Without being a gacha game, World of WarCraft is guilty of a lot of the same stuff. You probably know people who flunked out of college due to the addiction, or have heard of parents who neglected their child over that game. It preys on a lot of the same impulses that Diablo and Diablo II seemed to have found by accident, before they were monetized by subscription fees and then microtransactions. And you can see a lot of the same in games like Destiny.
I agree with you, to an extent. I would say it’s a lot more complicated than that with World of Warcraft, which is an MMO, and does not revolve on gambling except in the aspect of random number generated loot. This is probably the majority of looter shooters out there today as well and a large number of other games. Pure chance in just the loot and rewards. Personally, World of Warcraft did not affect me adversely, because I have very strong self-control, and was able to develop very strict limitations for my own personal life which was important in college.
But I think there’s something you’re definitely missing. Sure, while World of Warcraft can be blamed by some people flunking out of college or high school due to its addictive and fun nature, Have you considered the fact that the world we live in is simply so boring that they don’t want to pay attention to those things? Over a 20-year time span since I have graduated, high school and college has not evolved. It’s the same boring ass mess that it was when I went to school. Unnecessary classes, study only for the test and never use that information ever again, very rarely are their projects and when there are, they are silly group projects in which two out of the four members of your group are lazy and don’t want to do a damn thing. You also are faced with constant demoralizing facts thrown at you from the media and the outside world that your college degree won’t help you get a job, you won’t see any student loan relief, the wealthy elites are in positions of power and rising faster in companies than you ever will be… Reality is so disappointing. So I can understand why these people have trouble paying attention in school and want to turn to stuff like World of Warcraft, theme park MMO that has so much fun and enjoyment in it
But when we’re talking about a gacha, This feels so much more insidious. Every aspect of the entire game, not just the loot, is gambling, and you’re gambling with real money. Not your time. In World of Warcraft you don’t get a drop, oh well, try again next time. You still paid $15 for that entire month, so you can try as many times as you want on as many characters as you want. But when you pay 50 bucks for Genshin impact and you get nothing, you know what that money goes towards? Absolutely nothing. You lose that money forever. Now you are mentally afflicted with that, and you’re already considering whether or not you should pay another 50 bucks to try and get it again with the gamblers fallacy in the back of your mind that if I pay another $50 I’m already $50 in, so I have a much better chance of getting it now. It’s sickening
You could throw most of this same argument back at gachas. They’re just gambling because the world sucks, or something…
No, my understanding is that the reason people get addicted to this stuff is that we evolved to gather finite resources when they’re available, even if it’s rare, so we’re prey to systems like this that can control that rarity. WoW absolutely did this, just without putting a price on each interaction.
I agree with you, to an extent. I would say it’s a lot more complicated than that with World of Warcraft, which is an MMO, and does not revolve on gambling except in the aspect of random number generated loot.
The way that the drops are is literally the same approach as a slot machine but with more steps to take up your time with boring shit and require more of your life to be dedicated to it so that there is less risk of you getting distracted by things like hobbies or games with finite stories with quality writing. A one-armed bandit might snag a handful of whales that spend all of their time feeding the machine. The Wrath of the Lich Bandit gets a much larger percentage of its users in front of it for a larger amount of their time, increasing the ratio of addicts/whales caught. Add in expansions, real money auctions, etc and you’ve got something much more fucked up than anything on a Vegas casino floor.
This reads like “the only moral Skinner box is my Skinner box.”
Also sounds like you haven’t played in a while. The addition of real currency to gold trading creates an even more direct pipeline from one’s wallet to in-game gear dice rolls. Guilds selling raid gear is even more common now, and with crafting orders, a whale can spend to reroll secondary stats on crafted gear.
With the way Warcraft is throwing currencies at players now, it’s clear Blizzard has taken more than a few cues from how gacha and other live-service outfits are doing things these days. Plenty of opportunities for ruinous, addictive behavior.
The addition of real currency to gold trading creates an even more direct pipeline from one’s wallet to in-game gear dice rolls. Guilds selling raid gear is even more common now, and with crafting orders, a whale can spend to reroll secondary stats on crafted gear.
