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Dota and our community have always strived towards a relationship of fairness and solidarity. Releasing an arcana for a hero that costs £50, cant be traded, and can only be purchased during a period, is utterly against the spirit of this .
It's a REALLY BAD business practice and i'm amazed that people are so stupid to not realise how ethically abhorrent it is and how it goes against everything we fight for as fellow gamers, consumers and developers
On May 20 2017 08:01 Bigtony wrote:
It's a cosmetic item. How is this any different from sports team releasing limited edition jerseys?
Because it's an arcana for a hero. It's not a healing ward for jug or pink slerk cosmetic or whatever. It's an arcana, something that everyone who plays and loves the hero should expect to be able to have a reasonable and spirited chance of aquiring, not because valve wants fucking £70 on a 3 month deadline, but because we, as a community of human beings, strive to uphold a standard of fairness and integrity that promotes solidarity, sharing and mutual enjoyment of a game we love.
This business practice with regards to the io arcana is utterly against the spirit of this
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I didn't know that Valve was forcing you to buy a £50 arcana item to win at Dota 2. Tough times, its almost like you don't have a choice in the matter and they just took it out of your bank account. In all fairness just pass on the item.
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Commend ME, support ME, don't steal MY courier, let ME mid, dont take MY kills, dont take MY exp, dont take MY lane, buy ME tango. Someone is going 0-3 early game ? REPORT THAT FEEDER. Someone is getting caught offguard ? LET HIM DIE, it's not worth it.
So much solidarity indeed.
I WILL GET ALL THE FARM and you will have to pick a support for ME, or else you don't want to win and will be reported, you will probably get one shot all game long btw but it doesn't matter since all you have to do is buy wards, sentries and dust for ME.
Sounds fair.
But then, they release a cosmetic item, which... breaks all of this.
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The only thing this community strives for is to feed hard and flame.
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It's a cosmetic item. How is this any different from sports team releasing limited edition jerseys?
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Katowice25012 Posts
On May 20 2017 01:15 FFGenerations wrote:
It's a REALLY BAD business practice and i'm amazed that people are so stupid to not realise how ethically abhorrent it is and how it goes against everything we fight for as fellow gamers, consumers and developers
my brother fought and DIED for us in the gamer wars and now this???????? valve!!!!!!! what have u done!!!!!!!!!!!
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On May 20 2017 08:01 Bigtony wrote:
It's a cosmetic item. How is this any different from sports team releasing limited edition jerseys?
Because it's an arcana for a hero. It's not a healing ward for jug or pink slerk cosmetic or whatever. It's an arcana, something that everyone who plays and loves the hero should expect to be able to have a reasonable and spirited chance of aquiring, not because valve wants fucking £70 on a 3 month deadline, but because we, as a community of human beings, strive to uphold a standard of fairness and integrity that promotes solidarity, sharing and mutual enjoyment of a game we love.
This business practice with regards to the io arcana is utterly against the spirit of this
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I actually agree with this. Yes, it just a cosmetic item, but it's unnecessarily greedy from Valve to not make it tradeable at all...So if I don't have the time to grind it our during this time or pay an obscene amount of money for a cosmetic, I can never have it. Feels pretty lame to me.
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I'm sorry but this is just silly.
It's an arcana, something that everyone who plays and loves the hero should expect to be able to have a reasonable and spirited chance of aquiring
It's a skin! It does nothing for you in game. Valve provides you with a game that's free to play and has exactly 0 pay to win features. You come off sounding like an entitled 12y.o. Valve owes you nothing.
As a company have to make money some way and they want to make a profit. How is that weird? You have to get out of your little bubble you live in. Money matters! Does that suck? Yes. Does that change anything? ROFL no.
