Maybe its just me but I never liked the games who adjusted difficulty ie as I leveled. That's lazy design. Completely demotivated me to try to do sidequests / other ways to improve myself before moving to more difficult quests/areas. I mean what would be the point? Just facing more difficult enemies.
Compare it to the game who gets the difficulty balance just right with static setup, and every gain makes a bit of difference and game is never frustratingly hard nor too easy. Areas of initial struggle become walk in the park. To me that's rewarding.
Maybe some middle road where enemies can get a bit harder, but still they become more defeatable as player progresses would be ideal. Or even better - make it tweakable in the menu (but that's a mammoth effort to do and test)
Puzzle games seem like the perfect example of an entire genre that strives to get the difficulty level “just right.”
I think Stephen’s Sausage Roll might be my absolute favorite recent example of this. The Talos Principle and the Witness are also other great recent examples.
Also, to your last comment about adjusting difficulty in the UI: many, many single player action/adventure games have this. It’s been a commonplace thing for quite a while now. It also enables cool things like maximal-difficulty speed runs.
I recently had a great time watching someone speed run Metal Gear Solid 2 at its absolute highest difficulty level (that I don’t think the game even offers to players until the first play through is completed). I believe it was a recorded speed running-for-cancer event or something like that. I’ll have to try to find the YouTube video.
I found The Witness perfectly balanced. None of the puzzles were insurmountable but some took plenty of headscratching. The way that if you get stuck you can go and try a different area of the island made it - I might have lost interest if I'd been stuck with no room for manoeuvre.
I think depends on the implementation. Skyrim does dynamic leveling and this has the advantage you are not stuck in the beginners zone where you have to do most of the quests so you can get enough levels and money to be able to exit this zone.
I also like Gothic series did the static enemy levels and enemy would respawn only on Chapter changes, this gave you a god feeling when you could finally access a hard area and defeat the guys that were impossible to scratch at start.
So IMO both Skyrim and gothic work because they feet the game and the player base that is targeting and give a different feel of the world, there is no better system IMO. Also in Skyrim the stronger enemies differ visually too, is not just a hidden number that is increased, stronger enemy types with stronger gear is spawn.
I think this is the optimal model, set the level of enemies to wherever you’re at on arriving and then leave them at that level going forward. That way as you progress through the game you’re always being challenged by new areas, but you can always go back to earlier areas if you just want to unwind and stomp low-level enemies.
It depends on the implementation, I do not like how in witcher 3 the quests,weapons,NPCs,creatures have a level so a cool sword is garbage after 1 hours and a some random NPC will drop a rusty ugly sword with a better number. I prefer the games where you don't have a level printed over the enemy head, all low level bandits are the same level but you can find in other areas a different NPC camp with different gear that can defeat you in one heat.
There’s grey area. For example: Half Life 2. Every so often there’s a downtime area full of boxes. The amount of loot in those boxes is enough to get your ammo up to the levels the game thinks you need for the next challenge.
Is this dynamic difficulty? Depends on how you view it. The worse you were at the previous section, the better your rewards, but maybe the challenge is just “get to the next area by any means necessary”.
The article never adequately explains how the increase in difficulty affects multiplayer gaming. Football is played beween 2 players, so the difficulty is defined by the skill of the competitor. Does EA favor one of the players? How would that result in increased spending?
It's supposed to work as follows, from the article:
> A popular video titled “TOP 10 SCRIPTING PROOF! EA 100% EXPOSED! FIFA 19” purports to show 10 different clips demonstrating dynamic difficulty adjustment during gameplay, mostly near-misses, goals that should have gone in but don’t, that sort of thing.
A game is just a simulation and the skill of the player doesn't influence every aspect. Any event that is not in complete control can be nudged to benefit the weaker player. For example, a ball that's just in or out.
The article doesn't state it, but you indicate the game is favoring the weaker player.
There's still a missing link: the article makes an assumption that the incentive to boost the weaker player is greater earnings. Otherwise it's hard to get upset about the practice.
But how does it translate to increased spending? I would guess that having more matched games would lead to both players having more fun and being more satified with their current skill levels.
Yes, its about keeping people playing and not rage quitting. I love halo, but after a few months of playing, I start matching against semi-pros (or koreans at night =P) that are far too good and even though I've been getting better, it reaches a point where it's more stressful than fun.
> unfairly increase the difficulty of multiplayer mode online matches in order to encourage players to spend real-world money to boost their chances of winning
I admit it's a big leap and this technology seems like a good idea to an extend but it doesn't reward getting good at the game as much. As mentioned elsewhere, Elo-type matching is an alternative but does have the disadvantage you never get to beat down on noobs.
Some gamers indeed hypothesize that the earning of more money is indeed through better engagement based on artificially balancing games:
> "EA Wants to Get Rid of Fair Matchmaking to Focus on Player Spending & Engagement"
The 10 scripting examples video in the article states that to increase your chance of winning the game, you need to have the best players on your team. Apparently there's some online market where players can be bought and sold. The theory is that EA makes players lose, so they feel more incentives to spend money to buy stronger players.
I saw the video, but I have to say I am not wholly convinced of their argument. For example 1 of the "scripting examples" show a ball going through a goalkeepers' hands. In my opinion the game could have already decided that the player would shoot inside the goal (partially using RNG) and perhaps the rendering messed up a bit when the goalkeeper was jumping towards the ball. I am not sure if this is solid proof of so-called "scripting". Other examples can't really convince me either.
In for example Fifa, at the start of a new release you start with a random squad of average players and usually 1 decent 83 odd rated player.
Now it could be that you know all the moves, tricks and are really good overall, but in general most people are only average players. So then they adjust the odds that you are constantly faced with better players, or they adjust the odds so that when you're 70 rated striker takes a shot from x, he's going to miss. If your opponent's 70 rated striker takes a shot from the opposite x side of the pitch he's going to score, and so on.
