Developer Insight: Hearthsteel Virtual Currency and Housing in Midnight

Originally Posted by Illuminance

The Virtual Currency argument they use as damage control is so stupid it's an insult to the players' intelligence. If you are buying a table and chairs (virtual or not), it's much easier to understand if the purchase is in $USD (or your respective local currency) than some contrived housing ducats.

Easier to understand.... are people that bad at math?

Originally Posted by Trazzle

Who cares? Absolutely no one should be shocked by this, the biggest way most players will interact with hearthsteel will likely be via game purchase bundles, “buy the heroic their or above and receive 5k hearthsteel!”. People who don’t have the time available to grind/put time into the game but still want a flashy house now have an option (one that makes more money for bliz of course).

I don't really care about housing but I can see the concern here. At least after the Diablo IV situation where they said you could earn most armors in-game for free. Which is technically true. They just never mentioned the free armors are few and far between and look like dogshit compared to the $25 ones.

Obviously it all depends on implementation at the end of the day. But it could quickly become something where the free pieces are just recycled, low quality clutter and there's 5x as many premium pieces being added to the game in the same time period.

Let's hope the EU will move forward with banning these scummy practices of using obfuscating currencies.

And yes you don't have to buy it, but Blizzard are specifically targeting weak-willed whales. They had many meetings about how to manipulate players into buying as much as possible, and it resulted in this. That's what makes it so scummy. I mean they could have used trading tenders or normal gold but no, another premium currency was deliberately chosen.

Either way, I expected nothing better of a crap corporation.

This can be an inefficient, inconvenient, and often tedious process when a player wants to purchase multiple items.
Smaller Housing items in the shop are often low cost and players will want to purchase multiples of them to complete a set. Using an in-game currency can help make the process of obtaining many of these types of inexpensive items more efficient.

I mean it doesn't? People go in a supermarket and buy a bunch of inexpensive items all the time. Online shops use carts that neatly list all your items.
It's pretty much universally aknowledged that using ingame currency is just a scummy move to confuse consumers.

Originally Posted by Zalraki

Let's hope the EU will move forward with banning these scummy practices of using obfuscating currencies.

And yes you don't have to buy it, but Blizzard are specifically targeting weak-willed whales. They had many meetings about how to manipulate players into buying as much as possible, and it resulted in this. That's what makes it so scummy. I mean they could have used trading tenders or normal gold but no, another premium currency was deliberately chosen.

Either way, I expected nothing better of a crap corporation.

Wasn't there a (recent?) EU ruling that companies offering premium currencies for things like this, must offer the option to buy a specific amount of currency needed to buy an item? Example:

Cheapest you can buy is 500 coins. Item costs 400 and you have 200 coins already. Companies MUST offer the option to be able to buy only 200 coins so you can buy the 400 coin item with 400 coins instead of having to buy 500 coins.

Everyone knew this would come. But still, looking at the state of the game, this is bullshit. If we had patches with a lot of content I wouldn't mind having another money grab. But expansion's life cycles are shorter while the expansion themselves are more and more expensive, half the patches are recycled content, K'aresh is a shame with how little open world content it has and its only delve is a reused dungeon.

And so people understand why I'm frustrated with this even if it was predictable, here's a look of what we've had in TWW so far :

-Stone dwarves whose customizations are 10 polygons gems spread on their body
-Worldsoul memories or whatever it's called (who does them ?)
-2 world event (theater who manages to be worse than anything done in DF and the Radiant stuff in Hallowfall who are just world quests and dailies gated behind currencies)
-Devles (useless as it's not considered to be a real endgame feature outside of nemesis)
-8 dungeons where half of them happened to take place in the open world (less instances to design)
-8 bosses raid (which has been the standard since WoD so it's ok)
-Hero talents (which were mostly really cool I won't lie)

As for content patch, we had :

-Unused BFA content made into a zone, which is ok as unused content shouldn't rot into the game files
-Visions 2.0 who were far from being an upgrade of the BFA version (still timegated, way easier than the BFA version)

