Eh, you can recover FGO data easy enough, as long as you know your user number and pretty basic details about your account. Had to do it myself not too long ago, even.
The problem is not that the app was deleted. The problem is she actually spent 2 million yen on the game in the first place. Seriously, the F2P model needs to die in a fire...
The problem is not that the app was deleted. The problem is she actually spent 2 million yen on the game in the first place. Seriously, the F2P model needs to die in a fire...
There's a rather large difference between allot of actual F2P games and the glorified slot machines that are most Japanese mobile games. I've spent way too much money on WoWS perhaps, but I always spent it knowing exactly what I was getting and paying said money didn't really give me an advantage over people that didn't (well okay... mostly *cough*Kaga*cough*).
There's a rather large difference between allot of actual F2P games and the glorified slot machines that are most Japanese mobile games. I've spent way too much money on WoWS perhaps, but I always spent it knowing exactly what I was getting and paying said money didn't really give me an advantage over people that didn't (well okay... mostly *cough*Kaga*cough*).
The problem isn't the "value for the money", (the small number of F2P games I ever play, I adamantly refuse to give even a single cent for), it's that the whole business model is based upon getting the small number of people with no ability to control their spending habits to finance a whole company.
I'd rather a game where I pay X money up front and get the actual product (and OK, sure, DLC isn't inherently terrible, provided it isn't day 1 DLC), rather than play a game financed by a parent not being able to feed their kids somewhere.
I'd rather a game where I pay X money up front and get the actual product (and OK, sure, DLC isn't inherently terrible, provided it isn't day 1 DLC), rather than play a game financed by a parent not being able to feed their kids somewhere.
See, even in the 'glory days' of gaming we had a good market for things things like the Gameshark and cheat books which demonstrates that at least some people have always been willing to pay for extra or different content on top of the full price they put down for their 'finished' games.
And that was ALWAYS content which was already on the disk when it was burned, which makes people complaining about on-disk DLC a bit funny.
Of course, now we can find the method for such unlocks for free online but back then having them on GameFAQs often meant that some early adopters already ponied up hard cash for the prestige of being the first sharer.
Now players can pay cash for individual bits of content that's not in the initial disk or download (shady publishers aside). You can't argue that's not an improvement compared to the above even if the model demands to be exploited.
The main point is that the point where all players of a 'full' game were completely satisfied with what they got for the box price passed long ago. Publishers have only recently caught up with gamer nature.
See, even in the 'glory days' of gaming we had a good market for things things like the Gameshark and cheat books which demonstrates that at least some people have always been willing to pay for extra or different content on top of the full price they put down for their 'finished' games.
And that was ALWAYS content which was already on the disk when it was burned, which makes people complaining about on-disk DLC a bit funny.
Of course, now we can find the method for such unlocks for free online but back then having them on GameFAQs often meant that some early adopters already ponied up hard cash for the prestige of being the first sharer.
Now players can pay cash for individual bits of content that's not in the initial disk or download (shady publishers aside). You can't argue that's not an improvement compared to the above even if the model demands to be exploited.
The main point is that the point where all players of a 'full' game were completely satisfied with what they got for the box price passed long ago. Publishers have only recently caught up with gamer nature.
People buying a Gameshark is not at all comparable to deliberately predating upon people impulses or gambling vulnerabilities. A Gameshark is at best like buying DLC, still a one-and-done proposition.
The point of F2P models is that they can NEVER spend enough money, and the games are deliberately built explicitly for the purpose of getting a small portion of their playerbase to bankrupt themselves by exploiting weaknesses in human psychology. That is not even remotely like what happens when someone bought a Gameshark.
I'm with NWSiaCB, on this. That said, it's handled much better some ways than others, and I wouldn't say the system is outright evil.
Most of the time though, the pay systems are excessively punishing to non payers and horribly throw off the pacing, learning curves, and balance of potentially good games even with paying.
Best case it's like frozen pizza. Everything that makes the game interesting is for sale and immediately available, destroying good game progression or challenge, and instead the game is loaded with superficial objectives, bland gameplay that would be much better flavored if all the good ideas weren't strung out by the marketing plan, gates that arbitrarily block you from progress just to waste your time, and cheap preservatives.
