I’m saying the internet and gaming forums are littered with hundreds upon thousands of complaint threads without any action in them. Its just hammering on the keyboard and hitting send with the expectation that some revolution is going to kick on over it.
The things that actually trigger me to post in this are the individuals posting that those people that are fine with things are somehow morally bankrupt or simps or any of the other words being tossed about because those people don’t agree with them - in essence trying to shoulder some kind of make-believe weight of moral blame on the shoulders of those that are fine paying $10 for a battlepass and can control our impulsive buying by not engaging with the entirety of the bazaar.
Excuse me folks, but you’ve all gone way off track with this whole legality argument. The legal definition of “predatory practice” doesn’t matter. I mean, it would if they were actually doing something illegal but the thing is they can be using predatory practices without being predatory in the legal context.
FOMO is predatory. That’s how it works. It exploits and preys on people’s fear and emotion. In and of itself, that’s not necessarily a bad or immoral thing to do. And after all, it’s a marketing gimmick that has been around since trading was invented, so it’s not like this is some new strategy recently invented by malicious and greedy CEOs.
But like most things it can be abused and combined with other strategies or gimmicks to make it immoral. Or at the very least just a generally rotten way to treat your customers. That also doesn’t mean it should be illegal either, but you’re not doing anyone any favors pretending FOMO isn’t something to wary of.
Some people believe that giving money to a system that is morally bankrupt makes you a supporter of that system, and therefore complicit in its moral bankruptcy. Especially if the participation in that system is, as you are fond of pointing out, completely voluntary. It’s easier to “forgive” participation in a system when there’s really no other option, but BLB is not that kind of a system.
Cool. And some people believe that people need to take responsibility for their own actions and stop trying to project some type of moral authority over others because others are doing things you don’t like and stop playing the victim card about being ‘preyed upon’.
So post about how people are complicit in moral bankruptcy by doing something one doesn’t agree with, and expect some kickback in return for being complicit in being a victim or trying to play moral authority and claim to know the public data and claim most people hate it and that most people agree … so the argument is won.
If you guys don’t like Funcom’s practices, cut ties and move on to another game dev shop whose practices you like. Don’t pay anymore money into them. You’ll either truly have a lot of people that side with you and move on and stop paying into Funcom’s projects and they will have to change or kill off Conan (depending on what Tencent decides), or you won’t and Funcom will continue to produce games and use the FOMO marketing practice of battle passes and bazaars.
Yes, I know. You’re one of those people, and that’s crystal clear. And I respect your right to have that opinion. In fact, when I said “some people believe”, I meant just that. I’m personally not one of those people when it comes to this particular topic.
What I personally believe is that whether we participate or abstain from BLB won’t change what the industry does, and without an industry-wide change, a company like Funcom won’t change either. And if we want to change the industry, we won’t do it on these forums or by boycotting it – boycotts rarely work for that kind of change – and instead we have to push for concrete legal/political action.
What bothers me about your stance is this:
Yes, you are. Own it.
Like I said, boycotts almost never work for that kind of thing. In fact, “just boycott it” is reminiscent of “just protest peacefully”. Both are a way to tell people to shut up and play by the rules that favor the status quo, because that’s the “proper” way to do these things
I respect your right to have your opinion on these things and to voice it, even if I disagree with it. But I’ve told you repeatedly, no matter how much you tell us to shut up, we won’t.
No. I’m not. If I was saying your complaints were wrong, I’d tell you your complaints are wrong. There is no right or wrong in this because in the end we’re talking about the price of make believe video game assets.
If you feel screaming red faced into the wind is going to do anything - carry on screaming. You’ll make it onto a google search when you type in “FOMO Predatory” I’m sure, along with the other thousands of hits of people screaming about the same thing on other games over the past decade.
Dude, don’t pretend you don’t understand words, okay? You’re better than that.
People like @Yshtola and me are asserting that BLB is morally wrong. You believe it isn’t. Therefore, you are believe our complaints are … what’s the word?
You’ve said that. Many times. But thank you for giving us all the permission to exercise our right to express what we think
Now hang on. So buying a battle pass is voluntarily supporting a morally bankrupt system, and people who do so are therefore morally bankrupt themselves?
