this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2024
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things can only be enjoyed if you trade money for physical objects then?
Cuz my partner has gotten many many hundreds of hours of enjoyment from the few hundred bucks they have 'wasted' on things like Fallout76 furniture and stuff. Eventually she will stop playing and 'lose' all that stuff.
I personally think the many hundred hours of happy playtime is well worth it. It's her favorite way to relax after work. We don't have a lot of space for her to build real castles but she spends sooo much of her time enjoying building virtual ones.
How is it any different from enjoying nice food or drinks with friends?
I guess if you are enjoying the act of spending money that's good? But like I'm not spending any extra for cosmetics, that money could be spent on having real experiences instead of some bits on a PC that you'll lose access to within a decade. Paying for DLC and extra content is one thing, but to change the look of virtual space for real cash is insane to me! Personally I have more fun when I don't spend stupid amounts of money, but to each their own. When the game is free to play, or close to it you can have almost the same experience as someone who decides to spend the money.
It just sounds like my partner and you enjoy different 'real experiences'. I just don't get the judgment against people who have fun alone playing games for fun with their money vs whatever 'real experience' it is that you value.
People buy flowers, nice food and drinks, go to amusement parks. They get nothing but memories. My partner has lots of fond memories from building castles in the game. Why is one set of experiences acceptable to spend money on but not another, to you?
What makes something a "real" experience to you? When people buy cosmetics in the game, they're not (generally) doing it just to own those "bits on a PC"; they're doing it for the experience that comes with the cosmetics. Maybe their character looks pretty now and it makes them happy, maybe they can build a cool castle now and it makes them happy.
These two comments are contradictory. The first comment has the same issue with DLC as it does cosmetics. It sounds like you don't really have any issue with the first comment, rather, your issue is that you don't consider cosmetic things an experience worth spending money on. Which is fine. But you should realize that many people do find fun and enjoyment (enough that they don't mind spending money) from things like character customization and building (among other things), which cosmetics let them do. There's a reason the Sims is so popular.
If you read what I said that way you'd get the impression that I don't even think its a good idea to buy games at all, but I was trying to point out there is a difference between good DLC that adds to the experience and shit like the $20, 3D audio in Black Ops 6 which is literally a ripoff, or cosmetics upgrades like yay I spent $100 and now my virtual room looks slightly better, just seems like idk pointless to me. I know people eat that shit up, but it makes no sense to me, I don't even care enough to decorate my real life space so why waste the money on some pretty .png files?
Right, that was my entire point though. Different stokes for different folks. Also, I realize you're being hyperbolic there, but things like that tend to be a lot more than just a png.
Also also, no fucking way that's real. That's insane lol.
And my point is that I personally do not understand the mentality.
Preach. So many people are fine, in fact, better than fine, paying money for cosmetics. I think p2w games are scum but at least the player gets something from that, whether it be time saved, better gun, or whatever.
Paying for a skin (which is essentially what this mount is) Nahhhhh. I've never spent a dime on either of those, but at least the former has some value imo.
Spending $90 to look cool in a videogame is something people need to get therapy for. But they're still playing on official WoW servers, so we already knew that. (Shoutouts to Whitemane and TurtleWow. Neither costs a cent monthly and both respect your time)
"Time Saved" is not a real thing though. This would imply there was an unavoidable need to spend that time to begin with, there isn't.
The game is artificial, if something is time consuming it's by design. If you're paying to "save time" in a game, you're being farmed for money, plain and simple. You ain't gaining anything, you're paying to avoid the inconvenience placed there by the people who are selling you a work around for that inconvenience. You're getting fleeced son.
The grind to get those depends on whether the player is being farmed for money. If it feels good to play, and you unlock content at a reasonable rate, that's just called progression, not farming. But if the task is repetitive, unfun, and designed to frustrate players into paying, that's farming.
That's why people shit on EA for BF2. They did the math of the grind and loot boxes, and it came out so something ridiculous, like multiple hundreds of hours to unlock stuff. I used to play R6 Siege and never spent a penny. After a week or so of playing with my friends, we'd have enough in-game currency to buy a new operator. We'd all unlock new characters and try them out. Week after week, it was fun.
Paying, imo would have ruined that experience because the gameplay is what made it fun. Forcing us to use the ops we chose rather than having a full roster to pick whatever we wanted. Felt almost like deck-building. We were progressing, not farming.
The caveat is that the new ops tended to be OP. I think the devs probably do it intentionally. This is the P2W part. People could pay day 1 and get the operator with the overtuned kit. They paid to save time, because they want to be the first to use the shiny new toy.
But again, like I said. I'll never spend money on either, but at least that person paying is gaining something, an advantage, time saved, instant gratification, more time learning the op. The person buying a pink gun gets ... a digital pink gun?
It seems we disagree on the value of things. For me at least, somebody had to be vaguely creative to create the fucking blue 20$ skin, and the value is not in the non-existent item, but in the very real aesthetic and social experience of owning that skin, a social symbol, like art in your wall. Useless by itself, but it makes you feel things and let's you say something about yourself to strangers.
To me that is understandable. Like buying AirPods instead of cheapo earbuds just because they look cool and you want to look preppy with your friends. (Notice the extra cost is not about the sound or the function of the thing, but a out the social value, which I'd say is still value)
Monetized grind is the exact opposite. You are working to have the privilege of not paying money for the better experience that is already there. People are getting paid to make things WORSE for you, so that you pay money to avoid-displeasure rather than enjoying something new, even if it's literally just enjoying fleeting vanity.
Paying to skip is not saving me time. They are giving me a worse quality product and then making me pay to solve the problem that they have a financial incentive to make worse. This is like thinking you're getting a deal when phone sellers remove the cable from the box. You're are not, you're being given a free problem, that you can pay even more to solve.