Hajile

Aren't Mithril Coins just parroting the Cryptic method of Dilithium/Magic Crystals/etc thing they use for CO, STO and now Neverwinter, only with all the player-side advantages stripped out? It's always struck me as so.

Sounds like something Turbine would do - Copy something someone else has done, but put their own horrible money-hungry spin on it to make it more advantageous to them and less attractive to the player.

montyburns, on 13 May 2013 - 17:19, said:

Because it's been manhandled by clueless simpletons who think that because they wear a suit to the office and have a business degree they know better than the developers how to make a high-quality, successful game. Then they bullied and patronised the developers out of rightly telling them to screw off.

It's been market tested up the wazoo to avoid alienating anyone with anything they find unpalatable and to have the broadest possible appeal, because these besuited idiots don't understand the difference between catering to an audience and that audience actually materialising. An unfortunate byproduct of that sort of blanket homogenization is that it only ever serves to make a game more unremarkable, and in turn eventually marginalises its appeal.

These buffoons will do the bare minimum and will wait expectantly for the audience to come to them, then they will wonder why the things they have done to attract said audience aren't working, because all their books and papers say that they should. Then they will blame the developers, costing talented people who have done nothing wrong their jobs. If not the developers, they will blame the audience themselves, despite the fact that the audience doesn't exist. They will feel confident blaming the audience that doesn't exist because their books and papers will tell them that they do, in fact, exist.

Short sighted, short-term goals from an industry that is obliviously charging head-first towards a brick wall. It can't see the wall, of course, because the dollar signs in its eyes are obscuring its view.

Patience is very good at her job and has a reputation that precedes her. She'll be fine.

Whatever else can be said, they could have come up with a better name for them instead of just a flat, uninspired 'Hobbit Presents.'

I remember a time when they at least gave a toss about the flavour of their worldbuilding and text and would have named them 'Shirriff's Commissions' or something in-world appropriate. There's only so long they can give things straightforward, self-explanatory, breaking-the-fourth-wall meta-names before everything becomes completely devoid of colour.

cossieuk, on 12 April 2013 - 18:29, said:

Still. They could conceivably find that lockboxes constitute online gambling with no age restriction...