There's a tendency for games to start strong and make a powerful first

impression, but then peter out when company avarice starts to trump the

game's design.

The other day, I was clicking through the ad links on Ten Ton Hammer -

something I recommend for everybody - when I happened across a particular

"news" site that shall go nameless. This "news" site had lots of articles

that were clearly targeting a very specific market, with articles about

video games, sci-fi movies, hot girls and zombie stuff, and about 80% of

the articles had titles like "10 Things About (X) That You Probably Didn't

Know," "5 Things That (Y) Doesn't Want You To Know About," or "The 20

(X)-est (Y) Scenes Ever." These articles were clearly written to generate

pageviews, rather than to express an opinion or inform the reader of an

issue of personal relevance to the writer. Low-value, lucrative trash.

Normally, this sort of thing would kind of disgust me, and I would simply

close the browser tab and do something else instead. But I've grown

accustomed to this kind of low-rent marketing, because that's how they do

things in MMO's these days. In fact, this "news" site reminded me of a

couple of games in particular, and of how they would be a lot better if it

weren't for aggressive, spammy marketing taking place inside the game -

low-value items being pushed too hard, making the whole rest of the game

suffer for it.





The tooltip shows

more purple items than green ones, but guess which is more likely to be

in the box you paid to open.



PerfectWorld/Cryptic are, unfortunately, pretty bad for this. In both

href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/sto">Star Trek Online

andtheir low-value, hard-push item is keys for lock-boxes. These lock-boxesdrop quite often, can't be sold to vendors, usually contain items ofmarginal worth, and can only be opened by spending money on them. To makematters worse, in both of these games, anytime someone lucks out and findsa very rare, high-value item in one of them (in STO it's Tal Shiar ships,in Neverwinter it's the fiery Heavy Inferno Nightmare mount), a messagepops up on the screen informing everyone on the server.

This system creates an artificial demand for items of very little actual

value. The keys usually don't get you much; they're essentially digital

slot machine tokens, and the loot boxes are the one-armed bandits.

Certainly, these gambles have some kind of payout every time, but that

payout is usually low-value junk that you wouldn't normally pay real money

for.

Even this wouldn't be so terrible if the boxes dropped far more rarely

than they do. In the Lord

of the Rings Online, there is a similar system in place, with

leveled loot boxes requiring store-bought keys to open. In LotRO, I have

personally found maybe three of these boxes since they were first

introduced a couple years ago. They're rare drops, and players can sell

the high-level ones for a good chunk of gold. I have no problem buying

keys for these, even though they often contain little more than vendor

trash.

In STO and Neverwinter, however, I find a dozen of the damned loot boxes

every time I play, and I am in no way tempted to buy all the keys I would

need to open all of them. It would end up costing too much money, even if

I did get one of the purple-quality items. They are so common that you can

barely give them away - sometimes they can be sold at auction if the

buyout price is ultra-low, but more often they get returned unsold.

Furthermore, I would be embarrassed if I actually did end up getting a

Nightmare mount or Tal Shiar ship, because it would be announced to the

whole server, and everyone would know I'm a key-buying sucker. No thanks.





Congratz, Skippy... but

why should I care? I'm busy fighting Orions!



Though I cite LotRO as a better system for their rare loot-box drops,

that's not to say that they aren't fumbling into low-rent marketing these

days. The introduction of the catch-all currency, Mithril Coins, to their

cash shop gave Turbine a whole new way to sell "convenience," as these

coins can be used to bypass some travel restrictions and reset cooldowns.

But that convenience has become sort of intrusive lately - Mithril Coins

are used to speed up just about everything, and they're even used as a

cash-type currency in the new clothing store in Bree. But that little

button shows up plastered all over the UI - you're encouraged to spend

your coins every time you ride a horse out of a stable, every time you

complete quest objectives, and for a hundred other little things. The hard

sell doesn't even let up when you die; you can buy another instant-revive

if you fall in battle and already used your hourly freebie. It's

just as bad for subscribers and VIPs as it is for F2P players - Turbine is

selling the living hell out of those coins.





Broken gear? Burn a

coin. Need a ride? Burn a coin. Finished a quest? Burn a coin. Run out

of coins? Burn your cash.



It's becoming enough to make a fella want to run some kind of ad-block

software in-game. I get that the studios need customers to use their

stores, but the pushy sales tactics can be exhausting. Neverwinter isn't

out of open beta yet, and I'm already kind of burnt out on it. It feels to

me like the monetization of the game is more important than the player

experience - as if they don't care whether or not we're enjoying the game,

as long as we're spending money on it.





Shop 'til

you drop... and then keep on shopping!



These are all good games. There are things about all of them that I

adore, and they're not the only games or game developers doing these sorts

of things. But this pushy, aggressive marketing of low-value junk is

making these good games suffer. It's the same kind of marketing that

inspired the development of spam filters for our email. The next logical

step is in-game telemarketing - customer service reps sending us tells

trying to sell us limited-time account upgrades and character unlock

bundles. Y'know... the kind of tells we get from gold-seller drones.

There has to be some kind of middle-ground here, something less than

spamming players with loot-boxes and irrelevant banner announcements. By

all means, make the cash shop visible and accessible. But we don't need to

be urged to reach for our credit cards with every single interaction we

make in the game.