Worst case it's like tobacco. A cool concept that is based around something designed to waste payer money on poor odds, and can be dangerously addictive to the weak-willed. Whether simple or robust, they are based around the system of chance and encouraging the players to gamble with their money in order to win. I think some game companies willingly take part of a neo-gambling phenomenon that is affecting a generation of gamers in a bad way.
Personally, I never thought World of Warcraft looked like a bad game (though I've never played). Is the Free to Play model really that much better than subscriptions when it comes to sustainable income? I think at the least it certainly builds a better experience for everyone involved.
Thankfully, FGO is slightly better in that there is basically never a need to pay; it's entirely feasible to complete the current content without any 4/5 star servants or craft essences (though it's certainly easier, but you can use support servants dor You're basically only either paying to ensure OPness (i.e. Merlin) or for your waifu/husbando of choice.
The lure of the waifu is strong enough to make it the highest grossing mobage out there, though. Those whales are just crazy.
Personally, I never thought World of Warcraft looked like a bad game (though I've never played). Is the Free to Play model really that much better than subscriptions when it comes to sustainable income? I think at the least it certainly builds a better experience for everyone involved.
Ya know, I just realized that a subscription based game awarding perks for richer players that subsidize or outright fund the subs for others who can't or won't pay themselves would be a much more transparent way of implementing the whole system.
The thing is, it's not so much whether you, individually, need to pay, it's that someone needs to pay, or the game goes offline. No matter how much something that is premium content is "just cosmetic" or whatever someone has to pay for the servers and the trickle of additional content.
Hypothetically, this is a form of price discrimination with some valid concept that says you can get the rich to pay more in your game than the poor can afford, so that the game is available to all, but the costs are only distributed according to capability to pay. In practice, however, that's not at all what happens, and the entire burden of the game's costs (plus all the bonuses the execs pay themselves for successfully bankrupting their customers on failed gacha rolls) fall on the shoulders of people who generally can't afford what they're paying.
A subscription service for online play means everyone pays the same price for the same service. Now maybe that's a notable chunk of the budget for some people (I've read about people who were homeless, but kept their laptop and WoW account because when you're broke and out on the street, apparently, you've got plenty of time to raid...) and maybe it's a spit in the ocean for others, but at least it's in some way fair to all players.
And even if you don't care about the fact that you're basically free riding on someone else's bankrolling of your game, the devs care. You're now a "minnow", and they're a "whale". And the game's devs care about the whales (to the point of sending them personal messages and special bonuses the way that a casino tracks its high rollers) but only see the minnows as valuable only so far as they provide content to the whales that actually pay their bills. (After all, what's the good of premium weapons or ammo if nobody is online to beat to death with them? And if only other whales are playing, all the people that lose even with premium weapons will just stop playing because they can't win even after buying an advantage... and that just starts eating itself, because if the bottom tier quits after constantly losing, then the next-bottom tier becomes the new bottom tier and quits, as well...)
However, as a counterpoint, FGO's popularity had been partially attributed to its complete lack of competitive play: there's no pvp, hell, there's no ranking system at all in the game. The merchandise sales also assist for less dependence on whales.
However, as a counterpoint, FGO's popularity had been partially attributed to its complete lack of competitive play: there's no pvp, hell, there's no ranking system at all in the game. The merchandise sales also assist for less dependence on whales.
The only real 'competition' is bragging rights.
Ethical gray area. If a hardcore Fate fan is going to buy up all the merch and content he can regardless then that's not the company's fault, and the structure of the Grand Order game ensures that they have access to plenty of content that can be manufactured at a high quality and low cost.
But gacha gambling is bleeding their fans dry. There has to be a better way to keep their product fresh and in supply without using tactics they HAVE to know people are getting addicted to and destroying their lives over.
How responsible should a company be for the livelihoods of their customers? Is it even their fault?
I'm sure she would still have the same reaction if the devs announced the end of service of the game.
(When I thought it was about time I tried that Kamen Rider Transcend Heroes game that they stopped the game since 2 days ago...)
Yup, the publishers sucking blood out of whales is secondary problem compared to this. Once the devs decide it's time to turn their servers over to another cash cow, the thousand-or-whatever-dollars you've put into your account is dust, along with the content that kept you in. And these days even many desktop online games don't last a decade; who knows how many mobile ones just disappear with the money every day. This is what Ross Scott, one of my favorite Youtubers, has always been worried about. And it's also the reason why I'll never make micro-transactions in a game that'll one day shut down and never come back.
