Why do game makers punish their players?

• Posted by beast-usa (Admin) August 31, 2015 - Filed in Online Gaming - 3,782 views
  Why Does Nintendo Want This Superfan’s YouTube Money?
  
  IN 2006, WHEN Masae Anela was 13, she wondered why her dad kept sneaking out in the wee hours of the night.
  
  Eventually, she realized there was nothing untoward going on. Her father was going out before dawn to line up at local stores in hopes of scoring a Nintendo Wii for her. The console had just been released, and Anela, who had loved and played Zelda since as far back as she could remember (her earliest memories, she says, were of watching her mother play Ocarina of Time), wanted to play The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.
  
  Zelda was an outlet for a girl who had been homeschooled since fourth grade and “pretty introverted and not very up for talking to anyone.” It didn’t get better as she got older, either. “I started developing anxiety when talking to people,” she says, “and I had somewhat of a speech impediment.”
  
  A few years later, in 2009, a friend convinced her to start producing “Let’s Play” videos, in which gamers play through a popular game, comment on the experience as it happens and upload it all to YouTube. If you watch her first video, of The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time, and compare it to her most recent work—also a Zelda game—it’s like meeting two different people. In the first, Anela (a nom de YouTube she uses for privacy reasons) begins hesitantly, apprehension in her voice, not sure why anyone would want to listen. Today, she’s effusive, excited, and entertaining. It explains why she’s got 50,000 subscribers. Watching her makes you want to play Zelda. She’s an enthusiastic ambassador for Nintendo, hyping its games like no other at a time when the company that introduced Super Mario is losing mindshare to Minecraft.
  
  Read the full story on wired.com
  http://www.wired.com/2015/03/nintendo-youtube-creators
  
  I'm always on wired reading about new tech :) and though some of their stories are not for me, about 99% of the stories I do like! So I saw this one about Nintendo and it got me thinking about all the game companies that make BILLIONS of dollars from us players and treat us like POO! I don't play Zelda, :) but I see how this girl has helped Nintendo earn money but then they punish her for it! Is it just pure greed or what?
  
  Below are a few games I play or have stopped playing after their companies stepped in and ruined them or didn't step in and fix them as needed.
  
  "CLICK ANY PICTURE TO SEE A LARGER VIEW"
  
  Top of my list, all the Call of Duty games.
  
  
  
  Most COD games have combat training mode so you can play with just friends. No cheaters and no hacks. But game manufacturer updates make it harder to connect in combat training mode while forcing higher connection pings. Higher than the hack infested online games. :( A few years ago I could play Black Ops 1, 2 or Ghosts with friends anywhere in the US with a ping of about 50 to 60. Now, after all the updates, the pings went up to 125 to 135. (Lower is better.) All of us have pretty fast internet, mine being the slowest (slow Charter Cable Internet) with an upload of 4.88/Mbps, but my friend would be hosting at 10-12/Mbps which should have no problem hosting 3 or 4 players! We all have upper end systems, all with 12 gigs of DDR3 to 32 gigs of DDR4, 8 to 12 core intel cpu's and video cards of 580GTX's to SLI 980GTX's. There is NO reason to ever see LAG! So after trying two to six times to connect to each other only to end up playing a lagging game, we all give up and start playing an online game.
  
  But there are so many cheaters in every version of COD and every time they say they are going to fix it but they never do! (BUY THE CHEAT AND WRITE A PATCH TO BLOCK IT - EASY FIX)
  I just play and ignore the cheaters. I don't make comments but my friends get mad and stop playing. So we server jump for more time then we actually play trying to find a game without cheaters. I tell my friends, "Just play on this one. It's COD. COD = cheaters." So none of us have bought the newest COD game. Cheaters, Lag, No servers, No one doing anything about the cheaters . . . why waste $59 dollars? I don't think I will buy another COD unless I read in the Steam forums they are really trying to fix the cheating & lag.
  
  Left 4 Dead 1 & 2
  
  
  
  These were great games and people were making maps by the hundreds (DOING IT FOR FREE - MAKING L4D 1 & 2 SELL LIKE CRAZY)! You could play different maps all day long and you could mod your games, host your modded game locally with no LAG and up to 12 friends playing! I would mod the ammo, gravity and monsters. :) We had games we played with the Tank's damage set at 50,000, up from the stock damage of 2,000. When a Tank could take 50,000 in damage, he was almost IMPOSSIBLE to kill! LOL We adjusted hordes from 20 or 30 to 200 or 300 up to 1,000! With all the maps and mods, this game never got boring. It was like playing a new game every day! So every gamer friend you talked to you would say, "Get Left 4 Dead and join us! We have some insane tweaked games!"
  
