Quote:
Originally Posted by Kope
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Giving you your full quote but going to talk about this:
What I was actually thinking about is something I saw on EQ1 when I went back for a month to play it to see how it was. They have items that drop that change the aesthetic of that piece of armor to look a certain way (I think that's how it worked anyway, I never actually used them).
What you could do is allow people to buy a piece of armor from the shop with RL money and attach that to the piece of equipment you want the visuals to change for. It would be purely aesthetical and the people would have to purchase it again if they wanted to look the same way when they got a new piece of gear in the slot they had already purchased the aesthetic change for.
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This is a perfect example of the negative effect of F2P and ingame purchases. It seems harmless right? The problem is that carefully designed piece of high end armor that someone spent months getting now is not unique looking. So you can no longer gauge the power or value of something from the way it looks, and you lose the value of the effort it took to get there, so you just undermined your entire game. Colours and detail - basic visual rewards - now mean nothing. This is game breaking, as it breaks the implied visual contract that undergirds all games. Now this contract
can be broken, but the point is the breaks are exceptions and being exceptions gives them value (for example, a really weak looking item that is in fact potent, like the Mossy Twig). You can't have an exception unless you have a clear status quo.
Apart from that, it makes your world ugly. Everyone is running around in horrid colours (or all black, which is inevitably the most popular), and that talented, expensive Art Director just had his/her meticulous, carefully chosen colour palette and colour tagging made completely redundant. Colour is a language as powerful and subtle and expressive as any other, and by allowing everyone to mess with it you just made that language useless. It's now noise.
I'm telling you, F2P ingame purchasing violates games. You can't make it alright, no matter your careful justifications. In the end it's about money pure and simple, and nothing to do with fun, authenticity, or making games better.