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Comment by javajosh | Hacker News Reader

Immortal can be played for the mainline story without spending any money at all. So far, at least up to level 40 (about 12 hours of gameplay) I haven't felt the urge to spend money. It's a little like Path of Exile in that you can enjoy the base game and the story for free; it's only if you "get into it" that you start spending money (I never "got into it). I can't help but feel it's fair to give away a really nice game to everyone, supported by the super fans who stick around to dwell in the experience without bound.

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Path of the Exile is not a far comparison. The most you can enhance is extra sorted inventory space.

In Immortal Cosmetics are locked to one character. PoE cross character, remind able, and serve as trophies between leagues.

That's not to mention the breaking of the mold to a near open world versus instanced. Which drives FOMO. As well how the transactions are gamified.

Why people dislike p2w games is that it directly effects gameplay via inflation of grind.

It is nit good game design. Good profit making sure, but at some point you have to admit that these studios pull talent from Vegas.

Be fair. This is an obligation of major studios to make as much profit as possible. However is this short term versus long term? Will the make the needed profit to make up for the lack of trust in the long run?

And with the Path of Exile inventory space purchase, the game is effectively a free trial with an optional purchase when you get sufficiently far into the game for inventory space and management to matter.

the "free trial" is still a great deal though. you get around 10 hours of gameplay per class if you're new (I'm aware the actual way to play the campaign takes only 5-6 hours)

also, there's a cap on how much you can spend on inventory tabs. and even then you don't "win", you still have to grind and be smart about what you do

The problem with Path of Exile's campaign is that it is dated, frustrating and unfun.

It pushes away new players with difficult instead of convincing them to play.

Maybe the pshchologists hired by the company that makes the game made a psychological profile of whales - and this allows good conversion. However they also wfite thwt they dont use data for decisions (just vibes) so it is not clear.

They seem to be lucky with no real competition apart from maybe Diablo3.

If you treat the campaign as a separate single player game that expects you to finish in 10-15 hours and never have to run it again, it's less bad. That's how new players should feel about it. If they like the game to the point to repeat the campaign, obviously they're the target audience for the game (those like to play RPG with cheatsheets on the side) and can deal with the campaign the "proper" way. I'm not saying they shouldn't fix the campaign though, but anything that we do 100 times over will be boring so I'm not sure what they can do

In Diablo 2 a friend could "rush you through the acts" what took like 20-30 minutes, not 5-10 hours

To you it is a good deal where you save some dollars but at expense of the poor people with addiction disorders who get ruined by this. This isn't a good deal for society as a whole which is why such practices ought to be illegal.

I think free to play is fine when they employ less predatory practices, like for example league of legends. Some spent a lot of money in that game, so it works as a business strategy, but it wasn't designed to trigger sick people into a spiral where they spend more and more money. You buy a thing, now you have the thing, you don't pay money to pass artificial barriers or hoping to get the thing you want in a lottery. Paying money to pass a barrier just to get to another barrier you need to pay money to pass is also predatory in my opinion, not just the random lootboxes.

are you assuming I'm talking about D:I? I'm talking about PoE. To the average "gamers", they're not getting addicted to the campaign because it's so god damned hard for the uninitiated. If you get past the campaign and you still want more, obviously you gotta pay for the game, like any other serious game. There's a hard cap on how spending money influences your gameplay (iirc around $40-50), so it's not fair to compare this practice to what D:I (and countless other mobile games) do

I would say that there is a huge difference between the amount of money spent on inventory tabs, and what is happening in diablo immortal, where it takes 100k for people to max out their characters.

It's not fair, it's predatory behavior aimed at addicts and children.

I hope the rest of the EU will follow the fine example set by NL and BE.

it's predatory behavior aimed at addicts and children.

Have you played the game? I saw the OG YT video on this, and I was expecting to see lots of in-your-face tactics, but wanted to be fair before passing judgement. I really don't think it's predatory. At least, not yet. Maybe things change at higher levels - they sometimes do. (I'm looking for points where you can't progress in the mainline quest without spending money or ridiculous time. Haven't seen that yet but it may be there.)