  Then came the patches . . . :( Custom maps didn't work anymore. You needed to re-mod your mods. FREE map makers had to re-make their maps daily. I even put all the maps & mods up on one of my sites so my friends could download them to keep all of us that were playing in sync. But we spent more time re-modding, downloading, trying to sync all the files to play than we did playing! So we deleted all the mods and all the maps (over 100 maps) and went back to playing the stock game. But it was too easy to finish and boring, even on the hardest setting, in the stock game. And like always, almost impossible to play local (Hosted Games) because only a few friends could connect. And after going from hordes of 200, 300, 1,000 zombies with Tanks at 50,000 damage down to stock 20 or 30 in a horde and Tanks at 2,000 damage, we could just looked at them and they died. :( And it wasn't like the L4D game makers replaced all the mods they now blocked with addons you could buy. They just blocked everything and ONLY allowed their handful of standard stock boring games. We pretty much stopped playing, then.
  
  I'm just one person but :) I have hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars in games. I set them up so my kids and their friends can all play together.
  Steam - I have 7 accounts with 30 to 74 games on each account.
  Origin - I have 7 accounts with 8 to 12 games on each account.
  Plus, the friends I have and friends my kids have that all buy the same games so they can play together.
  
  I don't understand why game makers don't THANK the people advertising and modding their games. It only helps them sell more games. But instead, they punish the people that support them! CRAZY!
  
  But, so this isn't all doom & gloom, :) here are a few game makers that work very hard at keeping players happy!
  
  Sanctum 1 & 2
  
  One of the least expensive and most fun game I have ever bought! They are always adding stuff for FREE and they listen to what the players want!
  Had an update in Sanctum 2 and it was bad. :( A couple days later? Fixed!
  
  Defiance
  
  
  
  Great game! (All but that new GLYPH login! grrr, :( )
  Not one of the cheapest, after I bought all the copies :) but a great game. And now it's FREE 2 PLAY! It's always changing, adding new stuff, new locations and no problem playing with your friends. If it has problems, they are fixed very fast! One of the greatest features is game scaling. If you play with a friend that's level 400 when you're level 5,000, the game adjusts their level up while they do missions with you!
  
  Borderlands 1 & 2
  
  
  
  Another great game! Crazy at times the stuff it says and the characters! Again, always changing and very inexpensive! Down side to this game is leveling. :( If you're level 50 and your friend is level 10, you can't play with him/her unless you start a new profile. They won't survive on your level (50) and if you play on their level, (10), everything will be 1 XP and your friend will never level up. Second thing that's really bad, if you have all the addon's, you level up too fast. Then, if you miss a mission and go back to do it when you are 4 or 5 levels higher then that mission, the enemies are too easy to get past and again you will only get 1 XP for everything. I've tried a few times, no wandering off, just doing missions as they come up, and I still get way above the mission's levels. If they fix the "level enemies up to your level gives you more XP" issue, then this game would be perfect!
  
  Battlefield Series
  
  
  
  
  From 1942 to BF4, all great games! If they'd just come to Steam! lol Origin? Well, if you have it, you know what I'm talking about. Battlefield has a few cheaters but when your playing with up to 64 players, you don't even notice them! Plus, when you're playing, you'll see player xxxxx kicked for known hacks. I've NEVER seen that in a COD game with its huge 12 players!
  
  Bottom line, game makers should stop biting the millions of hands that feed them. They should listen to their customers, the actual game buyers and computer geeks who play their games, and learn from them how best to expand and adapt their games for long term player commitment, enjoyment and brand loyalty rather than irritation and annoyance of game cost and lack of play-ability.
  
  And last, but not least, NINTENDO should be PAYING that expert Zelda game playing girl for her endorsement and promotion instead of suing her for her video ad money! They'd have to pay big bucks for that much advertisement anywhere else. Now, rather than being known as the cool company with that great Zelda game, they are now known for suing a young girl for playing their game too well in front of too many people. Bad business Nintendo. Bad business.
  
  Okay, this rant is over! :)