The problem isn't the "value for the money", (the small number of F2P games I ever play, I adamantly refuse to give even a single cent for), it's that the whole business model is based upon getting the small number of people with no ability to control their spending habits to finance a whole company.
This is a stupid argument, it's like saying "the brewing industry is based on getting alcoholics to finance the whole company". When given something to spend money on a certain portion of stupid people will spend to excess, this is true in everything. Saying that automatically makes something exploitative is a massive leap of logic, and certain people spending allot of money also isn't any sort of proof either. Lots of people spend lots of money on shit we'd considered stupid, but if they can afford it that's they're choice.
The F2P model is ultimately no different then anyone asking for optional donations for their work. It's like musician who will release their music for free and say "if you like it please consider buying the album to support me". In the main western F2P model like the Wargmaing Titles, Warframe, etc you pay for a specific thing with a specific effect. You get only what you want and you know exactly how much what you want will cost.
The problem with the model used in many of these Japanese games in many cases however is that you CAN'T just pay for what you want and you have no idea what you're going to get or how much it will cost to attain. The western one is paying for a product, you can argue over the price, if what you get is worth what they're charging, but ultimately you're paying a set price for a specific item.
The Japanese model however is straight up gambling. You have no idea what you're getting or what the final price to attain what you actually want would be. There is a very large philosophical difference and they are not comparable.
I'd rather a game where I pay X money up front and get the actual product (and OK, sure, DLC isn't inherently terrible, provided it isn't day 1 DLC), rather than play a game financed by a parent not being able to feed their kids somewhere.
Jesus Christ, a literal "but think of the children!", why don't you just toss some Nazis in there somewhere for good measure?
If you want to get on a high horse about people wasting all their money on shit at the expense of their family go after booze like I mentioned. As far as I'm concerned as I said if you're not against banning donations to artists for their work in general you don't have a logical leg to stand on in attack F2P model as used in most western titles.
WhiteCrow said:
Yup, the publishers sucking blood out of whales is secondary problem compared to this. Once the devs decide it's time to turn their servers over to another cash cow, the thousand-or-whatever-dollars you've put into your account is dust, along with the content that kept you in. And these days even many desktop online games don't last a decade; who knows how many mobile ones just disappear with the money every day. This is what Ross Scott, one of my favorite Youtubers, has always been worried about. And it's also the reason why I'll never make micro-transactions in a game that'll one day shut down and never come back.
This is a dumb argument to me, you spend money on luxury items that have a finite lifespan all the time. If you applied this logic to other things you should subsist on nothing but white rice, boiled boneless chicken, spinach. After all any premium spent on tastier food is 'wasted' once you eat it. What about any form of sports equipment or clothing that will if used invariably be worn out and in need of replacement in a few years? What about movie tickets, you only get to see it once, and so on
I could name a million other examples beside but "you might/won't not be able to use the exact same item in a decade" is a stupid as hell argument against this stuff. You buy all sorts of things that are not reusable for the sake of the entertainment or pleasure they give you one or a limited number of times. The value of those items is purely up to the person being referenced, I consider make up a stupid waste of money, but clearly many woman disagree for instance.
It's also stupid because in multiplayer games the servers shutting down occurs after the game is dead most of the time, even if they had by law to run the servers for say 50 years 95% of games would be dead in five because the player count would be too low to reliably get a match when you wanted it, 99% would be dead in ten. This is why the servers shut down, by the time you're keeping this running for an average of like a dozen people at any given moment can you really blame them for pulling the plug?
For the rare exceptions to this rule fans are often able to take over, since the now much lower player counts can make it viable for a private server to handle this stuff. Really so long as they release some kind of patch to remove online authentication or keep the servers for that running so SP content is still accessible using this as an argument against DLC or any sort is pedantic idiocy. If the above is the case then you're perfectly free to use whatever SP DLC you might have paid for, and the fact no one would be around to play online with years after the games release is hardly the devs fault.
This is a stupid argument, it's like saying "the brewing industry is based on getting alcoholics to finance the whole company". When given something to spend money on a certain portion of stupid people will spend to excess, this is true in everything. Saying that automatically makes something exploitative is a massive leap of logic, and certain people spending allot of money also isn't any sort of proof either. Lots of people spend lots of money on shit we'd considered stupid, but if they can afford it that's they're choice.
