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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

#231

Post by caf »

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.

"Apple and Google are really gambling companies" was not exactly the hot take I expected to see today (I am not disagreeing!).

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

#232

Post by matheusmoreira »

geysersam wrote: post #219
matheusmoreira wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> That sounds like an arms race that's both wasteful and difficult to win.

It is.

> Why should we not use the tools democracy provides to shape society?

We should, if we can. I'm just not holding my breath.

I think copyright should be abolished but the trillion dollar companies that depend on it will never allow that to happen. So we're better off de facto abolishing it by making copyright unenforceable and eliminating consequences for copyright infringement.

I think advertising should be illegal but companies like Google will never let that happen. So I use software like uBlock Origin to block ads whenever I can.

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

#233

Post by supernes »

tuvan wrote: post #163
supernes wrote: post #16

Fans have dubbed it "Diablo Immoral" and say that it goes far beyond what other mobile titles infamous for their monetization have done.

It really doesnt. Fans are just upset the Diablo name was stained with this practice. You are looking at this level of spend required for pretty much any mobile gacha game

It's not just the amount of money they try to get people to spend, it's some really obnoxious tactics, like NPCs telling you they "don't run a charity" (i.e. steering you into spending real money) and paid bonuses that you lose if you don't login daily (as opposed to free ones in most other games).

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

#234

Post by discardable_dan »

elif wrote: post #212

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…

This is, honestly, why I'm focusing my children on Nintendo products. They do sometimes charge for skins, but by and large they don't succumb to the same "pay me to play" traps as other platforms.

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

#235

Post by matwood »

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…

I'm wondering the same. D3 was seasonal grinds, and this new game seems to capture the same season grind. So far at least, it looks like paying lessens the grind, but rift grinding is what Diablo has been about for years.

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

#236

Post by TrackerFF »

can16358p wrote: post #24

While I definitely don't like pay-to-win monetization style, what I find even more ridiculous is the laws at Belgium and Netherlands around loot boxes. I mean, no one is forcing anyone to play a game or purchase a lootbox. Why ban a game mechanics for this? It hurts the (potential) players, let people decide for themselves FFS.

You're dealing with addicts, and often times very young and impressionable addicts.

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

#237

Post by [deleted] »

donatj wrote: post #139
Termitiono wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> A hobby […] doesn't push you to do [it] every day Look at organized sports, if you don’t show up enough times, you don’t get to play anymore.

[deleted]

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

#238

Post by 2muchcoffeeman »

MereInterest wrote: post #223
curiousgal wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

I'm not seeing the connection here, and don't see any mention of country of origin in the parent's post. Can you explain further?

I suppose it's a bit of a first world problem to be able to spend 100K on a game. But I'm not sure why this isn't a legitimate problem for people in "first world" countries. Why shouldn't be allowing companies to capitalise on people's addictions. I'm not sure why the existence of people who have it even worse off should compel us to do what we can to prevent people from not ruining their lives.

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

#239

Post by SapporoChris »

azeirah wrote: post #216
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…

> 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

I'm sure you know there are other ways. Android phone emulator on a PC and scripting the mouse is one of the easiest. However I'm incredibly impressed that you used a software/hardware solution.

Thank you for mentioning the hardware, I looked it up and it looks affordable and interesting. https://www.axidraw.com/

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

#240

Post by elif »

charlieyu1 wrote: post #221
gspr wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> casinos do exist. In many jurisdictions they don't. And where they do, they're often very heavily regulated.

While the stock market is much more accessible, operates in a less transparent way, and ruins more people for life than an actual casino.

The stock market, by inflationary design, rewards >50% of the time.

Gambling, by regulated design, rewards 45-49% of the time.

Diablo Immortal, by comparison, is designed to reward 0% of the time.

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