The Jimquisition: Loot n' Plunder

I honestly think I'd agree with Jim if the Rio skins were a bit better. Wait till Halloween or Christmas special edition roll around. Then we'll cry!

Is there a special cream you use for POG related chafing? It’s not for me it’s for my friend. Also if the shiny surface comes off should I , by that I mean my friend get it resurfaced or change POG’s.

"I am shocked—SHOCKED—to find that gambling is going on in here!" (Sorry, couldn't resist.)

Twit In A Hat

To get it out of the way; There are definitely issues with Overwatch and its loot box system, I will never deny that. That said... 1. No matter what tone one uses to say it, the content IS still cosmetic. As someone said below, in a way, dressing Lucio up as a hockey player or soccer player won't effect how fast he moves, how high he jumps, how much his heal tics for, or the damage of his gun. No loot, for any character, will effect gameplay. It CAN effect your experience perhaps, but it's only a matter of personal taste and aesthetics and not fairness or balance. Hinging my enjoyment of the game on whether the Lucio I use has a hockey stick on his back or not would be like hinging my enjoyment of driving my car on whether I like my keychain, or whether I was able to secure the vanity place for my state that says CHUNGUS on it or not. And even then, things like vanity plates and keychains and such all cost money, where as... 2. Much like above, no matter the mocking tone used to say the word, all the content is FREE. While there are things that need to be addressed, the fact remains that not only is everything that you can get from loot boxes aesthetic in nature, but that it can all be earned by playing the game. The fact is they could have released a payed dlc that added new stuff, or pulled like they did in World of Warcraft and have cosmetic things that you have no other way of getting besides paying for them ($25 mounts, $15 pets, etc) with the new stuff. But instead, nothing is gated off and the olympics loot boxes and game mode are just available. That doesn't make the system beyond reproach, but that goes to the fact that... 3. Defending Overwatch or its loot system does not necessarily mean you think it's perfect, that you have no complaints, that you're trying to hold up or shelter Blizzard as a company, or any number of other things. All it means is that, perhaps, you think that it's not a system/game/patch bad enough to warrant such a strong backlash. Yes Blizzard screws a lot of things up, yes Blizzard is in it for the money, yes limited time content from the patch should be available for in game currency, yes the frequency of sprays and duplicates could be improved... but, from the above and the way I've seen it since day one, it's still just a bunch of wacky free extras that occasionally pop up when I've played enough. Defending it also doesn't mean you don't see the other side of the argument or you think people complaining or baseless, just to be fair; Because I can totally see how someone could see it as a system of frustration designed to psychologically coerce people into spending money on the boxes. But I would also hope others could see my point of view where the whole loot box thing is just bonus content on a well designed game that was put there as a fun little set of things to earn and give you goals besides just playing the game. Frankly, as indicated above, there is a lot of room for improvement; The most immediate issue of course is the problem of not being able to buy olympics content with in game currency. But I also think things like more currency for duplicate drops, making sprays free or adding currency to spray drops, decreasing the amount of xp needed to level, and/or increasing the amount of items from four to five or six would be nice. And personally, I'd be just as fine if they removed the ability to buy loot boxes so the issue would go away. But then I know people who have bought loot boxes and don't regret it, so I suppose the option being there does appeal to some people. To be doubly fair, there are issues with Overwatch I'd place more importance on than many of those loot system tweaks anyways like adding more maps, adding more game modes, adding more A.I. difficulty levels, or adding more characters the computer can control (like they recently did with Lucio). Anyways, keep up the great content Jim and hope your back stuff goes quick, cheap, and easy as possible. Would be a pretty boring world if I ~always~ agreed with you.

Sean Lennon

In all of the shooting games you've had video of over the years, I've noticed that you can see the other players through the walls.... I don't understand games anymore. That's literally defeating the entire purpose of walls! This "loot" setup reminds me of Megami Tensei: IMAGINE what feels like a decade ago (the Shin was added much later than when I was playing it, maybe for legal or marketing reasons.) How IMAGINE did it felt pretty organic. There was an ecosystem more or less. The "real-money" things bought essential services like storage, and it also bought lottery tickets. The lottery was like a grab bag. It had big-ticket items of course, which changed according to events, but also you'd always get (I say you'd but I was part of the ecosystem that didn't buy them, probably I couldn't have if I wanted to, without a Japanese bank account) run-of-the-mill items, that were a cut above NPC store standards. So this way the lottery ticket buyers were acting as distributors of the higher-end items. Finally, players would set up kiosks by the NPC storefronts, where they leave their items, and name their prices. So the lottery ticket set would always have a lot of junk to unload. They'd probably let it go for cheap, so not to be burdened by it. The bottom feeders could easily buy their items, and then flip them, to quickly collect lots of in-game currency (probably makka) with which they can then buy the very prized lottery ticket items. In this context, it never felt like something to be demonized. It actually felt like a tight little economy of scale.

Michael

"But heavens forbid you change a schoolgirl's skirt length in a game because that's censorship" Jim, you are my hero. I hope your back gets better as soon as possible!

Is the tracers image on the podium some inside joke I just missed? ;)