Of course, I was being unclear in my earlier post. What I referred to as the “monetization system” was not meant to refer to the cosmetics only, but the whole Ages system and the new mechanics brought into the game through them, such as Sorcery (disappointing), the new Purge (promising, but with severe flaws), and the Events (which never worked properly).
Yes, those were all free features, but their release was forced into this quarterly release schedule that so pleases the investors, and thus they all were… less than perfectly executed.
The cosmetic stuff mostly works, and looks pretty. The supposedly functional buyable objects also seem to work as purely cosmetic, and pretty, which is a shame, especially since we won’t know before pourchasing whether an object is functional or cosmetic.But those are little things.
It’s the need to rush the big things, and the lack of time to fix broken things, that causes a lot of the unhappiness we see. It’s not like Funcom was ever very good at releasing big features that weren’t seriously broken upon release, but at least before the Tencent takeover they could postpone releases if they were hopelessly broken. And not, like, ban half of their player base by accident and then go for holidays for a month before getting back to fixing whatever new game features they added that were maybe a little broken too.
Investor interests do not unfortunately often align with making a better product, whether it’s video games, mobile phones or cars.
1 Like