The Queue: Virtual insanity

This pretty great Jamiroquai song from 1996 is about the unchecked advance of technology as a whole, but maybe it fits into more specific themes as well.

It’s a bop, and the video is still very much worth a watch.

You know the drill, this is The Queue! Let’s do it.

I’ll open with the only remotely “good” things I saw in the announcement post:

The VAST majority of Housing items are (and will continue to be) earnable in-game. Only a small fraction is available for purchase from the shop. Comparing this number against collectibles such as mounts is a good metric here, with more than a thousand mounts earnable in-game and only a few dozen from the shop.

I sure hope so. But the mount example stings a little because we often see “premium” mount designs that can only be obtained with real money. I can’t imagine that won’t also be the case with housing items.

The ratios of Hearthsteel to real money are fixed and easily understood at a glance. You should be able to obtain an amount that makes sense for the purchases you want to make.

Having “$1 = 100 currency” instead of “$2.65 = 347.82 currency” (like many other games do) makes it considerably more transparent, which is good as well.

Now let’s move on to the bad. Their “Why a Virtual Currency?” section says:

Why bother when we already have a Battle.net balance? It’s important to note that when dealing in transactions involving real money, a more deliberate and cautious process needs to be implemented to provide appropriate financial protections for both parties. This can be an inefficient, inconvenient, and often tedious process when a player wants to purchase multiple items.

That’s… just misleading. Battle.net balance already solves that problem: you can purchase balance in whichever amount you want (essentially a “bundle”) and spend it in a deliberate and cautious way. Virtual currency isn’t required for this.

And, sadly, there are other incentives for companies to use virtual currency, none of which are consumer-friendly (and, obviously, not anything they’d include in the announcement blog post).

For one, they can add small amounts of this currency bundled with other services, getting players to engage with the system. If they were to do something like “if you buy a 6-month WoW subscription, you get 500 housing currency”, players would invariably browse the shop to spend that currency. And in doing so, a portion of those players would also feel tempted to buy “just a little more currency” to get something else they saw and liked. It’s an effective way to get people to interact with the system and spend more than they normally would that wouldn’t happen by using just Battle.net Balance.

Another non-consumer-friendly perk of a virtual currency is that getting players to purchase it often makes them spend more than the items they actually need. Currency is often sold in fixed-size bundles. So you want to buy something that costs 200, but you can only get a bundle that has 250 of that currency. What do you do with that 50? You already paid for it. So you feel compelled to get a little more currency so that you can add up to buy something else, trying to get to zero.

The truth is that using virtual currency can be considered a predatory practice, since it has no real benefit for the consumer (battle.net balance or direct purchases would prevent people from “wasting money”), and obvious advantages for the company.

I just hope we can still enjoy the Player Housing system without having to ever purchase this currency. I, personally, have no plans to — just like I’ve never purchased any Runestones in Hearthstone despite it being my main game.

There are a few I can think of, but I think chief among them is a Lore Compendium (like we have in games such as Final Fantasy Tactics and 13 Sentinels).

It would be an in-game panel where we could search for terms / characters / locations / items / etc. and read a lore paragraph or two about them, as well as re-watching any in-game cutscenes. Each lore article would also feature keywords that you could click directly linking to the other articles, much like an in-game official wiki — except considerably less verbose, sticking to the essential info rather than the minutiae.

The info we have at the moment is that any level 80 characters will get Veteran level gear (regardless of their ilevel in Remix). So that should be ilevel 668.

However, before they disabled conversions, we had multiple reports that people were getting 655 gear (which would be Adventurer gear, two levels below Veteran). Maybe that was a mistake or bug, and maybe gear will be the intended 668 once conversions are enabled again. We don’t know for sure yet.

Ghosts are friends, not food! Or decoration!!!

I should, shouldn’t I? What is time. Chronos don’t hurt me. Don’t hurt me. No more.

It depends. When you frame it like that, it sounds like we’re being put into a simulation against our wills — in which case, the answer would be no. It would be a Matrix-like situation where the reasons we’re in a simulation are exploitative and meant to keep us pacified.

If, however, we were able to willingly go into a simulation, then yes — but there would probably be constraints. If everyone was 100% free to choose their avatars, some people would choose Superman, while others would become Godzilla or Cthulhu. It would be pretty chaotic. So I assume there would be some restraints. But we’d still probably get a ton of super fit, extremely beautiful supermodels walking around.

…wouldn’t be too different from a regular MMO, now that I think about it.

And that concludes today’s Queue! Take care, friends, and have a good week, or Yogg will drive you insane. Virtually.