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

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

#211

Post by encrux »

INGELRII wrote: post #195

Regulation proposal: Set maximum spending limit/time tied to the purchase price. The limit is tied to account and player character. example: 1. free-to-play: $100/year. 2. other: 10×purchase price/year. For a $50 game the maximum spending is $500 per year. This would not set hard limit. It would only mandate up-front investment related to the amount of in-game spending. A Whale who spends $10k a year would have to pa…

This would pretty much kill the current industry (*as we know it).

F2P/mobile games are monetized through Wales, but they're only willing to spend if there's enough incentive (e.g. prestige). That's not given if there's no F2P player base, because the base game would be too expensive.

IMHO the best way to go about is to vote with your wallet. There are plenty of worthwhile games where you don't have to be a whale to be successful.

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

#212

Post by elif »

It's like, gaming used to have some gambling flavor elements to it, but since ~2020 they gave up moderating it and everyone decided to go all-in on gamba. CSGO skin cases were meme-ably game-able, and I'm sure some people lost their livelihood, but it certainly wasn't conditioning EVERY CHILD that played to casually walk that line deeper and deeper... What we have now is sickening.

The stance of NL and belgium of just banning all games that have gambling elements, is truly the only path forward. There will be no self-regulation. The studios have to be stopped from selling to care anymore.

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

#213

Post by curiousgal »

DaveSapien wrote: post #208

There will be, for sure, lives ruined because of this game's predatory practices. It really sickens me. To quote myself from a previous thread: "If you could hear the contempt that "some" game devs have for their customers, you might never buy a game ever again. It really is quite shocking...and the contempt exists from top to bottom, its everywhere. That isn't to say there's not a vast number of of honourable people…

No post body was provided.

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

#214

Post by 7sidedmarble »

diffeomorphism wrote: post #190
taurath wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Investors love the monetization model and they get to decide what is just right and moral in our system of economics. The “fiduciary duty” to investors means sociopathy is the only way that businesses are allowed to conduct themselves. If you can make money, you MUST make it. Someday I hope we find some way as a society to give value to other things. Its not really working out.

> you MUST... Common myth but utterly false: https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co...

There's a difference between what the law says they can and can't do, and what the forces of capital are set up to encourage them to do. The law may say you can't avoid costly waste disposal by dumping it into the rainforest, but the incentive (ie the profit motive) is there to skirt as close to breaking the law, and often blowing right past it.

I mean I don't think I even need to give examples of corporations breaking the law because they thought they could get away with it. Corporations, like any group of people, can fail to see the big picture. Short term profits for the risk of a big slap on the wrist is a gamble a lot of companies take.

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

#215

Post by thrwyoilarticle »

phpisthebest wrote: post #112
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.

Rich people are rich because they do not spend $10K on a digital downloads that have no actual value... The ONLY people that would do that, are people with an addiction

There are a lot of famous rich addicts. Or were.

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

#216

Post by azeirah »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #68
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.

> 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…

> I managed to cure myself of this addiction by... cheating.

Oh yeah that works so incredibly well! I get addicted to idle/tap/infinite progression types of games every now and then.

At one point I got sick of it and I wrote a program that taps my phone with an axidraw robot. Seeing the progression happen without my own input totally broke the addictive cycle for me.

And I got to play with the axidraw :D

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

#217

Post by martin-adams »

xuki wrote: post #51
tjpnz wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Time to start regulating these games in the same way we regulate gambling. They shouldn't be sold to children. They're not Kinda eggs nor LOL Surprise and should never be brushed off as surprise mechanics. They're glorified slot machines, through and through.

Apple/Google revenue will see a big decline if those games are regulated. Most if not all the top grossing games on mobile follow the same spending pattern, and a big chunk of app stores' revenue come from those games.

It does sadden me that Apple/Google are happy to take that revenue

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

#218

Post by charlieyu1 »

xmodem wrote: post #57
ekianjo wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they're just people with an addiction. Everyone has an addiction to something. You are lucky if its to something thats cheap and legal.

It depends on the timeframe obviously, but $10k is hardly cheap.

10k a year is hardly a lot…

As a Japanese gamer says, paying for games is like dining out. You get nothing useful after a good meal, and paying for games may as well be more useful.

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

#219

Post by geysersam »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #193
nonrandomstring wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I managed to cure myself of this addiction by... cheating. I reverse engineered the game and wrote a bot for it. All those silly tasks were now getting done automatically, my progression was assured and the game's hold over me was destroyed. This is absolutely fascinating. It's something I kinda missed from Digital Vegan, thinking that extrication would be a matter only of self-mastery and access to good informatio…

EFF calls this adversarial interoperability: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interopera... A digital civil war is preferable to surrendering to the designs of exploitative corporations. We should fight back on principle. We should block ads and tracking, scrape websites, reverse engineer private APIs, violate DRM technology, replace their proprietary apps with our own free software that we control,…

That sounds like an arms race that's both wasteful and difficult to win. Why should we not use the tools democracy provides to shape society? These corporations are not out to get us. They maximize profit constrained by the regulatory environment. We have to guide them, and channel their capacity for good.

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

#220

Post by elif »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #173
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?

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…

Wait, what's the random element in golf? I play weekly and the only random element I can think of are maybe cars and animals distracting me?

Golf is a game of 3D localization and mapping, wind analysis, projectile estimation, and fine-tune physique control...

If you are treating those elements as "random" you are missing large aspects of the game.

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