Not many people have played it I’m sure, but imagine this:
You’ve just downloaded a new free MMO. You figure it’s gonna be super pay to win, but it’s free so why not give it a shot anyway.
For the first few minutes, after you stop being confused by the UI, you start to take everything in. There are no classes, you can do whatever you want. Want to be a mage AND a warrior? Totally doable. Want to be a bard playing in the town square for tips? Thanks to the robust music system, you can. In fact, you’re having trouble finding anything you can’t do.
A few months later, things are progressing nicely. You’ve mastered every skill, played thousands of songs by now, got some pretty good gear, and you haven’t encountered even a hint of the p2w you expected. Life is great. However, you’re going to need a bit of a gear upgrade before tackling this next dungeon. You check how much it’ll cost you. 300 million.
You’ve never even seen more than 50 million in one place before. Nevertheless, you figure with hard work, you can achieve it. After a month, you’ve gathered about 100 mil by exploiting market bubbles to sell anything valuable as fast as possible and in as large of quantities as possible. It’s still not enough though. The cash shop begins to beckon you. You could pay a little real money to buy a cash shop item, and sell it for gold.
But you realize that in order to get the 200 mil you need, you’d need to spend over 100 dollars. You rationalize to yourself that hey, the p2w isn’t that bad if it’s easier to make the gold in game than it is to make the real money to buy it. You continue on your quest, but you run into an issue. There just aren’t any more bubbles to exploit. You’ve crashed the market in your quest to obtain all the gold you need without spending a penny. You cave, and buy just a couple cash shop items to sell and make up the difference. You get your shiny new equipment. You feel powerful. It’s such a huge upgrade it’s almost ridiculous. You feel like 20$ was worth it to have this much fun. Out of curiosity, you check to see how much your next upgrade will cost.
2 billion. It’s too late. You’re addicted. Sunk cost fallacy has kicked in. You’ve already invested in your character, and that next upgrade is gonna cost you 2000$.
You can’t quit. You’ve tried. There’s just no game like this anywhere else. You will spend that money eventually, no matter how hard you try to avoid it.
This is my story. I’m aiming to get that gold without spending a penny. It’s been months. I’m half a percent if the way there. It’s not gonna happen. Every day I have to pull myself away from that cash shop. It would be so easy, but so irresponsible.
But one day I will spend that money. The game is insidious like that. The only way to avoid it is to either not play the game in the first place or not give a shit about progressing. I am in neither camp.
Genuinely, I love the game, but every day I pray it gets shut down before I have the chance to pay in that much money. It’s so hard to stop myself.
Dude. Uninstall it, walk away, get a hobby with that $2000. Something you always wanted to do that’s on your bucket list. There’s no way playing a P2W game was on your bucket list.
Buy a guitar, take some lessons. That would be way more fulfilling than playing something in a virtual town square for imaginary tips.
I know you’re joking, or at least half joking, but I literally am getting help for this. I have psychiatric appointments constantly to deal with how easily I get addicted to things and occasionally try meds to try to improve my impulse control.
I haven’t quit the game because my psychiatrist and the few therapists I’ve gone through feel the game’s actually been a net positive on my life, and the real problem is my impulse control. If I wasn’t drooling over a 2000$ staff I’d be buying 2000$ worth of 40k minis that I’ll never actually get around to putting together and painting. That actually already happened a little bit during a brief period where I quit the game, and I did indeed buy a bunch of 40k shit I still haven’t assembled.
I’m relived to hear that you actually got the help you deserved because I was serious. I know how awful it feels to not be in control of yourself or your motivations and I don’t want anyone to experience it
It’s a serious issue how many games now are deliberately designed with compulsion conditioning tactics to get people playing and spending not out of legitimate interest but out of a manufactured “need”.
I heard stories of people who had to drop their favorite franchises, like sports ones, because they started to resort to that, and they knew they’d be too susceptible to keep playing without giving in.
I am diagnosed with ADHD, but more pressingly I’m diagnosed with Schizoaffective disorder. The manic phases from that make me try to empty my bank account at the slightest provocation, even after being medicated rather well for it.
The ADHD sure doesn’t help though, causing me to still be impulsive even when not in a manic phase, just less so. It’s also possible my impulse control in my manic phases is only as bad as it is because it’s combined with ADHD.
2 billion. It’s too late. You’re addicted. Sunk cost fallacy has kicked in.
I think the Sunk cost kicked in by the time you chose to spend money to get those 200 mil, since you were “already a third of the way” and “worked so hard already”
I’ve played a different one and resisted spending cash. One day I felt depression getting worse over my addiction to that game and had given all of my accounts to other players and uninstalled everything. It felt kinda bad for a week or two but then got better. I’d say you still can win that
I remember back when - at least over here in Germany - Gamestop were… cool. When they were just shop for consoles, games and some gaming geek stuff. And the whole used-sales was a small small side-business.
That was a long time ago, but damn was it awesome to have dedicated game shops.
Partner found out about the unity crap when a bunch of steam library games published updates about changes in development, at least one of which stated they’re transitioning from free to paid
Seriously? Maybe it’s just cuz I was a poor kid who had to play the same games a shit ton but I went through at least 5 different disks in my time that I can think of just from playing them too hard.
Something closer to to 50 for disks that were scratched from other shit, though that’ll include music CDs and DVDs too
The only disk that I ever had get destroyed because of my own incompetence. Was a copy of the first season of Stargate SG one, it was actually the first disc of that season. And what happened was I left it outside of its case, in an area that allowed the sun to go across it every single day for about a month and a half.