Does it matter why I think it’s OK to buy a battle pass? It’s not because I don’t think they’re a shady business practice. They are. It’s because I think video games are trivial things with little-to-no moral importance. They are by definition a diversion, a thing of little consequence.
I can and have actually put my money where my mouth is and donated funds to anti-capitalist causes. When real things are at stake, like workers and renters rights, corporate tax evasion, f***ing Monsanto flooding the market with sterilized seeds to make sure people can’t grow food in the future unless they buy it from them. We all have to compromise ourselves simply to live in this world. Video games are not, in my view, an appropriate thing to take a stand over, and I kinda resent being told that makes me a bad person. It’s like saying that responsible gamblers are immoral people because the gambling industry is provably harmful to the vulnerable. It’s fine to think that, but you might not like where that argument leads.
I also want to say too that all games are pretty entwined with gambling, shadiness and even organised crime, and always have been. I mean the casino and betting industry, lotteries, they’re all legally called “the gaming industry” and have specific laws regulating what they can and can’t do. Even video games were in arcades at the beginning, this is not new. Oh you died, don’t worry, just put in one more coin!
Yes it sucks. But this sort of shadiness is kind of just a hazard that has always come with the territory of games.
EDIT: I immediately regret that post, I’m trying to be a more chill person and a diatribe about morality isn’t helping
The moral aspect comes in when psychological stuff is coupled with systems like this, to prey on people who have problems with addiction. That’s why I linked to the casino stuff above. It’s literally how they are designed and built, to prey on addicts.
Premium Currency and stuff like the Bazaar is very much immoral with how it’s designed.
Well fine is clearly subjetive. I recently opened a post trying to get info if there are plans on having a region based price on steam because the simple battle pass cost 3 times the cost of the full game. You can get the game plus all dlc bundle and it is still cheaper than a single battle pass. So no, its not fine for a lot of people.
The beauty about morality is morality is different from person to person. For instance, I find it to be immoral for people to not take responsibility for their own actions and pull the victim card and blame others for preying on them.
Legit addiction of course is a thing and gambling addiction is of course a thing. The thing here is there:
there is no gambling - you aren’t putting in coins into a machine and maybe get a payout and maybe not getting a payout
Casinos with actual gambling, not pretend-gambling, take away peoples’ livlihoods and mortgages. In Conan Exiles we pay at max like $85 if we are impatient and don’t want to grind battle pass. This is also known as “making the mountain out of the molehill” - or hyperbole.
If this gambling addiction thing is your hill to die on you need to provide evidence of the number of people that are actually suffering from OCD on pretend video game assets that are dumping their $85 or whatever into the game and then show how that is destroying their livlihood at the level casinos do, where they are losing their house and their families etc.
People with actual addictions need to seek real professional help. Alcoholics don’t hang out in places with alcohol. People with this OCD to own every make believe skin in a video game need to really examine not being on the game if that is true.
Bazaars are not gambling. They do not prey on gambling addictions. They target people with Obsessive Compulsion Disorder who feel like they have to have everything. There is a difference between those two things. Gambling is the thrill of putting your paycheck down with the chance of a big payout (or putting any money down with the chance of a bigger payout). These two things are not the same thing.
Battle passes are not gambling. For the same reasons above. They provide a carrot and stick to get players to stick around the game on the servers to accomplish goals to win things, but those things are not random and not gambled that they may not get them when they pay… they have a reasonable time limit to accomplish. (“BUT AUTICUS WHAT IF THEY DONT COMPLETE IT IN 90 DAYS ITS NOT FAAAIIIIIRRRRR” - then don’t buy the battle pass if you don’t think you can complete it in time when completing it has objectively proven to be trivial)
Marketing 101 in general is everything you all have posted about in its “morality”. You are trying to weaponize “morality” to “win” your argument. All of the examples linked and shown have been opinion pieces, forms of hyperbole, and forms of slippery slope fallacies, with a touch of appeal to the majority fallacies in trying to assert the majority of the global population dislike battlepass so it should go away.
Would I prefer the old dlc delivery system? Sure I would because it was horrendously cheap! Do I prefer DLC in general compared to bazaar? Yep. Do I hate battlepasses? Nope, they are usually cheap and you just grind them for cool things to keep me motivated in the game.