-Undermine, who was actually one of the most daring patches they've made since BFA. Had a lot of flaws but it tried stuff with the D.R.I.V.E. 1 recycled area dungeon, 2 whole new delves.
-We had the Arathi patch with a boring questline
-Dastardly duo (remembered that this thing existed) and the glitchy 1 hour event in Hallowfall

-K'aresh with its really original legendary cloak, raid and dungeon. 1 recycled content delve.
-We got a full patch of Lemix, a different game mode based on recycled content
-Now we have Brawler's guild, Shadowlands timewalking and housing early access (so what's left for Midnight ?)

And this come from someone who's willing to buy stuff on the store as long as the content is good. But this game's never been as souless as it is right now. Half the cosmetic you get comes from the Trading Post, the other half are recolor. The open world has never been this bad and the current rating system doesn't give you any reason to push once you've got your 3K.

I agree that companies get to make the most out of the least but right now this isn't even intelligent. This is exactly what's going to bring them on their knees. You can allow yourself to sell a lot of stuff if you're selling good products or if you're at least good at selling stuff.

Originally Posted by Zalraki

Let's hope the EU will move forward with banning these scummy practices of using obfuscating currencies.

And yes you don't have to buy it, but Blizzard are specifically targeting weak-willed whales. They had many meetings about how to manipulate players into buying as much as possible, and it resulted in this. That's what makes it so scummy. I mean they could have used trading tenders or normal gold but no, another premium currency was deliberately chosen.

Either way, I expected nothing better of a crap corporation.

I agree with this one. Most games these days have this scummy practice of using obscure currencies, such as ESO. I don't remember if FF14 had one. But purchases in games is getting out of control. If it continue like this, I won't allow my kids to play games like these.

Costs in the shop are clearly defined. The ratios of Hearthsteel to real money are fixed and easily understood at a glance. You should be able to obtain an amount that makes sense for the purchases you want to make.

Yeah, no. If this was the case, the price would just be in real money without the "need" of a special currency. The only purpose of those currencies is to obfuscate costs and force hands at spending more than needed.
Disgusting that they actually made a post trying to fool people ...

Again… you’d never see gold directly in promos/bundles, hearthsteel being added gives blizzard a new currency to add to what ever they want, promoting housing. Yes, it also allows them to create another revenue path for those who want to buy hearthsteel, but it seems to me to be equally useful as a currency to allow for promotions.

Feel free to feel incensed by it, it’s a classic hallmark of corporate business… but it is a functional/useful currency. Where it’d fall apart, if they fail to supply players with non hearthsteel decor items but like… they’re not that stupid, there are cool xmogs in the store from time to time, but it’s not like we’re not receiving banger tier set still.

Originally Posted by kranur

Yeah, no. If this was the case, the price would just be in real money without the "need" of a special currency. The only purpose of those currencies is to obfuscate costs and force hands at spending more than needed.
Disgusting that they actually made a post trying to fool people ...

Yeah nah. Real money transactions often require several steps of security checks, so making a few of them is annoying. I'd rather buy a currency in a bundle, and if I want to use it later for 20 different transactions of 1 chair (or some other shit), it's a lot more convenient.

Originally Posted by milkmustache

$15/month sub and record numbers just isn't good enough I guess. There'll always be someone to willing to buy it. Truly a gross, greedy mindset. I hope there's immediate outrage and they fuck right off with this, but I highly doubt it. Bye bye recovered goodwill from the past few years.

You'd think. But the mantra of the CEO and corporations is " It is not enough to make some of the money. We have to TAKE all of the money ". Corporate greed knows no bounds. They have proven it time and time again.

It wouldn't be so bad if money from this kind of extra stuff gave the devs more money to make the game better and you could tangibly see that

But we all know it's just going straight into CEO bonuses and other bullshit

Before was not the time to be angry. Now is.

Originally Posted by fatgunn

Buy what you want, don't buy the rest. Other people's lack of self control isn't my problem.

