a home before you purchase it. No rational person would simply *LOOK* at pictures of the house online or read REVIEWS of people who have lived there. That's a totally unacceptable business practice.

Ironically relevant.
Warning: DarkMater2525 / Religious content. TL;DW:
Video essentially makes the point that we don't buy houses sight unseen, but we'll happily sign up for religious after-death rewards without a second thought.

But yes.  This topic is why I was banned from the (old) Steam forums after having paid for an absolute lemon of a game and posted quite a piece of vitriol on that game's discussion subboard which ended with "this is why I pirate."

That said, I haven't pirated a game in a long time.  Mostly because I've got enough unplayed ones that I've paid for already and not enough time to play them all compounded by the rather plentiful bounty of cheap-but-decent titles.  I've also cut down on my pirating of TV shows (which is a gray area due to the laws on time-shifting) mostly due to the convenience of legal avenues such as Crunchy Roll.

Offline Wingflier

  • Core Member Mark II
  • *****
  • Posts: 2,753
  • To add me on Steam, click the little Steam icon ^
Re: Endless Legend?
« Reply #25 on: November 29, 2015, 09:27:47 pm »
Lol Draco I was thinking of that video too when I made that comment. +1

Darkmatter is one of my favorite youtube authors.
« Last Edit: November 29, 2015, 09:34:54 pm by Wingflier »
"Inner peace is the void of expectation. It is the absence of our shared desperation to feel a certain way."

Offline Draco18s

  • Resident Velociraptor
  • Core Member Mark V
  • *****
  • Posts: 4,251
Re: Endless Legend?
« Reply #26 on: November 29, 2015, 10:24:04 pm »
Lol Draco I was thinking of that video too when I made that comment. +1

Hehe.

 

SMF spam blocked by CleanTalk