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

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

#421

Post by paxys » Sun, Jun 05, 2022, 2:26 PM UTC

sokoloff wrote: post #376

skohan wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Long term, Casinos absolutely have odds slanted toward the house. With the exception of a very few games, like blackjack, which can be effectively gamed, a gambler will statistically be guaranteed to go broke as the number of games approaches infinity.

That’s true of pit and slots games, but there are people who make a living playing poker in casinos. (It’s a player-vs-player hosted game with the casino taking a rake or seat charge rather than a player-vs-house game.)

Some difference in the mechanics, but the overall concept is the same. An individual player might be able to win money in poker (with some combination of luck and skill), but a group of players will always lose to the house.

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

#422

Post by mLuby » Sun, Jun 05, 2022, 2:27 PM UTC

gonzo41 wrote: post #416

dylan604 wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who did it? The gamers playing those games you just steamrolled, or the investors in the gaming companies that mandated to do whatever to make games more profitable? What generation those investors came from isn't relevant as these types of investors are in every generation as investors were not required to be gamers but just "savvy" business types.

Truthfully, its on the developers. Developer Talent could walk, but I suspect golden handcuffs and willful ignorance.

I don't think game developers have golden handcuffs. Quite the opposite is what I hear, that they're often laid off after a game is released.

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

#423

Post by ZeroGravitas » Sun, Jun 05, 2022, 2:28 PM UTC

Aerroon wrote: post #396

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is obviously not going to work. You'd have to be thoroughly conditioned against government intervention to even briefly entertain the notion that it might. "Well, if I just don't buy any drugs, that'll take care of the problem." Obviously, government interventions can have negative impacts (see drugs parallel again) but the answer is encouraging sensible regulation, not pretending, against all evidence, that it…

What is "all the evidence that it can work"? Drugs are a perfect example where governments have spent a century destroying people's lives with harebrained regulation. And yet all that it has done is empowered bloodthirsty cartels in developing countries. It hasn't improved the drug situation at all, regardless how much money we've poured into it. As far as I can tell, gambling laws don't stop gambling either. In fact…

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

#424

Post by pototo666 » Sun, Jun 05, 2022, 2:28 PM UTC

forgotpwd16 wrote: post #27

pototo666 wrote: post #12

As someone used to work for Chinese mobile game companies. $110k sounds average for a pay-to-win game. But the game is new. Designers would create other slots to make money.

>average for a pay-to-win game What games are above this average?

Many mobile games made by Chinese, especially Net Ease, who also makes Diablo Immortal. Net Ease is notoriously good at sucking money from whales.

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

#425

Post by RicoElectrico » Sun, Jun 05, 2022, 2:29 PM UTC

discardable_dan wrote: post #234

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.

All you said is true, but they have gotten lazy and complacent these days. Not sure I would support them. They have become the Disney of video games. Family friendly, but at what cost?

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

#426

Post by neogodless » Sun, Jun 05, 2022, 2:29 PM UTC

dylan604 wrote: post #408

api wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My take on cryptocurrency has become: it’s also all gambling, and for that reason I no longer think there is any chance of it going to zero. Absent regulation there is a simply massive market for gambling. It’s shameless exploitation but people will do it (on both ends). Most of this stuff is actually worse than casinos. Casinos have a social component, employ people, and are often at least a little regulated so that…

>My take on cryptocurrency has become: it’s also all gambling I have the same feeling towards the stock market. Sure, it can be well researched information on the stock in question, but it's all a bet your interpretation of that stock is right.

In other investments, you can pick an asset allocation, buy index funds of each asset, dollar cost over time, rebalance, invest over a long time.

Maybe some of that is available now with crypto? Index funds? But with how heavily the bigger cryptocurrencies are price-correlated, I don't think you get good intra-asset diversification benefits.

Personally within my asset allocation, crypto is a tiny fraction of a percent.

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

#427

Post by Aerroon » Sun, Jun 05, 2022, 2:30 PM UTC

synu wrote: post #412

Aerroon wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would they have to care? They could just block the EU region and publish to other countries instead. Plenty of games, especially from Asia, already block all EU countries from playing. Usually they're looking to sell a license or don't know how to enter the market. Nevertheless, they are absolutely willing to block the EU region. I see so many Europeans repeating the line that if Europe regulates X together, then…

Isn’t that mission accomplished from the EU perspective, though? Whether they don’t care very much and left, or whether they care a lot and left, as long as the level of caring was sufficient that they were forced to take the gambling for kids stuff with them that seems like a win. The alternative is to not care at all and keep selling in the EU anyway even if it’s made illegal, which seems unlikely at the level of s…

Because I like playing some of these games. I don't want to be stuck with the 5 games that are officially EU approved. Asking for this kind of regulation is basically asking for legally mandated region-locks for online games. It's back to being a second class player in another region, where technically you're not allowed to play via VPN and you might get randomly banned.

Also, it's not about the children. Children don't make their own money - they only have money that parents give them. Even if these games banned children from playing them, a lot of the people complaining about it still wouldn't stop. The problem for them is that they can't make their friends stop playing these games, so they want the government to stop them instead.

I don't like when games monetize stuff like Diablo Immortal does. I hate it. But I'm certain that when legislation does arrive it'll be broad enough that other stuff gets caught up in it and the people advocating for it will just shrug their shoulders and go "lol i didn't care about games anyway".

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

#428

Post by _jal » Sun, Jun 05, 2022, 2:31 PM UTC

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.

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

Turns out that's also a Red Queen's race. And if you look at the lobbying costs vs. potential rewards, there's a lot of room for escalation in US politics.

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

#429

Post by maccard » Sun, Jun 05, 2022, 2:32 PM UTC

Dunban4 wrote: post #386

Instead of government, an industry standard: total microtransaction purchases cannot exceed the full market price of the game. If the purchase limit is reached, every microtransaction item is unlocked unconditionally. - DLCs are not microtransactions but they must add either new features or narratives.

What's the full market price of a f2p game?

Why is it ok for narrative content to be considered a DLC but cosmetic content to be considered microtransactions?

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

#430

Post by api » Sun, Jun 05, 2022, 2:35 PM UTC

dylan604 wrote: post #408

api wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My take on cryptocurrency has become: it’s also all gambling, and for that reason I no longer think there is any chance of it going to zero. Absent regulation there is a simply massive market for gambling. It’s shameless exploitation but people will do it (on both ends). Most of this stuff is actually worse than casinos. Casinos have a social component, employ people, and are often at least a little regulated so that…

>My take on cryptocurrency has become: it’s also all gambling I have the same feeling towards the stock market. Sure, it can be well researched information on the stock in question, but it's all a bet your interpretation of that stock is right.

If you are doing much other than value investing long term you are gambling.