But you can't just buy what you want now, can you?
You have to pay for a bundle of currency.

Which inevitably will lead to you having some left over, never getting your full value back, or needing to purchase another bundle and spend significantly more money than you otherwise would've, just to gap the few coins you would actually need.

This sort of system solely exists to obscure costs and manipulate you into spending more without Blizzard needing to make your moneys worth.
It's indefensible and crosses any otherwise acceptable boundary.

I simply won't be engaging with decor from the cash shop. Hopefully it won't show up in the housing catalogue if you don't own it, or at least that you can filter it out.

Easy way to not have to deal with the Hearthsteel crap at all. So long as they stick true to their promise of not having already-existing decor or core class/race/faction fantasy stuff in the shop, I have no interest in what they put in the shop.

I remember when I said housing was being implemented as a vehicle for micro transactions, and the usual suspects told me I was crazy. Now, they will tell us all how this is actually a brilliant decision that is great for the game.

Originally Posted by fatgunn

Easier to understand.... are people that bad at math?

There's a couple answers to this and virtual currency.

To start, yes: not everyone's good at math, so making people have to do extra math in order to purchase something can be considered taking advantage of them. There's a difference between swiping a credit card to pay $9.95 for an item versus swiping a credit card to pay $5 for 675 virtual currency to purchase something for 1350 virtual currency, as extra steps can cause math errors on a purchase that likely will have zero refunds (yes, I intentionally made it so the converted virtual currency cost is more as that can happen too!). And that's assuming the conversion from money to virtual currency is even for purchasing items, which it rarely is as they'd rather make you buy currency bundles that result in leftover currency because of the second point...

The second point is that the virtual currency is a psychological manipulation in order to fleece more money. First of all, when you're spending virtual currency instead of real money, it's been shown that you're less reserved in spending it because it's not 'real' money; the more steps between your actual money and the item you're buying, the more likely you'll keep spending without realizing what you're doing compared to if there's only one step of spending actual money. Second of all, virtual currencies are almost always bought in bulk in uneven amounts so you'll have currency left over, which invokes something akin to a sunken cost issue: people loathe having a leftover virtual currency balance and tend to buy more to 'get rid' of that balance, as they feel like they already spent money so what's a little more to make sure I don't waste anything in the end? It gets worse if your game has multiple virtual currencies that can be acquired via MTX, or the game gives you free virtual currency to where you can't really buy anything or it gives you leftover after one purchase, starting the cycle even if you don't initially engage with MTX.

There's more issues involved, such as tax workarounds and other manipulative aspects of virtual currency, but that'd make this a super long post. The point is that there's a reason Blizz is using a virtual currency for this, and I guarantee none of them are in the best interest of the players. Even their blue post says as much.

Originally Posted by Zalraki

Either way, I expected nothing better of a crap corporation.

I expected a rational answer of any corporation - seems I was wrong.

Investing in a new virtual currency instead of just the normal battle.net approach (e.g. pets etc) sends a signal that this isn't just incidental - it is purposeful.

You don't spend resources on something which is just used in a tiny corner.

Originally Posted by NineSpine

I remember when I said housing was being implemented as a vehicle for micro transactions, and the usual suspects told me I was crazy. Now, they will tell us all how this is actually a brilliant decision that is great for the game.

Housing requires huge dev resources, there's just no way Blizz would invest them if the goal was not to sell stuff in thr shop.

Question:

Why a new currency? Why not just money?

Im pretty suspicious what Blizzard said is false and a lie.
If this part they say is true, then why a new currency?

-Costs in the shop are clearly defined. The ratios of Hearthsteel to real money are fixed and easily understood at a glance. You should be able to obtain an amount that makes sense for the purchases you want to make.

-Similarly, the costs of items are designed to align with Hearthsteel offer amounts in a player-friendly way. Buying Hearthsteel at the amount you want lets you purchase the items you want without requiring you to think about which packs should be added together to minimize leftovers.