541–550 of 700 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s a bit disheartening when you look at how many people deal with the numbness ever present in their lives by playing games that mete out little rewards in easily quantifiable bits. This is not what humans need, or, if we’re honest, want.
Isn't this the same as many of us do even outside of games?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s a very romantic view of the goals of game design. For a live service game the metrics to hit are mainly retention and monetization. Whether something is subjectively fun doesn’t really come into the picture
If this was 100% true for all live service games, then they would all resemble casino games; a lot do, but some don’t.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If your argument hinges on the premise that being either a police officer or a politician makes someone either a paragon of morality or wholly incapable of committing crimes, then I'm afraid I have some bad news for you.
My argument hinges upon the fact that Mr Nagle has been waging a FUD campaign for some time without much contest here, through leveraging his reputation. It's become tiresome, very few LEO support his concerns at this point, yet he continues unchallenged. It's mostly cherrypicking and well below the quality of his other posts. All of us who've been around enough know what FUD campaigns look like on well-managed Inter…
Do you see the irony here?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And yet creating an obsession and a goal and providing a way to grind or spend to that goal is popular. Now that the veneer of such "games" is dropping away to reveal that they've just been casinos all along, the bright side is that society might finally find the gumption to start taking gaming addiction as seriously as gambling addiction.
You mean, take it not seriously at all, and exploited by the government (lottery) to rip off its own citizens? Sports gambling via apps is getting huge and deregulated and advertised on major TV broadcast networks.
Plus having a single state owned lottery is better than 1000 shady companies competing, and lottery revenues can even be used for state budgets.
In the late 2000s, as a teenager, I was gifted a Runescape account. This account had level 80+ woodcutting, allowing one to chop magic trees - which would produce the most expensive lumber in the game. It took a staggering number of real hours to achieve this skill level, we're talking several hundred hours minimum. At some point I had realized that there were different sketchy websites that would buy and sell the in…
I know a lot of people have fond memories of this kind of thing, but from a designer perspective, is it good that a game is so boring that players are willing to pay real-world money to skip parts of it? Runescape set up a system that was so grind-heavy that players broke server rules and wrote automated scripts to grind for them, and other players gave them money to do that. Because the minute-to-minute gameplay of…
Those fleeting moments where you have a temporary advantage gained without malfeasance but with pure cunning and skill (or cleverness if we’re being bold), those are the happiest times in my life.
Finding the little edges where things just don’t quite add up, shining a light on them, and wielding them as your own; that’s the stuff from which real hackers are made.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know a lot of people have fond memories of this kind of thing, but from a designer perspective, is it good that a game is so boring that players are willing to pay real-world money to skip parts of it? Runescape set up a system that was so grind-heavy that players broke server rules and wrote automated scripts to grind for them, and other players gave them money to do that. Because the minute-to-minute gameplay of…
While I personally agree with your view that gameplay should always be actually fun, I think that misses the magic of games for a significant population of gamers. Is most of your real day-to-day life truly "fun" in a game-like sense? Most people would say "no", X hours in a day is a lot of time to be consistently having fun, yet a lot of people would still describe their lives as "rewarding" and therefore worthwhile…
You could look at the existence of these games as a triumph of capitalism. We have raised productivity to such heights that the real world does not provide enough grind to sate the need for reward, so people literally invent fictional realities to create more opportunities for grinding your way to a reward.
What is missing here is purpose. The reward could be more than just meaningless progress in the game. For example, why couldn’t you have a game were the grind is designing tailored-for-one phone cases, which then get printed and shipped in the real world. People could be ordering an NFT-backed guaranteed unique phone case, and many people would be willing to pay real money for that.
That these games have a grind that amounts to meaningless work disconnected to physical reality seems like a failure of imagination and a waste of opportunity.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don’t forget to prep the floors before every run!
Prep the floors?
In the late 2000s, as a teenager, I was gifted a Runescape account. This account had level 80+ woodcutting, allowing one to chop magic trees - which would produce the most expensive lumber in the game. It took a staggering number of real hours to achieve this skill level, we're talking several hundred hours minimum. At some point I had realized that there were different sketchy websites that would buy and sell the in…
> It took a staggering number of real hours to achieve this [woodcutting] level, we're talking several hundred hours minimum. [laughs in agility] Anyway I agree with Runescape teaching some real world skills. Runescape (and some other multiplayer games) also taught me about scams and I think trained me to be skeptical whenever something seems too good to be true. For a really basic example, that opportunity to double…
Isn't this kind of thing illegal with real assets?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bitcoin has a use case for money laundering, tax evasion, evading China's exchange controls, and drugs. That market turned out to be larger than expected.
Interesting it’s like meta money laundering. It allows regular folks to make money off the illegal economy. In some ways this was the extra profits banks made off illegal activities but that was largely held within the bank, not available to normies.
Few outside people get rich off the mafia.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe this is what happens with any open world MMO. There's no storyline to finish, there's no ending, and game devs have incentives to keep players playing forever (the more hours a player plays, the more likely he will spend more money). There's only two ways to keep players playing: new content and/or grinding mechanics. Grinding mechanics are way, way easier to create. You can even reuse sprites and just chan…
>There's only two ways to keep players playing: new content and/or grinding mechanics. You neglected what's by far the funnest and most important and user-retaining aspect of open world MMOs: player-to-player interaction - be it friendly, neutral, or hostile. The absolute most enjoyable open world MMOs I've played had essentially no content. Players forged their own content in the form of geopolitics, war, economics,…
What MMO was that? This sounds like a MUSH (a kind of text only roleplay server which is a couterpart of the more combat-focused MUDs)