I don't think it matters _when_ it becomes predatory. Whether or not gambling should be legal aside, if gambling for minors is illegal in a jurisdiction then i'd expect any game that becomes predatory at any point to be managed as gambling.

All of this is subject to the definition of gambling, predatory, etc - of which i'm not trying to argue. Just saying that befriending children with the goal of handing them drugs after a "long" period doesn't change that i'm still handing them drugs. Same goes for this, i would think - if it falls within those definitions, of course.

Diablo Immortal is wild too because Diablo 2 primed me 15 years ago to be a gambling addict. It took them awhile but the finally turned the casino of my teens into a real casino. I hate it, I wish I could get my teen hours back that I played Diablo 2.

Diablo Immoral!

I played a bunch of D2 as well, and D3. The thing with those games is that you can still enjoy the end game content after finishing the main game. Repeat on higher difficulty and then you have the option of respecing without having to start from scratch.

If you are having to pay to enjoy end game now, that's pretty sad.

Agreed. I've often thought of this, with respect to MMOs, and RPGs/etc with drop rates.

Inherently games are all just dopamine drivers. Some are of course based on physical skills (coordination/timing/etc), others on knowledge as a skill (exploiting game mechanics/etc). Where it gets fuzzy fast for me is very basic MMOs, RPGs, etc - RNG based mechanics. The fact that i completed the dungeon with a skill (knowledge/etc to play the dungeon correctly and win) doesn't seem, to me, to change the RNG roll at the end.

I'm in no way arguing that any RNG equates to gambling.. in the classical sense.. but it kinda does, if you squint. So when does it become bad? Is it when we make gambling addicts? Because old fashioned games with RNG rewards (loot/etc) likely form addicts (if we stretch the word for discussion).. myself included. Or is it just when we involve money?

Money seems an easy line to draw.. but is it fair to children if we make them gambling addicts and only charge them once they hit 18? Spend their youth training for the casinos, only to take part when their old enough to lose it all?

I don't have any answers.. but it feels like we're playing fast and loose with weaponized dopamine here. As with most of our society, i suppose.

I fully agree that we're training future addicts. And it's not like people don't know. There will be a deliberate sequence of hook, time sink, random reward because that's most addictive.

But I find balancing this very difficult. We want fun games and fun things are addictive. But we don't want addict-creating games. So how do you measure which amount of addiction is the correct amount?

I suspect we're unable to do anything until we understand the brain better, what defines addiction (at a very measurable, concrete way), etc.

The one thing that does scare me about addiction + money is that, like Diablo, the companies incentive seems aligned with getting players to spend vast quantities of hours and money. Regardless of what it is right now or what value it offers for free, that seems to be their incentive.

Simple buy models without MTX seem an easier model to keep company incentives aligned with player incentives.

They give out daily free items to draw you into the cash shop and then have small purchase offers to break the first purchase barrier. They sell in game currency to obfuscate the money you're spending and sell it in random amounts so you need to overbuy or make multiple purchases. They set dubious cost savings measures of 500-800% value on items to make them more artificially tantalizing.

They got me for $7 with the small cheap purchases. Then I hit level 60 and found myself thinking “well $100 is something I can easily afford, why not spend it?”.

I then uninstalled the game. My wife was glad and said I’d been a grumpy zombie all weekend, ignoring her and my kids.

People aren’t really addicted to progress, that’s window dressing for the mechanic that gives you the gambler’s high.

I think a lot of folks who are effectively immune to gambling’s allure dismiss the danger to others when they don’t see anything slowing or blocking progression because that’s what would motivate them to even entertain the thought of engaging the gambling mechanic. I think what you’re really evaluating is whether or not it’s pay to win which while terrible, isn’t insidiously predatory.

