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Chess. Fuckin’ a, no new characters for like a thousand years now. One map. Small children can beat me. Shit’s trash.
UMM ACKSHUALLY the queen was added in the 15th century, replacing the weaker vizier.
In my first language we still call the chess queen a vizier!
Last gameplay patch was in the 70s, when they fixed the vertical castling exploit.
Whoa, they had vertical castling?
Whoa, I’d never heard of that. Thanks!
What the hell are you on about, they added a new piece just last month.
I thought this was going to be about the nook :(
Jesus.
An LRR reference in the wild? Absolutely mythical.
Second time you’ve spotted me doing it!
Ah damn I’m so sorry I didn’t pick up on your name! I’m terrible at that, I really should be more mindful. Actually I’m going to tag you “LRR Enjoyer” now. There!
Also I have to confess I haven’t kept up with them lately. I used to watch a ton of it years ago, both their sketches and some of their stream stuff. And Desert Bus of course. I really should get back into it, I don’t know why I stopped.
According to Star Trek: The Original Series, in around 2 centuries, chess will have a new mainstream map consisting of 3 planes instead of 1. We won’t have to wait long! So exciting!
Just wait until they have 8 separate cubes each consisting of 8 planes with an 8x8 grid each: true 4D chess.
Now it would only take 8 arrays of 8 of these cubes to advance to 5D chess!
Fuckin’ a, I had to share that with !anarchychess@sopuli.xyz
I saw your repost before I saw this. Then I read his comment and thought “did he just steal that quote from the meme I just read?“
Any gacha.
“Oh I got so lucky! It only took 20 pulls to get Boobina!”
Yeah man, bet that felt a lot better than just unlocking her by doing her story quests like any normal game. Maybe you need to be a gambling addict or something.
It seems like you DO understand why gachas are popular. They are gambling.
Gachapon isn’t gambling, though I could see why one could be confused.
Gachapon (from which Gacha games get their name) is a Japanese word that essentially translates to “capsule toy.” It refers to the machine which you insert a coin and spin a knob, which causes the machine to drop a plastic (usually) capsule out of it. You know, like a gumball machine. Or those candy machines that were always full of banana hard candies near the exit at Ross or TJ Maxx.
With gachapon, you are paying for a capsule toy. You aren’t buying a specific capsule toy, you are buying a single capsule toy from the ones in the machine, and whichever one you get is random. However, you aren’t winning or losing, because you always “win the prize.” It might not be the one you want, but you always get what you pay for. Similar concept to blind-box toys.
With gambling, you spend money on a chance to win more money, usually. There is also a chance you win nothing and lose the money you spent. Gambling is when you spend money on something that can (and will often) give you nothing in return, which doesn’t happen with gachapon. With gachapon, you always “win,” but with gambling you very often lose. Gacha games always give you something valuable to the gameplay, even if you get duplicates of something you already have (makes the character more powerful, for example). Gambling often just takes your money and gives you absolutely nothing back except a sad, empty feeling.
Also, just don’t spend money if you don’t want to. It’s not hard. Nobody forces you to spend money on any game with a gun to your head (hopefully). Just have self-control, it’s easy. And if for some reason you don’t have self-control, work on it. Improve yourself.
Gacha games usually have enough free tickets built into it as rewards for playing the game that you can unlock almost everything you need to keep playing the game for free anyway. Just don’t expect to unlock everything in 3 hours.
Great comment except the part about telling people to just have self control. The FOMO aspect that gacha and gambling rely on is a real problematic thing. These game exist specifically because they can tap into that.
Gachapon and gambling might prey on the same psychological tendencies humans have, but they are not the same thing, which is the point of my comment.
I fail to see why saying “If you lack self-control, work on improving yourself” is a bad thing to say, or somehow wrong. If you cannot exercise self-control, then you will not have a happy life. You will find yourself constantly broke from impulse spending on things you don’t need or that give you no return on value other than “I might miss it.” You do not need a gacha game for that, as there are plenty of other things in real life that can do the same thing that people here wouldn’t be downvoting or commenting on, for example:
- attending a local farmer’s market
- attending live musician performances
- attending a live artist or author event
- eating promotional food items at restaurants
- attending hobby and art conventions
Everything has a time limit. Nothing exists for the span of eternity here, and thus everything has a chance to become, if it is not already, a time limited item or event that preys on FOMO for different personal interests. But if you have self-control, FOMO doesn’t have hardly any effect on you. Your do not HAVE to do X, or see Y, or buy Z. It is not a requirement of life. You aren’t going to ever be able to do, see, or buy everything you want. Its a fact of life. Self-control helps you realize this.
