@Angilion 76 is still so broken & buggy (this week's weekly challenge for silo codes has been bugged for months basic QA team obviously does not exist @ Bethesda !!) that they want to now charge players for private servers is so staggering even for the people managing this game for Bethesda
The problem is that what is staggering greed and misuse one year is the norm a few years later. 10 years ago, who would have imagined that gambling with real money for ingame items would be a normal part of gaming? Who would have imagined that it would become normal to pay full price for an unfinished game and then pay more for the rest of the game and then pay more to remove inconveniences deliberately written into the game solely for the purpose of selling their removal and then pay more to avoid being derided for not having whatever costumes are fashionable in the game?
Bethesda is a good illustration of the deterioration because of the famous horse armour. Bethesda was a bit ahead of the greed and misuse curve when they released decorative ingame horse armour for $5 of real money and they got a huge amount of negative customer feedback and negative media attention for it, enough to make them back down on the greed and misuse for a while. A few years later and Bethesda was able to get away with doing much worse in FO4, including releasing the horse armour again to take the **** out of their own customers. A few more years and Bethesda was able to get away with killing off modding for their games, removing game content and then selling it later, selling ingame-only fashion clothing for real world money, artificially limiting supply (of items that aren't even real!) to inflate prices and manipulate customers, defrauding their most devoted customers (which is stupid even for people controlled entirely by greed) and lying about selling an ingame advantage for real world money. What will they think of next? The greed and misuse curve has no end.
The pay to win atomic store items I knew would come there is so much money in it & Bethesda say the repair kits & health kits are the most popular items sold so to their logic & statement they are going to do even more similar items now
I recently found that I had acquired 51 improved repair kits from playing the game. Presumably the Scorched Earth event. I dropped them and they were destroyed. Those 51 improved repair kits were just 5.1 units of useless weight. The usefulness of them is so marginal that I suspect that it's deliberate. Bethesda are riding the greed and misuse curve as hard as they can, but not everyone calling the shots is completely deluded and so they understand that at some times it's more efficient to ramp up the greed and misuse incrementally. Jumping straight to overt and extreme pay to win probably wouldn't be the most efficient way to extract money from their marks. Hence the progression - first the useless fashion items and hope for peer pressure to coerce marks into giving Bethesda free money (that works extremely well in Fortnite, for example, but has clearly failed in FO76 due to the tiny player base, more mature players and the fact that it's essentially a single-player game), then one item that costs real-world money and has extremely marginal use in the game (so it can be claimed to be merely a convenience), then some more of those, then some that have a bit more use in the game, then a bit more use, then a bit more, each time pausing for the change to become the new normal. Acclimatisation by slow change is often the most efficient approach and especially so when the intention is malign and manipulative.
I have two questions that I know will never be answered:
1) Are Bethesda lying about their next step on the pay to win trail being the most popular items sold? We know they would lie without hesitation and we know there's no way of checking their statement.
2) How many of those items were sold for real world money and how many were sold for points made ingame? Assuming any were sold at all, of course, since we only have Bethesda's word for that and Bethesda's word is worthless. But assuming any such items were sold, the source of the points used to buy them is key. There's a world of difference between "I will spend real world money on buying a tiny advantage in convenience in this game" and "I have acquired lots of points ingame that I'm not using because I don't buy fashion clothing with them. Those points have no value outside the game, so I may as well use them for this tiny advantage in convenience".
Take me, for example. I bought the collectron in the atom shop, which is one of the items that Bethesda is referring to. They were referring to any item in the atom points shop that has any effect ingame, not just to the "repair kits & health kits" you refer to). Did I pay $7 of real world money for it? Of course not! It's not worth any real-world money. I bought it using the otherwise useless points I've accumulated from playing the game. I teleport around player camps very often because I'm searching for any plans I don't already have. A sizable proportion of players have collectrons in their camp, so it's clearly a very popular item "sold" in the atom shop. But I'd be willing to bet that at most extremely few people paid real world money for it.
76 will struggle to maintain player numbers its already heading downhill fast server hopping is now more tedious than ever you have a 1 in 3 chance of landing back on the same server as they do not scale until full up & player numbers are very low. So many players have just decided enough is enough!
My guess is that if I buy RDR2 for PC when it comes out (which I probably will) or get interested in any of the games I've already bought and never played, that will be the end of me playing FO76. I still play it so far, but a fair bit of that is habit and a liking for the game
world more than the game itself. I generally pop on, scav and sell the daily limit of 1400 caps worth of stuff (usually mostly a Whitespring circuit), do a couple of daily and weekly challenges if I think they're not too grindy and bugged, maybe do a couple of events if they're really quick ones or I happen to catch a non-trivial public event, scrap any legendaries I happened to pick up, buy some more useless legendaries if I've reach 1000 scrip, maybe teleport around player vendor camps on the tiny chance anyone is selling a plan I don't already have, maybe dig up any treasure mound I've acquired at least 5 maps for, leave.
I might buy another SSD - I notice they're a lot cheaper than they were a couple of years ago.