And you lost me, personally, there. I’m pretty sure there are people who would say “yes”, but I believe that lacks nuance.
To put it bluntly, if someone is doing something evil and you support them, you can’t be as evil as they are unless you are: 1) supporting them knowingly, and 2) have the power to stop them.
So when you apply that to BLB, you get a murky situation with a lot of shades of grey. Hell, even Funcom stops being the Big Bad Evil Guy, because Funcom is not one person.
I never said these things were easy, I’m only trying to point out that “everyone does it” or “it’s capitalism” or “they’re a business” or “it’s not illegal” are not ironclad defenses that some people think and they don’t shield BLB – or Funcom – from moral judgment.
I hope that after my previous paragraph it’s obvious that it very much does
We disagree there, but again, please don’t take it as a sign that I’m calling you morally bankrupt and evil. I think games are generally more important than most people think.
At this point in human history, saying that games are trivial is akin to saying books, or movies, or comics are trivial. They have grown into a medium for story-telling and they influence younger generations just as much as books, movies, and comics influenced my parents’ generation.
But I digress. I know what you’re trying to say.
Yes, we all have to compromise ourselves. Are we all bad people? No. Are there only good people and bad people? I don’t think so. I think the best way I could explain what I believe is that we’re not as good as we could be. We’ve all been in situations where we knew we could do better, but we didn’t, for a myriad of reasons.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but I don’t think you’re a bad person for buying BLB stuff. Like I already said, I don’t think boycott would work in a situation like this. I have my reasons for that, but I’ve already nattered on way too long.
As for games not being an appropriate thing to take a stand over, it reminds me of what my coworker said recently in response to “this isn’t the biggest problem we have”. His reply was “we also have more than one engineer so we can work on more than one problem at a time”.
Workers and renters rights are problems that dwarf the exploitative nature of online game monetization, true. And we don’t all have to take a stand over the latter. But it would be nice if certain people would stop trying to shut up those of us who are, at the very minimum, expressing disappointment that our favorite game stopped being free from this exploitative nature
And the industry moved away from that and largely hasn’t gone back to it. There’s a lesson in there somewhere
I don’t see why you should regret it. You were civil and honest, and it’s an interesting topic. Normally, it might have been out of scope of these forums, but hey, it’s not my fault Funcom decided to do this
Now that I’ve completed my morning workout routine let me continue on the morality train for just a moment and why morality as an argument for marketing does not hold weight here to me. Obviously… the comments below are hyperbole, slippery slope, and appeal to majority fallacies. But they carry the same weight with me as claiming battle passes and bazaars are immoral for the same basic reasons.
Premise: battlepass and bazaar are immoral because they target people with gambling addiction (should actually be obsessive compulsion disorder since there is no gambling with the pass or the bazaar, you get what you pay for, you don’t gamble for random things or bigger payouts which is what gambling addiction is… the endorphine rush of winning bigger prizes potentially and continuing to shuck quarters at the till until you are broke)
So lets discuss some other ways Conan Exiles is immoral, based on the slippery slope logical fallacy and appeal to the masses fallacies.
In Conan Exiles, I can enslave people. This will trigger people dispositioned to wanting to overpower others into thinking its ok to enslave people. Additionally, we’re not supposed to talk about slavery anymore, much less be the protagonists toward it, because of our past history as a people.
Worse yet, you can enslave people of color. This is like the hottest of no-no buttons in media and gaming right now. Dungeons and Dragons has had to issue over the weekend an apology for a space wizard finding wizard of oz space monkeys in space and making them intelligent so he can enslave them, and people lost their minds thinking they were talking about black people. But in Conan, I am encouraged to enslave them. Obviously a trigger to white supremacists to be able to encourage their immoral behavior. I mean - obviously everyone in the world is against this being depicted in media and games… why Funcom why??? (and this one IS used often on twitter to cancel Conan Exiles)
There are individuals in the game with hooked noses that fight with the pirates and have gold. As I’m instructed to cancel the Harry Potter universe because goblins have hooked noses and are obviously anti-Semitic, this portrayal of hook nosed pirates that love gold is clearly a shot at Jewish people. And you can enslave them! Clearly immoral. Funcom has to learn from the Harry Potter cancellation here. And even Dungeons and Dragons has basically walked back any depictions of actual people just in case they may resemble some type of person and cause offense.
