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Comment by donkeyd | Hacker News Reader

I used to live by the same principles, viewing in-app-purchases as something that's always bad. I have now, though, decided that I will decide what value a game has to me and will probably spend that amount on in-app-purchases. If the game has purchases that I think are worth it though. In Pokemon Go i haven't found them worth it yet, but that may come later.

Also, I think a game shouldn't impose too many boundaries when not buying anything in-game. So I won't buy off timers that essentially break the game (i.e. Candy Crush, though I never played that, so I might be wrong). I will, however pay for something to get that instant gratification of speeding up a timer that isn't game breaking.

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> In Pokemon Go i haven't found them worth it yet, but that may come later.

It's not a requirement but I highly recommend to people to buy some "Lucky Eggs (2X XP for 30 minutes) and extra "Incense" (attract more Pokemon for 30 minutes) and use them together in the early game.

The reason why is that you get 2X the experience for discovering a new Pokemon which you will do a lot of early on. By doubling that further you save a ton of time in getting to a reasonably high level and collecting a lot of Pokemon quickly.

I'd also buy some "Egg Incubators". You get 1 for free and it has infinite uses. The ones you can buy get 3 uses before they "break". My advice is to use the infinite one on all eggs that will hatch after 2km of walking and use the breakable ones on 5km and 10km eggs. You get more use out of them this way. And eggs can hatch new Pokemon which benefit from the bonus described above.

For a few dollars you'll save many, many hours which to me at least makes the game more enjoyable.

also, save up a bunch of Pokemon ready to evolve (such as the ever plentiful Pidgey) and do them all at once with a Lucky Egg. 500 xp per evolution turns to 1000, making leveling pretty fast. The last few days I've been saving all of my stuff until the end of the day to evolve and easily pick up 12k+ xp

it's tempting to evolve everything as soon as you can, but waiting to do batch evolutions with double xp is much more effective

Good idea. I haven't evolved many of my Pokemon's yet. Just saving the dust and candy for when I want to evolve higher level captures I'll get later. Of course, at some point you need to figure out when it makes sense to just start evolving!

But, I'll certainly use this idea when that time comes!

Why bother playing the game at all if you're paying to skip it?

You're not. You're paying to play it more efficiently. I could spend 30 minutes collecting 8 Pokemon (lets say that gives you 3000XP) or I could use that same 30 minutes to collect 16 of them and double my XP on top of that (giving you 12,000XP). This lets me play the game faster. You aren't buying anything other than the ability to do more with less time.

The delays in these games are designed to make you pay to skip them. If it wasn't a free-to-play game, the delays wouldn't have been there in the first place. They're just there to make the game worse.

Exactly. So play games that don't use these abusive tactics, instead of rewarding them...

You don't have to buy anything and the experience is just fine. There is nor requirement to buy anything - the game leaves plenty to do. It's just the option is there if you want to go faster.

Also, it's a free game. If they charged $60, then I'd get your point. But the game is based on a "Freemium" model like tons of other software.

> You don't have to buy anything and the experience is just fine.

As implied by the earlier commenters, that's obviously not the case.

> It's just the option is there if you want to go faster.

It's only an "option" because they crippled the game in the first place.

> Also, it's a free game. If they charged $60, then I'd get your point. But the game is based on a "Freemium" model like tons of other software.

And thus, freemium is inherently abusive. But even then, there are more acceptable ways to do it.

For example, look at how Smite does this: free to download, you can pick between grinding/microtransactions to unlock each character individually, or pay $30 to unlock everything in one go and effectively go back to what the game should have been from the start. Cosmetics are still paywalled, but at least there are no more microtransactions that have any effect on gameplay.

I'm not against paying for games. I'm against constantly being hounded to pay for the same thing over and over again.

I have come to see the same. I want to reward game creators for giving me enjoyable entertainment, and taking the risk by going free-to-play rather than forcing me into an up-front purchase.

I admit have become a bit jaded when it comes to gaming generally, but I still think it's worthwhile to speak with my wallet when I see someone doing something I think is good.

> Also, I think a game shouldn't impose too many boundaries when not buying anything in-game

This is the big problem the way I see it. Done badly, in game purchases become cheats, and I don't want to spend money on cheats.

Not for any moral reasons, but because it's no fun.

In game purchases that don't serve as cheats is another matter. E.g. as you mention speeding up something where the only difference would be that you'd have to wait longer to achieve the same.

I disagree, I'm all for buying cosmetics etc (praise gaben) to support a game. But I fundamentally am not going to spend money to skip over an artificial timesink that only exists to get you to spend money to speed it up. That's not content, it's a joke.

The idea of the two suggested actions being "spend more money or close the game and wait 2 hours" should be indicative of how they view the player. I'm perfectly happy to just close the thing and go play something else.

free to play, with no gameplay restrictions is an excellent model. when you can then do IAP to get "extras", it's a great "pay what you feel it is worth" type model.

another mobile game, Vainglory, does this with currency to unlock heros and skins. you can play the game to earn currency to get them, or just purchase outright.

Also works well in CS:GO. The skins add nothing to the actual game play, yet people like the value they add. Just a shame that it brings kids into a gambling state of mind. Would've been nicer if you could just buy them outright.

You can, it's an actual market. The price is just high, because the chance to get them is low. If you could buy them for what I assume you expect to be a lower amount, they would not sell nearly as many chests, or no one would want the item anymore because it's no longer rare.

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