How Block Blast harvests its players for ad money
ayoships.com
ayoships.com
> It requests the lethal puzzle exactly when all three conditions hold: 28 cases, including two ads instead of three, one ad closed early, a score 1 point short, and an ad worth just under 3.5×.
> Then we ran it live, in a test copy of the iPhone app running in Apple’s simulator, and read the rule’s inputs while we played. It had three good rewarded ads on record. The score was past the line. A rewarded ad from Google AdMob was loaded and ready. The rule priced it at 72.39, against 37.41 for the last one, which is 1.94 times. It needs 3.5. So on iPhone the rule is live, reading real ad prices, and waiting for an ad worth 3.5 times your last one.
What on earth is this supposed to mean?
The AI-dialect sounds very much like Harold, Clive, and Penelope from the Mumbai office; much of my work was then transcoding it into British English so that Surjit, Ismail, and Narinder from the Pollokshaws office could even begin to make sense of it.
(not the real names, but sufficiently similar)
It's the perfect time to put out a puzzle that you will almost instantly fail.
If they can't be bothered to write, I can't be bothered to read.
This is the kind of writing pattern that makes me nope out of reading.
“The ad rule” means nothing to me.
“isn’t the only one” only what? - rule? That thing you started by not making clear, and haven’t showed me the symmetry with?
“that asks for it” why is a rule “asking” for anything? And what is “it”?
When the agent says things like this, I can almost guarantee: the thing, the other things, what the “verbing” actually means, and how the impact is described, are all clear as mud — lost in some kind of metaphorical gibberish.
I cannot get people in my life to take any digital privacy seriously. A good example is when I couldn't convince a friend about the LG TV sampling your screen and phoning home, even with all the articles recently. I think this is why we like magic, fall for scams, and don't demand more from our politicians.
I thought by the 2020s we would have fusion power, and be busy exploring and colonizing space.
Instead, we got greedy corporations with moral-free executives (remember the "don't be evil" declarations? good times, huh) and incredible amounts of developer effort being poured into useless garbage.
It's evil, and just another example of nice things (games that are just games) we can't have because of capitalism.
if you'd asked me would they do it i would have said totally, but there is something different here about the level of effort they actually do go to not just to manipulate the game into a state where it can force you into the highest value ad state, but how much effort it goes into to manipulate the player so that they keep coming back for "one more hit"
a game with dark patterns but still a game is what i think i expected before. now its pretty clear you cant or shouldn't even really call this thing a game anymore. There is no "game design" in forcing a player to lose because you have an opportunity to sell a better ad. this is just ad tech wrapped in a game like package.
But there is no way for Apple to verify "as long as the update doesn’t change what the app is" right?
Supposedly this can also fire for legitimate A/B tests or other debug flags that aren't stripped from the Release build.
I suspect these games will be fine as long as they have an Account manager and pay Apple millions in commissions or for paid acquisition.
Ashamed of myself for getting halfway through the article before realising it was AI written.
I want to hear about the human author's motivations for doing this, the hard parts of doing the deobfuscation, their emotions when finding out what it did, etc. This is none of that.
> Rules downloaded from their server decide your pieces, your score and your ads. One waits for an expensive ad, then asks for a hand you can’t place.
I actually don't mind if it's good enough, informative and not overly long.
Haven't really read anything super well written (in terms of language and form) lately, other than a really fun hn comment summarizing Trump's War.
But I just haven't read that much lately.
It's like it chooses "simple" words, but uses them in unclear or fuzzy or slightly abnormal ways that make the overall meaning more difficult to parse. On its own, each instance is defensible, but the aggregate result when it happens many times over is very tiring to read. It reminds me of XKCD's "Up Goer Five": https://xkcd.com/1133/
Like this:
> One waits for an expensive ad, then asks for a hand you can’t place.
It reads as though it started with a straightforward idea, and then was forced to express it with words of only one syllable.
For some reason the current crop of LLMs are really insistent on generating contrast between two things in every statement.