It discolored the disk, and also made it unplayable , had to buy a new one.
That was fully on me.
Many of my games that I played in the late 90s and early 2000s I would play over and over and over and over again, never scratched them.
1999 was such an amazing year in my gaming life. Rollercoaster Tycoon, Mechwarrior 3, Battlezone II, and Unreal Tournament. So, so many hours of my life spent in those. That was like, 5 years ago, right?
Do you really? Dang, I’m so jealous. I still have my original discs for I and II, at least. Yeah, my brother and I loved those as well. My dad worked in IT for EDS at the time, and got some old laptops on the cheap. So, I remember my brother and I laying on the living room floor, playing BZ facing each other over the IR ports. We started implementing gentleman’s agreements, like no killing scavengers and no attacking your opponent’s base for 30 minutes. It became a cold war game, where we would max out our units, and just spy on each other. Maybe send a single fighter over to poke at defenses. Then, I’d send over the mass of APCs I was hiding away from my base, and just annihilate everything.
And BZII had such a great mod scene! We loved XMod. We’d always say no nukes, but we always made them anyway.
I remember my first foray into online in BZ II. I didn’t realize turrets could be glitched to not deploy, so my strategy of high-armor turret run lasted about 10 minutes…
My friend’s strategy was very similar to yours when we played BZ I. He’d go silent, then the next thing everyone knew, he had a fleet of bombers wipe the map clean.
I know MechWarrior gets all the praise and hype, but I genuinely love this specific title. It’s peak isometric turn-based strategy and I love it.
Although that may have something to do with scoring that MadCat in the first or second level. I think it’s supposed to give your Commando mechs a bad time, but I lit up the oil refinery next to it and lucked into getting the pilot to eject. The thing was completely salvageable and I absolutely dominated the first half of the game with it. Good times.
That MadCat was such a gamebreaker if you could capture it. I had all my mechs just do cockpit aims since blowing the oil tanks carried a solid risk of outright destroying the mech.
and it was not nearly as easy as I’m making it sound, it involved lots of running my lance around in circles and whiffed shots (And some reloads) before i ever landed a shot on its cockpit.
Honestly Yakety Sax should have been playing the entire time while i was doing it, lol.
There are certain video games that I feel like I’ve outgrown, but I will never outgrow video games as a whole. That’s like saying you’ll outgrow movies.
I wouldn’t say that. At some point, you may just lose interest. I used to be playing all day, but during my 20s interest faded and now in my 30s, I maybe play some old games for a few hours here and there, but more for nostalgia. If I couldn’t play any games anymore, I wouldn’t say I would be terribly sad.
Maybe it’s different for you. People are different, after all.
i usually stay away from hollywood and cookie cutter movies and its fine. even then every once in a while something will catch my attention, i think you are just tired of all the really bad movies out there, like your tastes got more refined if you will.
To your point, I’ve found storytelling to become fairly predictable as I age. Not that I didn’t watch shows or movies anymore. There’s a comfort in knowing what comes next and enjoying the art of visual storytelling and good acting. It also makes shows/movies that defy expectation that much better. Not “subvert expectations done poorly” like later seasons of GoT. More like (Andor spoilers)
! when Nemik dies. I know Cassian is the Reluctant Hero™. I know he’ll need a catalyst to galvanize his will and purpose. As soon as Nemik came on screen with his fresh face and youthful enthusiasm I thought “yeah he dies by the end of ACT II, and Cassian will be so moved by his sacrifice he’ll become a rebel”. But he died and Cassian was all “Yeah that sucks. Gonna take my money and bail.” !<
Agree. I just wish bedrock was a straight port from the java version instead of being borderline ruined, the only difference should have been better performance from not using java and it being rebuilt from ground up.
You didn’t have to deal with random re-balancing changing your gameplay, spying and tracking embedded in everything, hackers ruining the game or targeting you, invasive DRM (consoles), being forced to update your system for an hour before you can play, being forced to sign up for bullshit accounts in order to play the game you just bought, games that have required updates the day they come out, your games disappearing forever because the publisher changed their mind and removed it from the store, game content being removed to sell as DLC instead, being pressured to link social media accounts, bigger companies buying the game and forcing you to use their services to play it, companies monitoring and recording player interactions, companies going under making it impossible to play the game you already bought…
Holy shit. I never realized how bad modern gaming has gotten.
Holy shit, I read some of the other day that there was a bunch of garbage microtransactions but I had no idea it was this bad. And you can’t edit your characters without paying $2? What the fuck?
that has been a thing since monster hunter world tbh, if people are only finding about this now, they havent been playing capcom games with custom characters in the past decade.
It’s been a complaint every time, too. If people are only finding out about these disagreements now, they haven’t been discussing Capcom custom characters with people for the last decade.
This misinfo is so widespread it hurts my brain. You can edit your character easily by buying an item in game for a negligible amount of gold. A currency which is easily obtained. Same for all the other mtx offers. Stop spreading falsehoods.
Ofcourse, that being overlooked is completely stupid. Same goes for the horrible performance. Something which should’ve been there from the start. Those are legit complaints. Spreading misinfo about mtx is not part of that now is it?
That’s been a part of the game design since the first one was released over a decade ago. This is literally more than ten year old news people are getting riled up about for some reason.
Not exactly. The marriage faction was kind of buggy on launch and Lydia was somehow both in the faction and not in the faction. Wiki says it was fixed in patch 1.5.24.
lemmy.world
Ważne