With the possible addition of micro-transactions to a game that doesn’t really need them, it seems to me that 343 just wants your cash, (like any “good” company).
“For players who are new to the MCC, or who may not have dedicated much time specifically to unlocking items during the seasonal updates, or are simply completionists looking to catch the last outstanding items they need, we are internally exploring a potential new feature for the future in the form of purchasable Spartan Points.” - https://www.halowaypoint.com/news/bioroid-boogaloo
Though this idea seems central to cash-cows. The normal, average, player won’t spend anything for these “Spartan Points”. But no, these are for the noobs, who are intimidated by playing a game. Or for those who don’t care for the game at all, they just want to have all the cosmetics for their internet points.
Overall, I don’t think micro-transactions will really affect the community that much, because we won’t buy them. They are for the cash-cows, the pay-pigs, the tier-3 subs of 343. For the people who pay, and don’t play.
Their reasoning doesn’t warrant the inclusion of micro transactions. Players have complained for a while that the time gating of Spartan Points is unreasonably slow with the 1000+ items to unlock. There a good number of reasonable suggestions to speed up the process, but allowing players to purchase them is a tone deaf solution. Even if they are additive it shows that they hear the player complaints, but ignore the suggested solutions.
If the unlock process was significantly shorter I would be more open to the idea of mtxs, but as it stands no. Protect the consumers from themselves.
What’s to stop them from making it harder to earn spartan points down the road, after they’ve made them purchasable? Why trust them to only make this change and not go further when they feel like they can? At what point will you stand up and say this isn’t ok?
I understand why it might feel that way but I think it appeals to the kind of gamer that doesn’t have the time to spend grinding. That doesn’t make them less average, in fact it is more normal than you might think.
If they reduce the grind it will put the noses out of those who “worked hard on it”. MTX isn’t ideal, because I think it could definitely lead to feature creep. Maybe the accountants said these Azure servers are too costly for MCC. Who knows.
i’m reaching the point again, where i just hope, that the industry crumbles, bc everything seems to only be created to milk the players to satisfy the real customers (investors, board members, etc.)
and people keep defending it and, even worse, keep spending money on MTs (and not realising, how this hurts the very game they are enjoying). the marketing departments have won. MTs seems to be acceppted by gamers (with just the small outcry here, like in MCC now)
The solution is to increase the rate Spartan Points can be accrued. Players have complained about the grind for a while, and the solution isn’t to tell them to go buy their way through.
Just saying, when you compare the community vs the rest of the player base the community is just a tiny %. Even then a good portion of the community buys from the shop. Todays generation is so lost with gaming because of Microtransactions that it’s actually sad that most don’t even care anymore about getting a quality type of game.
You said it yourself, this is what gaming companies are doing to players these days. Conditioning them to believe a quality game doesn’t matter anymore.
See, this is what I agree with. Introducing microtransactions to MCC won’t really change that much. Yes, it will make the game seem less genuine and rewards seem more pointless, however if you’ve already unlocked everything then does it really matter all that much?
I won’t end up paying for Spartan points in Halo MCC because I pretty much already have everything I need in the game. If I played it more then I’d have no problem earning Season points / Spartan points through challenges. It’s not locking colours, it’s not forcing you to pay for armour, it’s honestly pretty tame and what I expected in Halo Infinite.
I DID grow up with the older Halos. And it’s not gatekeeping, it’s a fact. If you can’t grind a game because you’re busy with real life, then you probably shouldn’t be playing a grindy game. Pokemon is a game based around grinding yet you don’t see anyone saying “Oh we should make it so you can pay to level up your pokemon to make the grind less tedious.” There’s NONE of that, because MTX aren’t needed to circumvent grinds.
If you don’t like the grind or don’t have the time to grind, that’s a personal problem, and the community that actually enjoys the grind from time to time shouldn’t have to suffer or compromise just because other people have a life.
It may not be fair to those who can’t “complete the grind” or don’t have time to grind but as Professor Snape once said “It may have escaped your notice but LIFE ISN’T FAIR!”
If they were doing something like, unlock ALL cosmetics as a 10 bucks DLC, I would be like, hmm actually not a bad deal for a newbie fresh to the game.
But the way they are doing it inherently predatory. Let’s be fair and say, you get 100 Spartan points for 10 bucks. That’s like 80 dollars for all 8 seasons. Phew. I can buy a game with that. I can buy like, 40 Cheeseburgers. I think I’ll take those 40 Cheeseburgers and eat them while I unlock my cosmetics slowly thank you very much.
And this is not forgetting that MCC in entirety costs 60 bucks. Yep. They wanna make newbies potentially pay 100+ for a set of 10 - 20 year old games.
They said the micro-trasactions are just an additional way to get items though. As long as they’re not locking anything behind them I think it’s a fair thing to add. At least they can justify continuing to work on this game now, since (based on Infinite) the execs will cancel anything that they think won’t make them money
From where I’m sitting, they’ve been BSing us for a minimum of 3 years straight (or longer, depending on who you ask), so faith in them would seem to be… “misplaced”.
Problem with video games now is they all require you to grind there is no game in existence anymore that does not require grinding to gain something the simple way to fix this is to allow people to gain points in campaign save those points up and then when they have enough buy some stuff in the store but all companies want you to pay real money because they can’t come out with more content quickly enough and my new content I mean DLC
Grinding has ALWAYS been a big thing in games, ever since the first RPGs yet you never saw people complaining about it back then, even the ones who didn’t have time didn’t complain. Hell you don’t see the pokemon community complain about grinding.