You know, part of the reason that resorting to ad hominems is considered poor argument is that it tends to indicate you don't have any actual argument to make...
Anyway, saying that "because some people spend too much automatically means the entire industry is obviously based upon it" would, indeed, be an overstatement... which is why that's not what I was saying.
The thing is, the alcohol industry can exist without getting people addicted, and which doesn't need to do anything for those who have addictive proclivities to become addicted. This is more like the cigarette industry, which absolutely did, and was definitively proven to have built its entire business model around grooming newer and newer generations of addicts. Or, as previously mentioned, the casino industry, which offers up "comps" to help groom their own whales... and the F2P games absolutely do this - they have reps that act as relations with their whales to help them "feel valued in the community". In fact, the link's pretty obvious when the term "whale" comes straight from the lingo of people who groom gambling whales.
Tk3997 said:
The F2P model is ultimately no different then anyone asking for optional donations for their work. It's like musician who will release their music for free and say "if you like it please consider buying the album to support me".
By that logic, going to a restaurant is "ultimately no different" from donating to a soup kitchen. After all, in both cases, you're talking about a group you give money to "support their ability to make food".
F2P is not a charity. It is a business model. It is a business model that was adopted specifically for the reason that they believed it would make more money than charging up front because, after all, you can charge in F2P a theoretically unlimited number of times. So long as you keep adding new content for them to collect, they then have to roll the gacha a few more times to collect everything. (And many of these games make a point of adding new gacha collectables either monthly or seasonally.)
There is likewise a difference between someone making music or a game or whatever, and saying that donations to their patreon will let them afford better equipment, or if they get enough, maybe even leave their job and work full-time on their hobbies, and someone funding a commercial project's development or plain-out just making porn art through Patreon and selling access to "premium content" because they see Patreon as a viable business model that can make them more money than Kickstarters or begging for commissions.
And this latitude of options really does make what choice someone takes for how to fund their project have more meaning. If they choose to sell themselves on hopes for some nebulous thing in the future that may never materialize, as opposed to a concrete thing you can get now, that's a deliberate choice. There's been more than a few overt scam artists that sold the impossible and never delivered.
Tk3997 said:
In the main western F2P model like the Wargmaing Titles, Warframe, etc you pay for a specific thing with a specific effect. You get only what you want and you know exactly how much what you want will cost.
The problem with the model used in many of these Japanese games in many cases however is that you CAN'T just pay for what you want and you have no idea what you're going to get or how much it will cost to attain. The western one is paying for a product, you can argue over the price, if what you get is worth what they're charging, but ultimately you're paying a set price for a specific item.
The Japanese model however is straight up gambling. You have no idea what you're getting or what the final price to attain what you actually want would be. There is a very large philosophical difference and they are not comparable.
You kind of tip your hand when only trying to defend "main Western F2P model" when that absolutely wasn't the topic of conversation, but that's not at all the "main Western F2P model", the "main Western F2P model" (plus the "fee-to-pay" stuff like Shadow of War) is the loot box/"supply crate", which absolutely are a totally random thing, just like gacha. The fact that you're willing to throw "the Japanese model" (except wasn't CS:GO doing it first?) under the bus shows your real angle.
The thing is, by trying to distance the only game you want to protect from "the bad ones", you fundamentally undermine your argument by tacitly agreeing that "the bad ones" are doing something bad. If you're agreeing that what the companies I'm arguing against are basically just casinos that falsely pretend they're charities just accepting "donations to help fund more content", it really cuts down most of the justifications you made as the basis of defending Wargaming's actions... since now, of course, you just argued against that self-same "musician that works for free" argument you tried to use earlier.
Oh, and if Wargaming is totally just a starving artist and living saints that can do no wrong and not a business trying to make money that would stoop to something as crass as a loot box to add some sort of "thrill of gambling" into their game like those 'filty Japs', could you please explain why there's this WoWS loot box thing?
Tk3997 said:
Jesus Christ, a literal "but think of the children!", why don't you just toss some Nazis in there somewhere for good measure?
If you want to get on a high horse about people wasting all their money on shit at the expense of their family go after booze like I mentioned. As far as I'm concerned as I said if you're not against banning donations to artists for their work in general you don't have a logical leg to stand on in attack F2P model as used in most western titles.
