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Good points, and I hope you are right. I really want this to be a good game because it looks fun and interesting. I agree automatically assuming the worst is a bad idea. I can’t help it sometimes I guess. I agree that it is good we have Seth Killian there, I love that guy. I know some people hate on him but his job has to be tough sometimes; having to fight against something internally at Capcom that he knows will upset the FGC, then when Capcom says “tough” having to go out and promote it. I know he’s trying hard against certain things but at the end of the day he’s gotta bow to Capcom just like we all have to.
My two main concerns are gem exclusivity and (paid) gem DLC, which sucks because DLC is basically the answer to exclusivity. I want to agree with you and believe that Capcom is not dumb enough to give one preorder a stupidly powerful gem…it’s just hard to lol. And if that does happen, then the way to fix that would be to offer DLC of those gems to everyone. Now if the DLC is free or really cheap, then I guess I am worrying for nothing. But something tells me it won’t be either of those.
Ono keeps saying it’s like fighting games meets Magic: The Gathering and that’s actually what scares me. I’ve played Magic for years and it is DUMB expensive to play that game competitively. Of course, there are a few good, cheap decks for around 100 bucks, but most Standard decks (newer cards) are gonna run between $300 and $500; if you want to play older formats, the price goes up very quickly. If you want a good Legacy deck (a format that permits all the cards ever printed), you are spending $1000 easy. Of course, I don’t expect gems to get as ridiculous because, to my knowledge, there is no way for the players to sell individual gems. The reason Magic is so expensive is because once the really powerful cards of a set are found out, the community says “okay, this card is really good and you will win with it a lot, so it is now 30 dollars” or w/e price.
So I know the FGC won’t be able to do that with gems (I hope), but what’s to say Capcom can’t? If they see a good gem that everyone is using what’s to stop them from saying “instead of waiting for this gem to randomly unlock, buy it for 5 bucks” or worse, they intentionally design a really good gem that is not in the initial game and sell it as DLC? I guess that’s me assuming the worst again but at the end of the day…Capcom is a business trying to make money, and this just seems like a really easy/good way to make money (don’t misunderstand, I’m not saying businesses suck. Make that money, Capcom!) .
It all depends on how the gem packs are implemented I guess. If they are straight up packs where you buy them and you get X,Y,Z then that won’t be so bad. However, if they are like Magic cards and “random” packs, then you are going to be buying a bunch of them to get that one, good gem you need. Again, if they packs are like 50 cents or a dollar it won’t be TOO bad. But Magic packs are like 4 bucks, and I think the Street Fighter costume packs were 3 or 4 dollars as well, and that was for something completely cosmetic that unaffected gameplay.
A good answer to this would be to have all the gems in the game, all the time. Then you can either pay for them if you are willing to spend the money, or grind them out in w/e system they will have that unlocks them. They could actually make the system really fun. If it’s random unlocking and you can get duplicates, being able to combine your duplicates for a chance to get a “better” gem, or something like that. Not a perfect answer, but it would be interesting, I think. Also, I am expecting all the above concerns to also apply to UMvC3’s card system. I hope I’m wrong there, too.
In the end you are right though, no point worrying until more information is available. I’m just bored today and have nothing else to do, atm lol.
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tl;dr - no point for me whining til we have more facts