Editor’s note: Community is an editorial column where we discuss pressing issues in the gaming community, including outside of the MMO genre. The acknowledgement of events or actions by individuals or developers should not be misinterpreted as our approval of said actions, unless explicitly stated.
If you haven’t been paying attention recently, the Payday community is in a bit of an upheaval following the unveiling of Crimefest, Overkill’s celebration of the Payday series’ fourth anniversary. The celebration is being accompanied by ten days of updates and ten days of free game time for those who have yet to pick the crime shooter up. Overkill launched Crimefest with the Black Market, a system similar to Team Fortress 2 and Counter Strike where players receive lock boxes and must pay real money to open them. Inside said lock boxes are weapon skins of varying type and rarity, some offering bonuses that alter gameplay.
Microtransactions are a highly divisive topic in the gaming community, one that has only become more openly hostile as developers continue to include them in genres where they had previously been absent, with games like Tomb Raider, Halo 5, and now Payday 2 going down the route of blind box rewards. Especially egregious in the eyes of the Payday community is the fact that Overkill has not only denied multiple times that microtransactions would ever come to Payday, but shamed those who dared to think otherwise.
You would expect that an exodus of players would follow such an update, and there is certainly no lack of “I quit” threads being posted to the forums, but certain members of the community are taking another approach to showing their contempt for microtransactions: They’re targeting Overkill’s customers. One of the topics you’ll see being discussed on the Payday 2 Steam forums is the topic of how to curb item purchasing among those who will happily buy drills at $2.49 apiece, and the answer is simple: remove them.
Among those dissatisfied with Overkill’s new microtransactions, a number of players have pledged to kick and ignore any players that join their lobbies with skins gained from microtransactions. Evidently if you can’t physically prevent someone from buying items that are available to them, there is always the option to make their ensuing gameplay experience as miserable as possible, thus either forcing them to quit or diminishing their ability to play.
How widespread this sentiment reaches isn’t clear, while you can find a fair number of people in the forums pledging to block anyone with cash shop skins, I did not personally witness anyone removed from public lobbies while playing over the past few days. This is likely to be a very small minority of the active community, and one that most players will never encounter. Regardless, it will be hard for Overkill to ignore the growing discontent in their own community over the update, and the developer has promised to respond to complaints once the ten day event is over.
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