Oh Blizzard, how you have fallen (Diablo Immortal).

[NineSpine]

No, the legality revolves around it being considered gambling

They make gambling illegal because as a business model it is ________ and _______.

Fill in the blanks.

[Jerot]

No, I don't think it's nonsense. People are shadily induced into spending money on P2W games; people are similarly shadily induced into spending time on grindy games.

If you argue "people are freely choosing to grind so it must be fun", I will respond "people are freely choosing to spend $$$$ on the P2W game, so that must be fun."

If your whole argument hinges on time being more valuable than money. I don't know why you would defend a game that is intentionally making itself more grindy to make more money by selling people time skips.

[rhorle]

Selling power/loot boosts does hurt other players experience of the game. It encourages the developer to skew game mechanics and balance to favor paying players to the detriment of the core game experience. And they take no additional development resources to create. Its taking the cheap and lazy route to monetization.

Game mechanics are not skewed in DI though. The developers even created the strife debuff. "Bonuses from Legendary Gems, Magic and Breakthrough Affixes, and other percentage effects reduced while fighting players". So they went out of their way to balance the game between those who pay and those who don't. Or those who advance higher and those who don't.

[Zoneseek]

Were you surprised that the version of Diablo that had been stripped down for mobile played like a stripped down version of Diablo? It actually plays pretty sweetly on mobile .

I guess so. I don't play mobile games so really didn't have a point of reference, and after seeing this train wreck I think ive made the right choice!

[Osmeric]

If your whole argument hinges on time being more valuable than money.

Nowhere did I claim that. I'm pointing out an equivalence.

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You're missing the point.

I'm not saying they didn't spend time - I'm saying to equate that time with money is nonsense because it's not time you'd have spent earning money either way, game or no game.

No, it's you who are missing the point.

Time has value. We get a handle on that value by looking at what one might earn in that time. There are other ways to get the value: how much are we willing to pay to have someone else do something for us? However you do this, the value of 17,000 hours (two years) is going to be very large. The game you /play for that long had better be extremely entertaining to justify that consumption of your time. And if a game is that entertaining, it's also worth spending a very large amount of $$$$ on it instead.

I suspect the addictive behavior that leads to years spent playing a game is of a kind with the addictive behavior that leads to whales dumping many thousands of dollars on a game. Both are kind of pathological.

[Jerot]

Game mechanics are not skewed in DI though. The developers even created the strife debuff. "Bonuses from Legendary Gems, Magic and Breakthrough Affixes, and other percentage effects reduced while fighting players". So they went out of their way to balance the game between those who pay and those who don't. Or those who advance higher and those who don't.

I'm struggling to think of one ARPG that didn't have some kind of scaling in pvp, particularly when a lot of powerful effects were on gear and not from character skills.

One mechanic to partially keep the overwhelming power of whales from completely decimating all F2P player interest in PvP does not mean it is not skewed.

If they didn't, only whales would PvP. Then who would they get to feel powerful against? Why buy power at all if they couldn't flaunt it? They have to give players the feeling there is a chance to win, maybe if they bought a couple more crests or the battle pass...

It was actually possible to max out gems in D3 within a season. And there weren't any further enhancements gated behind paying real money for materials. That isn't the case in DI. How is that not skewed?

If it was reasonable to farm high rank gems F2P, who would pay for crests? If people could easily farm gold and materials, why spend money on passes, bundles, and boosts to get more?

They have to create value by making these things harder to acquire than they would be in a game where you cannot buy them.

Going out of their way to balance pvp would be making it so all players had the same stats and abilities and removing gear from the equation entirely. Some games have preset builds or sets to choose from. Others scale everyones gear levels to be roughly equal.

But then they might not sell as much power and might have to rely on cosmetic sales like well monetized F2P titles do. And that requires paying artists. (Less profit margins, non-consumable, non-recurring revenue eewww.)

[Biomega]

No, it's you who are missing the point.

Time has value.

BUT NOT MONETARY VALUE, unless it's time you'd actually otherwise spend earning money.

That's why saying sleeping costs money is inane - that is not time you could allocate to earning money, just like leisure time is not time you would allocate to earning money.

That kind of time has subjective, individual value. You can quibble over whether or not it's wise to spend that time playing video games rather than writing sonnets or whatever, but leisure time is an essential element of dignified human existence and CANNOT simply be substituted unequivocally for paid labor.

That's patently absurd on every level.

[Osmeric]

BUT NOT MONETARY VALUE,

Of course it does. Its value is what one is willing to exchange it for. This happens when we hire someone to do something for us (so we don't have to), when we buy labor saving devices, when we pay tolls on an expressway, when we work for wages.

This is bread and butter stuff for economists.

