The role of Gold: a serious problem.

Last Warrior wrote:

Back to topic:

WiseOdin wrote:

@Ironmann players that don't purchase gold, and obviously cannot understand economics, are normally also bad at strategy. Making you the perfect fodder for good players, whom are willing to spend a little cash. Your place in this world, is getting pounded into the ground in every map. You do it well.

Nobody likes be a meatball. If common average non-payer players make game more addictive for payer they could be rewarded. But main problem is only with unlimited payer, they can or kill mostly even average payer players.I have several times bought 1 year HC and pretty nice ammount gold first sell and several time little amounts gold.

But imho spending more then 100$/year in single online game is not necessary.

Diabolical wrote:

just go to the Players League

Players who spent only little amount of gold, to tilt disadvantage of own limited online time, can not play PL with full restriktion of gold usage.

But i gained new point of view: first try make a coalition, fight several battles to kill as many as possible units of hiperaddicted golduser, after that calm down and change gameround.

Sure i wish we would have more possible gameronds: PL without gold, common games without limitation and hard core rounds with limited amount each round and hardcore rounds vs stuff in almoast godlike mode without limitation.

I've been playing for two and a half years, and have only once even come across a player that was spending a good amount of a match. The concept, that most players have, that there is a huge volume of players "buying a win" is honestly silly. You're just terrible at the game, you were outsmarted, and your hubris leads you to think you were somehow cheated out of a win.

I'll be honest, I haven't come across any issues with gold, mostly because barely any players use it.

However, it is a stupid idea. The fact that you can buy as many troops as you want and essentially win a game with money is not outweighed by the stereotype that people use gold and that not many people would want to spend too much on a game anyway.

I get that the devs have to get paid, but another way needs to be found. Ads and pay-to-play, I would go for. High command is a great idea. The ability to pay to win a game is not.

Adelbert Ames wrote:

I'll be honest, I haven't come across any issues with gold, mostly because barely any players use it.

However, it is a stupid idea. The fact that you can buy as many troops as you want and essentially win a game with money is not outweighed by the stereotype that stupid people use gold and that not many people would want to spend too much on a game anyway.

I get that the devs have to get paid, but another way needs to be found. Ads and pay-to-play, I would go for. High command is a great idea. The ability to pay to win a game is not.

Sounds like you're just looking for stuff to be mad about. It is a free game. Few people spend anything on it, let alone spend over twenty dollars. High command is their main income, and a stable one. The gold option is a minor income. You're the kind of person that calls for no police, because one in a million officers do something dumb. One in a million players spend gold excessively. It is not a "problem," nor has it ever been a problem outside a few uneducated people's warped senses.

WiseOdin wrote:

Adelbert Ames wrote:

I'll be honest, I haven't come across any issues with gold, mostly because barely any players use it.

However, it is a stupid idea. The fact that you can buy as many troops as you want and essentially win a game with money is not outweighed by the stereotype that stupid people use gold and that not many people would want to spend too much on a game anyway.

I get that the devs have to get paid, but another way needs to be found. Ads and pay-to-play, I would go for. High command is a great idea. The ability to pay to win a game is not.

So, you agree that it is rare that any players would use gold to spam out tons of units, but think it's unfair still?Sounds like you're just looking for stuff to be mad about. It is a free game. Few people spend anything on it, let alone spend over twenty dollars. High command is their main income, and a stable one. The gold option is a minor income. You're the kind of person that calls for no police, because one in a million officers do something dumb. One in a million players spend gold excessively. It is not a "problem," nor has it ever been a problem outside a few uneducated people's warped senses.

1. barely any players used gold

2. people are deterred from spending gold by the fact that games are short, so they wouldn't want to spend too much

3. gold is an integral part of the game.

I'll go through each one.

1. barely any players use gold. True. However, this is not outweighed by the fact that you can win a game unfairly using gold. Imagine you are playing Risk (the board game). You go through a grueling, 3-hour-long game. You finally start to get the advantage. After you start to beat back your opponent, he pulls out his wallet and pays for some gold. He now has tons more troops, and wins easily. That is what gold does.

Now imagine that you aren't playing Risk, but instead a much more complicated, intricate game. You go instead of for hours, but for months. You are playing a 50-player map, and you have put tons of time and energy into the game. It is now you versus your opponent, and you have the advantage. Suddenly, he has tons more troops, buildings, and intel. He punches through your line and takes many of your core territories. He has bought victory, and destroyed what you spent months doing. With his wallet.

2. Well, that probably wouldn't have happened, because people aren't going to spend twenty, fifty, or a hundred dollars on a temporary game.

BUT THEY COULD!

Who cares if not many people want to? It does not outweigh the fact that you could.

Again, you work for months on a fifty player map, and it's just you and your opponent left. He buys more troops, buildings, and intel. What you have worked for months on is lost. This would barely ever happen. However, it could. And that is a faulty mechanic.

You said that I'm the kind of person that would ban all police officers because one of them did something dumb. This analogy makes no sense. Are the police officers players, because the players did something dumb? I don't want to ban players. Do the police officers represent gold? If so, I fail to see how a way to automatically get an edge on your opponent by paying the company that made the game represents a noble profession of protecting innocent people.

Here's my own analogy, and it makes perfect sense: You're the kind of person that would say, "murder should be legal", because barely anyone does it. If we were arguing for murder, your argument goes like this: 'barely anyone murders people, so what is the point of outlawing it? It's a core part of life, and shouldn't be changed. C'mon, no one really wants to murder anyone anyway.' But they could. Laws (and in the case of the game, rules) are made to prevent bad things from happening. It doesn't matter how unlikely those things are.

