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I think I was the only one of my friends that wasn't bashing xbox one on the e3 day. I know this post is probably a bit late as they have already removed the "feataures" that made people hate the console so much, but it still bothers me that people complain about xbox one but not about steam.
I don't really like not being able to lend your games to friends in steam, but I guess I got used to it, and It didn't stop me from sharing accounts with the games in it. That's the price we pay for cheaper games I guess.
I'm also the kind of guy that doesn't have spare money to buy single player games, so the games I buy and share are multi-player anyway, so my computer is always online when playing.
And I use an old computer PC as HTPC, and I belive xbox one could be used as htpc if they had a media player with support for subtitles and multiple formats.
I'm almost sure that xbox was trying to move away from the casual console gaming and all the people that cared about the xbox and were there to give feedback were the casual gamers.
The problem I think was that microsoft stepped in the middleground between casual and hardcore. The casuals don't want to step into anything else other than just sitting down and playing the game, and the hardcore gamers were already settled with cheaper/free games and whichever method they have for watching movies. I don't like the "hardcore gamer" term, I used it for the lack of a better word.
Another topic that bothers me is pay to win
Being a competitive player, I don't play MMOs because I'd rather have skill than spend money on the game. Be it by buying rare cards in CCG or by paying/running a bot farm to buy better gear, it really bothers me that people buying/botting are the ones competing for the top players.
How do you guys feel about pay to win? I've always wanted to give CCG a try, but never got into it because games charged for each card thus pay to win happened. Recently I found out about scrolls. The game is new and I got it because the community was still small and I thought It wasn't pay to win. Even the developers said the didn't want it to be p2w.
After trying to build a good deck, I was confronted with a card that costed a lot of in-game money. The game doesn't exactly let you buy the best cards with dollars, you can buy only random cards, but you can still buy the card from other players, which would very much likely sell those for real money if the game got popular.
I did some googling to see MTG players opinion on pay to win, they had the same conclusion as me: rare/metagame cards are in high demand and prices raise.
So I came to a conclusion that really bothers me: CCG games can't be competitiive, because when a card is in high demand, you're gonna have to pay big bucks for it. A competitive game shouldn't be about the gear/card/equipment you have, it should be about your personal skill. A sports player doesn't win because he has the best tennis or the most aerodynamic swimming wear.
What do you guys feel about it?
 
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I don't care about XBoxOne at all. What I didn't care for was the total lack of analysis. It didn't matter if it was Dodger or Total Biscuit or Force, the knees just all went up through their desks without an ounce of intelligent commentary. Being anti-DRM, etc is just an ideology now.
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On the subject of pay to win in card games, I can see how being unable to use more efficient strategies simply because of a cost barrier would make it be a "pay to win" type of game. Your ability to get a card simply by buying it has no reflection on your skill, you could pay however much money for said card but if you aren't good at the game then you can't really do anything with it. I personally just categorize this under the entry cost of playing, however. Depending on the game, it's highly likely that someone can construct a very good casual or perhaps even competition level deck, so their choices are limited but there are still options. If a player is serious about competing at a high level they will likely have no qualms with paying a premium for the best cards. Just because a card costs a lot of money doesn't mean that having the card will actually make you any good at the game, you have to know how to use it before it is worth more than you paid for it.
Still, the point still stands that one's performance in a tcg/ccg is directly related to the cards they can get, which is mostly influenced by how much money they spend, and obviously money has nothing to do with skill. In that case, many card games have different formats that are quite popular that help alleviate this problem.
In MTG specifically, although I am not an avid player I do believe that there are formats which help alleviate this problem, like Sealed Deck in which everyone is given cards from booster packs which means that the likelihood of getting the most popular expensive card in conjunction with cards that are needed to successfully perform its strategy are low. Another example would be in Booster Draft or they choose from a pool of cards in a way that there is an actual skill involved in obtaining cards similar to drafting heroes/champions in a moba, it's possible that the strongest possible selections or the most expensive cards are available to you, but essentially you'll always end up with a deck that is not a copy of a tournament pre-constructed deck, but one that is less efficient or effective. The reason why it is fair is because everyone else also has the same restrictions, and also have to plan around the cards they end up with instead of just buying the cards they want.
On the subject of scrolls (which I'm extremely terrible at), I get the feeling that it's more play to win than anything. You start out with one of the starter decks, and then you can get more cards by either buying them or playing. There doesn't seem to be any cards you can get by only paying real currency for, so I don't have a problem with it. Winning games often gives you a bunch of points, from what I've seen you can always get at least 1 new scroll by winning a game. Sure, it's chosen at random but it still is a new scroll you can get. The scroll pool is fairly small at the moment and it would look like it would be trivial to get all the cards by simply buying the other 2 pre-constructed decks and then buying the random scroll/color scrolls to get more copies of the card you want.