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28091 Posts
On May 20 2017 17:35 FFGenerations wrote:Show nested quote +On May 20 2017 08:01 Bigtony wrote:
It's a cosmetic item. How is this any different from sports team releasing limited edition jerseys? Because it's an arcana for a hero. It's not a healing ward for jug or pink slerk cosmetic or whatever. It's an arcana, something that everyone who plays and loves the hero should expect to be able to have a reasonable and spirited chance of aquiring, not because valve wants fucking £70 on a 3 month deadline, but because we, as a community of human beings, strive to uphold a standard of fairness and integrity that promotes solidarity, sharing and mutual enjoyment of a game we love. This business practice with regards to the io arcana is utterly against the spirit of this
To be fair you can easily get 150-200 lvls yourself by just playing the game (maybe more, idk). If you already play a decent amount you can probably get this IO arcana for about the same price as other arcanas. If you buy the lvl 75 compendium and 1-2 lvl boosts then it will be slightly more than a normal arcana but you have to remember you're also getting a shit ton of immortals and other random stuff.
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2774 Posts
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On May 20 2017 17:35 FFGenerations wrote:Show nested quote +On May 20 2017 08:01 Bigtony wrote:
It's a cosmetic item. How is this any different from sports team releasing limited edition jerseys? Because it's an arcana for a hero. It's not a healing ward for jug or pink slerk cosmetic or whatever. It's an arcana, something that everyone who plays and loves the hero should expect to be able to have a reasonable and spirited chance of aquiring, not because valve wants fucking £70 on a 3 month deadline, but because we, as a community of human beings, strive to uphold a standard of fairness and integrity that promotes solidarity, sharing and mutual enjoyment of a game we love. This business practice with regards to the io arcana is utterly against the spirit of this
Honestly the Arcanas are one big money printing machine for Valve. Most of them are boring masses of shiny effects and they are all ridiculously overpriced. People pay 30 bucks for their hero glowing a bit and maybe having a slightly different slash animation.
So the Io Arcana is just more of the same trend. This time it's actually at least an original concept. But ofc they are going to milk the hell out of it.
Can't really blame Valve for it though, if ppl are buying they set the price, the memers wanted it, they got it. I'm a little surprised about the steep entry price considering that Io is one of the least played heroes in the game, but ppl are putting a lot of money in the compendium anyways.
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For all saying this is fair business, read up on Computer Aided Persuasive Technology or just Persuasive Technology and stop being so naive.
And as if Valve wouldn't already make enough money without limited bs.
The difference between a jersey? Well, you can't actually wear it?
No pay2win? I feel on Immortal Gardens it is easier to juke, but I guess one can disagree.
Still, the excuse of "Valve is a company and needs to earn money" is pretty short sighted.
Does this reason allow Valve to not pay translators? I mean Valve needs to earn money, right?!
If you change the industry to look at, this is actually a really dangerous statement.
Please think before legitimizing bad business practice.
The only reason this is slightly ok, is that we're talking about a game. But still, read up on persuasive technology.
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Valve can do whatever they want. It's not like this improves your win conditions in-game. They make their money any way they want - and if people want the cosmetic then they'll buy it. If they don't want it, they won't buy it. I don't get why people care this much. Everything was "fine" before, now they offer pixels that doesn't change anything relevant in the game for $110 and people are angry?
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Well Jisira, usually when something "suddenly" becomes a hot topic, it was building up for a while and uses a new fact (=the arcana) as a vent.
And Dota has become especially sparky and skins have become increasingly expensive.
The latter would be easier to swallow if we knew how much the artists get out of it.
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On May 22 2017 21:43 Jelissei wrote:
For all saying this is fair business, read up on Computer Aided Persuasive Technology or just Persuasive Technology and stop being so naive.
interesting phrase, apparently stanford has a department dedicated to this http://captology.stanford.edu/resources . another one that comes to mind is Valve intentionally only releasing 'half' of the juggernaut arcana for 2 days. but we all forget about these things very quickly, don't we
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@Jelissei
Honestly, do you think anyone who gets the Arcana thinks about the monetisation model? Valve has NEVER been transparent - what must happen to highlight this is a full stop of workshop submissions in order to force their hand. The community will forget about this too, this is no different.
Also, the Io Arcana is one milestone on this scale. How much does the Io Arcana really contribute to people pushing their levels? Do we know who made the Companion Cube Io Arcana?
