Stronghold Package is Available...

lolmoneyforpacks

Dammit you made me boot up Andromeda for no reason....

was thinking "f***ing FINALLY" then I saw you mention the 10 dollar pack - sigh -

I don't know how this game could get any worse...

It actually works on at least one layer more than one would expect.

What horse shit. Fuck everyone responsible for this crap.

I'm pretty sure they don't have one.  I wouldn't be surprised if all of the new kits were locked behind cash only packages.

I remember launching ME1 for the first time, I didn't even notice the EA logo (didn't care for the Bioware logo either since it was my first Bioware game), it was just supposed to be a good RPGish scifi game, I didn't care about the background.
Then with ME2 it was "Bioware, a division of EA" and I felt suspicious.
Don't get me wrong, I still loved ME2 and ME3 though (yeah, even the ending)
But this one just felt like an EA game, they can call it Bioware Montreal as much as they want, it just feels like an EA game, no soul, just cash grab
You can shit all you want on Ubisoft and their unpolished copy/paste games and season pass, they still don't go as low as EA

Its called PAYWALL. Lots of online MMORPG/RTS are using this strategy. The technique is to stall the progress of non-paying players and reward paying players. Simple reason, non-paying players are just dead-weight on the server. They only want just enough of them to keep the "wheels turning". And if one still continues to play without paying, they would ultimately hold your time and effort hostage till the point when they force you to think if paying a few dollars is worth all that grind.

I only imagine what Anthem would end up being. The glorious days of ME3MP are all but gone.

I can understand their stance. Without any further enhancements to the game, their revenue from sales would almost stall. Yet, someone has to foot the bills for the MP servers and operations. And if players continue to play without spending another cent, that would mean incurring losses just to keep the franchise alive. So its about time someone did the maths for how much operational capacity would be sustainable within the proposed revenue stream.

Its not just the operational costs of running multiplayer servers, though my earlier statement may have sounded that way. There are tons of other recurring expenses like common development(such as Origin), support, legal, administrative staff who are on permanent payroll and whose ongoing costs are shared by all games.

Let me put it this way, if you think of a nuclear family where the husband and wife are both earning and they have a couple of children to raise then their financial situation would be vastly different from that of a joint family where only a handful of earning members has to support the expenses of the entire family across generations (without any government aid/health insurance).

EA is a huge company, and at any given time, there are only a few projects that are making handsome profits which need to support expenses of the entire family - old, (almost) non-earning senior citizens like ME1, ME2, ME3+MP or pregnant moms who would like to call their child Anthem. Being a publicly traded company the pressure is also higher. So every potential source of revenue needs to be leveraged so that the financial burden can be distributed and risks can be minimized so that revenue impact from a single project does not adversely affect the entire family. MEAMP is more like a youth in his prime who just lost their job but still has to support themselves and their ageing parents and yet can't afford to look like a failed investment in front of its stakeholders who might stop trusting further anticipated members of their family.

ME3MP may not be making enough profits, yet the ME3MP servers are still accessible because EA has a reputation to uphold and a franchise to protect. If you consider the entire Mass Effect as a single franchise (not separate development teams), then MEAMP is the only project where they can still generate revenue despite not delivering further SP content. And it has to do so as long as EA or Bioware pin any hope on any future Mass Effect prospect. Mass Effect is not like any software product where a newer version replaces older versions which can be retired. Imagine someone who would want to relive the entire Mass Effect experience right from ME1 without compromising on any aspects, its still possible today, because EA and Bioware have shaped a franchise whose entire weight now falls solely on any revenue from MEAMP.

P.S. I hope this doesn't make me sound like a EA fanboy. Its just that being part of a large organization in a past life has enabled me to see things with a certain perspective.