We’re not off the enslave train yet! I can enslave women! Holy hell, like… this is 2022 and I can enslave women! Do I even need to continue on about how immoral that is or how that is enabling people with the disorder of needing to dominate and brutalize women? I mean - obvs this one has the backing of the majority in being against this, but we’re on these forums just talking about our dancers like nothing is going on?
Alcohol is in the game. What about alcoholics? Why are we tempting them so? People have legit alcohol problems and the game just throws alcohol around like anyone’s business! Clearly this can have problems for alcoholics that choose this game as their means of escape to trigger them to start drinking again and damage their famlies, their finances, and their health!
Demon summoning! Holy crap - we sacrifice people on altars to summon demons! How immoral does that get?! The game is clearly targeting people with violent tendencies and demonic fantasies to live those fantasies out by killing innocent people to summon demons!
Combat and violence! So much blood and gore in this game. Anyone that has a predisposition toward violence will get the wrong idea that its ok to just go out and kill random people and splatter them all over the place! This is a real problem people have you know, particularly in certain countries with violence issues! Thats immoral and causes physical harm and death to the victims because we let this game feed into that.
Nudity (for some of us) - holy cow! Boobies! Kids could see or even play this! For some people thats peak immorality.
Theft and destruction of property - the game encourages you to go out and rob from your neighbor and destroy their property. Some people have real clepto disorders that they fight with and this game may trigger those into something dangerous and really life impacting!
Now that we have concluded, my real opinion on this is that the morality word is being used as a weapon to conceal the actual argument - "I want the things but I don’t want to pay that much for the things.
So very true. My dad likes to often equate the mass-shooters with “kids playing vidya games”. Because he dumps it all into a blanket thing. But saying that is just ignorant, because the games he’s talking about (the violent ones) almost universally have an M-rating, and it’s more on the parents for not paying attention or being in their kid’s lives, letting them play stuff they legit never should have had access to in the first place.
Media, no matter the form, definitely shapes minds. I can say I’m a good example of this. I am a huge science fiction reader. When I was back in elementary school, my mom was given a box of books. I saw one at the top had a sci-fi/fantasy cover, what looked like a dragon and a warrior.
So I grabbed it and read it. Years later I stumbled on the book through various means, and read it again. And realized I’d read this as a child. Needless to say, it was an adult book liberally full of BDSM-related stuff. And that definitely influenced my developing mind in relation to how it is today.
Kudos for that part! Nice to see gamers doing healthy stuff
As for the rest though…
Do you actually have a point or are you just listing game features?
How do in-game features relate to a real life company taking real life money from real life people? I don’t think it does… and as for the big list you provided I’m sure a simple disclaimer of “No people were actually enslaved during the production of this game and we do not support the idea of slavery in real life.” would take care of that
FC or another business doing immoral stuff IRL is the equivalent of having “immoral” stuff in a video game. With the obligatory buzz words about real world stuff compared to a fantasy world.
I particularly like all the racist connotations trying to be applied to Conan Exiles because of slavery, or the stuff against women with the same argument. Blithely ignoring that anyone can enslave anyone in this game, so it’s not racist or against women at all.
PoC can enslave white people. White people can enslave PoC.
Men can enslave women. Women can enslave men.
Somehow that’s the same as real world history, not sure how, since everyone in the Exiled Lands is equal. There is no sexism or racism. Just you vs them.
Conceal? I’ve been quite open about it, although not in this thread. It’s not my fault we already have 3 threads going on with the same discussion.
Excessive price hike is one of the things I find morally objectionable in the new monetization strategy. FOMO is another. There’s nothing concealed here, you’re just trying to insinuate that those of us who disagreed with your morality are not being truthful
Oh, I see Well, I really didn’t want to sound judgmental or mean in my reply, but the whole time I was thinking “good thing the game doesn’t have guns cuz that would’ve completed the American controversial topic list”
And also wondered when they said “Worse yet, you can enslave people of color”… kept wondering does that mean enslaving white people is “better”? Because otherwise how can this be “worse”?