Doing this they can influence the losing player to feel as if they need to spend money buying card/player packs, so they can "increase in skill".
Isn’t this just normal matchmaking like in every game, getting you close to 50 percent win rate with the only way to escape that by truly reaching the top of the ladder or quiting before you win rate declines.
There has been a recent trend of online games which actually just use bots. It took people a very long time to notice. I think the purpose in these sorts of games is to make the player feel they are more competent than they are (how often would you expect to win in a real 12 person lobby?), but they could also be used to more nefarious ends.
You unlock players by buying "card packs" that give you random players, some better than others. The hope is that people will see that you are more likely to win if you spend money, then spend more money themselves. Activision has a similar patent. Here's the summary of it[1].
> The system matches an experienced player with a novice player to encourage the novice player to make purchases of items used by the experienced player. A novice player may wish to emulate the marquee player by obtaining weapons or other items used by the marquee player.
There is talk of something similar in EA's Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes gacha game, but in this case it pertains specifically to the drop rates for things (shards or gear fragments) that players are farming.
Specifically, the drop rates for stuff decreases the closer the player is to important goals/thresholds. The intent is to force the player is to burn through available energy and, being so close to finishing something, that they spend premium currency to buy energy to get more chances for the shard/fragment to drop to complete the thing faster.
There was even talk of a software patent that EA might hold governing this very behavior.
I would be very interested in reading a statistical analysis of droprates in gacha games, as I feel like I've noticed this stuff in my own play. But short of hard evidence (plus the ease of explaining away this stuff to the nature of randomness) it's difficult for anyone to make accusations that aren't baseless.
It's sickening, really. Jim Sterling's video on lootboxes [1] really hammered it home for me, especially the section where he quotes from a talk by one such developer [2]. The talk is literally titled "Let's go whaling", a reference to getting people to "whale" the game by paying tons of money. Fate Grand Order, a gacha game, even lampshades it:
> What’s interesting about Fate/Grand Order is that the game’s marketing features a vicious caricature of dedicated players. She’s a slobbering, lecherous, gambling-addicted little monster.
Gacha whales are mad. They say it's disposable income, but seeing 4-5 figures in USD spent per year I can only conclude they've got major gambling issues...
Players like to tell stories of Saudi Princes but apparently a large number of whales are just hopelessly addicted people that aren't as well off as you'd hope.
It's a "well-known" fact that in WoW new characters receive something awesome very quickly. It was not acknowledged by developers, but plenty of people including me observed that behaviour.
After I dinged 120 level in BfA on new account, I got alpaca mount from the first world boss which is rare drop. My friend resubscribed after 3 years break and got Lich King mount from the first kill (also very rare drop).
I think these are coincidences rather than planned/rigged drops. The first 3 times I ran Throne of Thunder for transmog, I got "Clutch of Ji-Kun" to drop. I thought it was a high-chance drop until a friend told me he was trying to get it for years. (2.69% chance according to Wowhead) I was subbed for a while, started playing a while before then, nothing to suggest it was gamed to keep me going.
Does how long you keep it matter? I wouldn’t think so, since the dopamine hit only lasts a few seconds. In fact, replacing it quickly would only reinforce the skinner box cycle.
Eh? That would make them keep playing for those few days though, wouldn't it? That's the most important thing with subscription based games like WoW, keep them playing.
> The first time I was in Las Vegas I sat down and figured out the odds for everything, and I discovered that the odds for the crap table were something like .493. If I bet a dollar, it would only cost me 1.4 cents. So I thought to myself, "Why am I so reluctant to bet? It hardly costs anything!"
> So I started betting, and right away I lost five dollars in succession--one, two, three, four, five. I was supposed to be out only seven cents; instead, I was five dollars behind! I've never gambled since then (with my own money, that is). I'm very lucky that I started off losing.
I know in many markets (China notably) exact drop rates must be published. But some publishers pull out rather than reveal them to the western markets too.
As for an analysis I remember reading this for Genshin Impact which implied the rates are averaged and don't add up to what the publisher says. Anecdotally players say they often hit their mark at around 70 rolls so it's suspected the rates increase over time (and maybe not linearly). The 90th roll is guaranteed and taken into account for the published rates 1.6% rate to get a 5-star reward on a given roll. If all this is true then together this would mean early rolls in a set of 90 are largely dead and you're paying to reach the higher chances.
The lesson to take away from this is to make sure your sons and daughters never play games designed specifically to addict (like this one).
Bejeweled is addictive but when you shut it down, you don’t think about it. Games like these, it’s easy to spend time formulating in your mind how to best spend your next time playing the game. It’s unhealthy.
I honestly can't think of a single competitive game with RNG and/or matchmaking where people _didn't_ accuse the system of being unfair. Pokemon (Battle Tower/Frontier/Subway etc.), League of Legends (Elo Hell), the list goes on...
This goes back to before I was born, even. One of my past colleagues used to work on poker machines back in the 80s and the company would regularly receive complaints from people "proving" their machines were non-random.
I would take this accusation with a massive grain of salt.
There's an interview with Sid Meier floating around somewhere where he discusses how, in Civilization, people will assume the computer is cheating at combat, unless you actually bias it quite strongly in the human's behaviour.
Civilization shows you the odds for each fight based on the relative strength of the units. People expect to win a 90% odds fight every time.
(I'm also currently partway through reading Thinking In Bets, which has some interesting things to say about this sort of thing.)
Fire Emblem is one of the games that shows fake probabilities to get around this problem - if the actual probability of an attack connecting is 95%, it will display a value of 80-85% to the user.
The odd part is that I've played hundreds of hours of those games and never noticed anything wrong.