If you look at regulations, their desirability is computed based on the statistical value of a human life, which (for example) the NRC takes to be $9M (so, a regulation that saves 1 life better have a cost of at most $9M). If you divide this value by the number of hours in a life, you get about $14/hour. This is in the same ballpark of the number I used before.

[Biomega]

Of course it does. Its value is what one is willing to exchange it for. This happens when we hire someone to do something for us (so we don't have to), when we buy labor saving devices, when we pay tolls on an expressway, when we work for wages.

This is bread and butter stuff for economists.

It's like you didn't even read the rest of my post.

That applies only to time you could/would ACTUALLY EXCHANGE. It's not a simple equation that presupposes ALL TIME is exchangeable.

Because it isn't.

Your statement is completely inane, what's next "you know, reading a bedtime story to your kid cost you $14.50". NO IT DIDN'T. That's not time that is available. To make that equivalence is fallacious and absurd.

[Mojo03]

That's the thing I don't think people grasp.

It's f2p, buy it's not really free, you're giving it your time, which you have a finite amount of.

Go spend it doing something worthwhile. If you want to spend it playing a game, there is TONS of good game options right now or better yet go develop a skill or learn something.

Don't spend it on this manipulative and shitty game, soon to be full of just shitty addicts and whales still playing it, that makes shitty people at a shitty company rich and sets a terrible precedent for the future of gaming.

[rhorle]

I'm struggling to think of one ARPG that didn't have some kind of scaling in pvp, particularly when a lot of powerful effects were on gear and not from character skills.

That is irrelelvant. It shows that Blizzard/Netease has not given favor to those who pay their way. They reduce their power in the name of balance. There is no indication that they made things harder to acquire in order to create value. Besides from the amount of people whining about it that are not even interested in playing the game it shows they have inherent value of their own, right? Otherwise you wouldn't have devoted so much time over something that has no value, right?

If neither works when you want to sell power to give the paying player an advantage then they wouldn't have the Strife debuff that scales better geared players down, right? You defeat your entire post with that one statement.

[Osmeric]

It's like you didn't even read the rest of my post.

That applies only to time you could/would ACTUALLY EXCHANGE. It's not a simple equation that presupposes ALL TIME is exchangeable.

Because it isn't.

Your statement is completely inane, what's next "you know, reading a bedtime story to your kid cost you $14.50". NO IT DIDN'T. That's not time that is available. To make that equivalence is fallacious and absurd.

You're displaying a completely ludicrous lack of understanding of basic economics. The value of ones time can be, and is, computed all the time. This has meaning even if you aren't exchanging it. Time is something that's available in limited supply for each of us, and economics is all about the value of things under this sort of scarcity.

If you have ever decided if it was worth doing something one way or another, and you took the times involved into account, you were implicitly assigning a value to your time.

I understand that the realization that you've blown enormous amounts of value in playing a game can be disconcerting, if you don't think the game was actually worth what that time should have been worth to you.

[rhorle]

Go spend it doing something worthwhile. If you want to spend it playing a game, there is TONS of good game options right now or better yet go develop a skill or learn something. Don't spend it on this shitty shallow game, that supports a shitty company, soon to be full of just shitty addicts and whales playing it.

Then shouldn't you be spending it on something worthwhile rather then discussing a terrible game? It is almost as if people can enjoy different things and have decided to spend their time on something they enjoy. Just because you also wouldn't enjoy it doesn't mean they are wrong for deciding to spend their time on that thing.

If all of Blizzards games are full of addicts and whales then so be it. Why is that a concern of you? Move on.

[Hctaz]

So are we just ignoring the selling of skins whose entire purpose exists just to drain money? It is amusing how things are different when you like the game.

Dude, it's literally just skins.

You don't need to buy new characters, you can't buy stronger characters or better versions of gear.
You can still play the full entire game without purchasing a skin.

You cannot play the full entire Diablo Immortal game as it currently exists unless you spend a ton of real world money on the game. There's just a time gated one per month cap on Legendary Crests which are needed to progress your character unless you drop real money. If you do drop real money, you can buy infinite amounts of them. Do you not see the obvious problem?

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If all of Blizzards games are full of addicts and whales then so be it. Why is that a concern of you? Move on.

It's a concern because other companies will see it as an option for them to make money and will start doing this.

If one company gets away with it, then others will follow suite. We won't have games without MTX because every game will eventually have MTX. Snip that shit in the bud before it has a chance to grow into anything. That's why people are complaining.

[rhorle]

Dude, it's literally just skins.

And? They still exist to drain money from consumers and they use predatory things like loot boxes and fear of missing out in order to sell more. And again you can play the full DI game as it currently exists with out spending a single cent on the game. Stop spreading misinformation about the game.

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It's a concern because other companies will see it as an option for them to make money and will start doing this. If one company gets away with it, then others will follow suite. We won't have games without MTX because every game will eventually have MTX. Snip that shit in the bud before it has a chance to grow into anything. That's why people are complaining.

