@RanceJustice You've raised excellent points here. It was very interesting to read your response. I wholeheartedly agree with you in that EA are prioritising capitalisation over something more consumer friendly.
I've said time and time again that EA don't want to keep players happy, they just need them to stay invested.
As you rightly speculate, if things were more widely (not necessarily easily) accessible, EA would be able to better optimise their revenue through having a larger demographic who are willing to invest money into their IPs.
Warframe is an excellent example of where the developers present content, that people can purchase with premium currency and then know precisely what they're getting. Through full transparency with their consumers and arguably the single most accessible application of + time = reward for players to be able to play for exactly the in-game items they want. It's honestly surprising as to why more companies like EA don't employ them more often too.
In Warframe players don't have to spend a single penny to obtain the items they want, but they're still able to make a profit. How?
Well it's simply because people are genuinely happy to invest in the product.
I myself have purchase on multiple occasions the various prime only cosmetic packs. Why? Not because I felt pressured into needing them, but because I felt like I could actually better represent my investment in the time spend playing their game. I didn't have to, but it's one of the few times a player can know precisely how they are funding the content they want.
And so in lies beneath all the controversy in Apex Legends. People just want to be able to obtain what they actual strive for and not merely the chance to get it.
Sure, let EA charge whatever they want for the content they publish, however only when they justify the cost values they apply.
I've spent money in Apex Legends, I'm perfectly okay with admitting that.
But what I'm not okay with is how, as many of us agree on, the fact that the rewards system is fundamentally flawed.
I spent money because I wanted a legendary skin for my main character choice.
So I got myself some apex packs and began to open them. Obviously with RNG I was bound to get a lot of common items and crafting material.
So I thought, given how there are only so many items in the game, that I could reduce the loot pool by using my crafting material to buy up all the common and rare skins of my favourite legend, thereby increasing my chances for a legendary skin to drop for it.
Yet after however many packs, and there were a fair few, still nothing. But I had all the rare and common and some epic cosmetics for that one character, including skins, frames, posed and quips. So why didn't I get a legendary skin? And that's when I began to realise that despite loot box drops having random rewards, they actually don't guarantee you items based on a loot pool it real is all just drop percentages.
After a while, all apex packs would drop is common quips and crafting materials. Every single time.
I guarantee you if I went and bought more now, all I'd see given out is common items and more crafting materials.
This is why I feel so strongly about the way players don't have even decent accessibility to the loot they want to play and pay for.
All any player wants is to be able to make choices on where their investment goes.
Players aren't demanding that they want all the loot. Just the loot that matters to the, but never been able to get because of the ridiculous method which is currently in place to get it.
Which is precisely why we and so many more should make the effort to talk about the problems we're facing on a consumer level.
It's not likely ever going to be a case of making everyone happy but they could at least be given a real sense of reward after handing their money over to EA.
Sure cosmetics aren't essential and sure they have no impact on the core gameplay, but that still doesn't change the fact that the system in place that is meant to reward players for their time and money, simply doesn't do all that good of a job.
