Hotcakes: When Did Cryptic Become Generous?

Magic: Legends makes even more changes.

When you’ve covered MMOs for as long as I have, you build expectations for the companies you deal with. For instance I can always expect that when Jagex announces a new game and how excited they are to publish a new MMO, that we can assume that MMO will never finish development and in all likelihood will be silently scrapped and never heard from again. Similarly it isn’t a leap to recognize that when Gamigo buys a studio, it’s to wring that studio dry while providing minimal support.

Perfect World Entertainment is a company that I like but one that I know to expect big money schemes out of. The company loves its loot boxes, loves shoving player winnings that may or may not be fake all over the screens of other users to incentivize more loot box sales. Events exist to generate pay-to-skip with massive grinds and RNG awaiting those who cheap out. I don’t subscribe to the idea that PWE is evil, although they can be rather incompetent from time to time. It comes with heavy turnover and a constant influx of less experienced employees.

So imagine my shock over the past few months when I find myself consistently reporting on Magic: Legends receiving updates to remove some of the greed factors. Perfect World making a class specific to a loot box didn’t surprise me. Removing the class from that loot box and making it a reward for battle pass owners however did come as a surprise. The fact that battle pass missions stack, so you can log in once a week and complete your backlog instead of being forced to log in every day, surprised me.

Even last week’s update came as a pleasant surprise. Back in June 3 PWE updated Magic: Legends to remove weekly caps and instead institute weekly bonuses on various currencies. A new class got added in the form of the pyromancer and it was made available free for all players and as a free battle pass addition for those who didn’t claim it in the four day window.

I have my criticisms of Perfect World, most recently expressing my frustration that the company is constantly implementing some dramatic overhaul of Neverwinter and making it hard to get back into.

So is Perfect World Entertainment slowly swinging its pendulum toward consumer-friendliness? I have no idea, but it seems like certain factions within the company are making attempts.