Paywalls should not be in the Rift

CharlieCreston

I've begrudgingly watched this game slowly slip closer and closer to Electronic Arts' territory when it comes to in-game transactions.

At first understood, you need to make money somehow after the base sale of the game, so some optional premium cosmetics are a nice way to let players continue to support the development. There's nothing mechanically different about outfits, so there's no advantage gained.

Okay... well... I guess making new characters DLC makes sense... Because I guess the 10 million in base game sales + all those cosmetics wasn't enough to fund the studio... But some of them can be bought with Iri shards, and teachable perks show up on the shrine of secrets, so it's not necessarily bad. At least that way, nothing is 100% locked behind a paywall. You don't earn anything by buying them, other than faster access. There's no real time limit on when you buy them, other than your own patience.

Seeing a "battle-pass"-like mechanic was just disappointing, but since it only awards cosmetics and Auric cells, equivalent to the amount spent on the pass, once again the player is not awarded anything other than visual diversity when spending money.

But suddenly, in order to progress in the current Tome, you are required to own a DLC survivor. This completely breaks the conventions that, to me, made the paid content acceptable. Now, players that pay for the survivor gain a tangible reward: Bloodpoints, Rift Fragments, and general completion of the tome. If you've chosen not to buy the character, whether it be because they're not your style, you've already purchased the perks you needed from the Shrine, or what have you, then now you are barred from all of those rewards. This creates a legitimate divide between paying vs non-paying players, since one side is short at least 50k BP from the incompletable challenge. When you create a divide between paying and non-paying players, you create a paywall that is not fair for the players who have already paid for your game in full. This is a particularly hard slap in the face as I have paid for several DLC chapters... this just happens to be one I chose not to buy.

What makes this decision even more insulting and frustrating is... You did have the dignity and foresight to consider this problem with Daily challenges. As far as I know, daily challenges won't ask you to play a killer/survivor you don't own. As I see it, The Tome is just a collection of challenges with relatively comparable rewards with a less strict time limit, except it has the added bonus of unlocking lore as well. Why did it not ding into someone's head that making a DLC character required for the Tome might show some undeserved disrespect towards a significant portion of the game's playerbase?

A solution

Of course, most of the time it's unfair to criticise a game's design without offering a solution. There's several options that could be done. You could temporarily unlock Kate while the challenge is active. You could allow the challenge to adapt for players who don't own Kate by assigning it to a different survivor they do have. You could show common sense, decency, and respect to your players by not slapping a paywall in the middle of the very first level of the Tome. These are all valid, viable options. Of course, it is a little late, but a quick patch would be able to make one of these options happen. Additionally, I don't think it would be too far-fetched of an idea to award compensation towards players who were unable to work on the specific Tome challenge, even if it's only a few thousand BP. Just something small to acknowledge the mistake and apologize, not a massive payout.

Milo

Agreed.

Even if you're playing only for the lore you cannot unlock it until you get 9000k shards/buy the dlc.

Just make it so the character is unlocked but you can't progress on them/you can only progress to level 29.