I am reminded about XCOM, which some players complained about being unfair, too. In fact, the game is cheating - but in favor of you. (first enemy critical hits get negated and after someone of your troop dies, the rest gets better chances of surviving and so on)
But actually, I don't like that behavior either ..
If I remember correctly Sid Meier’s point was a little more nuanced than that.
It wasn’t that people expect to win 90% of the time, it’s that humans have a very poor intuition for odds and statistics. Pretty much everyone makes the common mistake of not understanding how a 33% chance of winning impacts independent events.
People assume that 33% chance of winning, means a pretty such sure fire win after 3 attempts (after all 33% * 3 is approx 100%). But every battle in Civilization is an independent event, so to get a sure fire win (90% confidence) you need to fight something 6/7 times (I don’t know the exact number, been some time since I studied this).
Having the number of fights you win against an opponent be 2 or 3 times greater than the intuitive number of fights makes people think the computer to cheating. When really they just don’t understand how stats work.
To fix this the Civilization games actually skew their stats so they better align with human intuition. So if the game says you have a 33% chance of winning, then that means you’ll probably win after 3 fights. Despite the fact that really you have a 40%-50% chance of winning that fight.
Sid Meier also worked with the Firaxis folks on the recent XCOM reboot and this is well known and documented now how the stats work out in the game and how the game will cheat for the player eventually on lower difficulties.
Nothing more frustrating than lining up shots perfectly and missing a 98% point blank shot from 2 feet away. I’ve always wondered what that 2% could be - gun jams, the character slips on a banana peel, who knows?
> . I’ve always wondered what that 2% could be - gun jams, the character slips on a banana peel, who knows?
Or just, the other person moving around in a hectic life or death situation? Trying to shoot someone in short range isn't 100% hit. The characters calmly standing there waiting to get shot is just a game representation.
Counter-hypothesis: these games' higher level gameplay loops demand a higher level of consistency; players' mismatched expectations come partially from a place of "if that chance is actually 90%, then what you're asking me to do is impossible".
Let me be more concrete. Take XCOM as the clearest example. On one hand, your troops level up with experience. A veteran soldier is more effective than a new recruit. So you need your them to survive, otherwise you'll be at a significant disadvantage on later missions. On the other, the developers want there to be some difficulty, to create a sense of tension (that you might not succeed) and make strategy matter.
These two goals are diametrically opposed, given the genre. It is difficult-to-impossible to create a scenario where there is both a real risk of losing and where a player can recover from losing a nominally 90% roll. Maybe once per mission. To keep the gameplay balance intact, devs would need to raise the nominal chances to match the actual chances, not the other way around.
The problem is, doing this would make it obvious to the player how much stronger they are than their opponents, in a game where you are supposedly vastly outgunned. So this type of fudging the numbers is more of a psychological trick by the developers, who want to have their cake and eat it, too. It's in the same class as shooters which prevent the AI from shooting you in the back or sniping you from offscreen, or horror games where the monster moves more slowly when you're not looking at them. An illusion to create a certain type of experience.
Note: I don't dispute that people are bad at judging probabilities. But I also ask that you consider that players may use this reasoning (probably subconsciously): "The developer wouldn't set me an impossible goal. If I lose this battle, it will be impossible to reach the goal they have set. Therefore, my chance of winning must be 100%. The game says it is 90%. Therefore, when the game says 90%, it must actually mean 100%. Therefore, when I lose a roll that the game says is 90%, the game is cheating." They don't really mean the game is cheating, they mean the developer is setting them an unfair task, giving them the illusion that there is a chance at victory through smart play, when in fact there is none.
I imagine you could test this hypothesis, or rather, how large of an effect it has, by taking the first 11 letters of the alphabet, randomizing their order, and then assigning them to probabilities 0-100% in steps of 10. Then have people play the game, showing only the letters. Then at the end, ask them to guess what each letter's probability is. This should show how much of the delta is the developer's fault vs player's. I think you'd want to do it with players whose perceptions have not already been poisoned by the lying of previous games, and use a less uniform distribution, so players can't guess the % just by figuring out the relative order.
Just to explain a term used here - the Elo rating system is used to give a rating to individual chess players. It works well - if you defeat someone, you gain points and they lose an equal number of points. The bigger the difference in rating, the bigger the change in points. A 1200 player defeating a 1250 player gains +7 points, but defeating a 2000 player would be more like +30.
This system has also been adapted to team games like League of Legends and Dota 2. Teams are constructed such that most players in the game have the same rating. The winners gain +25 each and the losers lose -25. A significant minority feel that this is unfair. Clearly they only lost because of incompetent team mates so they lose points even when they play well. If only they could gain 200-1000 rating points, they would be playing with people at their own skill level, and they would win way more.
Turns out this theory is a bunch of horse shit, as proven countless times. These whiners play high ranked players to temporarily take over their account, win 1000 more points and then start playing at their new higher rating. And then they proceed to lose 40 games in a row because they have no idea what they’re doing.
Source - played Dota 2 for years. Rating was 3000 (top 5% at the time). I saw countless posts from whiners and losses from account buyers.
Part of it is due to the game design though. There's a non-zero amount of games that are lost not because of skill, but because of another player trying out a new hero or build, someone having an off day, poor team composition, or the team chat degenerating into an all out flame war. If that happens, there isn't much that can really be done, and one is stuck in that doomed game for another half hour of unpleasantness. That's definitely a frustrating experience.
As you point out, the ELO system is fair, but it's also a rather noisy metric. Players can be skilled with some heroes while being completely awful at others, and the ELO rating is only a singular value that has to capture this range of player ability.
Poker machines are to some extent non-random. They can be tuned by the operator to set the rate at which they’ll pay out, some places will tune for better rates in order to entice customers in, while others set them to essentially be black holes for money.
