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Comment by Tohhou | Hacker News Reader

Or in other words:

>Games are built to make players feel powerful. Players understand that money is as much a currency as their time is, and some would rather trade their money to feel powerful than spend their time to build up to feeling powerful.

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But what if the game knows if you buy the cheats, and it makes you feel more powerful in the short term before hobbling you extra hard in the medium term so you buy more cheats?

So that you buy a token to increase your power but the transaction actually decreases your power, but is cleverly disguised so you don't realise?

The weaker you get, the more "power-ups" you buy, which only makes you weaker and more dependent on power ups.

That's what is particularly evil about some of these mechanisms.

This is part of the problem--but it isn't making the player weaker in the long term, it reduces the growth of player skill. Which amounts to the same thing as what you're describing, but a little more indirectly.

The bigger issue for me is that IAP pushers are not selling something the user decides they want, they're selling something that the pusher has manipulated the user into deciding that they need by changing the environment around them. It's not even in the same bucket as marketing (which sucks), but rather the outright control of the player's experience to drive them towards consumable IAP. There's no way that's not malicious.

If you spend $60 on a AAA game which makes you feel powerful is it less evil than spending once $2 in a F2P game which also makes you feel equally powerful? Is it only more evil once the user has spent more than $60 to feel powerful, or is it only the fact that the user can spend a little at a time to feel powerful that makes it evil compared to the one off $60 purchase?

Depends if the game is a competitive game or not and if you can continue to spend 2 dollars or not.

Consider a competitive game where someone who normally sucks buys a game which is awesome. He is able to have fun with all of the free players who are just good, and doesn't always win because he sucks. He's suddenly like a mini-boss to the players who don't pay, and they feel awesome when they manage to defeat them, because even though that other player had paid power they still won. And players who are both good and pay are set to fight against other players who are good and pay.

Everyone is happy. It's not evil.

Skill-based matchmaking is better. Furthemore, pay-to-win elements cannot be justified, even as a boost for weaker players in games that revolve around PVP competition. Skilled players will exploit them and create havoc in the overall balance.

Should all people in real sports be forced to use the same exact equipment because having a pay to win advance is unjustifiable there too?

If a game is premium only, meaning it cannot be play for free, if people win in the game is that unjustifiable for those who cannot afford to play at all?

If people play and enjoy pay to win games (even though I have yet to find a game which is actually pay to win instead of pay to gain a small advantage which doesn't guarantee victory) do those who do not deserve to have their wishes met and those who are enjoying it losing what they like?

>Skill-based matchmaking is better.

There is a thing called smurfing.

The competitive games I have first-hand experience with(LoL, DOTA2, World of Tanks) have no pay-to-win elements and the different heroes/items/tanks/ are all balanced.

And this whole discussion is about f2p games with microtransactions and this thread on whether microtransactions should give an advantage. Please don't confuse the issue.

Do you see that the problem is with people who deliberately use state of the art manipulation methods, backed by tons of cognitive science research, to milk people for their cash?

There's selling, and then there's just stealing from people. Many F2P border on the second one.

So if I'm a gifted salesman who's hit upon those methods by chance and paying attention, that's fine, as long as there's no Science?

This is irrelevant.

It's fine if you use Science as long as you sell me something of real value, so the transaction is win-win for both of us. It's not fine if you trick me into buying things that have little or no value for me. Also, if you had something valuable to sell, you wouldn't need manipulation tricks.

It's not a devastating rebuttal to everything you were saying, but it is highly relavent as a pompt for you to clarify your point - which this is a good start at. I don't think we're quite to somewhere cogent, though; real value is subjective, so I'm not sure exactly how we draw that line - particularly when it comes to entertainment. If a salesman convinces me to buy the pricier golf clubs, maybe I will have a "better" experience out playing golf, but under what conditions is that "real value" when I would have had fun and got exercise either way?

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