Comment by 3bodyProblem | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 3bodyProblem | Hacker News Reader

Countries are talking about gambling packs that you can buy for different games. Although that is an issue I'm more worried about all the other things those companies do. Especially BR's are incredibly toxic and addictive. The random aspect of each round, not knowing if you will land on the ultimate gear on drop, or having to fight tooth and nail with scrapes and still turn up victories I think is way more addictive then currently on the radar of those countries.

Besides that all of those F2P games make you invest in their ecosystem. Battle pass here, skin there. Free unlocks when you play certain game modes. That is the real crack, including unhealthy conditioning.

So if you are working for companies like Respawn, EA or Epic (or similar). Scratch yourself behind the ears. I would say I don't have an addictive tendency, but the amount of effort it cost me to get away from apex is higher then I would like to admit. I noticed playing those games didn't made me happy anymore, but I still felt like I've invested so much in it that I had to keep going.

I'm happy that the game had so many terrible design choices for me to make it easier to step away. But the moment these companies figure that out as well, I think they will trap even more customers

People claim that Apex Legends employs "Engagement-based match-making" (EBMM) instead of pure skill-based match-making. The supposed point of EBMM is to rig your games to keep you optimally engaged, as you can't just get winning games all the time.

This claim is based on some EA whitepaper on the topic plus the players' own observations of the match-making system.

I can't support or deny this claim as I haven't looked into EBMM, but the terrible match-making system is what turned me off of Apex.

EBMM sounds like somewhat skill based but with a twist. It makes sense, games where you constantly win or lose are boring. Skill based matchmaking probably doesn't work as well for games that have a lot of random elements that favor or disfavor players of the same skill level.

Yup. I started doing lichess this past year. I'm not really into chess, but I had a lot of fun moving from 900 to 1400. Beyond that improving was a real struggle because all of my opponents were equally matched, and playing tilted or tired would cause me to lose, repeatedly, very quickly, and suffer a big drop in rank. It was not fun at all so I quit.

Of course if you're trying to devise a serious ranking, fun isn't what you're optimizing for.

Same, made a similar rating jump. Chess is challenging, fun, and at times really frustrating. I lost 12 games in a row yesterday and rage canceled my chess.com membership and decided to take a hiatus. It’s not so much losing 50/50 for me it’s losing 8+ games in a row that sucks. I always say I’ll take a break after losing 3 in a row but then I’m paired with someone 200 points lower and figure it should be an easy match… not always the case. You gotta be at the top of your game to even keep your rating which isn’t always fun. At least I usually improve after a rating dip and a break.

The biggest problem with skill based matchmaking is that you eventually reach a point where you only win half of your games. There are days the struggle is appreciated, but some days that's just not fun - especially considering that it's an average and you'll have dry streaks. A lot of players hate it, they'd rather have a noob stomp, while others like the struggle.

The old days where you joined servers, got to know names, and formed communities offered a lot more than win/lose stats. Ultimately, I would say that is far more "engaging" but they neither want to run servers for us nor let us do it ourselves anymore.

It doesn't sound bad, but the EA paper is actually talking about a way to manipulate people into spending money. What they do is match you with lower ranked players after you've made a purchase, that way you feel like your purchase is justified and want to spend more money. It also encourages the lower ranked people to spend more because they see that they're losing to someone who paid for better players on their FIFA team.

These techniques aren't tightly restricted trade secrets or anything. Companies talk very openly about their techniques at conferences. They see engagement (or less charitably, addiction) as a laudable goal and I can sympathize with that - there are lots of activities that people find 'addicting' which aren't viewed negatively by society (running, knitting, sudoku, baking, etc).

Anyhow, here's a talk on engagement based matchmaking in Halo 5: https://youtu.be/0FoG4Jtpebs

I don't like BR games, but I do like roguelikes, and the randomness of each start has a similar appeal. BR is a multiplayer roguelike. If it is addictive, it's because it's a fun design approach.

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