I don't really have a problem with grinding in any game so none of these seem to be a big problem for me, but for people who don't like to have to grind to get items in any type of game would probably not like it in games like scrolls. In this case, it makes sense to me; playing games to get more items not only adds longevity to the game but you get to improve while you slowly build up a card base, but if you want to you can just buy all the cards and then learn how to use them afterward.
For people opposed to paying for anything to reduce the time needed to get cards, or grinding to get gear in an MMO, I highly recommend learning to play Pokemon on an online battle simulator. The games go much quicker than they do on a nintendo DS, you don't have to worry about breeding the perfect pokemon or leveling it to lv 100 or EV training it, all you have to do is plan out a team of 6 pokemon that have their own movesets and other statistics tuned to your own strategy and then play games.
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I always thought that card games are inherently supposed to be "pay to win".
The more decks you have the more flexible you are the most decks you buy the larger the card selection for your "playing decks" will be.
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you said it yourself, you can share steam games.
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United States47024 Posts
On the topic of competitive MTG, it's important to note that at a top level, everyone borrows from store owners/other players they know. It's very rarely the case that a top level player actually has to own the cards hes using. The "pay to win" issue only really affects lower/mid-level play. If you are good enough at the game to actually be recognized, you will have someone/somewhere to consistently get cards from without major investment.
Personally, I don't see "pay to win" as an issue. Any "unfair" advantage can be outplayed if you get better at the game. The only thing that really matters to me is that the game is fair and standardized at the top level of play--if you are good enough to get that far, you will overcome any unfairness at any level of play below that.
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CCG stands for collectible card game. It's there right in the name that the cards must be "collected" in order to improve your chances of winning. If you don't want to play a pay to win card game then don't, there are plenty of alternatives out there. Poker is competitive and all you need is a deck of cards, or you could try David Sirlin's Yomi if you want a strategy game that doesn't involve a large monetary investment.
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On June 23 2013 16:07 DW-Unrec wrote:
A sports player doesn't win because he has the best tennis or the most aerodynamic swimming wear.
But a Formula 1 driver usually places higher than drivers with worse cars.
If people compete in it, it's competitive.
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On June 23 2013 18:30 TheYango wrote:
On the topic of competitive MTG, it's important to note that at a top level, everyone borrows from store owners/other players they know. It's very rarely the case that a top level player actually has to own the cards hes using. The "pay to win" issue only really affects lower/mid-level play. If you are good enough at the game to actually be recognized, you will have someone/somewhere to consistently get cards from without major investment.
Personally, I don't see "pay to win" as an issue. Any "unfair" advantage can be outplayed if you get better at the game. The only thing that really matters to me is that the game is fair and standardized at the top level of play--if you are good enough to get that far, you will overcome any unfairness at any level of play below that.
I agree. On competitive MTG, you can gain a reasonable pool of cards of an edition by just doing draft and winning stuff in small tournaments, and trading/borrowing cards from friends.
If you buy every deck directly from shops, yep it's expensive
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United Kingdom14103 Posts
On June 23 2013 18:30 TheYango wrote:
On the topic of competitive MTG, it's important to note that at a top level, everyone borrows from store owners/other players they know. It's very rarely the case that a top level player actually has to own the cards hes using. The "pay to win" issue only really affects lower/mid-level play. If you are good enough at the game to actually be recognized, you will have someone/somewhere to consistently get cards from without major investment.
Personally, I don't see "pay to win" as an issue. Any "unfair" advantage can be outplayed if you get better at the game. The only thing that really matters to me is that the game is fair and standardized at the top level of play--if you are good enough to get that far, you will overcome any unfairness at any level of play below that.
This is exactly how I feel about all games, only the top level matters, if you're not top level and you lost, get better.
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Form my point of view I always thought pay to win games a bit of frustrating since innevitably if you want to win at them you need to spend money.
"CCG games can't be competitiive, because when a card is in high demand, you're gonna have to pay big bucks for it. A competitive game shouldn't be about the gear/card/equipment you have, it should be about your personal skill. A sports player doesn't win because he has the best tennis or the most aerodynamic swimming wear.
What do you guys feel about it? "
I feel the same way as you.Pretty impractical to have a pay to win game in an era of sc2,dota2 (I did not include world of tanks because form what i heard you need to spend some cash there too if you wanna get good stuff).It might seem a bit illogical but you might spend less money over a long period of time on games such as sc2 than so called f2p where you innevitably need to spend money to get better items from a time consuming point of view.
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On June 23 2013 19:05 Talin wrote:Show nested quote +On June 23 2013 16:07 DW-Unrec wrote:
A sports player doesn't win because he has the best tennis or the most aerodynamic swimming wear. But a Formula 1 driver usually places higher than drivers with worse cars. If people compete in it, it's competitive.
i would put motor sports of being multiple competitive aspects in one (competition between drivers/engineers/mechanics/pit crews).
,
Though to DW unrec (the post this quote quoted) aerodynamic swimming wear DID infact make sports players 'win'. hence why they were banned <3 <3
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EPT