Have you played it? I have. It's constantly throwing bundles with "+x00% value" in your face and does everything it can to try to get you to pay for stuff. And it gets far far worse when you hit the level cap. And no, it's not a valid excuse that it's a free game, so "I shouldn't complain". I'll gladly pay 60-120 Euros for a complete game as long as it treats me fairly as a customer.

Being predatory isn't about gating later advancement, that's actually less of a problem in my eyes, that's just a different form of DLC. What makes some games predatory is when when combine payments with randomness as to what benefit you get. That's why people are calling it gbling, because it uses the same mechanisms and is using all the lessons learned from casinos as to how to effectively maximize engagement and income.

The difference? Gambling is often regulated so there's specific payout percentages. Because there's not a direct monetary payout but instead a decoupled game benefit, it's not regulated the same way, so they're free to do whatever they want with the payouts (including valuing all the items however they want if they are called on to), as well as market to children who may not recognize the system for what it is.

I agree. Then hopefully some companies will shift back to the model of making games and selling them. This whole FTP model has horribly misaligned incentives.

To be clear, it's not the free-to-play model itself which is illegal here. There are plenty of F2P games which are fine in these countries. It's specifically gambling-style loot boxes where you pay to have a small chance of winning very valuable items which is banned.

F2P games which are clear about exactly what you're getting for your money in each transaction are fine, and there are plenty of F2P games which do this successfully and legally.

There are games with loot-boxes that I believe have implemented it fairly so it is difficult to generalize this for a law. I am thinking of games like Star Trek Online. It has loot boxes but overall a very fair monetization in my opinion and one of the best models I have ever seen for a free to play game. Don't know if that changed since I played that ages ago but it still is very alive as far as I know. You were able to buy loot-boxes with ingame currency too via currency conversion and there was a market where players could trade ingame vs bought currency. It was or is a really smart system.

In general I hate f2p games and any kind of micro-transaction with a loathing passion but this is an example of an extremely fair system in my opinion. I will certainly not play Diablo Immortal. In my opinion they killed the IP and I don't believe Blizzard will ever get to its former success even when completely discounting WoW.

Europeans understand that you don't have to play, right? I'm not playing. I don't think I've ever played a game with a lootbox. No part of me feels compelled to legislate away the liberties of my fellow countrymen.

It is mostly children playing these games, and yes we absolutely should save our children from gambling-based games.

So you maintain that it is the role of the state to determine what our children do, and you think that in order to have the state determine what children do...we need to restrict what everyone else does as well?

If my tax money pays for treating the ruined lives that these games create, then I feel justified in legislating the risk away.

Your tax money pays for treating the ruined lives that alcohol creates. Should alcohol be illegal?

It isn't designed to prod you into spending much before level 40 precisely because they want you to form the daily habit, the investment first. Whales are harder to create now that awareness of gacha is more mainstream. Make no mistake, you'll feel the pull to swipe soon, do report back about whether you decided to quit or pay in a few weeks.

And my golden rule of thumb, you either spend 0 in microtransaction, or at least 1000$, almost never in between since usually this game is designed with additional content that will dangling your carrot further and further, needing more and more money.

Isn't spending "at least $1000" already whale territory?

Maybe if you spend that in a month and only play for a month. Whale territory isn't even affordable for average people.

That's silly. I've spent like $40 in Hearthstone over the last 5-6 years. And I know a lot of people like that. It's not "all or nothing", plus there's a sense of fairness when you really like a f2p game, to spend something out of appreciation. (Although in general I'll cap my own spending to the price of a typical AAA game, e.g. $60, because otherwise I feel stupid and taken advantage of.)

Back in the earliest days of Hearthstone, control warrior was more colloquially known as “wallet warrior” due to how expensive it was to craft all the epics and legendaries needed to fill out the meta deck. And yet, it wasn’t the best deck in the game. Depending on when exactly we’re talking about, that title belonged to decks like miracle rogue (two legendaries but only Leeroy was truly core) or combo druid (zero legendaries iirc, possibly Cenarius). And then you had incredibly cheap aggro decks like zoo warlock that could still compete at the highest ranks.