These games are extremely random, by law. The card game itself is truly random, short of any unknown bugs that escaped testing by both the manufacturer and the regulators. The only thing that affects the payouts in a video poker game is the paytable, which is visible to the player up front and can't be changed while they're playing it, again by law. You can look up the expected value of each game online before putting any money in by the advertised paytable.
Source: I've been a casino game mathematician for 20 years.
I wouldn't call LoL unfair. If you're in elo hell means you're bad. If they match you with slightly better players, you'll drag them down, if you are matched with players way better than you, you'll be carried to victory without doing anything.
Once upon a time I made a flash game named Proximity where players take turns being given a numbered tile from 1-20 to place on a hex grid, and it captures any tiles next to it of the opponent that is a lower number. It was pretty popular in its day (I'm actually working on a new version at the moment).
Anyway, the way the tiles were drawn was that it gave each player an array of tiles of the same numbers that was just enough for how many turns they'd end up having, but it shuffled the order of each array at random.
Even though that was the case, I often got players saying the game was cheating, and the computer always got high numbers and they always got low numbers, even on easy. I even had one player claim they counted the 20s and the opponent got more (although it's possible to increase the numbers on the tile by placing one of the same team's tile next to it, so I'm guessing they only counted at the end of the game and didn't reinforce the tiles as much).
But it's literally not possible according to the code. And it wasn't a bug either, I tested it pretty thoroughly, and played the game a ton myself. And plenty of other players never had an issue with it too.
That was when I learned that people in general tend to not be very good judges of randomness. And I've seen many examples since that reinforce that.
As a matter of fact, I was actually working on a dynamic draw mechanic for the new game, where the further behind in score you were, the more of a boost to the numbers it would draw from you, to give you more of a chance to get caught back up (and vice versa, if you were ahead). So basically like this dynamic difficulty thing.
I knew not everyone would enjoy that so I was planning on having it be something you could turn on or off in the Options menu. And it's not something to get more money off the player, just something that might improve their experience.
The game will probably be a paid for game to begin with, or on mobile it might be free but you have to deal with ads unless you pay $5 to get rid of them.
Anyone who thinks a game with microtransactions isn't designed to push you towards buying them is a fool. And I don't mean only what EA is doing. They affect any game's design when they are present.
I personally think direct micro payments for skins, even without randomness and lootboxes, are still problematic. They aren't as bad as lootboxes, which are clearly designed to extract money, but their problem is that the potentially limitless money you can spend. If you go into a game knowing that it costs $60, you know that's how much you're spending on it. If you go into a game that hands out skins for $2.50 a piece, there's no limit, and unless you're good at making and sticking to a budget (which is a large portion of the world, especially kids who have no experience!) you can just as likely spend way more than $60.
This is worse when such things as skins end up getting tied to status within the game world. Fortnite doesn't have randomized loot boxes anymore, but that hasn't stopped kids from spending tons on V-bucks, especially since they get bullied if they don't [1]. Seriously, just look at videos of people bullying "defaults" on Fortnite. I think it's especially bad because there is a way to finance long-running multiplayer games: battle passes. It's an upfront cost so you always know what you're getting into.
"Seriously, just look at videos of people bullying "defaults" on Fortnite"
Well, but thats the beauty of a shooter game. If theres some moron fixed on style trying to bully, you can just shoot him and enjoy his whining. Knowing that cosmetics are no match for skills.
And about spending in general:
I believe that is a valuable skill to be learned as early as possible, don't you think?
So if a kid spends all his pocket money for the month on day 1. There is opportunity to learn.
(and if he spends all his parents money, then there is opportinity for the parents to learn)
When there is an option to pay for faster progress the developer is incentivized to make the overall progression slower and grindier in the hopes that more people buy those boosts. See EA Battlefront 2's original hero progression system or to a lesser degree AC Odyssey.
But it still means, that people with more time than money get to play the game. And those with more money than time, can take a fast dive here and there.
>There are free to play Multiplayer games, where microtransactions are for skins and other cosmetic stuff. Thats fine by me.
Actually no, it's not fine. Because if the cosmetic stuff would have been obtainable just through game play, it would have been easier to obtain. If it's available for real money, they have an incentive to make it more grindy to obtain otherwise. Consciously or not.
And if you think the availability of those cosmetic items doesn't affect you - consciously or not - you're deluding yourself.
No matter how they're implemented, microtransactions are a burden on either your wallet or your time.
Hell, there are companies who use this time of year for a big push for loot boxes and each year they tweak how it works to further their income.
An example, Wargaming which runs World of XXX games of which World of Tanks and World of Warships are the biggest tells players of their Warships game that containers can contain one of any one hundred and six premium ships but players noticed patterns and soon determined there was a short list of ships you had to roll first before the rest were available[0]. While they offered a refund after being called out they did not advertise such a refund in game or even on their own site. Duplicate premium ships used to reward the premium currency but that was replaced with another roll last year.
Their World of Tanks sister game operates under more generous rules but that may be more from their primary market is in a different region. Neither publishes odds but a version of the game on consoles does publish its odds because that platform requires it however there is no play against PC
I very much like Path of Exile because it goes against this grain.
The vast majority of MTX items in that game are cosmetic, adding new skins to armour, new skill VFX, etc. Some of the MTX is different in that you can purchase more stash tabs (though you get quite a few for free already) but it very much feels like ethical MTX, in as much as this kind of thing can be ethical.
That's debatable. Check out Guild Wars 1 skin collectors. There is no such thing in Guild Wars 2 because there are very few skins obtainable from gameplay, and the rest are in the IAP store.
If you're the hypercompetitive type yeah, I guess you don't care. Except you could be competing for the largest skin collection... In any case, a lot of people do care.
