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I think it’s tough with card games because they come from a physical form of lootboxes. Being expensive is kind of baked into their lineage. Collecting cards is a big part of the fun, and if you made it very easy to do I think it’s hard to say whether people would enjoy them as much.
I don’t play any collectible card games anymore because I don’t want to pay for it anymore, but there is something very entertaining about the model even if it’s easy to argue it’s a scummy business model by today’s standards.
I haven’t looked into this game beyond your description, but it does sound like a pretty weird model. Do you also have to pay for cards on top of that?
I remember kind of disliking the arena system in hearthstone because I liked the game mode a lot, but as a casual player it was really hard to get to play it much. I guess they wanted to keep people from spending all their time there since you didn’t need to buy cards to play. I much preferred magic arena’s drafts where you pay an upfront cost but get to keep all the cards you played with. Much more accessible for casual players and more satisfying, too, since you always get something out of it.
This game literally gave me a mind altering experience. The point at the end as you walk towards the light, I started to be unsure if I was controlling the character anymore or not, and it was actually quite dissociating like a psychedelic experience (I was sober at the time for the record). Truly incredible moment that no other game has pulled off.
I finally tried the first one not long ago and went in super excited. I had the same experience, though… I think for me what caught me off guard the most was how hard it was. I’ve played a lot of platformers and metroidvanias, and I found Ori to be punishingly difficult. The “escape the area” sections were the killers ultimately. The first one in the tree took me dozens of tries, and it turned a very cool and cinematic moment into a frustrating slog that I couldn’t wait to put behind me. I got as far as the next one of these in the ice area and it was even more intense, and finally I just threw in the towel. It’s a shame because there was a lot to like, but the difficulty was a bit too much for my enjoyment.
Server checks aren’t always just an arbitrary gate at the start so this makes sense. For example, if the game has unlockable things (paid or not) and those things sync across multiple devices, then server checks to make sure your progress get saved and merged together properly can be woven through the whole game.
To give you some background on the term, it refers to rich land owners in England who had a lot of inherited wealth through the estates they owned (landed, meaning they own land). These “gentry” generally led lives of leisure and wealth, but they didn’t actually do anything, they just inherited it all through their family wealth and land ownership.
I’m sure I have details of that a little off, but that’s my best explanation of it.
Yeah this happened during the Napster era and it was so incredibly unpopular and unsympathetic with the general public that it didn’t continue after a while. Suing a single mom on food stamps for thousands of dollars because her teenage son downloaded a game one time is a truly abominable look for a company.
I can’t speak for FFXIV, but if you want pvp in an MMO you might give guild wars 2 a try. It’s got 5v5 pvp matches where everyone is on an even playing field. It’s available in the free to play version, and you can go into it right after the tutorial if you want, don’t even have to do leveling.
There’s also a large scale pvp mode called world vs world where you have three teams of hundreds of players fighting over territory. That one uses non-equalized stats so it’s an end game thing, but it’s a lot of fun!
Like it or not it does have an effect, which is to raise the stakes. If everything is instant gratification there are less lows, but also less highs. You may prefer games that are less punishing, and that’s fine, most people do. It does have an impact on the experience that creates value for people who like a more punishing experience, though. It doesn’t create that value in the moment you’re waiting, it creates it when you’re debating whether a risk is worth it somewhere else in the game. If there was no punishment for a mistake, there’s no reason to debate the risks, and that removes the high of taking a risk and having it pay off.
Oh I see. Sorry for the off-topic response then!
It’s a shame that multiplayer games really struggle with paid models these days. It heavily cut into a player base if things aren’t free to play. That kind of forces all but the biggest releases to turn to other monetization models in order to keep the base game free.