And again, you can't actually come up with any facts or dispute any of the claims, so you just throw out false comparisons, reference ill-fitting tropes without making any attempt to explain why they apply, and then of course try to resort to ad hominems to try to distract from the utter lack of substantive argument.
The reason, incidentally, that Godwin's Law is a thing isn't because, as some people seem to falsely associate, "mentioning Nazis automatically makes you wrong!", but because the pattern tends to be that if someone is reduced to saying "you're wrong because you're stupid!" and that doesn't work, then people tend to react by just finding something harsher than 'stupid' to throw out, and 'Nazi' is inevitably one of the things they go for.
Also, nice to see you're framing the argument based upon whether I can convince you, as opposed to any of the people I was actually talking to, since that means you can "win" by simply staying within denialist mode. Considering most of your comments on Danbooru revolve around talking shit about anyone who has any complaint about anything involving Wargaming, I can make a pretty educated guess as to what your angle actually is, here, and to quote Upton Sinclair, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" (Although "gamer identity" can substitute in for "salary" these days...) Frankly, considering that's a company that sells premium ammunition, and recently had a controversy after one of their major YouTubers pointed out that one of their tanks in WoT was designed seemingly specifically to force players to buy it, it's not that unexpected to see someone sore point that out.
And because this is low-hanging fruit, let me pre-emptively rebut this one: That's not an ad hominem argument, (which is an argument that relies upon saying that the argument is wrong because someone is [insert insult here]). This is a variation on a Shill Argument, which states that someone is not arguing in good faith because they have a vested interest in the outcome. I.E. Don't trust a coal company executive that tries to claim Global Warming is false because, as that Upton Sinclair quote references, their salary depends upon people believing that coal is GOOD FOR EVERYONE! I'm simply pointing out that your argument, especially when you try to support Wargaming with the same arguments made for gacha, but then say that gacha isn't at all like Wargaming because that's just gambling, it reeks heavily of cognitive dissonance.
Tk3997 said:
This is a dumb argument to me, you spend money on luxury items that have a finite lifespan all the time. If you applied this logic to other things you should subsist on nothing but white rice, boiled boneless chicken, spinach. After all any premium spent on tastier food is 'wasted' once you eat it. What about any form of sports equipment or clothing that will if used invariably be worn out and in need of replacement in a few years? What about movie tickets, you only get to see it once, and so on
I could name a million other examples beside but "you might/won't not be able to use the exact same item in a decade" is a stupid as hell argument against this stuff. You buy all sorts of things that are not reusable for the sake of the entertainment or pleasure they give you one or a limited number of times. The value of those items is purely up to the person being referenced, I consider make up a stupid waste of money, but clearly many woman disagree for instance.
This isn't directed at my argument, but since I doubt it will be responded to by the original author, I'll go ahead and play Devil's Advocate, here....
The thing is, if you buy a book, its lifespan is determined by how you treat it. Even with games, even if the company in question doesn't support those things anymore, I absolutely still can play a Super Nintendo game on my Super Nintendo, which I still own, and still functions. (In fact, my parents absolutely adore the N64 Dr. Mario game, so they still play it constantly, and have the N64 hooked up to their bedroom TV.) Cars depreciate in value and need maintenance over time, but your ownership over them persists and you can maintain them.
Regardless of whether you agree with that mentality or not (and if you're someone fine with shooting away premium ammo, you're clearly past that bridge), the concept of ownership is a deeply ingrained one in the human psyche, and the notion that you're paying for something that will just vanish one day with no warning and completely regardless of actions within your own power makes most people uneasy.
It also happens to underline just what kind of "value for their money" they are getting. Personally, I just bought a replacement mouse for one that wasn't working properly. I buy cheap gaming mice because sure, it'll break in a year or two like my last cheap mice did, but at the same time, I don't think the mice that cost four times as much are going to last 6-8 years, themselves, to make that extra investment worthwhile. If you're forced to confront that you're not just spending money on a one-off event to get something 'forever', but that it's a dollars-per-hour-of-entertainment deal, then you push players into the mindset of considering how much bang they can get for their buck... and that's absolutely not what these companies want players to be thinking about.
It's for just this reason that these corporations never, ever, EVER want to admit that these games will ever shut down.
And no, it's not that games are dead before they shut down, either. Games can even still be profitable and shut down, just because companies think that their next big release is going to be more profitable, and they don't want to spend staff on the old, still-popular games. Halo 2 infamously had players stay logged into the servers for over a month until Microsoft finally just banned everyone from the servers after they tried shutting everything down.