I'm not saying that the discussion is bad, I'm saying that it's most likely not going to happen. The community needs to gather their voices and take unified action on a scale large enough for Valve to care, because my guess is that they are sitting pretty comfortably behind their (close to) bullet-proof glass.
@FFGenerations
Intentionally only releasing half of the Juggernaut Arcana for two days? Did they not fix it? Was it withheld from customers? I mean, if I buy two items online and one of them takes two days longer to ship than the other, usually I have to wait for both of them for those two days.
You're so intent on looking upon things as if they are intentionally malicious. I'm merely playing the devil's advocate but if we're pulling extremes - can't we regard the Juggernaut Arcana as a pre-release which was then released fully after two days?
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It's a been a while but I have been reading threads about monetisation of cosmetic items and of the translation of dota for a while. Also I've seen streams of artists complaining about the way Valve doing their business. Maybe it's because I'm interested in stuff like that, but I think it's more that such topics tend to re-emerge every so often.
This is but a feeling, but it seems to me it happened to Starcraft 2 as well. Not because of cosmetics but balancing, tournament format and lacking possibility for the community to be involved in changes. People were talking about it for a while, but they always got shut down for different reasons. Until at some point too many people felt it became too much and the game kinda died away.
And while I don't think it is very urgent for Dota 2, I would hate to see the game die because of an overload of cosmetics. That would be pretty dumb. Almost unbelievably dumb. As if we could not believe it happening at some point.
@Captology:
To my knowledge that was the initial name given by the inventor of the subject, B.J. Fogg. When his pupils continued and went on into businesses like Instagram, he kinda scolded them for using it for profit and not for the good of humanity ; )
@"Random Company" can do what they want:
They obviously cannot do what they want. We don't have a free market anywhere in the world and it's good that way. The last time we had completely free markets, companies were hiring mercenaries, fighting wars, buying and selling slaves.
This weird idea that free markets are a good thing bears any reason.
And that's just within law. If Valve isn't careful and overloads the game with "name_a_thing" people might get tired of it. In that sense, Valve can, but shouldn't for their own sake.
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@Jisira
I'm guessing you didn't follow the jug arcana release, because afaik there was no indication that a red version would be released. The green version was released and there was an enormous blowup about it being insufficient for an arcana, with people suggestion style/colour changes. Two days later, the red version was suddenly released, apparently in response to the complaints.
What really happened was that valve was engaging in a blatantly intentional marketing ploy to see what affect doing such a thing would have in persuading customers to buy the product.
It's a take on the idea that if you give a person 1 option, they will say 'yes' or 'no', but if you give them 2 options then they will be inclined to choose the preferable of the two options rather than a 'no' to both of them.
In this case, valve intentionally released a product that was considered substandard in order to re-release it a few days later with their (now almost trademark) 'We listened!'
In real terms, they done no additional work whatsoever on the product (it was designed to have two styles from the outset), but because of this manipulation of the customer they were able to influence additional purchases.
I'm not sure if i agree with the catchphrase 'persuasive technology', but it's without a doubt what they're doing. I think a more suitable term would be something like 'how far can we exploit brand loyalty' or more simply 'to what extent can we exploit a customer that has a high degree of emotional investment in our product'.
The topic is relatively new (so to speak) because video games are a more complex product than, say, foodstuff or clothing brands, and can garner far greater support and loyalty. You might closer compare the brand loyalty with something like high-end cars, where people are very loyal to a certain brand like Mercedes Benz, however the customers for video games are of course in a massively larger scale and there are almost infinite ways to exploit them using micro purchases.
In short, it is now more than ever that we should be concerned about getting a dick stuck up our asses without realising it.
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Very good description of the concept!
In gaming persuasive technology is usually called gamification. Meaning elements you know from games - that keep you playing - are used outside of games. In this case selling cosmetics.
For a good read about the topic: Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World
This has a positive outlook on the topic of gamification, showing how much good it has done and can do - if it is not used solely for the purpose of enriching yourself.
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