Is this AI written? It has "this is the smoking gun" vibes, just rewritten.
> One waits for an expensive ad, then asks for a hand you can’t place
Something about “asks for a hand you can’t place” just triggers the alarm bell. I think it’s unfortunately because I’m reading a lot of AI at $job. I do read books in my free time but something about the patterns…
Some more quotes from early on:
“Most of Block Blast isn’t in the app you install”
And then
“It waits for three things to line up: you finished your last three rewarded ads, the ad loaded right now is worth at least 3.5 times your last one, and you’re 1,000 points past your high score. All three get checked in one function.”
A really big AI tell for me is sensationalism and drama about things that don’t matter. Ok, fair, checking code in one function doesn’t seem dramatic. But consider this: a paragraph is building to a conclusion. You have a fairly long sentence, then a short sentence. The contrast in length gives the short sentence a lot of emphasis when I read it. In a newscaster voice: “all three get checked.. in one function”
But obviously it doesn’t matter at all, even to the technical reader, if they check this in one function or multiple functions. AI does this ALL the time, they emphasize some implementation detail that’s true, but completely irrelevant to the point the author wants to make. In fact this detail really should be removed from the article completely because it adds LITERALLY nothing to our understanding of how this app works.
So my alarm bells go off because a technical writer probably wouldn’t emphasize that point.
I’m not actively analyzing that, but when I read AI, I notice emphasis on things that are entirely irrelevant. The text starts feeling self-important about complete nonsense.
I think it all adds up for me, and I just notice the patterns in a surprising number of blogs and YT videos. It gets distracting, but IMO the bigger issue is that the wrong details are put in focus, so explanations get hard to follow.
“X things follow”, or from your example, “It waits for Y things to line up”.
> 1. You finished your last three rewarded ads. Every time a rewarded ad starts, the rule pushes false onto a list and keeps the latest three (lines 174–183). If the ad SDK reports that the reward was earned, it flips that entry to true (191–199). The check needs all three to be exactly true:
Pointlessly spun out prose. Pointless headers everywhere. Pointless lists. Yes, we understand what a list of booleans is, and that the game looks for a state where the last three are true. No need to spell it out like that.
Why do people post crap like this? Why do people post it to Hacker News? There is some merit to dissecting an attention sink ad-driven game, but this article just makes me feel like my attempt to grasp the meaning and writer's views fails every time — like I'm trying to grasp stalks of grain in a field, but my hand keeps passing through them as if they were holograms.
I would very much like to read people's thoughts with a forbearance for awkward prose, bad spelling, or suboptimal outlining, instead of that I get rewarded by text where the human who prompted it is suddenly absent.
Fuck this new AI world.
That is why it is posted.
Our record was 1,304, so its line was 1,434. At 3,356 points it rolled, and the game dealt a five-long bar, a five-tall bar and a zigzag. The game’s own record of that deal names this rule as the caller, shows algorithm 9 both requested and used, and labels all three pieces 致死题, lethal puzzle."
I love it!
From a linguistic "this one takes the cake in terms of strange terminology" strange terminology, this one takes the cake!
I could see this becoming a meme on the Internet... just like "pwned" (misspelling of "owned") was a long time ago...
I almost want to write a sitcom episode around it... something like "you've been playing this game too long... so now you get a "lethal puzzle!"..." :-). Classic! :-)
Anyway, very interesting article!
I wonder how such games can bring in millions per month.
Perhaps when your ads outperform the competition due to these devious optimizations, you can afford a higher bid for paid acquisition, keeping users coming.
It’s not like I get sucked into the game and decides to watch more expensive ads (which is the mechanic of golden berries or whatever)
As far as I understand the rule, high value players are more likely to die - but why?
If you tend to watch ads and have a high score then when killed it's likely you will watch the ad to revive.
It seems to be exactly like that for a sufficient portion of their users.
some advertisers are thus more likely to pay more for those placements, and thus the placement is paired to one of these higher bidding campaigns