Someone is going to make a business decision about WoT and WoWS at some point, as well, probably sooner than a die-hard fan like you is going to want it to be made.
...
To go back to the restaurant versus soup kitchen metaphor, what these companies are doing is like giving out free super-salty chips, then saying that, on a completely unrelated note, they are charging $8 for the dip and just doubled the price of their drinks.
The fundamental contention I was making, once again, is that F2P as a business model fundamentally relies upon trying to make players want unlimited quantities of something hidden behind a paywall. It is a fundamentally deceitful practice that relies upon getting people to buy into the platitudes of it just being optional long enough that they are willing to pay twice as much for a drink to make their free chips "worth it".
After all, if this really is just a game that you could play free forever, and all the premium stuff is 'just cosmetic', or 'you don't need it to win', and all those other platitudes, and you've mentally framed this as a competition between the player and corporation to see if the player can entertain themselves as cheaply as possible, then you're basically saying to the player that the new game is "if you ever pay money for anything, you lose!"
Likewise, if this is just a matter of giving money to a starving musician who is trying to put out content they truly believe in, and there's no limit to the number of donations that can be given, then that just begs the effective altruism question, where people will want to spend their money on the causes they most believe in.
You cannot for a second tell me that most players of a game like Overwatch are spending their money on loot boxes because they believe that Activision-Blizzard are a more worthy "charity" than their local soup kitchen. Likewise, I'm sure you bought your premium ships on WoWS not because you wanted them, but because you wanted to support Wargaming as a "Charity", and would have done even so if they'd released the products for free. Even if this were restricted to games, why would someone choose to give money to the money-grubbing AAA goliaths or cynical purveyors of over-glorified gambling games rather than a garage-band start up game that tries to do new things or revive nostalgia-driven spiritual successors of cult classics that are too niche to get mainstream funding? People would rather donate to Dwarf Fortress or Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night (or possibly get suckered into Mighty No. 9) or even something like Breeding Season before they would choose to "donate" to Activision or WB or Ubisoft or Wargaming.
A large part of why people will harp on the shutting down of a server as that moment of betrayal is that, as long as they're still justifying their sunk costs with ever-increasingly desperate cognitive dissonance, players will find some way to say that "it's worth it" to have spent $40 on drinks and dip to enjoy their "free chips". It's only in the aftermath that people start to tally it up and realize what they spent and won't get back that they realize how worthless their "deal" actually was. This is why I don't personally subscribe to the "servers will shut down" theory as a main reason to oppose it, but think other people do - it's because that's when people realize they were sold a bill of goods, and fell for all those same platitudes from the companies that you're regurgitating verbatim.
This discussion revolves around the idea people fail to realize what they are paying for. You aren't paying for a product, this is service constantly evolving. It's the same as buying airtime for your phone. It isn't like filling your tank or buying a finished product because you are actually paying for a product (gasoline). On a gatcha system you aren't paying for a specific item but for more chances you might get what you are looking for, just like everyone else. A premium item isn't a product but a service to enhance your immediate experience, once you pay that money is gone for good. It isn't an investment, it's a consumable. You might sell your account or the items brought, but that's just a work around for something that wasn't meant to be done unless the service tells otherwise.
So the next time you complain you should be conscious about what your think and what you truly are buying. Don't believe everything Terrance and Phillip say, the service is available for as long as it's profitable and everyone participates in different ways, not just the "whales". That's because everyone is a potential consumer willing to pay.
This discussion revolves around the idea people fail to realize what they are paying for. You aren't paying for a product, this is service constantly evolving. It's the same as buying airtime for your phone. It isn't like filling your tank or buying a finished product because you are actually paying for a product (gasoline). On a gatcha system you aren't paying for a specific item but for more chances you might get what you are looking for, just like everyone else. A premium item isn't a product but a service to enhance your immediate experience, once you pay that money is gone for good. It isn't an investment, it's a consumable. You might sell your account or the items brought, but that's just a work around for something that wasn't meant to be done unless the service tells otherwise.
So the next time you complain you should be conscious about what your think and what you truly are buying. Don't believe everything Terrance and Phillip say, the service is available for as long as it's profitable and everyone participates in different ways, not just the "whales". That's because everyone is a potential consumer willing to pay.
