@onyx said in Wherein Onyx is an old crumudgeon, microtransaction edition:
Ok, now, we want more money... If we do paid DLC we might split the playerbase, so we won't do that (this I agree with btw). So, what to do, what to... oh, right, microtransactions! And because we are Blizzard and we know people will lap anything we make up (I mean fuck, we got away with Diablo 3!), make it lootboxes as well!
But we'll still fuck them for those $30 upfront. Not because we need to, but because WE CAN!
$40 USD, not $30. And for an extra $20 USD, they throw in cosmetics for all of Blizzard's other currently supported games!!!!!1111
Anyway, I have yet to see mention of one of their other predatory practices:
Some of Overwatch's best cosmetics are only available during the 6 events they run per year, which run for about 3 weeks each. The next one of those ("Archives") starts less than 24 hours from now.
The time limit on those heavily encourages buying lootboxes since there's practically no other way to get all the new skins, emotes, and highlight intros due to Blizzard making them all either the rarest or second rarest drops. Oh, and their in-game currency cost is 3 times the normal price the year they're introduced.
In got bad enough with last year's Anniversary event in May 2017 that Blizzard was forced to add "duplicate protection" to loot boxes due to the sheer number of complaints they got over it. Meaning that it's rare to get duplicates until you've gotten all items of that rarity. This also means you get less currency since a lot of that came from duplicates. See the above part about events to know why that's bad.
Oh right, I forgot to mention that Blizzard added a lot of new items to the item pool a few months back, which means that pools you had previously depleted and could reliably get in-game currency for now give you trash-tier loot again instead.