Live service games are not only balanced around tedium, they are designed around tedium. Without it people wouldn't buy boosters etc. Adapting the meta faster than people can catch up and letting people pay to keep up simply switches the game from balance by tedium to straight up pay to win. Or pay to play optionally, at least, which live service games heavily push you towards doing.

Guess I will stick to warframe, No Man's Sky and BG3.

You can always be mad at 2 or more things at once, and how the gaming industry sucks out money from the consumer to pay their executives should be one of these. In all the industries you mentioned, "voting with your wallet" is a thing that's universally accepted as effective but at times hard to do. In gaming, it couldn't be easier, you can literally safe money by buying anything cheaper from the indie sphere, not buy anything at all and play games you already own, or wait 2 weeks and get a 2nd hand copy, or the unnamed 4th thing. And the impact is more than just having a worse game to enjoy. As much as we like to laugh at people for their bad financial decisions, some people just cannot think rational about these things, and every game that includes them is simply not safe for them. Casino's are heavily regulated for a reason, it is perversive brain stimulation with decades of research behind it, and we invited it into our consoles and computers for kids to enjoy. And more and more people just expect games to be predatory, and it warps how they think of the effort put into games. Being a functional, complete game without any in game purchases used to be the minimum. But if you expect the anyone to have your mental fortitude, that no kid will wander into this menu and that everyone has an unalterable image of the industry, feel free to support this. Genshin Impact lies at the end of this road. You do not have to support these decisions. You can be a Monster Hunter and Capcom fan, and not buy into the hype. Vote with your wallet.

counterpoint: i actually think it's the fat more prevalent mentality of "blaming foolish consumers" that ruins it for the rest of us. Expecting consumers to **ever** do differently at scale is a dead-end fantasy we all need to stop having. **Only** market regulation stops manipulative market practices. Doing anything less then "advocating for laws to stop this shit" izza giant waste of brain cells, yet i see threads of people making that useless case every time something like this happens. **Change will not come from consumers voting with their wallets,** FULL STOP** If you're thinking it will, *Never think this again* Furthermore, anyone advocating for consumer action or blaming consumers is doing the companies fucking us a huge favor and as these bad actors can continue griftin' as long as it is legal to do so

Anyone who disagrees with that fact also thinks it's okay to go to the casino just for the bar at the back.

That's what you want to fix? Companies trying new monetization strats?

Off-topic, anyone remember the early days of rockpapershotgun? God*damn* i miss the stylings of the og writers. Now it's just another game site but I'll never forget some of their early pieces

The author mentioned Horse armor's probs why commenters are bringing it up

I imported my beta character and for some reason the voice bugged out and is completely fucked up. Not sure if I want to use the edit voucher just to fix my stupid robot voice

Just recently start Skyrim again, with a laundry list of mods, of course.

> letting people pay to keep up That's what I'm specifically giving an alternative to. If you're trying to discourage keeping up with the meta, you make it take long enough to adapt to the meta that you can patch out the meta.

I don't believe in voting with your wallet, I believe in organizing. Individuals can never stand against an organization. A large group of individuals doing what they think is right but not working together can't win against even a much smaller organized force. In fact I think that your idea is little more than propaganda to keep the masses weakened in the face of power that is intentionally organized *against us*. But I don't play monster hunter to engage in political theory, I do it because it is a highly technical game with a steep learning curve. For whatever reason, a major stress reliever for me is to perform difficult actions with my hands. That's all I want. We are all treat brained little piggies in our own way, it shouldn't be controversial. I don't play genshin impact but if you do, whatever. Like I said, I work full time, I have a life full of family and friends, and I volunteer my time and energy to make my community better. If I wanna spend $70 on one of the like 3 game series that I *really* like, I shouldn't have to justify that to other gamers ffs. The problem with the gaming industry is a problem with *capitalism*, its called **the tendency for the rate of profit to fall**. Enshitification has been a proven phenomenon about for like 150 years. Voting with your dollars is pointless when it is the dollars themselves which are the problem.

When it comes to video games, idgaf if someone wants to give a game dev thousands of their own dollars because they want to pay an idiot tax. It's a free market, and we're all free to just ***not play the fucking game.*** Actually that's the default so just doing nothing is plenty. I get what you're saying but we're not talking about groceries here, we're talking about something that could literally cease to exist and aside from some folks maybe being out of work nobody would even notice or care. I do agree though that strong regulation is much better than expecting consumers to stop consuming something as long as it's a necessary thing or something with quite inelastic demand (ie: medicine).

The commenter you replied to was basically just informing people not to buy. You made a great showing that you were going to buy anyway and you don't care. That is something you need to justify, not the buying itself. No one would even know if you didn't go out of your way to tell everyone. And yes, what you do is good, but takes time to amount to anything. In the mean time, it is perfectly acceptable to also pursue methods that work in the short term. We aren't just individuals on a forum, we are public opinion. As flawed as it is, that's still better than the apathy you promote in your first comment.

It's almost like there's this loud vocal minority that companies keep ignoring because they keep making money doing what they're doing. Like if it wasn't profitable and predictable I'm pretty sure publishers would stop what they're doing.

This is the comment I responded to initially: https://midwest.social/post/23827090/15643582 > Capcom regularly puts out certified bangers. I’ll keep buying their games for as long as those games are high quality experiences are worth the money. They can learn about microtransactions by me not buying those lol. I was agreeing with someone else, and was sarcastically called a "good little consumer." Which fine, but I'm going to respond. So no, the comment I initially responded to was not informing people not to buy, the next I responded to was a sarcastic remark, and the next was, I believe flawed, justification for why its objectively wrong to buy a game? Or buy it on day one, or something. Is the objective to silence me? To make me follow along with a mainstream opinion that I don't agree with? I just want to play the new MH and not be made to feel bad about it. Maybe I'm not as up to date on all the nuances of this argument, but how do you think I feel when I spend significant time and energy learning and educating about political theory and practice, just to have people disagree with me from a point of ignorance? Maybe its just something you all are gonna have to learn to deal with, having people who share your interests but not your opinions disagree with you.

Idk, the game is great and I distinctly remember people crying about stuff like this with DD2. I'll tell you what I said then. I was not tempted to buy any MTX in MH Wilds *until* I started reading the comments of people crying about it. This is a basic fucking character creator we're talking about. If you're so spastic that you need to change your characters model every day, we have *very* different reasons for playing video games. Let me put it this way. This is Monster Hunter. Why the fuck does your character looking a certain way mean so much to you? If it *does* mean so much, make a new character - the game hasn't even been out for 3 days. These problems are literally non-issues.

Yeah, sorry, one comment up from that one was the one I thought you responded too. Doesn't change anything though as far as I'm concerned. I don't think there is anything left to say, good luck with that Revolution thing.

And good luck voting with your dollars

Variations on a scam.