I would think that it would cross the lines between “reasonable” and “unreasonable” expectations of a player to use a service. Maybe something under an FTC rule or so.
Eitherway ethically it would bar a person of lower-middle class to play Overwatch since they wouldn’t have the capital to play said game. I mean we can argue this already to the ends of the earth that Youtube, google violates this already. As it is a form of discrimination.
I think it’s pretty reasonable to give people F2P access to everything PVP besides Comp/OpenQueue.
And for Comp all they need to do is either
I can see asking for money for anything, as it is a said service. and monthly fees are fair to ask.
But asking someone to use another service to use said service is essentially “unethical” and bars a portion of players from this game.
I’m not even talking subscription fees or anything. And your box copy of Overwatch 1 would qualify for this.
They just need some sort of “collateral” to identify you if they ban your account for cheating.
Also again, this would only apply to Competitive.
Quickplay and Arcade would have no restrictions.
The amount of cost that folks pay on hacks, buying a license wouldn’t do anything to it. OW is a paid game and still has hacks just proves that.
Folks use hacks to level up accounts for comp and on comp.
So, on both folks would still be using hacks.
Your solution isn’t a solution, because if the problem wasn’t buying the game folks wouldn’t have alts or ow wouldn’t have hacks in general.
A better solution would be effectively deal with hacks and demote the need to create new accounts by increasing the requirement level for comp
I’m not expecting perfection.
I’m just expecting “At least as good as things are without F2P”.
Wouldn’t solve anything. Because the design itself it is flawed and the benefit of doing that outweights the downsides of it
Well I know we both have some strong opinions on this. But I think what the main thing is. Unless they are asking for a State ISSUED ID of some sort. and for something as petty as a video game. The fair thing is to ask a price of 30 dollars for the game and perhaps a seasonal payment of 10-15 dollars per month additional to play a competitive mode would be the “fair” and “reasonable” approach.
I mean when they report back that 24%-36% of the Nation cannot afford to maintain a constant cell service. As well as the rural communities such as mine. Where the cell towers work part of the time…
That is why I rightly have concerns of this type of business practice suggested. I dont think it would make our community grow stronger.
That, would really be something that requires more data than either of us have access to.
Well let’s put it this way.
They are 100% commited to F2P now. No matter what we say, they aren’t going to back down from it now.
So all they can do is figure out some way to mitigate the problems. Assuming the solution does less harm than the problem.
If buying the game was that hard. Several folks wouldn’t have alts.
Any person who has money for hacks, has money to effectively level up a new account and sell it. Like this forum have several situations about it.
If you made the need to buy an license* for those folks the impact would be minimal, while instead your solution would hurt the legit players.
If the comp entry level requirement wasn’t a joke folks wouldn’t buy alts. If you just put a paywall for comp that would hurt legit players because the one who bought hack would sell accounts and effectively buy a license to get even more profit from it.
Having the user of hacks need to play more games increases it’s chances to be reported.
So, blizzard needs to improve their detection and increase the requirement for comp if they want to tackle the problem. ID and phones are really weak forms of verification and annoying for majority of the players who would play comp. While on top 1-3% has some benefits, at same time they represent a minority.
Hacks are not cheap so I would assume the cost to join competitive is nothing compared to the subscription they pay for the hacks.
Well also, paying for hacks opens yourself up to some pretty extreme potential of getting ransom-wared by viruses.
If you do literally any banking on that machine, it would be dead simple to put a key logger on there to steal passwords.
Competitive is not more important than any other mode and it’s frankly insulting that you think it is.
That doesn’t relate in any way to Blizz stopping them though - they are hacking already.
Most folks who would do, can do it really safely. Virtualization techniques are pretty common, not to mention playing on linux are a thing that further decreases the risk.
Hacks are expensive and folks who buys it have enough money to build a rig that would be powerful enough for OW and virtualize it. Like 5-10 instances of ow running at same time on different VM.
The f2p reduces their friction, also reduces the polish of the code and the game that blizzard needs to provide. Unless they increase comp requirement for real, like many hours and stuff like that. The same situation that plagued ow1 will happen on ow2. Even more because ow2 it is more oriented for comp than ow1 was.
It has to do with there being significant downsides to hacking beyond getting banned.
Largely the issue of dealing with hacks, is similar to people pirating games/movies.
You can’t really stop it, but you can reduce it
Netflix and Steam largely stop piracy by being way more convenient and safe than piracy.
You can’t stop, but you can decrease. For that your solution doesn’t help. It is a good intention with a bad execution.
Because would hurt legit and if anything barely hurt the ones who actually uses hack.
The path of increase the friction it is needed, the methodology you suggested isn’t a good one.
Well another thing, just getting more normal players helps reduce it.
If you get 10% more hackers, but you get 20% more normal players.
Then the ratio of hackers to normal players actually went down.