Saying no to yourself is powerful. You dont always have to say no, but self-control helps you to know when you should. And thus, it removes the power FOMO has over you. You stop caring about what other people think or say, and it gives you the power to stay financially responsible, and helps keep you mentally healthy.
Why is this bad? Even in the context of what I am talking about, if someone decides to play a gacha game, they should definitely have self-control. A person with no self-control will quickly find themselves peniless playing a gacha game, but they were probably going to be peniless eithout the gacha game too. Its not the fault of the game, it is the fault of the player.
Self control isn’t guaranteed for everyone. Your take here is pretty ableist.
You’d place blame on victims instead of abusers. Companies that have spent fortunes to make sure their systems go after easy targets. People who aren’t neurotypical, people who grew up with different cultures that didn’t prepare them for this or any of multiple other sources that would make them easier to take advantage of over and over.
Also, just don’t spend money if you don’t want to. It’s not hard. Nobody forces you to spend money on any game with a gun to your head (hopefully). Just have self-control, it’s easy. And if for some reason you don’t have self-control, work on it. Improve yourself.
It’s not hard for you. But many people are wired in a way that makes it exceptionally hard for them to resist these kind of psychological dark patterns. These are innate characteristics, with some overlap with ADHD and other neurodiversity, not necessarily something one can “work on”. And there’s a reason why these dark patterns are in the games, because they work in extracting more money from players than they would otherwise give.
Stephanie Sterling made a video a few years ago where they go into detail how modern games prey on vulnerable people: The Addictive Cost Of Predatory Videogame Monetization (The Jimquisition)
It might not be the one you want, but you always get what you pay for. Similar concept to blind-box toys.
With gachapon, you always “win,”
Disagree with the 2nd point here. If you are playing genshin or whatever, spend real life money on pulls to get a specific character and instead get something else, you have effectively lost. What you got is not what you spent your money for and possible not or barely valuable.
When you put your quarter into the gumball machine, you are buying a gumball. Not a specific color or flavor of gumball. It doesn’t matter which gumball machine you put the quarter into, whether it is full of red gumballs with a few green ones, or if it is full of gumballs of every color of the rainbow. You are getting exactly what you are paying for: a gumball from the machine. It doesnt matter if you put a quarter into the machine with mostly red gumballs hoping for a red or green gumball, you are buying a gumball from that machine, not a specific gumball.
Same idea with gacha games. I understand its not popular or liked, but that is how it is.
Remember when games rewarded you with more game content by actually playing them? Pepperidge Farms remembers
If you consider spending money to be a game mechanic then this is still true lol
You must use your pickpocket skill on your mother’s Cloak of Shopping, retrieve the Rectangle of Potentia. Carefully enter the Sacred Digits into the Portal of Reclamation to receive your reward.
Go carefully young adventurers, for the penalty for failure is great, and La Chancla is indeed fierce.
When I went on the main Genshin subreddit, I was so baffled that people do little pulling rituals, and even do parties with thematic food and decoration for characters to influence their gacha luck 😵💫 Maybe they didn’t take it that seriously, but it still felt like a very unhealthy attitude towards such a predatory game.
Yeah that’s not great
To be fair, that’s not an issue isolated to gacha games. Plenty of modern titles take old style unlocks (skins, bonus characters etc) and turns them into small, often paid, DLC. It sucks but it’s a wider problem within the industry.
I can butt in on this a little bit. The problem with statements like this is that they treat “gacha” (the monetisation and unit recruitment system) as a genre when gacha games are too varied to be locked under this single umbrella (at least for a conversation like this). To name a few, you have games like:
- Arknights (tower defence)
- Azur Lane (bullet-hell kinda sorta)
- Bang Dream (rhythm game)
- Genshin Impact (action-adventure)
- Girls’ Frontline (tactical autobattler)
- Persona 5X (JRPG, just gacha Persona)
All of them play differently, offer different challenges and the impact of their gacha systems can be all over the place. Sometimes there are limited character pulls which have serious effect on gameplay (most of the modern titles), other times characters are super easy to obtain and improve as most of the monetisation comes from character costumes etc (Girls’ Frontline, Azur Lane for example).
Besides that, many of them have engaging stories, which combined with offering lots of content and being able to play them for free makes the whole thing even more appealing.Not that the aspect of “oh cool, I unlocked new character” doesn’t play any role or that there’s nothing predatory about most of the games using this mechanic, it’s just that “gacha” mechanics aren’t always the sole or main factor keeping people playing.
TL;DR: They are just free games that can, but aren’t always, predatory with a specific gameplay mechanic. Often offer enough value for free players to have fun with them.