There's tons of skins obtainable in GW2 from gameplay; some pop from regular loot you get - the very basic ones, for some you need a little bit of engagement like dungeon, fractal, raid sets, (there are also pvp sets) or sets added within Living Story updates. There are rare skins you can get from mystic forge, or if you're lucky juggling unidentified gear loot. The really exclusive ones would be legendary weapons and gemstore special offers - the latter you can still obtain via gold to gems exchange. Then there are unique cosmetic items like Queen Bee, Liquid Aurillium, Chak and Confetti indusions and Invisible Boots skin.
Path of Exile and GW2 seems to be sharing microtransactions model - both include account/character upgrades, convenience items and additional more appealing skins. Not sure about PoE but GW2 still allows you to exchange in-game currency for shop currency / gems to gold at I'd say fair rate.
Allows me to... lose interest. I played GW1 for years. Prepaid 2 GW2 accounts (was playing with the family). Lost interest in a few months because of the insane grinding for everything (in GW1 the only insane grind was the forge armor if you forgot) and the in my face gem store.
Stash tabs are pretty much required for serious play though I tend to see this as a free trial with an upgrade to a paid game. The investment is reasonable, and more investment isn't necessarily Pay to Win (More).
Though there is a meme in the community that when a popular skill gets MTX, it's nerfed next league. They made their sale, and it's time to bring a different skill to the forefront to make way for new MTX. There's definitely a risk of this kind of monetary incentive tainting game design choices.
Microtransactions is a generic term. Microtransactions can be purely cosmetic like skins, so it doesn't matter when it comes to gameplay, or extensions which had levels/story/whatever to an existing game. So microtransactions aren't bad, especially in a free 2 play game. What EA and co are doing on the other hand is different, it's called 'pay 2 win', the more you pay, the easier it gets to win whatever you have to win in that game (or progress faster). The latter is a questionable practice.
Pay 2 win games should absolutely be regulated and be 18+ only.
Putting microtransactions in a free to play game seems like an inherent contradiction. If there's a transaction, it's not free, it's just what people used to call demos or shareware—you get a small slice for free, the rest you pay for.
Note that there are a ton of games out there that are actually free to play and won't ever gate content behind paywalls.
If cosmetics didn’t matter, why are they such lucrative items to sell? Cosmetics were once the reward for playing the game, not for spending money. And the look of your in-game avatar matters - has always mattered - to a vast majority of players.
The reward for playing the game now? Getting the opportunity to spend more money.
Exactly, gamers have gone from thinking horse armor is stupid to now accepting "only cosmetic" and it's a problem.
Are you going to put better looking items in the game for free if you could charge $20 in the store? Are you going to spend time writing an engaging and rewarding quest line when you can just throw a price tag on it? Games do need content so they won't do this for everything, but the mere existence of a cash shop and MTX is a perverse incentive on development quality. It also often ruins the cosmetic experience of the rest of us, with knights running around wearing angel wings for some weird reason.
That aside, Jim Sterling brought up something I hadn't even considered since I'm too old. Kids getting bullied because their Fortnite characters only have the default skins and they can't afford (or aren't allowed) to buy anything else. "Only cosmetic" indeed!
No doubt pay to win games are not competitive, but they also usually aren’t deceptive. It’s not any more of a problem ethically than cosmetic micro transactions. The only things that should be 18+ are loot boxes regardless if they cosmetic or result in pay to win. Both are gambling for a random chance at rewards. Inserting the ability to buy those boxes with money rather than earn them is what makes the gambling detrimental to people. Of course that assumes gambling is bad when in reality only addiction to gambling is bad. By 18 adults should be taught about addiction in schools and so loot boxes should be available by then. Credit cards used to limit how much kids could spend online because you had to be 18, but now kids can easily go into every store and by a prepaid Visa card or gift card for just about any online service for cash, including formerly at toys r us.
It's a shame, Genshin Impact was actually really good but crippled as a game by the monetary choices. It could be amazing as a single player game with a set price but for myself, like many, what I enjoyed at the start was replaced by disappointment as I progressed.
EA could very well be responsible, but I can equally imagine poor sports taking "this game is rigged" so far as to sue the gaming company just to sooth their egos.
There is already an ELO system that ensures players will play against people of their skill level to keep your win rate around 50%. And EA has shown that all it takes is a shiny new card to manipulate people into buying packs.
I can see this being true. Recently watched a presentation from the CEO of Nexon and it was pretty interesting.
The most eye opening part is the live game operations. They have multiple people who are monitoring the players and if someone is close to leaving or feels like they are going to leave the game (he is mostly talking about Maplestory) they give them a "buff" or some kind of incentive to stay. You get a better loot, or a better equipment. Basically they rig the rng in your favor. And he was talking how the AI and machine learning will change that in the upcoming years because it's actually hard to do that manually (don't give too strong buffs because the player with the buff get bored quickly etc.)
Korean game companies are truly ruthless, everything is designed to keep you locked in, just comfortable enough to play without spending money, while always reminding you that it's better if you do spend money.
It's actually really impressive from a business PoV. The games are sad, soulless time wasters, though.
Seems that western developers/publishers learned a lot from them.
The last EA game I bought was FIFA12, I spent hundreds on ultimate team microtransactions and vowed never again, there was no doubt something dodgy was going on. They undoubtedly decrease the capability of in game players after a while so you feel the need to spend more and often
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 155 ms ] threadCompare it to the game who gets the difficulty balance just right with static setup, and every gain makes a bit of difference and game is never frustratingly hard nor too easy. Areas of initial struggle become walk in the park. To me that's rewarding.
Maybe some middle road where enemies can get a bit harder, but still they become more defeatable as player progresses would be ideal. Or even better - make it tweakable in the menu (but that's a mammoth effort to do and test)
I think Stephen’s Sausage Roll might be my absolute favorite recent example of this. The Talos Principle and the Witness are also other great recent examples.
