221–230 of 769 posts
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10k over a long period is very small compared to what one can lose in a casino night, and casinos do exist. What kind of game was your friend working on? Whales do exist but they are not the bulk of the revenue
> casinos do exist. In many jurisdictions they don't. And where they do, they're often very heavily regulated.
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…
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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…
Quoted post unavailable.
It's even more frustrating, because the game is good . I really enjoyed playing the first 30 levels or so. Good story, good controls, very satisfying gameplay. If I could pay $60 and just have a "classic" Diablo on my phone, I might. But I won't spend a cent on consumable in-app purchases. It is so sad that "make good game, sell it" model no longer works. It's all a wonky curve of "free - couple of dollars - hundreds…
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> 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?
You are allowed to be in any number of relashionships with other people, and some of them can be pretty weired.
However when someone is manipulating you and pimping you out, thats different.
You have the rirgt not to be stabbed, stolen from, or manipulated.
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…
It would be nice if simply pricing out poor addicts worked as a deterrent, but it just doesn’t. We see this in sports betting all the time, young men are committing suicide in England after getting in too deep on the betting apps.
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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?
Because a normal hobby is not designed to be addictive. A hobby like wood working doesn't push you to do woodworking every day and there are not people behind this non existing mechanism who design it like it. Also normally a hobby costs money due to physical parts of that hobby. A software engineer as a hobby only needs some computer, would worker needs a metal saw.
It is human abuse.
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Never thought of that, good point. I guess in the end if we wanted to find the boundary for harmful/tolerable addiction, we might not be able to find it, it’s a continuous spectrum. I guess in the end intent would need to decide the ethics—is the product designed to leverage addiction or is it designed to enable people to have fun, which might lead to addiction?
I think there is a very blurry line between non-chemical addiction and just liking something very much. Say a person spends thousands on audiophile equipment where the layman couldn’t hear the difference, and often even a double blind of audiophiles can’t, is that spending an addiction? Or do they just enjoy chasing that dragon?
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 jus…
Banning rarely accomplishes anything, it just moves one appearance of the problem out of sight for a period of time.
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> 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. 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…
The only difference is who does the concrete fighting: you by yourself, or let the police and criminal prosecution do the fighting.