Double XP for a whole week if premium scrub, double XP is 2.5 days for the pros.

JonWood007 posted...

I remember when all of this new content stuff was called "mods", and it was free. This is all about money and control. They're trying to make you pay for what once was free. And you have two choices, either complain and refuse to buy it, or act like a brainwashed zombie and fork over more money. The choice is yours. They only do this because it works. And it works because you let it work. It's a foot in the door/slippery slope situation. The community allowed publishers from removing modding tools from games in order to charge for DLC. And now the practices are getting more and more restrictive. Again, it's not about getting new content. We've had new content since the dawn of online PC gaming. It's how they're doing it.

You bring up an absolutely legit point. Modding is now something done with low-budget titles, while big name companies churn out maps, some of them recycled as expansions or DLC. I wouldn't have a problem with that, it's just another form of paying for content. BUT, the industry is at a point where people aren't paying for content but paying for the brand.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare cost US$40 when it was released. That was the same as any other A-grade PC title. Then MW2 came out and charged people $60 bucks for it simply because it's Modern Warfare. Despite the 50% price increase, removal of dedicated servers, rampant cheating online and shorter campaign length, people bought it in droves. Until MW2, PC games were always priced cheaper than their console counterparts.

Then people actually paid $15 for 4-map packs. Some were recycled from COD4.To Activision, it's a double gamble that paid off. Now A-grade titles are typically $60, full-fledged expansions rarely get made anymore, and instead we pay $10-15 for DLC that offers a lot less than a proper expansion. Instead, expansions are now being sold at full or nearly full price, sometimes as a standalone game so marketers can pretend that you're buying an entirely new game..

The most recent example is Diablo 3. Blizzard got away with an always-on DRM and an online auction house that they take a 15% cut of and promotes active farming of loot with the intention to sell rather than to play the game to have fun. But the story and game itself wasn't even that great. Ubisoft got burned when it did an always-on DRM with Assassin's Creed 2 (which it had to remove), but Blizzard is getting away with this because

a) It's Blizzard.
b) It's Diablo.

Before the game was out, people were already hyping 'the game is gonna be so good, because it's Diablo!'

Add to this problem by a company being supported and defended by rabid fanboys who will lap up everything offered, and developers and publishers get away with a lot of crap that wouldn't have been tolerated 10 years ago. It's now all about packaging and marketing, and not the actual game development itself.

All of this happened because people let it happen. It's exactly this kind of unthinking buying practice that changed the face of gaming and allowed companies to get away with shoddy business practices. If one big company does it, it's being Microsoft. If the big players in the industry does it, it becomes acceptable. Go figure.