Diablo Immortal player spends $100k, cant find anyone suitable to matchmake with
eurogamer.net
eurogamer.net
It would be more disturbing if players at this end of the spending curve _didn't_ encounter game-breaking issues. I'd be more alarmed if the headline read: "After $100K, YouTuber professes, 'This is where the game gets fun.'"
Would it be less worrisome if the game "only" required, say, $600 to max out?
It seems in both cases consumers are at the precipice of a digital money pit and it's not clear whose responsibility it is to keep people from falling in.
The lessons from gambling say that the maximum profit is gained from a few addicted high rollers, so I guess that's the route blizzard went.
And congratulations to Blizzard for finding a way to efficiently separate rich idiots from their money like this. Well done.
I'm half-joking, but the joke is based on sad truths.
It's hard to imagine pay-2-win not having similar devil's bargain problems for "wealth redistribution" that some of the players most interested/encouraged to pursue it aren't always the players that can truly afford it.
I am a hyper-competitive gamer, but I would never participate in a pay-to-win ecosystem. It's the last place I would want to spend my time.
When I lose a game, I want to feel full responsibility for that loss so I can improve. I want the win to feel entirely of my own doing. By shelling out cash for "wins", I am completely destroying this experience.
How long can someone pay for fake outcomes before they get bored and move on? I can't imagine you will find a long term community around titles like this. All you are doing is extracting money from people who forgot how to have fun.
I have no problem with people buying fancy skins (or companies making money on them) because it doesn't provide players any advantage.
However, do I think sometimes even cosmetics can get rather expensive / predatory / addictive? Yes, they're not immune to other problems. Especially when they come in loot boxes. Rocket League has some neat cosmetics but I'll be damned if I'm going to pay $20 for a neat looking goal explosion or whatever...
Are they a late stage addiction phenomena? Like, lowest effort gamling dose, or something?
They are digital heroin, except they've been engineered instead of a quirk of evolution. And it is perfectly legal. We KNOW that certain people get addicted to these machines, to the point of being basically physically unable to control their interactions with gambling machines, and it is perfectly legal to start a company and hire psychologists and build machines with the sole purpose and goal of milking these problem gamblers for every cent they have access to, including debt they could conceivably take on.
It's like food science trying to meticulously create all those "super addictive foods" that hit salty/savory/sweet/umami/fatty taste buds all at once in wild combinations. Overwhelm the senses and tell people they are having an exciting time doing practically nothing.
Traditional gamblers seem easier to understand. All you need is some magical thinking about randomness or probability to convince yourself you'll come out ahead. It would appear to me the trick here is much more about getting people emotionally invested in the game first. I'm not sure how many people you could get addicted to a slot machine if the money wasn't real.
I heard a rumor the match making service is wholesale copied from StarCraft 2 - on that game if you win about 10 times in a row you’re facing world champions - the match making really wants you to play against players better than you.
If the gear didn’t help the top of the ladder would be packed full of crazy talented kids.
In Hearthstone that you'd trounce new people while you move up the ranks after the monthly rank reset. It had to be demoralizing for the F2P Hearthstone users that are losing 10 games in a row.
He presumably wanted to be able to stomp on everyone, not realizing that the game would quite correctly not pair people with him that he could stomp all over. It's based on a reasonable distribution of ability levels, he's enough of an outlier that there's nobody near him and thus no matches.
"Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!" - Alice in Wonderland
The protagonist spends Yuan 30 billion in a game. The game currency looks a lot like bitcoin and after the initial purchase no further purchases can be made. So, he controls the in-game premium currency market and owns the vast majority. That unlocks all kinds of shenanigans. The longer it goes on, the more he alters the game mechanics. Dungeon bosses recognize him as their master and he owns entire cities, for example.