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Tuesday, 7 February 2012

Microtransactions: pay to cheat

Posted on 22:00 by Unknown
In "free to play" microtransaction games, items of power often sold. However people don't consider how strong they are. The reason is self-deceiving: the buyers don't want to believe that they were practically given "God mode" for their money, while the free-players don't want to face that they are nothing but hopeless NPCs in this game.

For these self-deceiving reasons everyone seems to accept that these items give only "slight" buff. In the game World of Tanks the players consider buying gold ammo a "bit lame" but nothing game-breaking. No wonder no one wanted to make a decent analysis. I bought 2500 gold for 10 euros and spent it all on gold ammo in a Hetzer tank. The 2500 gold were burned in mere 53 matches, making this game rather expensive (my total 3500 games would cost 660 euros with gold ammo). Let's see the results of this tank before and after the experiment:


  Without gold ammo With gold ammo
Win % 60 68
Win % without draws 62 71
Kill / battle 1.14 2.43
Damage / battle 443 827
XP / battle 320 676
Survive % 43.4 39.6
Ouch! The "slight" increase of power given by the item shop doubled my kills, damage and XP gains. My new winrate would place me to world top 100 (out of 500K) if I would start an account and play it with only gold ammo. My decreased survival rate tells that my godlike powers made me reckless so with more disciplined play I could get even more wins and kills.

These results mean two things: one is that any serious player must stay away from microtransaction games. The win depends only on payment and not on player skill or even luck, therefore these are not even games, they are mere "epeen machines": you throw in coin, epeen comes out.

Secondly the fact that such abominations can exist and financially thrive, tells a lot about the players who are finding it fun to massacre totally helpless opponents with their ridiculously overpowered item shop stuff. I mean, they know that they are cheating, where is the fun in winning this way? They are socials who doesn't really play to win, but to amuse (real or imaginary) peers. As long as the game company can upkeep the lie that the item shop stuff are just "quality of life" improvements, the cheater can show up front of peers as "awesome", and this is their source of fun.

PS: In the game they introduced French tanks. The Wiki says "higher tiers are more mobile and carry fast firing, high-penetration guns, which may leave players believing their grind wasn't pointless. However, most high tier French tanks lack armor." It seems a fair tradeoff. However it's just another gift to the pay-to-cheat players. Armor is irrelevant as gold ammo penetrates it. However those who pay more money for the experience conversion to get French tanks fast will get totally overpowered tanks that can easily destroy anything in the field, even tiers above them - with gold ammo. The pay-to-cheat games become more and more unbalanced and messed up with every patch, until they become simply unplayable.
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