I did not know this one was so close to release! I am glad to see that it is awesome, and now I don’t want to know anything else about the game because I want to be surprised!
Seems unlikely that all these would have fallen here.
I wonder what sort of creature would go around collecting them, only to leave them out where they would reflect light and attract the attention of anyone passing by. It’s almost as if…
I was a young idiot making minimum wage and I spent 500 dollars in a gacha game over a three month period. It’s been years and I still wake up at night, remember this and feel the strongest remorse.
I’m sorry, it really sounds like it turned into an addiction for you. Very happy that you got away from it. Be careful with addictive substances or activities in your life, some people have a predisposition for it.
I very much have that predisposition. I’ve noticed that I have addictive behavior towards sugar and caffeine as well (I’m fine as long as I don’t have any, but if I have some I’ll continue to crave more at shorter and shorter intervals until I go to sleep and it resets), and recently celebrated my third month nicotine free after about four years total smoking and then vaping.
Addictive proclivities are a personal defect normally. But when you exist in a context where there are people whose job it is to get you hooked on things, they become a handicap.
I don’t allow myself to play any mobile games anymore. Spent like $300 on one of those idle games. Not worth it. I refuse to play any free to play titles at all, no matter the platform these days.
I once spent $10 on a mobile game. You can get a special item by purchasing gems or by winning coins for which you have to grind for a year. After getting the item, i felt so disgusted that I gave up mobile gaming and shifted to PC.
This was pretty much my experience. I played some browser game with friends, way before gatcha and mobile games. Gor today’s standards, the game was actually pretty good, but i started like a week or two later than my friends so i payed for a booster pack or something that was like 10 dollars and i immediately regretted it so hard. I almost felt sick and like an idiot.
You escaped addiction (hopefully) without too many long-term consequences, hopefully that remorse will help you avoid similar situations in the future :)
Damn, I’ve never thought of myself as a whale before but I guess for a while there I was. I wonder how many of the people we see in these games with all the premium characters and skins are like me, struggling. I always thought of them as having more money than sense but maybe they (we) lack both.
I watched a documentary on Darksyde Phil. He managed to spend 44000 on a Wrestling gambling game per month.
I think the bright side is that you learned something even tho it was a 500 dollar lesson.
I used to work with a guy who was super cheap. Like i sometimes payed for his coffee or whatever, because i always did that with friends and co workers, and sometimes they would pay too. He never did that. One day we talked about video games and spending habits. He said he doesn’t play video games, but he played clash of clans. I didn’t really know what clash of clans is, aside from seeing some screenshots and seeing memes. He said that he spend 500-800 dollars a month on the game. It kinda blew me away, because i knew that whales often spend a bunch of cash on games, i just was a bit shocked about the amount and that it was HIM. He looked at me and said, oh that’s nothing, you should see what my girlfriend spends on candy crush.
Sigma Star Saga is an odd RPG game where the random encounters are short side scrolling shmup segments. I really enjoyed the amount of it that I played, but you can get screwed in some encounters as it gives you a random ship each time, and some are worse than others.
The problem is the new wave of gacha games are really selling you on characters and Hoyoverse isn’t even hiding it anymore: The more money you pour into Zenless Zone Zero, the less clothes the Proxy wear in the unlockables.
World of Warcraft and Diablo are gacha. Every time you play, you are “pulling” and hoping for a good drop(item). What modern gacha games did, is take that gameplay/psychological feature and directly monetize it(instead of indirectly monetizing it through a subscription/1 time payment).
But both are gambling. I am ok with having age restrictions but we need to be honest with ourselves. And what is “fun” is whatever makes neurons activate. Gambling(ie rpg elements) has always been a core mechanic for many games.
Nah, they are not comparable in a meaningful way. Sure, at a high level, you can apply aspects of “gambling” to both examples. But the biggest and most important point is the ability to spend actual money for additional changes at “winning”.
People are against gaming because of some deep-seating fear of Random Number Generation by itself. They are against it because of how easy it is to lose money.
It depends on if you value your time or not. That’s what you gamble in WoW. If you don’t get your drop at the end of the raid, you lost time. When a new expansion obsoletes your gear, you lost time.
Oh wait, you literally have to buy play-time to even do the raid in the first place and roll the wheel. Not to mention the (sub)time it takes to level up and gear up.
Yeah. Just because you are not pulling out your wallet at every kill doesn’t mean you aren’t gambling and losing, both time and money.
In that case aren’t most games gambling? You fight a boss and you die. You have failed and you lose progress of the boss fight which means the failed fight was a waste of time. Gambling.
My actual point is that despite us having a relatively good intuition on what is gambling, defining what gambling really is is pretty hard. Be too broad and you will end up marking non-gambling things as gambling, be too narrow and you get things like lootboxes that definitely feel like gambling but don’t actually fit most legal definitions of gambling.
Your definition is so broad it encompasses almost all games and as such is useless when you want to use it to regulate gambling on games.