Also, to your last comment about adjusting difficulty in the UI: many, many single player action/adventure games have this. It’s been a commonplace thing for quite a while now. It also enables cool things like maximal-difficulty speed runs.
I recently had a great time watching someone speed run Metal Gear Solid 2 at its absolute highest difficulty level (that I don’t think the game even offers to players until the first play through is completed). I believe it was a recorded speed running-for-cancer event or something like that. I’ll have to try to find the YouTube video.
Actually, here it is: https://youtu.be/3DDMhcxUoAc. Obviously not something to watch if you ever want to play the game and haven’t yet. Another excellent one for MGS3: https://youtu.be/jUMDBOasRbA
I also like Gothic series did the static enemy levels and enemy would respawn only on Chapter changes, this gave you a god feeling when you could finally access a hard area and defeat the guys that were impossible to scratch at start.
So IMO both Skyrim and gothic work because they feet the game and the player base that is targeting and give a different feel of the world, there is no better system IMO. Also in Skyrim the stronger enemies differ visually too, is not just a hidden number that is increased, stronger enemy types with stronger gear is spawn.
Is this dynamic difficulty? Depends on how you view it. The worse you were at the previous section, the better your rewards, but maybe the challenge is just “get to the next area by any means necessary”.
Either way it’s pretty invisible to the player.
https://half-life.fandom.com/wiki/Civil_Protection
> A popular video titled “TOP 10 SCRIPTING PROOF! EA 100% EXPOSED! FIFA 19” purports to show 10 different clips demonstrating dynamic difficulty adjustment during gameplay, mostly near-misses, goals that should have gone in but don’t, that sort of thing.
A game is just a simulation and the skill of the player doesn't influence every aspect. Any event that is not in complete control can be nudged to benefit the weaker player. For example, a ball that's just in or out.
There's still a missing link: the article makes an assumption that the incentive to boost the weaker player is greater earnings. Otherwise it's hard to get upset about the practice.
But how does it translate to increased spending? I would guess that having more matched games would lead to both players having more fun and being more satified with their current skill levels.
I admit it's a big leap and this technology seems like a good idea to an extend but it doesn't reward getting good at the game as much. As mentioned elsewhere, Elo-type matching is an alternative but does have the disadvantage you never get to beat down on noobs.
Some gamers indeed hypothesize that the earning of more money is indeed through better engagement based on artificially balancing games:
> "EA Wants to Get Rid of Fair Matchmaking to Focus on Player Spending & Engagement"
I saw the video, but I have to say I am not wholly convinced of their argument. For example 1 of the "scripting examples" show a ball going through a goalkeepers' hands. In my opinion the game could have already decided that the player would shoot inside the goal (partially using RNG) and perhaps the rendering messed up a bit when the goalkeeper was jumping towards the ball. I am not sure if this is solid proof of so-called "scripting". Other examples can't really convince me either.
This is somewhat anecdotal, but fairly convincing
Now it could be that you know all the moves, tricks and are really good overall, but in general most people are only average players. So then they adjust the odds that you are constantly faced with better players, or they adjust the odds so that when you're 70 rated striker takes a shot from x, he's going to miss. If your opponent's 70 rated striker takes a shot from the opposite x side of the pitch he's going to score, and so on.
Doing this they can influence the losing player to feel as if they need to spend money buying card/player packs, so they can "increase in skill".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCqnD40Q5T8
> The system matches an experienced player with a novice player to encourage the novice player to make purchases of items used by the experienced player. A novice player may wish to emulate the marquee player by obtaining weapons or other items used by the marquee player.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S074756321...
Specifically, the drop rates for stuff decreases the closer the player is to important goals/thresholds. The intent is to force the player is to burn through available energy and, being so close to finishing something, that they spend premium currency to buy energy to get more chances for the shard/fragment to drop to complete the thing faster.
There was even talk of a software patent that EA might hold governing this very behavior.
I would be very interested in reading a statistical analysis of droprates in gacha games, as I feel like I've noticed this stuff in my own play. But short of hard evidence (plus the ease of explaining away this stuff to the nature of randomness) it's difficult for anyone to make accusations that aren't baseless.
He said after doing this work he might as well work for weapons manufacturers or the mob.
> What’s interesting about Fate/Grand Order is that the game’s marketing features a vicious caricature of dedicated players. She’s a slobbering, lecherous, gambling-addicted little monster.
> Fans love her.
[From [3]]
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7S-DGTBZU14
2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNjI03CGkb4
3: https://www.polygon.com/2018/4/18/17247246/fate-go-free-to-p...
> The first time I was in Las Vegas I sat down and figured out the odds for everything, and I discovered that the odds for the crap table were something like .493. If I bet a dollar, it would only cost me 1.4 cents. So I thought to myself, "Why am I so reluctant to bet? It hardly costs anything!"
> So I started betting, and right away I lost five dollars in succession--one, two, three, four, five. I was supposed to be out only seven cents; instead, I was five dollars behind! I've never gambled since then (with my own money, that is). I'm very lucky that I started off losing.
As for an analysis I remember reading this for Genshin Impact which implied the rates are averaged and don't add up to what the publisher says. Anecdotally players say they often hit their mark at around 70 rolls so it's suspected the rates increase over time (and maybe not linearly). The 90th roll is guaranteed and taken into account for the published rates 1.6% rate to get a 5-star reward on a given roll. If all this is true then together this would mean early rolls in a set of 90 are largely dead and you're paying to reach the higher chances.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Genshin_Impact/comments/ja7c0b/gach...
Note: this is fairly old, I stopped playing so it could be outdated. I also didn't check the conclusions.
Bejeweled is addictive but when you shut it down, you don’t think about it. Games like these, it’s easy to spend time formulating in your mind how to best spend your next time playing the game. It’s unhealthy.
