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Comment by taurath | Hacker News Reader

Rewarding play is addictive play - the rewards are why its addictive.

There's people who've put 10,000 hours into Diablo 2, for example, a game that is incredibly repetitive at the highest level - they play for the chance of that one great random drop.

Microtransaction games generally trade money or time, and then put barriers up on the time, or increase it vastly. The difference is when it feels like you're being asked for money it turns it exploitive, rather than being asked to spend 100 hours waiting for a yellow item to drop (that being more akin to "skill" and "investment").

Players want their reward fix. Microtransaction games are frequently like a watered-down drug. Just like social media, I don't think that just because people use them means they're a good thing - its junk food for the mind.

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> Rewarding play is addictive play - the rewards are why its addictive

true, but addictive gameplay isn't necessarily rewarding. That's the critical difference I was trying to emphasize.

I think it is - you're being rewarded with "progress", even as the game gives you the concept.

That's "a reward". I'm talking about whether at the end of a gaming session you feel good and would like to play again (rewarding) or if you feel unfulfilled and want to play more try and get that fulfillment. Rewarding.

> they play for the chance of that one great random drop

You know, I've always been confused by this: if a game is using random chance to require probabilistic hours/days of effort in order to find some drop, my first response to finding that out is not "grinding for the drop", but rather "hacking the game to give myself that thing." (First thing that comes to mind: the Sword of Kings in Earthbound.)

In such cases, the only thing standing in my way of the goal is mindless—and totally automatable—repetition. I could write a bot to grind a Sword of Kings for me. Heck, I could download someone else's bot they already wrote. So what's the difference between downloading+running such a bot, and just editing the game in a save-game editor to give myself the sword? Same amount of effort. Same reward. Either way I'm not really "playing the game." But either way, I get to skip the part of the game that isn't fun, and get back to doing something that is fun.

The only place where I feel that this approach doesn't apply, is when the game isn't using HWRNG randomness, but rather deterministic seed-based randomness, like Minecraft or many modern roguelikes. If the resources I want are only available down on the 90th floor of the dungeon in this seed—and that's a deterministic fact-of-life of the seed—then that's just the scenario I signed up to play, and I'll accept it. But, of course, with such systems, I get to "choose my luck" by looking for a generous or mean seed someone else discovered during their own playthrough (or using a bot to scan for such seeds.)

> You know, I've always been confused by this: if a game is using random chance to require probabilistic hours/days of effort in order to find some drop, my first response to finding that out is not "grinding for the drop", but rather "hacking the game to give myself that thing." (First thing that comes to mind: the Sword of Kings in Earthbound.)

I don't think I was nearly as smart as you but Maplestory was actually my first introduction to computing.

The game was really grindy and required you to just use your mana (I was a mage), and then sit to recover it, and then go back to killing stuff. It seems like they didn't do server side checks so I actually learned how to use a memory editor and just save the mana field which made it so that it didn't go down.

Of course, the problem with this is that it morally questionable since it gives you an unfair advantage and gets you banned.

People _like_ doing something repetitively and getting random rewards. It triggers reward systems in the brain.

I can understand that when it takes a few minutes at most before—if not the reward you’re looking for—at least some kind of reinforcement stimulus (e.g., with a slot machine, seeing two of the three wheels line up, making you feel like you “almost got it.”) That seems “fun”, if just due to a bug in human brain-hardware that you should probably not want-to-want.

But these games don’t work like this. When you’re trying to find a rare drop, there’s nothing giving you the feeling that you’re getting any “closer” to it. You just have to throw days of blind dice rolls for no reward at the game, before it’ll turn around and give you the reward once. Variable-schedule rewards shouldn’t actually work at that sparse a frequency. People who get easily addicted to things don’t usually find themselves grinding for rare drops.

The people who do do this kind of grinding are people with big reserves of determination. And I don’t really get what they get out of it.

One incentive is that you get other more common drops along the way which help beef up your arsenal and help you progress at faster and faster rates.

It builds up. Early in the game you get useful drops very quickly, and slowly slowly over time the frequency goes down until you grind for weeks just waiting for that single drop.

Good observation about Diablo. Diablo 1 was the last Blizzard game whose art style I liked, but I stopped playing when I realized that I was clicking on enemies until they're dead. The actual core game mechanics are garbage.

I was old enough to play the Diablos, Starcraft and Warcraft when they came out. When I was kid playing Diablo it don’t bother me. When Diablo III came out I played it as an adult and realize it was just clicking. I hated the game. Starcraft is still nice but I don’t play it.

Almost bought Diablo for my Switch this year and recalled how much of it is just clicking.

Or perhaps Diablo III wasn't a very good game?

I enjoyed Diablo 2 a lot when I was younger but didn't care anywhere near as much for my experience with 3. I think the main issue is that with 2 I mostly played it in the same room as friends I was playing it with, and it was more something to do while we would hang out and talk to each other. I played with friends when I played 3 too, but it wasn't in person and I think that hurt it

I recently finished Titan Quest (with the latest expansion), a Diablo clone. And I found that most of the gameplay wasn't just clicking: it was choosing on which enemy to click (to prioritise the most dangerous enemy first for example), when and where to use my skills/scrolls/potions; then outside of combat, which equipment to use, which skills/stats to upgrade, which upgrade to apply on which piece of equipment. Another important part was also the art style/ambience of the levels, which was an important part of my enjoyment of the game.

On the other hand I spent little time grinding and have little desire to play the game a second time on harder difficulty.

That is exactly the same as Diablo and all true. The metagame is moderately interesting and the artwork / ambiance / style (in Diablo 1, for me) is nice.

Yes, that's why I disagreed with the idea that Diablo = click on enemies until they're dead; it's a little more than that.

Would you apply the same reasoning to card games like Hearthstone or Magic Arena?

I was thinking about Hearthstone reading his comment, it's exactly like that -- huge time investment if you want to pay nothing or a little bit, less time investment if you pay.

That said, the amount you have to pay to get a large collection in Hearthstone is staggering, if you drop $80 every few months for the next expansion you still only have a few of the epic and legendary cards.

And those cards become useless in 9 months as they rotate out of standard. Have a great deck you find fun to play one month? Gauranteed it no longer works after another 2. It’s an incredibly efficient scheme to make you want to buy more packs, if you’ve decided you want to be good at the game.

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