Captain BS (hehe, that sounds funny but I do not mean it that way), Could you please explain how Blizzard is unethical. I played Diablo and Diablo II for ~10 years and played Starcraft II a LOT also. I paid the ~$60 for each game and played them for many years with no further expenditures needed and I never felt they were the slightest bit unethical. I do not even recall the ability to spend more money on these games than the original price to purchase the game. What am I missing that makes Blizzard unethical?
When I think about unethical business practices, I come up with the following:
- Selling products/services that are known to be defective and/or to not meet safety and environmental standards.
- Making false or misleading claims about what is sold.
- Causing severe harm, such as environmental damage or addiction (differentiating between things that are inherently addictive such as nicotine vs. things that people can developed an addiction to).
- Charging inordinate amounts for necessities or otherwise exploiting vulnerable people.
- Concealing harm caused by use or production of what’s sold.
- Mistreating of employees.
- Intentionally or negligently breaking laws.
- Practicing discrimination.
So far as I know, FBG doesn’t do any of these.
Of course, not being unethical does not equate to being ethical. Although FBG does get points for creating a game welcoming and representing a wide range of races, genders, etc.
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Yes, that’s great! And pretty important to me, personally, so thank you FBG.
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From a gameplay perspective, the real money auction house in Diablo 3. From a business perspective, pervasive sexual harassment, and union busting.
To your point, there weren’t any gacha or micro transactions in StarCraft, nor in Diablo up through 2. Those elements certainly have been in the Diablo games after 2.
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Wait, ALL of those are things the Masters do, and who is responsible for them?
Right, FBG.
I must reconsider my position on the matter.
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Hey hey hey the Masters don’t practice discrimination! It’s one of the very few bad things they don’t do, but let’s not pretend the Masters aren’t the foremost proponents of equal rights in the British Empire.
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Well, equal rights for all of them, and separate, lesser, equal rights for all the humans.
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I think they just have trouble telling humans apart.
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Come now. Failbetter’s games tell stories, and stories need villains. Enter, the Masters.
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I always assume worse. It is a sensible course of actions after those meanness FBG did with Noman.
Considering murdering of Khagan (via Crackling device) and Piracy (via Fabulous diamods) grinds, I was right.
What do you even find wrong with idea “waiting weeks or months”?
Fallen London is a long game. You can not compleate it in a week… or month… or even a year. Thus, it demands a long-time strategies, and when theese strategies are suddenly murdered, it is the very pinnacle of definition “nasty” and “dishonest”.
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One day, you will have to explain what exactly you’re talking about when you complain about supposed changes to the Noman.
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The melting schedule got way more severe, making it MUCH harder to get the poor thing to Witsun.
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No? It only made it impossible to last past Whitsun. And even then, there’s no mechanical reward from it lasting until Whitsun, so it’s not a mechanical/reward nerf.
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No. This is strictly untrue. It changed the formula to be approximately exponential, so it actually takes about ¼ more tears now to make the noman survive.
… people don’t do the noman for stat boosts, and it was still a nerf that made the vanity grind harder :p
It didn’t affect you and that’s great but it’s a little silly to pretend it wasn’t a nerf when FBG called it one even haha
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@DarkSquirrel is actually correct, Noman melt rates do not increase significantly until after Whitsun
you can look at the data we have for last years melt rates, along with comparisons to previous years yourself since it was all recorded right here in the forum: Noman Melt Rate Tracking (2024) - #122 by elderfleur
Nomans were designed to be difficult to keep alive, such that even getting a Noman tattoo in February was once considered a notable achievement. So making it harder to make it to Whitsun correct for how much easier tears grinding has become over the years seems incredibly reasonable to me, but even so they didn’t actually do that
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People collected resources for years to keep Noman alive for the whole year, and then their efforts were blown away in one moment. I tried to express my feeling toward thgis fact in the most polite and appropriate terms, but the post was hidden. So, ask yourself: how would you feel if your efforts for some years would be blown away in one moment?
And people always complain about this without remembering that FBG state multiple times that keeping a Noman alive a whole year will be impossible and will cause bugs on their end. I think they first mentioned this few years ago before anyone even had a plan to keep it alive.
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The obvious answer that they should fix those bugs. Bugs exit to be fixed, after all.
Insted of this they perfomed the pinnacle of dishonest action.