This goes back to before I was born, even. One of my past colleagues used to work on poker machines back in the 80s and the company would regularly receive complaints from people "proving" their machines were non-random.
I would take this accusation with a massive grain of salt.
Civilization shows you the odds for each fight based on the relative strength of the units. People expect to win a 90% odds fight every time.
(I'm also currently partway through reading Thinking In Bets, which has some interesting things to say about this sort of thing.)
But actually, I don't like that behavior either ..
It wasn’t that people expect to win 90% of the time, it’s that humans have a very poor intuition for odds and statistics. Pretty much everyone makes the common mistake of not understanding how a 33% chance of winning impacts independent events.
People assume that 33% chance of winning, means a pretty such sure fire win after 3 attempts (after all 33% * 3 is approx 100%). But every battle in Civilization is an independent event, so to get a sure fire win (90% confidence) you need to fight something 6/7 times (I don’t know the exact number, been some time since I studied this).
Having the number of fights you win against an opponent be 2 or 3 times greater than the intuitive number of fights makes people think the computer to cheating. When really they just don’t understand how stats work.
To fix this the Civilization games actually skew their stats so they better align with human intuition. So if the game says you have a 33% chance of winning, then that means you’ll probably win after 3 fights. Despite the fact that really you have a 40%-50% chance of winning that fight.
Nothing more frustrating than lining up shots perfectly and missing a 98% point blank shot from 2 feet away. I’ve always wondered what that 2% could be - gun jams, the character slips on a banana peel, who knows?
Or just, the other person moving around in a hectic life or death situation? Trying to shoot someone in short range isn't 100% hit. The characters calmly standing there waiting to get shot is just a game representation.
Let me be more concrete. Take XCOM as the clearest example. On one hand, your troops level up with experience. A veteran soldier is more effective than a new recruit. So you need your them to survive, otherwise you'll be at a significant disadvantage on later missions. On the other, the developers want there to be some difficulty, to create a sense of tension (that you might not succeed) and make strategy matter.
These two goals are diametrically opposed, given the genre. It is difficult-to-impossible to create a scenario where there is both a real risk of losing and where a player can recover from losing a nominally 90% roll. Maybe once per mission. To keep the gameplay balance intact, devs would need to raise the nominal chances to match the actual chances, not the other way around.
The problem is, doing this would make it obvious to the player how much stronger they are than their opponents, in a game where you are supposedly vastly outgunned. So this type of fudging the numbers is more of a psychological trick by the developers, who want to have their cake and eat it, too. It's in the same class as shooters which prevent the AI from shooting you in the back or sniping you from offscreen, or horror games where the monster moves more slowly when you're not looking at them. An illusion to create a certain type of experience.
Note: I don't dispute that people are bad at judging probabilities. But I also ask that you consider that players may use this reasoning (probably subconsciously): "The developer wouldn't set me an impossible goal. If I lose this battle, it will be impossible to reach the goal they have set. Therefore, my chance of winning must be 100%. The game says it is 90%. Therefore, when the game says 90%, it must actually mean 100%. Therefore, when I lose a roll that the game says is 90%, the game is cheating." They don't really mean the game is cheating, they mean the developer is setting them an unfair task, giving them the illusion that there is a chance at victory through smart play, when in fact there is none.
I imagine you could test this hypothesis, or rather, how large of an effect it has, by taking the first 11 letters of the alphabet, randomizing their order, and then assigning them to probabilities 0-100% in steps of 10. Then have people play the game, showing only the letters. Then at the end, ask them to guess what each letter's probability is. This should show how much of the delta is the developer's fault vs player's. I think you'd want to do it with players whose perceptions have not already been poisoned by the lying of previous games, and use a less uniform distribution, so players can't guess the % just by figuring out the relative order.
This system has also been adapted to team games like League of Legends and Dota 2. Teams are constructed such that most players in the game have the same rating. The winners gain +25 each and the losers lose -25. A significant minority feel that this is unfair. Clearly they only lost because of incompetent team mates so they lose points even when they play well. If only they could gain 200-1000 rating points, they would be playing with people at their own skill level, and they would win way more.
Turns out this theory is a bunch of horse shit, as proven countless times. These whiners play high ranked players to temporarily take over their account, win 1000 more points and then start playing at their new higher rating. And then they proceed to lose 40 games in a row because they have no idea what they’re doing.
Source - played Dota 2 for years. Rating was 3000 (top 5% at the time). I saw countless posts from whiners and losses from account buyers.
As you point out, the ELO system is fair, but it's also a rather noisy metric. Players can be skilled with some heroes while being completely awful at others, and the ELO rating is only a singular value that has to capture this range of player ability.
Source: I've been a casino game mathematician for 20 years.
Anyway, the way the tiles were drawn was that it gave each player an array of tiles of the same numbers that was just enough for how many turns they'd end up having, but it shuffled the order of each array at random.
Even though that was the case, I often got players saying the game was cheating, and the computer always got high numbers and they always got low numbers, even on easy. I even had one player claim they counted the 20s and the opponent got more (although it's possible to increase the numbers on the tile by placing one of the same team's tile next to it, so I'm guessing they only counted at the end of the game and didn't reinforce the tiles as much).
But it's literally not possible according to the code. And it wasn't a bug either, I tested it pretty thoroughly, and played the game a ton myself. And plenty of other players never had an issue with it too.
That was when I learned that people in general tend to not be very good judges of randomness. And I've seen many examples since that reinforce that.
As a matter of fact, I was actually working on a dynamic draw mechanic for the new game, where the further behind in score you were, the more of a boost to the numbers it would draw from you, to give you more of a chance to get caught back up (and vice versa, if you were ahead). So basically like this dynamic difficulty thing.
I knew not everyone would enjoy that so I was planning on having it be something you could turn on or off in the Options menu. And it's not something to get more money off the player, just something that might improve their experience.
