My Observations; Planet Side 2’s micro transactions and power creep

My Observations; Planet Side 2’s micro transactions and power creep

Sooner or later I will post a positive post here on the FAT, but until then I will continue to be a Grinch in this corner of the internet.

I’ve been playing a lot of Sony Online Entertainments Planet Side 2 lately. It’s a good game, it could be a great game, but it  has some very suspect systems in place. I like the game because of its theatrics. One of my teenage ambitions was to be one of those little dudes in Command and Conquer games who yells out a single line of pseudo Russian before getting squashed by a tank in some huge maelstrom esc battle. Planet Side 2 allows me to live out this masochistic fantasy.

At its best Planet Side can create an awesome spectacle as hundreds of players geared up with tanks, planes, guns, sharp sticks manoeuvre towards some fortified point and exchange carnage. It’s like a sci fi version of Kilgore’s beach assault in Apocalypse Now which each exchange adding to a meta story of a conflict across three continent sized maps.

What I really want to discuss though is not the game itself but the free to play / micro transactions model and the in game balance / power creep.

We’ll start with the micro transactions. I don’t have a problem with this model in principle. We are in an era of online games where people don’t expect to pay a subscription. If a game goes for an upfront purchase it places a long term cap on future development, unless they introduce compulsory pay for DLC, which is effectively a well disguised subscription.

In Planet Side 2, anyone can download the game and play it without paying a penny. And actually it’s not a bad game if you don’t pay anything. I played about 30 hours before I put in any money. That’s more than I play many games these days. You get access to all the vehicles and troop classes with a default weapon set. Those default weapon sets are quite good and you can use experience points to upgrade them. The only real short comings of the free stuff, is situation adaptability, and a lack of serious anti air fire power (lack of anti air  fire power is a fairly serious issue imo). The second one of these is what finally pushed me into spending. You can also pay a subscription that gives you in game money to buy guns each month plus experience perks and reduced queue times etc. If you not willing to subscribe you can do what I’ve done and just buy the occasional weapon. FYI guns are not cheap. You’re looking at typically $5 an item. I usually wait until a 50% sale to get a better deal, but for a virtual thing that still is expensive.

So whats the issue? Imagine you bought I dunno, a new desk top graphics package for example. Then the publisher released a patch that downgraded your graphic package, reducing the number of things it could do, and then released a better version of that software on to the market and suggested you buy it. This is effectively what SOE does with its in game buy able items.

A new rifle might be released. It looks pretty effective, you like its recoil, bullet distribution, power etc. So you buy it. A month later SOE rebalances the guns abilities down grading them (a nerf) and releases a new gun that did what your gun used to do, but better.

The point is, I’m not actually buying a gun as advertised. I am buying something that SOE can change into whatever they want, whenever they want.

There are two issues here. One is a question of consumer ethics, the other is one of power creep. From the consumer ethics point of view, are micro transactions actually what they are being presented as? If the items I buy in game may become redundant, requiring me to buy more items to maintain a similar performance edge, am I really just paying another form of subscription? I suspect I am. There are obvious motivations for SOE to do this. They don’t want consumers who buy a few guns and then feel satisfied to just play, they want a continued long term investment, so it’s in their interests to try and motivate consumers to keep paying.

The second issue, power creep arises due to the way some weapons / armour / vehicles are rebalanced. Sometimes a new gun or item is simply better than what was there before. CCG players will have no problem understanding this issue. If over time more powerful tools or abilities are introduced into a game, many older items and abilities become redundant, creating lots of dummy decisions for players. This is poor game design, driven primarily by the want to generate more cash revenue than improve the game itself. Planet Side 2 is already a very inaccessible game despite its F2P nature. The game has terrible tutorial videos and lots of important information that can only be learned through trial and error experience (lots of deaths) or reading through long forum threads. A power creep situation will simply exacerbate this.

I enjoy playing Planet Side at the moment. But will I still be playing in a years’ time? Will SOE have developed the game in such a way that the $50 or so I’ve spent become redundant? If they do it’l get uninstalled. It’s worth saying I’ve made little effort to back up what I’m saying hard facts, this is all based on my, and the people I play with perception of the in game updates and balancing changes. Unfortunately SOE have not released any sort of statement or guide as to how and why they make changes. They appear to be making things up as they go along.