You can’t seriously blame people who scrolled through the battlepass and think Blizz didn’t know EXACTLY what they were doing. Not everyone reads the devs blogs, social media, ect ect… some people just log in at the start of the season to see what the pass has to offer. And when they did, it was MADE to look like you were getting the gold currency. It was a total bait and switch scam. They knew it wouldn’t get everyone, but it didn’t have to fool everyone. It tricked enough people to sell more passes again, people who were not going to get it because the value of playing this game at all is dropping into only the third season.
I think what they should do is prompt people to see patch notes when there’s a new patch when they boot up the game. If people don’t want to see patch notes, it’s their choice, but there are instances where you could miss things.
Though I agree the way they maliciously - whether by active choice or not - led people to believe they were premium currency was awful.
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This is coming from the company who deliberately does this like crazy for Diablo Immortal, where if you buy the item, it’s special in ways the non-bought item isn’t, even though they have literally the same exact icon and MOST of the same name.
Like, they had to recolor the coins to look similar to the credits. They obviously did this on purpose.
And sure, you can get at people for “not reading,” but that doesn’t give Blizz a free pass for being scummy here.
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Exactly.
People should be informed and make sure they’re seeking that info from many sources… but this does not excuse what was done.
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I’d bet my life that they changed the colors because it was grounds for being sued.
False advertising in a nutshell. So many people complained - the water was getting too hot.
Not always, but in this case despite a color swap, there are more differences than similarities.
Marketing isn’t built on 100% honesty, this is no exception.
Those companies still exist, there’s plenty of them.
The companies of yore have transcended and nothing is going to bring them back to where they were. Either accept that and find fun within the cash grabs or move on to greener pastures.
Doesn’t matter what the basis is, changes were made to a premium currency that weren’t in the changelog.
The point of this part of the reply was to show there’s no precedent for including changes to something that concerns money, not about OWL itself.
I didn’t put words in your mouth, what you suggested is the most roundabout way of saying they lack the ability of discern past rudimentary visual stimuli.
Then in the followup you changed your argument to something a little more rational.
Lmfao I’ve had a lot of health insurance companies over the years, and not one tricked me by changing the color of my plan.
They’re a corporation that makes games.
There’s nothing that says they’re mandated to have a focus on leisure or a love of gaming.
Their message was clear enough for this individual to call it out 7 days before season 3 went live for us to see:
Well then by all means, tell them how to run their ($59bil) company champ that ($1.84tril) Microsoft and ($103bil) Sony are hounding each other over. Show ‘em how it’s done.
I think it’s amazing that despite their apparent heavily degraded, very publicly tarnished reputation that they’re still leveraging hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of players to spend time in a game that’s so overly panned by its playerbase, and still getting truckloads of people who say “I knew Blizz was shady, but I didn’t expect to get sCaMmEd like this” like it’s a surprise or something.
They’re not going to change, and I guarantee you they’re not going to glance at your favor. Hate to be a doomer on this one but what you see is what you get. Accept it or don’t, but your choice isn’t going to change anything.
It was either done to get impulse buys on people that didn’t know otherwise, as many BP systems give back premium currency for completing them.
Or simply could be a leftover icon from the loot box syste, that got overlooked and didn’t get recolored to match the new system.
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That’s exactly what needs to change in the future in our society. Laws should change, especially in the US, so that kind of dishonesty towards customers becomes “suable”.
What I said above. We, the people, need to call that out as much as possible and not let it go. The more vocal we are about it, the more chances there are for this to change. That’s how people got their rights over the centuries.
This is the very issue. In the 90s, when games weren’t so mainstream, companies were more honest. It’s sad that success always lead to turning them into scummy corporations in our capitalistic societies.
We’ll see how it goes when Microsoft takes over but I don’t believe Blizzard / Activision will be having a bright future if they keep on treating customers as such. Sooner or later, they will get the consequences.
Marketing would cease to exist, plain and simple. This stuff is built upon the idea that there’s a level of discernment that can be applied to understand what’s being shown off and what can be discovered when you dig a little deeper.