The game will probably be a paid for game to begin with, or on mobile it might be free but you have to deal with ads unless you pay $5 to get rid of them.
Just. Avoid. Them.
In other games, you can make progress faster if you pay. That is more annoying, but still no pay to win, or dishonest.
But all those lootbox games and arcade ones, designed to lure you into more buying, well, everybod gets what they deserve.
But who is to say you aren’t being manipulated to buy those microtransactions? Their presence gives designers the wrong incentives.
This is worse when such things as skins end up getting tied to status within the game world. Fortnite doesn't have randomized loot boxes anymore, but that hasn't stopped kids from spending tons on V-bucks, especially since they get bullied if they don't [1]. Seriously, just look at videos of people bullying "defaults" on Fortnite. I think it's especially bad because there is a way to finance long-running multiplayer games: battle passes. It's an upfront cost so you always know what you're getting into.
1: https://www.polygon.com/2019/5/7/18534431/fortnite-rare-defa...
If you're an aesthetics whore, welp.
Well, but thats the beauty of a shooter game. If theres some moron fixed on style trying to bully, you can just shoot him and enjoy his whining. Knowing that cosmetics are no match for skills.
And about spending in general:
I believe that is a valuable skill to be learned as early as possible, don't you think?
So if a kid spends all his pocket money for the month on day 1. There is opportunity to learn.
(and if he spends all his parents money, then there is opportinity for the parents to learn)
But it still means, that people with more time than money get to play the game. And those with more money than time, can take a fast dive here and there.
I've seen that work (more or less) in some games.
Neither do I play pay to win games.
I think one of the Dead Space games was the first EA title to both be full price and have IAPs for materials you could also slooowly grind?
Also Devil May Cry 5.
Actually no, it's not fine. Because if the cosmetic stuff would have been obtainable just through game play, it would have been easier to obtain. If it's available for real money, they have an incentive to make it more grindy to obtain otherwise. Consciously or not.
And if you think the availability of those cosmetic items doesn't affect you - consciously or not - you're deluding yourself.
No matter how they're implemented, microtransactions are a burden on either your wallet or your time.
An example, Wargaming which runs World of XXX games of which World of Tanks and World of Warships are the biggest tells players of their Warships game that containers can contain one of any one hundred and six premium ships but players noticed patterns and soon determined there was a short list of ships you had to roll first before the rest were available[0]. While they offered a refund after being called out they did not advertise such a refund in game or even on their own site. Duplicate premium ships used to reward the premium currency but that was replaced with another roll last year.
Their World of Tanks sister game operates under more generous rules but that may be more from their primary market is in a different region. Neither publishes odds but a version of the game on consoles does publish its odds because that platform requires it however there is no play against PC
[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/WorldOfWarships/comments/k6ivy5/how...
The vast majority of MTX items in that game are cosmetic, adding new skins to armour, new skill VFX, etc. Some of the MTX is different in that you can purchase more stash tabs (though you get quite a few for free already) but it very much feels like ethical MTX, in as much as this kind of thing can be ethical.
https://www.pathofexile.com/shop
If you're the hypercompetitive type yeah, I guess you don't care. Except you could be competing for the largest skin collection... In any case, a lot of people do care.
Path of Exile and GW2 seems to be sharing microtransactions model - both include account/character upgrades, convenience items and additional more appealing skins. Not sure about PoE but GW2 still allows you to exchange in-game currency for shop currency / gems to gold at I'd say fair rate.
Though there is a meme in the community that when a popular skill gets MTX, it's nerfed next league. They made their sale, and it's time to bring a different skill to the forefront to make way for new MTX. There's definitely a risk of this kind of monetary incentive tainting game design choices.
Pay 2 win games should absolutely be regulated and be 18+ only.
Note that there are a ton of games out there that are actually free to play and won't ever gate content behind paywalls.
If cosmetics didn’t matter, why are they such lucrative items to sell? Cosmetics were once the reward for playing the game, not for spending money. And the look of your in-game avatar matters - has always mattered - to a vast majority of players.
The reward for playing the game now? Getting the opportunity to spend more money.
Are you going to put better looking items in the game for free if you could charge $20 in the store? Are you going to spend time writing an engaging and rewarding quest line when you can just throw a price tag on it? Games do need content so they won't do this for everything, but the mere existence of a cash shop and MTX is a perverse incentive on development quality. It also often ruins the cosmetic experience of the rest of us, with knights running around wearing angel wings for some weird reason.
That aside, Jim Sterling brought up something I hadn't even considered since I'm too old. Kids getting bullied because their Fortnite characters only have the default skins and they can't afford (or aren't allowed) to buy anything else. "Only cosmetic" indeed!
What a smug piece of shit. Maybe pick another player to highlight instead.
but the real problem is the asian p2w games, that's something that needs to get fixed ASAP
EA could very well be responsible, but I can equally imagine poor sports taking "this game is rigged" so far as to sue the gaming company just to sooth their egos.
The most eye opening part is the live game operations. They have multiple people who are monitoring the players and if someone is close to leaving or feels like they are going to leave the game (he is mostly talking about Maplestory) they give them a "buff" or some kind of incentive to stay. You get a better loot, or a better equipment. Basically they rig the rng in your favor. And he was talking how the AI and machine learning will change that in the upcoming years because it's actually hard to do that manually (don't give too strong buffs because the player with the buff get bored quickly etc.)
The part start here but worth watching the whole video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEqzZCmlzTk&feature=youtu.be...
It's actually really impressive from a business PoV. The games are sad, soulless time wasters, though.
Seems that western developers/publishers learned a lot from them.
They exploited lots of human behaviors like hoarding/collecting, competitive behavior and fame. And the game mechanics were carefully orchestrated.