It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal • Hacker News Board

Re: It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal

#171

Post by JohnJamesRambo » Sun, Jun 05, 2022, 10:33 AM UTC

makeitdouble wrote: post #170

matheusmoreira wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they're just people with an addiction Yes. These games are straight up designed to be habit forming and should be regarded as equivalent to gambling and addictive drugs. I've been down that rabbit hole myself. Daily tasks and rewards offer positive reinforcement. Timers create a schedule for players, place a cap on their progression and establish negative reinforcement by punishing days of inactivity. Player groups…

This picture is too black and white. I have no interest in EA games so I don’t know if it appliesto them, but most “social” games make the bulk of their revenue from players paying small amounts every now and then, or ideally on a regular (a bit every events) shedule. The main target is not the whales, it’s the sustainable long tail (though paying players stay a small minority, even 4~5% of hundreds of thousands of u…

Do you have any data to support this assertion? It goes against everything I’ve ever read about how games like this make money.

Re: It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal

#172

Post by iancmceachern » Sun, Jun 05, 2022, 10:33 AM UTC

matheusmoreira wrote: post #88

chii wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so the question becomes whether people should be allowed to spend money any way they see fit, even if that spending isn't great for themselves. Like someone who's very invested in their hobby, they could be dropping tens of thousands of dollars into it (depending on the hobby of course). Why are those not considered the same as wasting money on mobile games?

Hey, I love video games. They've given me thousands and thousands of hours of fun. Awesome games like Subnautica can bring joy to the world. The problem is the one time I tried mobile games I eventually started waking up at 3 AM because that's when some timer resets. At some point I started wondering where my life went so wrong. Then I started studying the design of these games and I realized they are designed to cau…

Just like much of social media

Re: It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal

#173

Post by ZeroGravitas » Sun, Jun 05, 2022, 10:35 AM UTC

chii wrote: post #75

matheusmoreira wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they're just people with an addiction Yes. These games are straight up designed to be habit forming and should be regarded as equivalent to gambling and addictive drugs. I've been down that rabbit hole myself. Daily tasks and rewards offer positive reinforcement. Timers create a schedule for players, place a cap on their progression and establish negative reinforcement by punishing days of inactivity. Player groups…

so the question becomes whether people should be allowed to spend money any way they see fit, even if that spending isn't great for themselves. Like someone who's very invested in their hobby, they could be dropping tens of thousands of dollars into it (depending on the hobby of course). Why are those not considered the same as wasting money on mobile games?

This is a good question.

Golf seems very similar to me. There's the random element. A friend described it as a feeling of continual frustration followed by a high when he hits a good shot.

You similarly can buy your way to 'success' with gadgets and training or investing more time.

There's the community of similar addicts that gather together and provide a social element and re-inforce each others addiction. People's marriages suffer to the degree that there is a term "golf widow" for someone who's lost their partner to the game.

But I can still see clear differences between golf clubs and casinos, and there's also similar differences between different mobile games. I feel it's worth delineating them, particularly as golf isn't constantly being replaced with a slightly modified version of golf that takes it 2% closer to being a Casino and casino's are heavily regulated for good reasons.

Re: It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal

#174

Post by Havoc » Sun, Jun 05, 2022, 10:37 AM UTC

This sort of stuff reminds me that I've got 200+ unplayed games in my steam library.

Of which presumably at least 10 are excellent, so think I shall pass on this slot machine game and play something else.

Re: It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal

#175

Post by yurishimo » Sun, Jun 05, 2022, 10:37 AM UTC

matheusmoreira wrote: post #135

ramshanker wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same for me. 2015 or so. FarmVille addiction. Once I clicked 1200 times straight to farm/plaugh/seed, my fingers heart. So searched for a solution and found click recorders . Not exactly cheat but once I started using the auto click, I was out of addiction within a month and left game in Two month.

Awesome. In these cases, bots are not really cheating, they're legitimate self-defense against shitty repetitive addictive games. They are addiction prophylaxis and treatment.

I think it's okay to label it as cheating and not feel like you're breaking some moral code. If the game is rigged, then the only way to win is to "cheat". When the hero in a story does it, we call them clever.

Re: It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal

#176

Post by matheusmoreira » Sun, Jun 05, 2022, 10:38 AM UTC

safety1st wrote: post #168

matheusmoreira wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Awesome. In these cases, bots are not really cheating, they're legitimate self-defense against shitty repetitive addictive games. They are addiction prophylaxis and treatment.