To me Gacha isn’t a genre it’s a business model. And I understand their gripes …
So do I, I’m just saying that many wonder “why people play gacha games” without realising (or caring) that there’s actual “game” part outside of the monetisation itself.
MapleS had these “gacha machines ingame starting 10+years ago” thats how i knew what gacha was before it became a thing. I only played the main game until it got to grindy and required actual cash if you wan to further your account . it is then i started search cracked version which were fun for a time.
Yeah, I put 2000+ hours into Genshin over 4 years and have like 75 characters without ever spending any money. But the game is still so full of psychological dark patterns that would squeeze out the last penny from those whose personality or neurodiversity makes them vulnerable against such manipulation.
And yet again, the core of the issue of capitalism. As Stephanie Sterling put it many a time, the companies’ attitude is “Why be satisfied with a lot of money, when we could have all the money.”
My main game is the already mentioned Girls’ Frontline (the first one), which is thankfully old enough to come out before the modern monetisation practises and psychological tricks became the norm. There’s no limited pull currency, no need for character dupes (can be replaced by a resource that is so easy to get I can’t even spend it all), no character specific events to push the new and shiny unit etc.
It does have skin gacha for most (but not all) character skins but even then you can use farmable resource for that + getting duplicate costumes turns them into “Black Cards” which can be exchanged for specific outfit. It’s still a bad system and a black mark on an otherwise extremely free-2-play friendly game.I feel like the most important part of playing gacha games is the ability to just walk away if a title ends up being monetised in a way that affects your enjoyment or well being (for those with lack of self-control). There’s plenty of fun to be had for free, no need to give into FOMO and suffering through predatory balancing decisions when there’s so many options on the market.
I agree with you but then I see people calling themselves gacha gamers and hopping into every new gacha regardless of genre or gameplay so I just assumed I just didn’t get it.
Oh, absolutely. I assume people who play exclusively gacha games do so due to the combination of F2P, regular content updates and excitement from pulling for characters/gambling but that’s just a personal guess. I don’t have any hard data to confirm it.
As for folks playing them regardless of genre, that’s not really exclusive to gacha games - there’s plenty of people who play whatever catches their attention, myself included. Strategy, racing, shooters, adventure games… if it clicks with me I’ll play anything (gacha or not). There’s too much fun stuff out there to limit yourself to a single genre, in my opinion.
And then half the time, “Boobina” is like a 11 year old girl.
For the ones I play, the actual gameplay is the appeal; and I accept the gacha only if it’s reasonably permissive to free players.
The genre definitely has a recurring issue with power scaling, to get people to roll for the newest gooner bait, and when that becomes too apparent, it kills my interest. That’s the other thing: You have to prepare your sanity for the inevitable day you’ll stop playing that game and sacrifice hours of “character progress” to find something else fun. Heck, could just be another gacha that’s bending over backwards to cater to new players.
As someone with 2000+ hours in Genshin, I completely agree 😆 I only play for exploration nowadays because the story actively pushed me away, while the gambling never appealed to me. I wish we could just unlock characters via quests. I get no joy from a lucky draw, so I just treat gacha pulls in batches of guaranteed unlocks, like the price of this character is 160 pulls and that’s it. But the whole monetisation is disgustingly predatory for those who are even a little susceptible to it.
arnt these the anime games that are primarly played by a specific demographic.
Genshin has been played by 150 mil people in china and another 150 mil in rest of the world according to a economic report by the game developer.
Eh at least it’s cheaper than actual casinos, let them have it lol
Any game with grinding where microtransactions can invalidate weeks of grind.
It’s already a big ask to make players find fun in a grind, but some C-level dipshits found a way to stamp that fun out too.
IMO, that method is valid, but it is HIGHLY dependent on the gameplay loop and the game company.
Take Warframe for example, one of the grindiest games in existence:
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The game is mainly PvE (and the PVP stuff has near to no impact on the raw skill needed), so someone buying their way to power doesn’t feel so bad.
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The ingame premium currency (Platinum) is fully tradable by all players. Getting extras of stuff is also common. Grinds often reach the ‘unfun’ level. So EVERYONE is encouraged to skip grind once it gets too much.
TLDR: Microtransactions are encouraged and available for free for ALL players, once you’ve reached your grind tolerance level.
Nope, I hated the freemium grind crap in Warframe. Killed my enjoyment of the game and uninstalled.
Fair. To each their own.
They’ve gotten better about that with Rebecca in charge now. Many of the new grinds have pity shops built in, or mercy systems in place.
Some of the old pity shops need a rebalance though (eg Citrine)
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Any game where just grinding is the main thing you do
I would generally agree, but some games have massive grinds and can be totally fun to play without participating in most of the grind.