Thousands of companies have already gotten away with it. You, and the other poster, spending time discussing it on these forums isn't going to stop any companies from going down that path. It is hilarious that you think you are fighting some righteous fight against the evil of game development by discussing here. It has also already grown into stuff because this is nothing new for the gaming industry or mobile gaming. lmao.

[Hctaz]

No, I don't think it's nonsense. People are shadily induced into spending money on P2W games; people are similarly shadily induced into spending time on grindy games.

If you argue "people are freely choosing to grind so it must be fun", I will respond "people are freely choosing to spend $$$$ on the P2W game, so that must be fun."

I don't think that argument is quite the same, but I do see where you're coming from to some regard.

The pay to win stuff in Immortal is different because it's not only actively costing you real money, but it's also usually still costing you time as well. Like in the case of Immortal, you aren't actually paying to skip playing the game. You're paying to skip the arbitrary time gating.

Example is like... if you're somebody who is trying to farm for a 5 star legendary gem, you PHYSICALLY cannot obtain one unless you use a Legendary Crest and put it into an Elder Rift. The rift itself takes about 2-5 minutes to complete.
If you are playing the game Free to Play, you are strictly limited to being only able to buy ONE Legendary Crest per month. Doesn't matter if you logged in, bought one Crest, completed the rift, and then logged out for 30 days or if you played 8 hours a day every single day for those 30 days. You are still only going to get one chance (a low chance at that) to get a 5 star gem.

Or you can spend about 3 bucks per crest to buy as many as you want at any period in time as you want. You still have to complete the rifts, but you skip the arbitrary ingame timer that says you aren't allowed to farm more.

It would sorta be like if you could spend $40 a week to reset your raid lockout so you can get twice as much loot as the people who don't pay any money to do so.
You aren't buying extra loot, you're buying the opportunity to go back in and spend 3 hours clearing the raid for a second chance at loot.

[Jerot]

It shows that Blizzard/Netease has not given favor to those who pay their way. They reduce their power in the name of balance. There is no indication that they made things harder to acquire in order to create value.

You can spend 10 years grinding a character or one month and six figures to reach the same point. (If we ignore all the mechanics which are paid-only)

I explained the logic to you, if you want to be deliberately obtuse that's on you. You can argue it isn't AS skewed, then we get into subjective values and what I think is a fair amount versus what you think. But to deny it's skewed at all? Come on.

And? They still exist to drain money from consumers and they use predatory things like loot boxes and fear of missing out in order to sell more.

"Then don't buy them, play the game for free or move on", at least you won't be slower in progression, kicked from a clan, or weaker in PvP because you don't own a skin.


P.S. Believe it or not, we're not all flat out anti-blizzard. I was okay with Overwatch and Heroes of the Storms monetization. I would even argue HoTs was a better game for its genre than LoL.

[Ashana Darkmoon]

You're displaying a completely ludicrous lack of understanding of basic economics. The value of ones time can be, and is, computed all the time. This has meaning even if you aren't exchanging it. Time is something that's available in limited supply for each of us, and economics is all about the value of things under this sort of scarcity.

If you have ever decided if it was worth doing something one way or another, and you took the times involved into account, you were implicitly assigning a value to your time.

I understand that the realization that you've blown enormous amounts of value in playing a game can be disconcerting, if you don't think the game was actually worth what that time should have been worth to you.

Evaluating everything in your life like this is a quick way to fall into terrible depression or psychotic episode! No mentally sound person sits around evaluating every minute of every day in terms of "how much is this minute worth to me?" It's like peering behind the veil in an incredibly unhealthy way lmao

[Jerot]

Game mechanics are not skewed in DI though. The developers even created the strife debuff. "Bonuses from Legendary Gems, Magic and Breakthrough Affixes, and other percentage effects reduced while fighting players". So they went out of their way to balance the game between those who pay and those who don't. Or those who advance higher and those who don't.

I'll be honest, I never tried PvP before I uninstalled. But with the barest amount of research, that proved to be a big lie.

https://youtu.be/Zdz4JOAR8pE

[Kantoro]

The game is shallow trash with a strong emphasis on presentation and making it as easy as possible to play to mask it all.

The game pretty much plays itself.

Combat is ability spam. You don't even really need to aim, since it's auto lock on you can just press the button. As long as you keep abilities on CD, it's only possible to lose if you're a total idiot.

They tell you exactly where to go and what to do pretty much at all times.

Gearing consists of equipping stuff with a green arrow on it and upgrading gems/gear when you can.

This game is actual rat in a maze garbage with all the worst aspects of game monetization and designed to milk addicts and whales.

And they turned Diablo into a cheap theme park.

Company has completely traded its soul for money.

Gotta say, of all the responses, this one is the most accurate depiction of the game.