By the time I quit HS at the beginning of this year, the “cheap” aggro decks generally cost about as much as old miracle rogue and nearly all the non-aggro top meta lists were at least in the same ballpark as a deck formerly considered so expensive it was nicknamed wallet warrior.

The game has definitely gotten dramatically more expensive for anyone looking to branch outside the aggro archetype. What turned me off enough to finally quit were the yearly tweaks to monetization that kept being sold as a good thing but were obviously just further efforts at obfuscating the cost of playing.

- played since beta, sunk a couple grand into ranked standard, maintained legend or dad legend (rank 5) every month for years. Idk if I’m a whale, but the predatory practices finally reached a head

Gacha meaning: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=gacha

Very little like Path Of Exile. That game can be played to its full extent without ever spending. If you feel like spending 5-10 dollars you can get a premium tab so your item gets easily listed on trade -- but that's a single purchase and then you are done with spending. This makes it easier to trade your gear for in game currency with others -- but it's possible if clunky without and also there's a solo self found mode where you can't trade anyways so why bother. I can't emphasize enough: there's nothing in Path Of Exile where real world money affects the gameplay. You can't get better gear, skill points or whatever by paying real world money for it.

No. Sell me a game, not a matryoshka of skinner boxes I have to pay for.

I don't get this comment. This is how the game is incompatible with gambling regulation. This is same as "casinos are great to stay because foods and drinks are cheap", it's cheap because the cost is offset by gambling income which is horrible. Am I missing something?

Not remotely similar to Path of Exile and that comparison reveals inexperience in the field.

Diablo Immoral is a very thinly veiled Lost Ark clone gacha game reskinned as a simplified diablo 3. There is very little meaningful feeling to loot. The skills are all really simple and there's just a couple different builds to pick between that it even lays it out for you. It hand holds you all the way through to the point of being bottable with an auto-clicker.

You can't do any of that in Path of Exile and you find meaningful items all the way throughout the game at every step of the way and your build truly your own if you want it to be at every step of the way. Then the content itself has great variety and there is extensive challenge to it.

I haven't gotten to end-game in diablo immoral but I wouldn't be surprised if it's literally a direct clone of end-game lost ark but simpler and basically hard stops you if you don't pay for legendary gem upgrades on every piece of gear. And at that point there really is nothing to the game at all. It's pay us money to beat the monster. No technical skills no build depth no variety of equipment. It's your 5 star gacha rolls or no dice.

Even at level 40 now I'm experiencing serious content rot. There's just nothing to the game at all. It is such a thin veil it's easy to see through instantaneously. It's the same as Lost Ark. Do this auto-generated dungeon from this town portal in town or do that one. They're all the same thing with very little variation. But you don't even get anything out of them meaningful. You either get a very obviously rapidly declining EXP curve or a tiny bit of loot (unless you bring those precious legendary crests!)

The first part of your comment resonates with me, there are certainly freemium games out there that feel great if you commit to not spend any money on them. I put about 100 hours into Destiny 2, and got a lot of fun and immersion out of it before I quit -- I felt like I was "over" the free content.

Meanwhile, I see people who are deep into that game (season passes, expansions, etc) and they look like someone you know who's on the bad end of an unhealthy relationship. They keep on playing and paying for the new content, but they loathe it and just can't summon the strength to quit.

A season pass is quite different to a loot box, however. You're spending a fixed amount each month and hopefully getting entertainment value in return. Not much different to a Netflix or Spotify subscription.

Loot boxes, on the other hand, are tapping in to addictive gambling behaviours. They're like casino slot machines, except unregulated!

I agree with this. Not a popular opinion, because it's not railing on a company. Free to play with legitimate and enjoyable content is a gift.

I don't think I can enjoy a game so much that I'd spend more than $100 for 40 hours of play. Beyond that dollar amount, it's really $/hr for me. If I'm sitting there spending $50 in a play session, then I will not be able to continue doing so without guilt and self-loathing.