But again, the problem I'm highlighting is that, unlike a phone service, where everyone pays the same amount per plan to get onto a phone plan, people are paying wildly different amounts.
It's like if you charged $5 for a medicine to the people who could also be cured by a competitor's product that can work for the same symptoms, but if you know that a customer is allergic to your medicine, you suddenly charge $500.
The entire point of these systems is to trap enough people who are vulnerable to such techniques that they pay for the others who don't fall into the trap. And these traps are very deliberately being set up to do this. So yes, just like cigarettes, they may be able to say "oh, well, people got exactly what they were paying for", but that doesn't mean there wasn't a very deliberate attempt to sucker people, nevertheless.
People do pay different amount of money for services. That's why there are plans with Internet, with SMS, with a new phone, with long distance calls, with cheaper local calls, etc.
I'll repeat once more, they're services. Your analogy of the medicine (a product) is totally invalid. You pay more to your cable provider for more channels even when it's exactly the same infrastructure.
No one is pointing you a gun to buy the "deliberately set up traps" the "evil" companies do. I quit Love Live!, I quit Puzzle&Dragons, I'll quit KanColle whenever I feel like and so can everyone. No one is forced to spend their money if the consumer doesn't want to. Companies spend great amounts of money in marketing so their product or service is attractive to the consumer. Why can't a service provider offer premium services to attract potential paying consumers?
Should we stop all gaming services only because some aren't responsible for their own lives? Should we cut the Internet to everyone because agoraphobic people hide in here? That's irresponsible people putting the blame on the wrong person.
People do pay different amount of money for services. That's why there are plans with Internet, with SMS, with a new phone, with long distance calls, with cheaper local calls, etc.
I'll repeat once more, they're services. Your analogy of the medicine (a product) is totally invalid. You pay more to your cable provider for more channels even when it's exactly the same infrastructure.
No one is pointing you a gun to buy the "deliberately set up traps" the "evil" companies do. I quit Love Live!, I quit Puzzle&Dragons, I'll quit KanColle whenever I feel like and so can everyone. No one is forced to spend their money if the consumer doesn't want to. Companies spend great amounts of money in marketing so their product or service is attractive to the consumer. Why can't a service provider offer premium services to attract potential paying consumers?
Should we stop all gaming services only because some aren't responsible for their own lives? Should we cut the Internet to everyone because agoraphobic people hide in here? That's irresponsible people putting the blame on the wrong person.
Again, there's a difference between a company that sells a product forthrightly, and one that actively seeks to exploit their customers to harm them, which is why cigarette companies are not regarded the same way a furniture company are... and there absolutely were just the same people saying "I can quit if I want to" and "they know what they're buying" when it comes to cigarettes, as well.
And no, there's a difference between having different tiers of phone plans and deliberately gambling-addiction-seeking game monetization. One is like selling a stool for $50 and a plush recliner for $500, the other is, again, an attempt to addict the consumer.
Just because YOU aren't paying for a game simply means your free ride is being paid for by someone else. Saying it's not your problem because those other people walked into the trap but you didn't doesn't negate what's happening, it just reveals a lack of human empathy.
Says the guy with the childish behavior of down voting everyone giving reasonable arguments. This is not the first time I say not everything is black or white.
If you believe the world except oneself should carry the burden of their own problems so be it, just don't complain later the life is so miserable because they are afraid to know the world.
No one obliged anyone to enter the casino where common people look for some fun, only to spend a low income with the false belief he/she will become rich. Then blaming the personal for not tracking every single penny, not being invasive enough to discriminate those with no brakes and not stopping from betting everything he/she had to survive the next day on his/her own will. If everyone had to do that business wouldn't work for any.
The only responsible of your own life is yourself. Everyone else is busy with their own lives nor helping those who try to help themselves but they can't. Maybe everyone who sells kitchen knives should retire them from sales because one in every thousand will be used to kill with it.
Updated
Poke*on?
Or was it Castlev*nia?I went and erased your game data again, Yuubari-san!...what?
You're lying, right?...hmm?Oh, don't worry about it. It's not like we can't just do it again or anything, right?I-It was the FG* that you spent more than 2,000,000 yen on the gacha, Yuubari-san...I thought that I was updating it from the Play Store, but I made a mistake and uninstalled it...What's up?Waahhhh!I-I'm so sorry, Yuubari-san!