This is really insightful. Things in 2022 are so bad that the manufacturer of this addictive product is not only unregulated, but has actually banned the therapy in its ToS. (If you think about that a bit it follows that the smartest course of action is to break the ToS early and often!)

Yeah. The thing about these little agreements is they're all about what's good for the company, never what's good for us. They are inherently abusive and it's in our best interests to subvert them as much as possible.

Re: It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal

#177

Post by gryn » Sun, Jun 05, 2022, 10:38 AM UTC

gambiting wrote: post #54

The thing is - is it necessary to have the best gear to enjoy the game? As a different example - I'm sure it would cost tens of thousands of dollars to max out your characters and gear in Genshin Impact, but I've played very enjoyable 100h+ and it's perfectly fine even if you don't have the max ascended characters and gear, I have a feeling those are there basically for the wales to spend money on but aren't necessar…

in this game ? absolutely game progress is limited by it. can't complete a quest if your combat rating is not high enough and the only way to improve it is to upgrade your items.

how do you upgrade your items ? by upgrading their rank and the rank of the gems they have attached to them.

so how do you do that ? well either directly pay money, or pay money for for stuff needed to to challenge elder rift so that you can drop the resources necessary. or if you really don't want to do that challenge the rift without the resources and have a really shitty drop rate of alternative resources that can be converted into runes that can be used to make said gems. that would mean that you needs months of repetitive farming.

oh an the first fixes of the paid drug is handed to you for free so that you get a taste of how great of a drug it is. then once you're dry of it they'll keep giving it you at ever decreasing doses to keep you crazed for you fix until you crack and give in.

my experiences with game is that it was enjoyable until lvl 35 which you hit in 2 days of playing and just hit an impenetrable wall at lvl 42 where it meant full time grinding or paying in order for the story to progress at an acceptable pace.

I'll just remove it from my phone or maybe play with reverse engineering it to see how hard it is to make a bot. (on the first day there was already one spamming chat)

Re: It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal

#178

Post by Andrew_nenakhov » Sun, Jun 05, 2022, 10:38 AM UTC

Ekaros wrote: post #101

AdvicePlz wrote: post #3

I knew someone who worked for EA as a UX researcher. He said that games like these are primarily targeting whales who will drop $10k on a game. They are the real money earners. The really sad part was the he said the most whales aren't super rich, they're just people with an addiction.

I wonder what we could do to legally balance this. Out right banning is bit questionable. But weekly or monthly spending reports? Some total number shown regularly to players?

I think that the option in appstores to completely hide all games with in-app purchases would be enough. Like, if you don't know they exist, you can't get hooked. Probably banning advertising such games anywhere but on the AppStores, too.

Re: It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal

#179

Post by scotty79 » Sun, Jun 05, 2022, 10:39 AM UTC

jack_pp wrote: post #2

I've watched a lot of discussions about this from twitch streamers and I'm not sure where I stand.. On the one hand I'm amazed at how good this game looks on mobile and if you're just the type to casually play a game not really caring about being the best at it you could have fun playing it for free or for very cheap. On the other hand this game is clearly exploitative and while other games like Hearthstone or Clash…

I had a ton of fun with Clash Royale for many months (even years at this point) without spending exactly zero money. I think the way they mix free players with paying players is absolutely brilliant (from a perspective of free player).

If I go against a player two levels ahead of me, I can be pretty much sure that he bought his deck and since he's going against me not some higher rank I know I have chance of winning if I can outwit materially stronger opponent.

When I'm going against someone with lower level then I can be sure that this guy has very carefully crafted deck and is a very skilled player.

Re: It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal

#180

Post by scotty79 » Sun, Jun 05, 2022, 10:42 AM UTC

mywaifuismeta wrote: post #43

I regularly play games with gambling (gacha) mechanics and I love them. The short bursts of fun are exactly what I'm looking for in my current busy life. I have nothing against this model of monetization. Gambling is fun. Casinos are fun. I am not a big spender by any means, but I've probably spent ~$2k on these kind of games over the past two years or so. I don't regret it, and for me the fun is in figuring out how…

I don't mind existence of those games. But I hate how this single mechanics floods the market and makes everything else harder to find.

I don't mind casinos in Vegas but I would mind if grocery store around the corner was replaced with small, low quality casino.