There’s marketing that isn’t forthcoming, and there’s marketing that is overtly false. The former is entirely acceptable, the latter is already illegal.
Your sentiment for doing so is understandable, but it’s vapid.
Sir this is an industry built on entertainment, not a civil rights movement in the making.
You want to see change in the industry, talking about it on a forum where 98% of the playerbase doesn’t exist isn’t the way to do it.
They absolutely weren’t my guy, in fact marketing were actually overtly more dishonest than what we have now. That’s childhood nostalgia talking not reality, go back and watch ads, look at boxes, and read the descriptions of games as they were intended to be read.
Games were better sure, more complete, better value, but marketing was absolutely bordering on false advertisement and games were held together with bandaid fixes.
Considering OW2 uses almost identical financial systems to that of Halo Infinite, I would say don’t get your hopes up even if I want the merger to happen.
Honestly, both are equally likely, either Blizzard was being greedy, or lazy.
“OvErWaTcH sCaMmEd Us”
No the developers didn’t scam you. They made it perfectly clear, from the get go when they announced that credits were coming to the battle pass that they would be ‘legacy credits’ not credits used on the store to buy most skins, bundles or really anything that’s currently on the store.
It wasn’t a secret. They didn’t pull a fast one. They were up front from day 1 when they made that announcement.
Now if you want to be angry about the fact that you’re getting legacy credits, which are pretty much worthless, instead of actual store credits, then I am in full agreement. An easy win for the OW2 team would be to add store credits to the battle pass. They didn’t do that, instead giving a mostly worthless currency that can’t even buy epic skins, just the standard recolour ones.
But don’t say you were scammed, because there is no scam at play here. Period.
Honestly I do hope they get sued for it. The color change was only to trick customers and no other valid reason. And of course their justification will be “well who will sue a video game over $10?”
How exactly do you think any lawyer will justify a case when they didn’t scam players at all?
All Blizzard has to do, quite literally, is point to the blog post announcement for what was coming in Season 3 (which is when they announced legacy credits were coming to the battle pass) and any case trying to argue scam gets trashed and shredded.
The color change was intended to trick consumers into thinking they were getting a more valuable in game currency. Its very scummy and legally questionable
Uhh, no.
Again they made it crystal clear that we were getting legacy credits. Anyone with a working brain who knows how to read would know this. Additionally the battle-pass reward is named ‘legacy credits’ and the symbol for legacy credits is not the same as the one for store credits.
Did they make a mistake by originally having the legacy credits appear as gold? Yes. And it was one they fixed quickly enough, but there was no deliberate misleading behaviour here. You’d have to be a special type of stupid to claim otherwise when every shred of evidence pointed to the fact that we were getting legacy credits, not store credits.
The blog doesnt matter because the average player is unaware that this forum or even an OW official blog exists. All they know is they saw the new battlepass and thought “oh they now have a currency I want! Purchase!”. Furthermore, the fact that it happened when the battlepass initially released is because thats when battlepasses are most often purchased. Blizzard fully intended trickery when they did this and had full intentions of reverting it as they expected players who actually care to respond to it.
soo the average player is an idiot?
It used to be yellow in OW1, it was never white or gray until OW2.
The blog literally does matter and it will be used as evidence in any legal case.
And that alone is going to cause any legal case to be thrown into the dumpster where it belongs, because a judge is going to look at that, say: “It’s an unedited document telling people in writing that they’re getting legacy credits. You have no case.” and then the case will be dismissed, likely with prejudice, meaning no idiots in the future can try this crap again.
I get it, people are mad about getting mostly worthless legacy credits instead of store credits. I would have rather seen Blizzard add normal store credits, that would have been 100% fine and an easy win for Blizzard that everyone could agree on. But crying scam when there’s no scam is just stupid.
I wouldn’t say “scam” but its definitely tricky and confusing to an extent. Coins should have 1 Icon and Credits should have a different one, like a V or a A or even a Grey OW1 symbol/icon. Like for example its really easy to tell OWL tokens from OW2 Coins, but not the Coins vs Legacy Credits etc.
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