In Game Purchases Ruin Many Good New Games

I think there is a rather unhealthy tendency going on. Nothing new but oh well here I go. Have you noticed that there are literally hundreds new free games coming out - Facebook games, browser based and, of course, touchscreen devices - iPad and so on? They are.. sort of free to play but there is one very big catch.

Here are few examples. Let's look at The DeadZone - The Last Stand. Idea is superb - run your own compound in zombie infested city, in a post apocalyptic world - raid buildings and other compounds, gather resources, trade with other players and so on. Very addictive and exciting... for the first 5-7 levels. After that the game will start to drag - to complete mission you have to wait 2-3 hours or spend money to get "FUEL" and speed up mission return times. Sheesh. Spend 100$ to enjoy the game play.... or portion your fun to few minutes per day.

Same deal goes with new title from EA - Dungeon Keeper - for the first few hours it is interesting, exciting and addictive - just enough time to hook you up on the game and then the drag begins. You need gems, gold, mana and so on to speed things up or the exciting new game turns into a massive training in patience. Wait... wait and wait some more till you get your dungeon upgraded/new areas cleaned up. I think EA went very wrong with this and, in my opinion, ruined perfectly good remake of a classic Dungeon Keeper title from 1997 (love that old game, hence so angry!! :D ). Well, with this one at least you can get a good iOS/Android Dungeon Keeper hack to get all the free gems. Of course, that's cheating, but oh well, at least there is a way to speed things up.

Thing that totally pisses me off is that it's not enough to spend let's say 10-15$ to enjoy the game, you need literally hundreds of dollars spent on in-game purchases to have fun. Gosh, after all this the classic monthly subscription models like with World Of Warcraft seems like a very fair deal.

It looks like there is a simple pattern - make a new game, release it for free with just enough game time to get people addicted/hooked up and then tempt them with in game purchases to continue playing. Who can resist?

What happened with making games to have fun?

Seriously people, so many new games get screwed up with in game purchases. I'd rather stick to a titles with fixed payment plan or one time payment rather than spending endless times on gems, fuel, soulstones and other resources. Seriously.

Well, apologies for venting it out, but I had to write this! :D

Back To WoW?

Hey gang. It's been a really really long while since I wrote something here. I guess I was just too busy doing all sorts of weird things... like getting a life lol... and in all honestly I even forgot I had this page up. I've been doing my online inventory (lol) to minimize some of my digital footprint (rofl!) when I came across this page.

I had a few relapses here and there and got back to playing World Of Warcraft from time to time but you know what? Like in that old saying (or was it song?) - The Magic Is Gone. Either I got way too old for this game (doubt that, there are plenty people older than me still playing it) or the game itself kinda got dumbed down.

In my opinion, it is latter. If you recall, first two expansions were really really great - I mean there was a challenge getting through all those heroic dungeons in The Burning Crusade. You actually had to balance group and have good crowd control, tactics. It was challenging and fun. Same went for WOTLK expansion - still needed a strong guild or a good friends to get those gear runs done and PvP was thrill. I admit, there were a lot of IMBA things (imbalance in classes, gear/etc) but it still was fun - you had to tinker your builds, play around with them and had many options how to go about your character.

I think the whole mess began as soon as the Cataclysm was released... Down the hill we go. Simplified talent trees to dumb down the game so the six year olds can play it, LFG across the realms and dumbing down dungeons made the whole gaming experience from a challenge and fun into a 3 button smash and run.

Now, it boils down to ilevel of your gear, that's it. You can literally run through dungeons with a 4 mele and a healer, no need for tactics or careful planning. Where is fun in that???

The game that used to be fun and challenging to play now boils down to grinding dailies to get your gear ilevel up, grinding weekly raids in LFR with hope to get some upgrades and, if you are lucky, having a few raids with your guildies. More grind, more daily grind, more "kill 10 pigs and bring me their heads" type of things. Ofc, it is not actually that bad, but it is close.

Look what happened to all the old dungeons. It's literally a ghost town. No one goes there unless they are drunk or so bored they have nothing better to do. There are many fun and great instances that a lot of new players never even saw because they flew by them while leveling up. Same goes for raid instances - at the top level you can now actually solo many old raids. Again, no fun.

So today's World Of Warcraft is turning into a shiny nice looking grind'o'mat instead of something that is really fun to play. I agree that a lot of new storylines and quests, especially in MoP, are great and fun if you do it once or twice. In a while it boils down to a grind again.

I sort of start seeing through the quests and all I see are "kill another 10 pigs"... Oh my. I want my old WoW back! :D

Right, I vented, I do feel better and time to get back to mycheats.net - write a code or two of some new hacks....