Comment by pling | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pling | Hacker News Reader

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Spot on.

I did a contract a few years ago for a startup 'gaming' company. They were extracting cash out of people for plays in their games I.e. you buy credit and throw that into nonrefundable plays. In the end if you built up enough virtual credits, you could trade them for expensive consumer electronics.

I was hired to fix their infrastructure.

Well it turns out most of their infrastructure was used to create fake players that these people were pitted against. The odds were fixed and the fake players win nearly every time. Occasionally they'd send someone a MacBook or something by pulling a number from a hat. They were fixed so short term wins were possible but it tailed off in the form 1-e^x.

So basically they were forcing people to toil with no return.

This crossed my ethical limit, so I reported this to ASA (Im in the UK too) and trading standards and immediately quit. The company scurried away with no one ever to be seen again. Turns out their op was running from Gibraltar and everyone was dodgy.

A couple of weeks later I got a narky letter threatening to sue me big time, so I wrote a 'fuck you assholes' reply and folded my limited company and started another one.

If any of the assholes, and you know who you are, are reading this, I'm still armed to deal with your shit.

I was tempted to make a similar game infrastructure design decision recently, namely, faking players in game highly dependant on reaching critical volume of players, in attempt to alleviate problem of players waiting too long for their next opponent.

I, of course, said 'no' to myself, and then tried to work around it, and [some technical difficulties ommited] we now have awesome feature presented as Special Encounter where players play against NPCs, but still weighed similarly to plays against real players.

Being plain evil is easy way out, with higher risk assigned to those decisions. But somewhere in the problem-solution space, there's an ethical solution begging to be found, frequently better performant than the obvious evil one.

Unrelated, how long did it took you to fold a company? It's a lengthy and painful process here, even if you're profitable and without debts to anyone.

Fake players are not necessarily a bad thing. You don't have to program them to fix the game as the company pling worked for did. You can make them perform as average players or even weak ones (so you have many winning and happy real players). You decided to openly advertise them as NPCs and that's ok but you might have just hinted about their nature. Plenty of games have bots and NPCs. Actually, up to the time of Internet games everybody played against bots all the time and the end level bosses were usually very strong. Nobody complained (too much) about it.

This presentation works better, as it looks like a feature, not a "hack". Also, I don't really agree that winning players are neccesarily happy players. We took special care for bots to match very closely player's skill level so it leads to intense games, instead of wins.

If the objective is to gain by winning then losing players aren't happy. If playing it is the point then it matters less.

However most of the rip off games are chance based so playing it isn't relevant.

As long as you mark fake players as such, I don't think anyone will complain. The problem is when you present bots as real player. At this point you're just lying to people.

Sounds very similar to the mechanics of most 'penny auction' websites...

Yeah it wasn't far off that.

If the human race grew out of this disrespect for itself and utmost respect for self-gain, things would be better for everyone.

It disgusts me.

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