3. Gold is an integral part of the game.

This statement has never been true. The core mechanics of the game are, to be honest, beautifully constructed, masterfully strategic, and impressively complicated. However, the mechanics of the game all fuel each other. Provinces give materials to produce troops, buildings, or spies, and which you can sell for other materials. Troops enable you to prevent other players from taking your provinces or destroying your troops, and you can use them to take over more provinces to get more materials. Buildings are made with materials, and you use them to defend, make troops, etc. Spies use money, which can be gained from selling materials or from provinces.

What you see here is that all the mechanics of the game fit together, and each one aids you in acquiring the others; even spies can steal resources, or help you take over more provinces, thus acquiring more resources, which can be made into anything else.

Nowhere in there is gold.

Gold just appears. You get it from winning games, but not enough to actually be useful. It makes materials, troops, and intel appear out of thin air. I don't know about you, but a game mechanic that disregards all others should not be a game mechanic. It's essentially like playing monopoly, where houses and cards and properties all help you get money, but you can pay real money and make it appear out of nowhere. Faulty, unfair mechanic.

The only time that gold is an integral part of the game is the fact that it is currently in the game. I get that the devs have to be paid. I really do. I think High Command is a great idea, and I absolutely love how they have managed to make a free game that you can play to the fullest without buying premium. However, it is not an integral part of the game if it doesn't fit into the concept of the game itself.

I've said a lot of things here that some people may be angry about. Let me be quite clear. I think that gold is a stupid, unfair idea, and that is why I'm expressing my opinion against it. However: this game is my favorite game of all time. It is so complicated and strategic that it far outperforms any war game I have ever seen. I have long been searching for the perfect war strategy game, and this is it. I don't, however, agree with people being able to buy their way to victory.

Adelbert Ames wrote:

WiseOdin wrote:

Adelbert Ames wrote:

I'll be honest, I haven't come across any issues with gold, mostly because barely any players use it.

However, it is a stupid idea. The fact that you can buy as many troops as you want and essentially win a game with money is not outweighed by the stereotype that stupid people use gold and that not many people would want to spend too much on a game anyway.

I get that the devs have to get paid, but another way needs to be found. Ads and pay-to-play, I would go for. High command is a great idea. The ability to pay to win a game is not.

So, you agree that it is rare that any players would use gold to spam out tons of units, but think it's unfair still?Sounds like you're just looking for stuff to be mad about. It is a free game. Few people spend anything on it, let alone spend over twenty dollars. High command is their main income, and a stable one. The gold option is a minor income. You're the kind of person that calls for no police, because one in a million officers do something dumb. One in a million players spend gold excessively. It is not a "problem," nor has it ever been a problem outside a few uneducated people's warped senses.

I don't, however, agree with people being able to buy their way to victory.

Also, last I checked, you don't have to pay money to get someone killed. And is a completely different thing to premium currency. It doesn't even fall into the same argument type. Murder is a question of morals and the punishment for such an act. Premium currency is about money and what you should do with it, and also a question of wether the government should allow game makers to allow such things, and also a question for the developers of a game to allow. It is still an apples to oranges argument. Are loot boxes gambling? No, but it all depends on your frame of reference. Same with collectible cards.

And laws ≠ rules(especially rules for a video game). Law is a piece of paper. Without law enforcement, written law has no meaning or any way to enforce itself on the people, and even with said enforcement, they can't outright prevent terrible acts. Why do you think America had so much trouble at the start of its existence? The states did not take direction from the government and the government could not enforce the constitution due to having to take militia from the states(who already aren't listening to the government). And is also why the League of nations was a complete and utter failure.

Games rules for a traditional board game fall into this same category, though the board was designed with these rules in mind and makes it impossible to deviate from certain rule sets(like, for example, having to roll the dice in Monopoly. You can't advance the game without some way to randomly generate a movement counter). Video game rules are decrees by an almighty overlord. Nobody can break the rules set forth by the game, except those who intend to break the game.

Admittedly, the gold currency was forced into the game model. But that is no different to most games in this category of gaming(not the legit strategy type, as I said above). If you can't deal with that... Well, try and get it through to your local official to get it to a higher level. Maybe it'll be done in your country. Probably not, though. And the devs have more pressing issues than trying to implement the things discussed in this thread. IE it is not the highest priority.

I see what you are saying.

I still don't agree with it, however. My argument will always be the same - no matter how unlikely it is, it still shouldn't be possible. My murder analogy was a comeback for the other guy's analogy, but it still works. This is because many players consider it a terrible, awful thing for someone to be using large amounts of gold, and will often times just leave the game because they are so angry and discouraged. We can all agree that someone dropping so much gold into a game that they make it one-sided is a bad thing that no one wants to happen. It is also incredibly rare. Because of this, an analogy about murder works, as it is a crime that is incredibly uncommon that no one wants to happen. Should we allow it just because it is so rare? No!

I actually quite like a good challenge; it's fun to be the underdog. However, the possibility that an enemy could buy their way to victory is discouraging. Put a cap on the amount of gold usable in a game, or something.

And yes, I mean 'buy their way to victory'. "You can still win against a non-gold player!" yells everyone. If course you can! However, none of us are perfect strategicians. Someone earlier in this forum mentioned that their enemy had about 20 LT's on day two. Somehow, the guy won! That's amazing! 99% of the time, someone would not win against that, especially on day two. There is always the possibility that our enemies could buy a huge advantage that we could never defend against. Until that is fixed, I will be anti-gold.

WiseOdin wrote:

I've been playing for two and a half years, and have only once even come across a player that was spending a good amount of a match. The concept, that most players have, that there is a huge volume of players "buying a win" is honestly silly.

WiseOdin wrote:

You're just terrible at the game, you were outsmarted, and your hubris leads you to think you were somehow cheated out of a win.

Since we can't keep this civil and productive I am closing this thread.