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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

#481

Post by oefrha »

uberswe wrote: post #253
matwood wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've played to around level 30 or so also and it feels just like any other recent Diablo. So far it seems like I can pay to speed things up/improve the drop rate, or just keep playing without just fine. Is there some spot I'm going to hit that I can't progress without paying?

The article mentions that you can get the best gear for free but it will take you about 10 years. So I'm sure you can play it and have fun. If you try PVP however then you would be at a great advantage if you pay money for upgrades.

It's not like you can get the "best" seasonal gear in D3 (which is paid upfront) without a ridiculous amount of grind. Well, not as ridiculous as 10 years, but still.

Without knowing how money scales in this game it's very hard to judge the 10 years / 110k figure. In D3 sometimes you're grinding exponentially for 1% or even 0.1% improvements at a time, and you don't have to.

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

#482

Post by mywaifuismeta »

stevenjgarner wrote: post #477
mywaifuismeta wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The model is extremely standard in mobile games, especially in Asia, where it has been the norm for almost a decade in gacha games, and where people are used to paying and gambling. They all have the same mechanics, or variations of them, Diablo doesn't really do anything innovative here, but it certainly is on the aggressive side. A lot of the outrage comes from the fact that 1. Diablo is originally a PC-based IP wi…

> The only way you could cash out would be to sell your account, which is against the ToS, but commonly done nonetheless. Interesting. Why would the publisher have such a ToS? Just so they monopolize the revenue from in-game sales? Or is it more altruistic, like preventing new players having an unfair advantage? I would have thought encouraging a secondary market in their game would actually attract players.

I would imagine it's because they want to avoid people building bots and creating businesses around accounts creation and selling. Once you have such a secondary market you get a cheap supply of accounts due to outsourced labor or bots. This devalues the in-game purchases. Why would I spent more money in-game if I can just buy a cheap account?

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

#483

Post by stevenjgarner »

mattnewton wrote: post #474
stevenjgarner wrote: post #452

I am not a gamer, but I am fascinated by all manner of monetization. Is Diablo Immortal unique as a free-to-play game that has a microtransaction model to support continued development, or do other games do this? It seems the equivalent of the freemium model with web applications. Does buying the so-called Legendary Gems enhance "winning" or just game playing? And can "winning" result in a financial reward (like in L…

> Does buying the so-called Legendary Gems enhance "winning" or just game playing? Yes. Look up “gacha games” [0] for the broader category. One very successful and very rich version of this genre is “genshin impact” > And can "winning" result in a financial reward In this case, no, not currently. People tend to structure competitive scenes around games without these mechanics but it could be done by the company devel…

For a programmer, are those gacha "vending machines" available in code libraries? I would love to experiment with implementing one in a productivity web application.

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

#484

Post by Ralfp »

matwood wrote: post #345
uberswe wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article mentions that you can get the best gear for free but it will take you about 10 years. So I'm sure you can play it and have fun. If you try PVP however then you would be at a great advantage if you pay money for upgrades.

The article is really quite confusing. Early on it says F2P can't get the best gear, then later says they can. Then they say even for paid players it's random so I'm not even sure how they come up with 100k figure. It's just hard for me to get upset about a game that's always been a pretty skin over a blatant Skinner box.

The way those games are designed most of time there is a way to get good gear for free, but its usually behind hundreds of hours of same monotous gameplay.

I’ve played Homeworld mobile recently. The progress is great for first 15 hours but then game drops at you timegates. Wanna spaceship strong enough for later content? You can do god know how many missions hoping you get ship design, or you can do god knows how many missions to earn money to buy that from one of factions for cash. Or you can buy credits for cash. But only on Android because game is in public beta and Apple forbids monetization in those.

And once you get the ship design, you need to mine resources for it (this is manageable) but then you need to refine those, which takes around 70h of wait, but if you have other premium currency named „adamantium”, you can cut that wait in half for 100 adamantium, then another half by another adamantium and half of that.

And then you need to build ship in shipyard which takes between 10 to 15 days, but with adamantium you can slice that time down like for refining.

Every day you can collect 100 adamantium for free and buy 1000 extra for $9.99.

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

#485

Post by _abox »

encrux wrote: post #211
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…

Well good.. Let's kill it. Who cares if the business model works. It shouldn't work.

The idea of such regulation is to stimulate the business to move back to normal models.

In the Netherlands this is already working, Diablo immortal is not available there. It's a small market but once the whole EU does it they won't have a choice but to come up with something more reasonable. Win-win.

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

#486

Post by GekkePrutser »

heretogetout wrote: post #469
devoutsalsa wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it get ridiculously hard or monotonous without purchasing add ons?

Diablo is the king, or at least a well-placed prince, of monotonous gameplay.

True, this seems to be Blizzard's thing. I also hated WoW for this reason, I played along with friends but it took me 3 years to teach level 60

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

#488

Post by hw »

jack_pp wrote: post #433
doix wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand the comment, sorry. I don't think other streamers are lying, you can pay to get stronger, easily verified by opening the shop and looking at what is available. But it looks like if you play the game as your job, you can still be competitive. Does it suck that you can pay to get stronger and make the game unfair? Yep, but I'm not convinced it matters if you're playing casually. None of the pay to wi…

I understand your point but Asmongold and Shroud are saying it isn't worth playing the game unless you plan to spend a couple thousand dollars on it so that's where I'm coming from.

Do yourself a favor and play the game instead of trusting the words of streamers. You can get a ton of enjoyment without paying anything. If you want to be ultra competitive then it is a different story

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

#489

Post by azalemeth »

eknkc wrote: post #297
discardable_dan wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have a Switch (got it when I had a surgery to ease the long recovery). The Nintendo IP is almost completely bullshit free. The success of Switch is nice too. FromSoftware is another bastion of hope. The popularity of Elden Ring is no coincidence.

Honestly, I shamelessly took a switch into hospital and it was an absolute god-send. I couldn't manage it while on a fentanyl infusion, but combined with the drugs it was perfect – episodic gameplay, pick up and put down, and a wonderful form of escapism. The Witcher and Skyrim come highly recommended, after BOTW.
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