It has literally always been like this. Where have you been? People were selling power leveling runs through stockades back when the game first started. They were selling BOE gear for gold, and that gold was obtained with a credit card through gold selling websites. The introduction of wow tokens just changed the recipient of the money from Gold farmers to Blizzard entertainment. I assure you that most people who are active players of the game are not buying tons of gear with gold that has been obtained through their credit card, and even if they were, it doesn’t affect you at all. The guilds that sell runs through challenging content, they have always been doing that, since the very beginning. I remember back in burning crusade people spamming chat that they would carry you through black temple near the end of the expansion. So there’s not like some new shift towards that. It’s always happens like that. The only thing that has shifted is that now, more than ever, you can play the game on your own and get your own gear. The introduction of solo delves has made it possible to gear up your character completely on your own without any additional help from others
With the way Warcraft is throwing currencies at players now, it’s clear Blizzard has taken more than a few cues from how gacha and other live-service outfits are doing things these days. Plenty of opportunities for ruinous, addictive behavior.
I fully agree with this and they have been ignoring player feedback about it for a while now, it’s completely bullshit how many stupid currencies we have and it almost feels like they are AI generating the game design at this point. Like they are going to chat GPT and asking, “what’s a good way to create an addictive loop of currencies for players?” Because some of them are in your bags, some of them are in the currency pane, some of them are bind on character, bind on account, some of them can be traded and some can’t. It’s utter insanity. Truly ass game design. This is the first time they finally made a shift back to using a single currency for PVE though, the flight stones and valor stones. Kind of like marks of valor back in wrath.
Come on. We both know that legitimizing the RMT system increased the number of gold buyers and normalized the process. Not only does it now capture the players who were both a) squeamish about paying unproven third parties and b) had no recourse if they did get scammed, it’s also a far more convenient process. We know the gold-for-gear (and other services) market exploded in size because Blizzard was finally forced to make systemic changes to fight/redirect services spam. Service sellers are everywhere, and there was a point they were constantly in your whispers, your mailbox, your chat, your group finder. It’s nothing like it was 15-20 years ago.
No, gold buyers are not most players (and no, I don’t care that some players are doing it). Most gacha players aren’t whales, either. My point is that yes, your game is also chasing the whales right now and will continue to design systems to do so.
We both know that legitimizing the RMT system increased the number of gold buyers and normalized the process
Really? Where is your data to back that up? Games like old school RuneScape and World of Warcraft still have people who buy gold and get banned for it all the time. You’re also conveniently disregarding lots of the benefits of this system. People can now earn currency fully in game to pay for their subscription. Completely for free, and other players are making a choice the purchase the tokens. There’s virtually no pressure in game whatsoever in World of Warcraft that prompts you to purchase them. There’s no pop-ups, no advertisements for tokens at all. This is the least predatory form of microtransaction I have ever seen. Compare this to Destiny, in which you are constantly given currency for free to use in the eververse, and repeatedly going there back and forth being flashed with bullshit items that you’ll never have enough currency to afford.
Good luck figuring out how to avoid labeling every game every made as a “skinner box”. It’s basically a jaded person’s definition of what video games are at their core.
It doesn’t have to be jaded. As with the original quote I riffed off of, these particular Skinner boxes don’t have to always be pure evil and can provide net-positive outcomes, as long as we’re clear-eyed about the consequences of participating. The latter part is what I’m trying to drive home here. Consumer behavior psychology is part of every major live-service game.
Haven’t played WoW in awhile, but do they now have ‘you can spend unlimited money’ mechanics? Previously it was just stuff like mounts and character transfers and stuff. I know you can also sell tokens for gold, but I thought gold kind of becomes irrelevant at some point. The best gear is bind on drop right? Theoretically I guess you can pay gold for boost runs, which probably counts as an endless money sink.
I kind of have a mental separation in my head between games with unlimited money sinks (like games with energy mechanics) where you can spend and spend and spend and it never stops, vs games that have a finite of things to buy.
It can still be way over priced, but there’s a maximum amount of money you can throw at the game. Even Diablo 4, with a relatively huge and highly priced number of cosmetic items has effectively a maximum price (though every new cosmetic increases that price). Vs Diablo Immortal allowing you to spend 10s of thousands of dollars and still need to keep spending. I think unlimited money mechanics should be outlawed or at least fully classified as gambling and regulated accordingly.
I think keeping you addicted so as to continue to paying a monthly subscription is bad on its own, and I don’t think it needs to be qualified by how much you spend overall if they’re still knowingly capitalizing on that addiction in an unregulated environment. But also, while I don’t know the answer to your question for a fact, I would imagine that they do have ways to spend unlimited money in that game if you’re so inclined.
Fair, but given the degradation of gaming these days I think a lot of people who aren’t paying attention have an outdated and understated view of just how bad things are. A parent might be thinking: wow had a subscription, so this game with micro transactions isn’t all that bad, not recognizing just how tuned modern predatory gaming has become at extracting money and addicting its users.
