It might be shocking, and controversial to say it, but with GTA V, RockStar screwed up. That is not to say that GTA V is not a work of art: it boasts an astonishing single player experience - a sandpit of opportunity rarely offered to gamers and testament to the astonishing man-years of dedicated work that pushed the boundaries of modern gaming in its storytelling, its graphical splendour, its voice-acting, scripting, music... So what the hell possessed RockStar to make them decide to cheapen the online experience with the ability to buy in-game currency with real-world cash? Leaving aside the flawed decision to delay the online component thereby ensuring that everyone who played GTAV was going to log in the same time, everyone having completed the Single Player experience and thus crashing the servers for days. We'll allow that the grandiose scale of Rockstars dreams led to server overload and the loss of characters. Let's jump into the one decision that soured the heart of every honest, scrupulous fair-minded gamer out there. Selling in-game cash is wrong; it is lazy, and it makes a mockery of any pretensions to police the online world of money cheats due to their 'breaking the in-game economy.' Plus, it sells the developers' souls for a mess of pottage. The GTA Online community were crying out for fixes to character and progress loss, for the much needed promised additional content, yet Rockstar seemed locked in a war with hackers and glitchers whose main aim was to get as much in-game currency as possible, and further, to splash that money around to every player they'd meet, an ultimate money shot in protest at players being able to buy their way to success. Successive updates saw in-game cash rewards being dropped significantly, rewards that already seemed designed by disparate committees, vying to outdo each other with nonsensical formulae of rewards bearing no relation to difficulty or time invested. How many players lost faith or trust in RockStar once they decided to prostitute their art? How many gamers had genuine achievements in the game devalued as other players saw not someone who'd been rewarded for their in-game efforts, but had been rewarded for pushing credit card numbers into the store, or was seen as one of the glitchers and hackers made endemic by the bean-counting ethos of the developers? Oscar Wilde famously said a cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Rockstar, you could have satisfied the ever-increasing need for extra-curricular earning in so many ways. On the store you could have sold clothing, vehicles, apartments, all carefully designed so as not to disturb game balance, all beautifully crafted to make players want to strut like cocaine addled peacocks. Instead you cynically and lazily saw monetary gain in selling in-game rewards, and lost sight of their value.
When not overthrowing governments MuddledMuppet can be found on youtube making mockery of life with slightly better than average gameplay.
https://www.youtube.com/user/muddledmuppet