It is gambling becaae there is a “house” you at playing against, whoever sets the odds and has a financial interest in them.
If you’re playing a singleplayer game, you are still triggering the same mechanisms, but no one is profiting from you staying up until 3am playing a singleplayer game you already paid for.
So all subscription games are gambling? What about Fallout 76? It’s not gambling if you just buy the game but if you buy the subscription the game becomes gambling despite the game fundamentally stays the same and the subscription doesn’t add any RNG to the game?
I stopped playing WoW because it didn’t value my time. There is a limit to how much you can spend on WoW. Sure, you can buy gold, but it honestly won’t help you that much. The upgrades come from the weekly content, mostly.
And then there’s the mobile stuff where whales rule the day.
Modern gacha games are more exploitative and effective. But there is a reason why almost all conventional games have “rpg elements” nowadays. I am an old gamer and i remember when this happened.
Game devs realized that if they have “number goes up” mechanics in their games, those games will be more popular and they will sell more. Thats how all games, including multiplayer competitive games, started adding temporary progression(session based, ie buying items between rounds in counterstrike) and then permanent progression(unlocking attachments and prestiging in call of duty).
Quake and unreal didnt have any progression, yet they were very popular multiplayer games. Many people blamed the lack of “parallel progression” systems in starcraft 2, for its failure(sc2 eventually added more parallel progression). Mechabellum, an autobattler(the modern equivalent of an rts), has like 3 different numbers that go up, on top of unlocking unit abilities and skins.
The mobile game market is very competitive and game development is extremely fast and iterative. So they leapfrogged ahead of conventional gaming when it comes to all kinds of user metric manipulation(addictiveness, engagement, etc). Dont hate the player, hate the game.
Funnily enough, the most popular mobile games atm are by Hoyoverse and they arent even that exploitative. They are AAA games, with decent story, graphics, gameplay and the gacha is just there for the more vulnerable/rich people. IMO playing them as f2p is not only viable but actually more enjoyable(ie challenging instead of rolfstomping everything).
If only there were more conventional games as a service that could pump the amount and quality of content that Hoyoverse creates for their games. But Hoyoverse is a private company, probably funded by the chinese government, so they can afford to reinvest all those billions back into the game development, unlike other games. And it shows.
So ultimately, gacha is kinda like real life gambling. I am kinda ok with it, as long as it isnt promoted and its profits go to a good place(funding education or creating decent games).
The original versions of the game wouldn’t allow you to simply spend real money for in game benefits.
That’s since changed, as in game marketplaces have given users the ability to buy up their level, their gear, and their various grindable ranks.
But this is a relatively new iteration of the franchise. They also don’t use the “stars” power curve, wherein characters need to spend exponentially more in game currency to achieve linear power scale.
It’s a small measure, but I’d really like to see a law where gacha games need to publicly advertise their odds and allow independent verification.
The biggest effect it would have is, the odds would need to be static. Many gacha systems have been accused of putting a hand on the wheel, assuring someone “so close to their needed item” must keep going through a series of failures.
I don’t really know a lot about gatcha games, the only one i played was some DBZ game, because i wanted to get back into DBZ, and shiny things. I never payed money for it, because honestly i didn’t really see the point, aside from it being an obvious waste of money, and at the end of the day, i never felt like i missed out of anything, because of maybe luck or just grinding or not caring enough.
anyway, i’m pretty sure they said what the odds are of pulling a specific card, and that it’s like in the 1% or 0.5% or whatever. But i don’t think that helps at all, because people who gamble like to game, no matter the odds.
Without spending money, a lot of these games simply become boring and deeply repetitive over time.
The system for farming “free” in game currency feels more like a chore than entertainment. The benefits of each upgrade is more marginal while the adversaries progress rapidly.
There’s a “git good” angle to this kind of game, as it drifts from an FF-on-easy-mode to Dark-Souls-on-Legendary. But if I want that experience, why not just buy a copy of a Souls game?
Certainly Eldin Ring is worth a few hundred hours, has a much richer experience, and won’t immolate my wallet inside a month.
Quite a few years ago now I went to my nan’s house for Christmas.
My cousin, I think he was about 13, had got a £50 Steam voucher for some games. Him and my other cousin who was a couple of year older went to Steam, swapped the voucher for something, and then took that to a gambling site. I don’t know if they’re still a thing. It was something to do with Counter Strike drops I think. Heavily advertised by YouTubers who ran them, with a bunch of videos showing them winning. The sort of thing they’d be sent to prison for in any right thinking society.
They took that £50, put it in, and clicked. The younger one went “what now?” and the older one just went “oh, nothing. It’s gone.” A couple of games worth of money, gone. For nothing.
He looked like he was about to cry, and only didn’t because he was going through that acting tough phase.
He’s an accountant now, and plays crown green bowling. I like to think that was a relatively cheap lesson in why not to fuck around with gambling.
Curious to see what that would do to the industry as a whole. But this is not entirely our of line with what countries like Korea, China, and Japan have already been fiddling with.
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Aktywne