The 18th of Soon.
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I think Sushi in that blog comment summed it up pretty well. DLC is selling a product piece by piece, often with the intention of making more profit from the separate pieces than would be possible with everything combined. In my book it’s a shady practice that exploits our urge to collect (and to amass a complete collection, at that). In that light arguments like
miss the point. People want a complete product, so not buying isn’t really an option. Perhaps they do resist, but they feel bad about it and leave rude comments and bad ratings instead.
Now, that’s DLC in general. In case of this specific piece of DLC, I do understand the rationale behind it, and it’s as sound as it gets. But the road to hell is paved with good intentions too. Sometimes, even the most innocuous action, undertaken for the best of reasons, will get people upset. Though I must admit, some people are especially thin-skinned these days, and the steam people vent on the internet might be long cooled off if they had to sit down and write a letter instead. This unfortunate social component is something developers should also include in the equation, together with the pure technical and financial considerations.
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I’ve mixed feelings about this. Some of the (character) animations do look superb. The backgrounds though, while perhaps accurately reflecting the original graphics, seem to lack in details for the much higher resolution. And as with a lot of 3D graphics in general, they lack patina.
So personally, I’m not looking forward to this one, but I certainly appreciate the work and dedication that went into this. Keeping the classics alive is time well invested 
.
It’s not the same. If you haven’t bought the knife/DLC and have no experience with it you have no business rating it. What you are doing is rating the seller/shop.
You can tell what you think is a reasonable product price in the review and I may consider this when buying the product (or waiting for a sale). But bad reviews just because of the price will get immediately down-voted by me.
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Because he isn’t rating the game. He’s rating the price. A rating should help potential buyers understand if something is nice, not its price which is already explicitly stated. If I find a knife to be too expensive, I’m not telling my friends “that knife sucks”, because the obvious answer would be “oh, you tried it and it doesn’t work fine?” “Uh, duh, no, I have no idea, I just thought it was expensive”. Way to go.
That’s NOT what Ron did. Let me ask you something, when you buy a car you buy it with all optionals just for your urge to collect? Ransome’s DLC is like a car optional. You don’t need it to enjoy your car, and if you don’t think it’s worth your money, you leave it where it is, just as I left my integrated GPS navigator in my Mitsubishi. But I don’t write bad reviews of my car just because their GPS costs too much and I’ll resort to maps. Becauad my car runs fine without it.
The price is a part/an attribute of the product.
But shouldn’t a rating/comment system help potential buyers to decide if the price and/or the cost-benefit ratio is worse? For example if you have never played an adventure game in your life, wouldn’t it be helpful if there are other people telling you that a particular game is too expensive for an adventure game?
Gog offers only the five star rating system and the comments, on Steam you can only vote thumb up or down and comment. There are no other ways to tell the people that the price is too high (in their opinion), so they just use the available rating systems.
But you tell them: “That knife is too expensive, I won’t buy it. This cheap one is good enough for my needs.” Do you think that they will then buy the expensive knife or a cheaper one?
So, you think it’s OK for a person who hasn’t even tried TWP to give a bad review on the Play Store because it’s “too expensive for a mobile game”? Sorry, but I can’t agree at all.
I mean, it’s everyone’s right to comment and discuss. I might say “I won’t buy that knife, it’s too expensive” to my friends, to which one of them might even reply “I tried it and it’s worth its money, if you need a very good knife go and buy it”. That’s perfectly fine.
But I don’t *beep*ing go on Amazon and give it 1-star review. Because that won’t be helping strangers that might want to know something about the product itself, regardless of the price (which, again, is already stated).
If I’m reading a PRODUCT review, I want to know how the PRODUCT performs, not the fact that someone that never tried it didn’t want to buy it. When I read such “reviews”, I usually think why should I care about how you prefer spending your money? I want to know if the product works fine!". That’s TOTALLY unhelpful.
I think that a Luis Vuitton purse costs way too much for a damn purse. My solution: I don’t buy them. Period.
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we will be doing translations and beta-testing in a week…
there is gonna be 6-8 languages made by fans and we have about 9 game testers to polish it.
Excuse me, how many millions is this going to cost?
And that’s what I’ve acknowledged.
Regarding your car analogy: when I buy a new car (which I will actually have to do sometime this year), I’ve got a list of (often mutually exclusive or interdependent) options that I can mix and match according to my preferences (and budget). I don’t expect to see new options released for that model a few months or a year after purchase (although I fear this is exactly what will happen in the not so distant future, as more and more of a car’s functionality is defined in software 
. I think I’ve seen cases of it already. Yay for car-DLC 
)
I too think that rating systems are often misused for people’s personal agenda, which may not have anything to do with the quality of the product. Though I also agree with @Someone that price cannot be seen completely separate from quality.
Anyway, it wouldn’t be such a big issue if you’d have to actually read the reviews and could easily dismiss the irrelevant ones. But as all of the ratings get lumped into a single score, it can have a hugely negative impact on other buyers initial perception of the product. That’s highly unfair in most cases. Though It could also be a legitimate form of protest in some. It’s definitely not warranted in case of TWP and the unbeeping of Ransome.
Ok, but expansion packs for games exist since at least 20 years.
I also hate when DLCs are just used to make you pay more for what should have been in the base purchase. I was just objecting to the statement “DLCs are not respectable”. They can be respectable if used right.
What I meant to express with that is: DLC in general has a bad reputation. By producing DLC, some of that bad reputation will inevitably rub off.
And I find nothing wrong with those, most of the time. Usually they offer much better value for players than minuscule, or purely cosmetic DLCs. What’s not to like about something that breathes more life into a game that you enjoyed, but is now lacking novelty? As such, the Ransome DLC isn’t so bad. While it does not directly touch upon the gameplay, it certainly changes the tone of parts of the game.
Maybe the better business plan would have been to release easy mode first and sell hard as an expansion later. Yeah, hindsight and such … *ducks and runs*