WoW mostly addicted people to playing (consuming their time), you can go hours and hours of gameplay without inputting more money. But mobile games maximize extracting maximal profit for minimal gameplay. There’s no functional difference between a gacha pull and a slot machine pull. It’s an endless, mindless set of pretty lights where you just hit the buy button over and over and over. If you sat people down and made them watch (with a running cost total) most people would immediately see the resemblance to a casino.
I think it’s helpful to break things down into more granular levels of predation, just to help clarify how bad it’s getting, even if all of it is problematic.
Without being a gacha game, World of WarCraft is guilty of a lot of the same stuff.
I’m not a fan of trying to poison the well on this discussion by trying to bring in a lot of secondary issues and try to broaden the issue to the point of uselessness.
The biggest issue with gambling is the ability to lose your money.
Sure, you can waste time with World of Warcraft. But I can also waste time playing too much Baldur’s Gate 3, or Civilization, or by binging shows on Netflix.
But none of those allow me to spend thousands or tens of thousands by gambling on mechanics within the media itself.
Because I’d say the addiction is the issue. The biggest issue with gambling is the addiction. If you’re not addicted, you’re not spending time or money beyond your means. So I’d rather not broaden it to how much money it sucks out of you when the addiction is the issue. It all relies on the same principles that we know to be worth legal regulation when it’s acknowledged as gambling. I don’t know anyone who got addicted to Netflix, but they’ll “binge” shows because we no longer live in the era where we can only watch shows according to a broadcast schedule; plus sometimes, you just want some background noise while you’re doing something else, including a show you’ve seen a million times.
Cozy Space Survivors is a short (few hours) cozy survivor-like indie game with pixel graphics. A run is only ten minutes, so it works also for people with not too much time. It is developed by a single person and it is his first release.
I’ve also tried a whole bunch, my favourite is probably Rogue: Genesia, I really like the challenges and metaprogression over some of the other titles I’ve tried
Heaven’s Vault is a game about archaeology and translating a dead language. You explore a unique solar system and discover ruins, in which you uncover artifacts, and bits of text. Through context clues, you translate the passages to uncover the storyline. It’s not difficult, so if you’re looking for a puzzle, this won’t really do it for you, but it’s more of a narrative experience. If you aren’t sure about a word or phrase, you can give it a guess (based on assigning words from a collection of possible translations to specific symbols), and the game will remember that choice and let you slowly revise your translations as you find new text that rules out prior incorrect guesses. There’s an interconnected storyline with multiple paths to follow, and a very unique world - haven’t seen anything like it in other games.
The game has a NG+ mode wherein you start with all of your translations from the first playthrough intact, but, most of the bits of text are considerably longer and more involved, letting you use your prior knowledge to uncover more of the story and the lore of the world, which is also neat.
Didn’t know that! Was going based off of the review score; 1600 reviews in 5 years seemed pretty little-known. All the same, don’t mind the downvotes - that’s the point of the thread after all. :)
This sounds really interesting. I'm gonna put this on my wishlist in hopes it goes on sale or something. Can't justify $25 right now due to circumstances.
If you enjoyed it, you might also enjoy Chants of Sennar! It’s also about translating languages; it’s more puzzle-oriented and less story-based; there’s a story to uncover, but it’s not as clear-cut and narrative driven. Still a great game, however!
Turn-based all the way. RTS is a test of how fast you can click. APM is king. Turn-based allows you to think and plan and make decisions. Brain is king.
To be clear there’s nothing wrong with liking RTS, it’s just not for me.
Yeah same. Although I started liking RTS but then over the years realized that the stressful click centric realtime part was something I liked the games in spite of, not because.
So voer the years, I slowly went more and more towards TBS.
If you haven’t tried Total War it honestly is the best of both worlds. Economy and movement is turn based with RTS battles that let you slow down and pause to issue orders.
Their biggest problem is being so invested in historical settings and semi-accuracy when, quite frankly, a lot of classical military history isn’t very interesting.
I don’t know about this case specifically, but I own Alan Wake on steam which has since been delisted because of music licenses running out. At least for that one, I still own the game on steam and can download, install and play it normally whenever I want, it’s just that people cannot buy it anymore through steam. If you’re lucky, it’s gonna be the same with the adult swim games.
Alan Wake is actually back on Steam! Remedy was able to work something out with the music rights (the reason why it was delisted) that put it back on virtual storefronts.
Am I weird for not having a backlog? I have games I haven’t played much of, usually because it didn’t click with me, but can’t thing any that I have never played.
I have almost 1000 games. There are certainly genres I own but don’t want to even install. The games that I haven’t played are those I don’t want to play but somehow ended up owning. Probably through bundle deals.