Games, particularly RPGs are about optimizing characters and builds. Especially Diablo/ARPGs. The campaign was never the meat of the game. It's a part of it, but not the core. You can't actually participate in the core gameplay loop without spending decades in game or spending tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Actually in the case of Immortal some things are simply not possible by only playing.

That's not a game anymore, it's a skinner box.

I'm always fascinated by $/hr of entertainment.

Video games are generally extremely cost efficient entertainment. A $20 Minecraft purchase can lead to hundreds of hours of entertainment. $20 to see Top Gun: Maverick in IMAX is 2 hours of entertainment.

Everyone has their spending habits, but for me I don't think twice about going to see a movie with my family of 6. But I'm pretty selective about buying games.

Hello from the Netherlands!

We consider that it's a really bad idea to have gambling games that are deliberately engineered to be as addictive as possible to encourage players to spend money, particularly when they are available to children.

Interestingly, casinos _are_ allowed here, unlike in much of the US.

> supported by the super fans who stick around to dwell in the experience without bound.

Your "super fan" is what most of us call "a gambling addict".

> Interestingly, casinos _are_ allowed here, unlike in much of the US.

But casino's and other forms of gambling are licensed, and they are held to strict rules. For example: casino's will refuse entry to people when their gambling habit becomes problematic. They also don't allow in minors.

I bet Blizzard doesn't do any of those things. If they wanted, they could simply apply for a license and play by the rules.

Some "free to pay" games are actually quite fun if you force yourself to not pay (or severely limit paying) - Hearthstone is a good one - I've hundreds of wins across the various game modes and only made one purchase to get the beta gold legendary something or other.

You can play it without paying but good luck with the end-game content. To get the most out of a single item at that stage in the game you either have to pay or wait multiple weeks.

If you've made it to the end maybe you should pay?

If it was a mainline Diablo game I might, but that's not the kind of product they're selling. If I chose to treat it as such I would be dropping significantly more than the usual 60-70 dollars. That's a bad deal, even more so for those with gambling tendencies.

I got probably a thousand hours out of Diablo 2 for $100 total. Somehow I feel like the value proposition of $110,000 to have a maxed out character isn’t so great.

I can't believe people are even playing devil's advocate here. The level of quality has dropped so far the company should go bankrupt over games like this in a world not driven by perverse incentives.

These US-based companies that made a couple good games really have too much goodwill going for them. Same with Bethesda. Imagine if CDProject did something like this, the snarky anglo hate would be infinite.

I mean a lot of US companies are like this. Some grifter VC firm buys the face of your favorite thing then starts pumping out garbage and gaslights you for noticing. The people who worked on Diablo 2 or even the original World of Warcraft are long since gone.

I’ve even noticed it with Cocomelon, the YouTube toddler show, funny enough. Then I looked it up and realized it had been bought by a kids show corporation. I could just tell! The episodes are just different and weird somehow. Like the lessons they’re teaching seem off. Before it was just an enterprising mom and dad running a YouTube channel teaching wholesome values.

It also explains all the new toys and marketing around it.

There's a lot of MTX but my guess is that $100k number will change over time. Surely they'll introduce new tiers to reach (or buy). You'll never finish... but on the other hand it's pointless to be maxed out anyway.

The same can also be said for other highly addictive and risky activities. It's possible to try some highly addictive drug once and not get hooked or "use responsibly" - but most would say it's not worth the risk. It's especially strange in this case because there are games that look and play significantly better that don't have the same risks!

Actual lv. 60 player here. (proof: https://twitter.com/minimaxir/status/1533201559776923650 )

There's an interesting amount of misinformation regarding MTX in Diablo Immortal. But the TL;DR is that the significant gameplay advantages from MTX only really apply at higher Paragon levels, especially not before lv. 60. The primary way of increasing power before that is the same as it was in any Diablo; get better gear, which can't be accelerated by MTX at all.

That said, post-60 there are still a few systemic issues surprisingly not explicitly tied to the existence of MTX. (required grouping for dungeons is not fun)

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