Comment on Anon fixes Super Mario Bros

• UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  If I’m playing a game where it feels like spending money like that is the only way to have fun with it, I just drop the game.

  A big part of the “hook” in GACHA and other whale-hunting games is the initial hook of a fun and engaging setup. Genshin Impact and Sword of Convallaria both stick out to me as initially very fun and captivating games. They draw you in with the cut scenes and ramp up the curve like a normal open world JRPG.

  But the longer you play, the more you start tripping over resource requirements and timers on abilities and the need to do “daily” activities that involve logging on every day. All of this is fun in the early cycles but feels more and more like work by the later stages of the game. Dungeons start looking more and more basic - big empty rooms with a bunch of respawns in the center. Fights feel more contingent on having a bigger number than any kind of strategy or skill.

  If you’ve played older traditional JRPGs before, it’ll start feeling weird because you know you should be expecting the game to pick up towards a dramatic conclusion after 100 hours of play. But these games just… go on forever. There’s no payoff. You get tired and bored and you leave.

  But if you haven’t played older traditional JRPGs, you’re just falling into this skinner box of induced anxiety. The game becomes habit-forming. The induced reflex to trigger a feature or use a power that’s increasingly paywalled encourages you to open your (parent’s) wallet.

  Actually, I don’t even really bother with any games that I understand to have p2w aspects or any mtx that aren’t just cosmetic.

  There’s a networking effect to a lot of these games. Up front, you’re strongly encouraged to get your friends to join in. And friends playing a game together can have enormous staying power. I know people who have been running the same D&D game for 20 years (literally the same characters and world, going on into the level 200+ range as they just crank those numbers higher). I know a couple that’s been doing WoW for their entire relationship - they started playing when they started dating and now they’ve got their ten-year-old son along for the ride.

  I think part of what gives these games staying power is that they don’t require you to empty your savings account to participate. But I think its naive to discount the addictive power of a community space you’re comfortable socializing in.

  These places are predatory. I can’t discount them just because I’m not one of the ones that got eaten.

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  • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Agreed, I’m hoping to impart my mindset on my daughter so she recognizes the trap before spending money on it. The games use an exponential growth curve, which means you can spend some money to be dominant for a little while, but the enemies will always catch up because that’s what it’s designed to do. So any power purchase is temporary and will set you up to feel like you need to spend even more to “keep” the “investment” you’ve already made.

    Which also makes quitting harder because quitting entirely is admitting whatever money was spent on in game shit was wasted. It’s just sunk cost fallacy and there really should be regulation on shit like that.

    And, to add insult to injury, the people running the game can decide at any point that it’s not worth running anymore and just shut it all down, leaving players that wasted tons of money with nothing.

    I prefer subscriptions over that and still to this day don’t mind that I spent a lot of money on my wow subscription because I knew what I was paying for.

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