A lot of teenagers don’t like being in photos, I never did. When I got older, I was to lazy to move out of the frame, and charmander aged me was like fuck it life is great
Is the openworld meant for exploring, like pre-Starfield Bethesda game? Yeah i love those.
Is the openworld crafted only for wasting player time, like Ubisoft game? Nah.
Is the openworld crafted as a backstage for the main story but also can be explored, like GTA franchise or dying light? Yeah, those are nice.
Is the openworld only used as a backstage for the main story that doesn’t encourage exploration because it conflict with player urgency, like Metro Exodus? I’d rather not.
Skullgirls - Still the best damn fighting game ever made. I've been grinding for a full decade now, and I'll be entering Combo Breaker 2025 once again this year.
Slay the Spire - The game that ruined all other roguelikes for me. What I love about StS is that it never lets you get complacent, never lets you lean on just one good synergy that will carry you the entire run. You always have to keep adapting, and you have to have a well-rounded deck to deal with enemies that are designed to counter players who try to rely on only one thing. And when I eventually got to the point where I'd had my fill of vanilla, there's so much fun stuff from the modding community to play around with. Packmaster is incredible.
CrossCode - It's been years since I finished this RPG and its colorful cast still lives rent-free in my head. This is a game that is perfect in every way and adds up to more than the sum of its parts. Fantastic combat, tons of side content, endearing characters, emotionally powerful story, beautiful visuals, amazing soundtrack.
CrossCode is all about how it plays! That’s why there is a free Steam demo! Go give it a try! Take the best out of two popular genres, find a good balance between them and make a great game. That’s what CrossCode does. You get the puzzles of Zelda-esque dungeons and are rewarded with the great variety of equipment you know and love from RPGs. During the fast-paced battles you will use the tools you find on your journey to reveal and exploit the enemies’ weaknesses and at the same time will be able to choose equipment and skills for a more in-depth approach in fighting your enemies.
Yeah, I took a look because of your comment. Sounds like something I should try. The art is certainly appealing to me. Appreciative that more games are putting out demos lately.
I’m so glad someone’s mentioned CrossCode! Such a wonderful experience from beginning to end. The world really feels alive with every inch of a mal being used to either enhance the story or hide a puzzle! I loved seeing chests and figuring out how to get to them across several maps.
I’m really looking forward to their next project, Alabaster Dawn. I hope it’s just as good!
I think “mandatory physical versions” kinda misses the point of the issue, tbh. It’s bad digital rights laws that are the cause of the problems that you’ve mentioned, not a lack of physical media. DRM has been around a lot longer than digital downloads of games, and shutting down a game’s online services affects purchasers of physical disks just as much as digital downloaders.
Besides, mass-producing physical media is expensive, and I’d rather not give publishers another excuse to make games even more expensive than they already are.
Then you purchased a wrong game and should just play solitaire.
Witcher 3 is absolutely great, but if you just go through only the main quest, won’t explore the world and won’t do side quests then I can see you ending up disappointed.
What I like is that side quests can impact the main quest and even the ending.
But you’ve made a lot of assumptions in your comment, and you’re mistaken about most of them.
I played the side quests. Many came with a good backstory, but that is not gameplay. Nearly all were copy/paste instances from a small pool of tedious tasks. There were a few memorable exceptions, but very few.
I explored the world, as much as one can “explore” something that is fully labeled with point-of-interest markers. They lead the player to a repetitive handful of uninspired encounters, cloned over and over again.
It has plenty of other flaws as well. If you loved it, then I’m happy for you, but I found the gameplay boring.
The strengths I found in The Witcher 3 were its story, lore, characters, and Gwent. Not its gameplay.
Meanwhile, Gwent is a surprisingly well-designed strategy game. So much so that it ended up spun off into a stand-alone version (although I don’t know how good the spinoff is).
Yep. I played an earlier version but it’s the same game.
The key thing that made me notice was the scarecrow cards that allowed you to pick up your units, those make sense in Condottiere as it’s divided in rounds where you fight multiple battles, so it made sense to pick up your units if you had excess power and were winning anyway, save your strength for the next battle in the round, whereas it made a lot less sense in Gwent given its 1v1 nature and fixed amount of rounds.
Mind you Gwent evolved a lot afterwards, I don’t know much beyond the witcher 3 version, which I still enjoyed plenty.
There is no argument if the statement is objectively true
The Witcher 3’s gameplay was so bad that I couldn’t finish it (the map and the quests’ gameplay part too, but that’s another story). Gwent was pretty cool though
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