Take war thunder or world of tanks. If you just want to drive a Panzer IV all day you can unlock that in a few days or so, then never care about unlocking anything again. Just keep driving your panzer and having fun.
*coughs ORS", so much gatekeeper and fans defending such a grindy game. why drag the rs3 into it too, complained enough to get rid of MTX, in a fit rs decided to eliminate almost every single thing that gives some afkable skilling, because they got mad they lost 10% revenue from removing the entire mtx systems. funny ORS players got mad recently because, no surprise they RAISED prices again for membership, what did you expect if you suddenly lost 10% of your revenue. with no extra benefits for rs3 members now, people dint see the worth it maintaining one anymore. they couldve just eliminate all the xp boosting instead, which was the main problem form the MTX.
Heya, quick question: WTF is ORS?
Old School RuneScape
Because you already have the other answers: OSRS. He just misspelled it ;)
Original RuneScape maybe?
I’m generally fine with microtransactions replacing some grind, just because I’ve finally reached a point in my life where I don’t want to dedicate 20 hours a week to a game for months. It mostly boils down to whether the game is wasting players’ lives to drive money from them. SOME games make the grind fun and worth playing, and thus I don’t really care. If the game’s fun isn’t locked behind a gate that requires significant time investment, then you’re not really harming players by having a grind. If the game isn’t fun in the meantime, and the cost is too much (and basically anything more than a dollar or two is), then I can go find another game.
mobas.
i remember not enjoying warcraft 3 due to its focus on hero characters, then someone modded all of the non-unique units out???
and everyone who plays them seems genuinely miserable.
Lol I actually like the idea of controlling one hero a lot more than focusing on commanding a whole army.
My only problem is how fucking toxic MOBA communities are.
I never played any moba, but i know how toxic they are. I watched some league tutorials, to figure out what is even going on, and every tutorial i watched started with: first off all, turn off voice chat.
Now valve is cooking deadlock, which is a moba as far as i know, and it’s probably the best game i have ever played. But you can smell the moba player base, by the way a lot of them behave. I play online games since counterstrike 1.4, and i have never been shittalked as much and as bad as in deadlock since i play that. It’s usually your own team too, you can be winning and someone tells you to kill yourself and hopes that my family gets raped, because you did somethimg they didn’t like. A shitton of russians too, which is probably the big overlap of toxic shitbags and mobas.
That sucks, I’ve heard so much good about Deadlock’s gameplay, but that playerbase is exactly what I expected.
I want to be a single unit in a massively multiplayer Age of Empires II. Like, get in the unit queue hoping you get drafted as a Hussar or something cool. Get sent in as villager with an axe every time but still do your best chopping the most wood for your team to win.
sounds like battlefield
That’s basically what happens when you join the auto-fill queue and get assinged Support in League of Legends.
And then your team flames you for not chipping enough wood.
I played League for many years when it came out. I think the genre is fun to play, requires lots if skill, but I am only willing to take so much verbal abuse for what is supposed to be time I spend for fun.
Every person I’ve ever disliked had one thing in common, League addiction. Shits so bad for you it’s crazy.
I hate the RTS+hero game in all its forms. It started with WC3, but so many are doing it now.
But I love RTS, and I quite enjoy moba-like games. It’s just that I absolutely fucking hate the community.
I don’t think that RTS+hero started with warcraft, there were hero units in warlords series (better implemented I think) before warcraft.
Yeah, but in WC3, especially in multiplayer, it was a super hard requirement. 80% of your time would be hero micro
I really don’t understand it. I’ve played a little of both Dota & LoL and it’s the same group of miserable pricks. Is there a moba that doesn’t have a lethally toxic player base?
Heroes of the storm wasn’t too bad, but I never got into the competitive aspects, and that’s usually where things get bad.
Put 10 random people in a competitive cage where errors on minute 5 can snowball to a loss on minute 50 and you will get this all the time.
Bonus: give them access to a keyboard and a game speed to slack off.
Only if you rank. Play the other game modes, those are stupid-fun.
I enjoyed Warcraft 3 because of its focus on Heroes. And I dont really know about other rts games with focus on Heroes. Maybe Age of Mythology or Starcraft 2 campaign but not PvP. Are there some other good ones? I’m in a mood.
Check Godsworn and I agree that there isn’t that many Warcraft 3 like games.
Play League. Can confirm.
Addiction
As a counter example MonsterSSS has a lot of fun.
i played the custom games which were very fun, because new one appear frequently, so theres plenty of content, eventually i got tired of the game and moved onto something else.
Work simulators and games which gameplay loops turn out to be work simulators in disguise.
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I love sim games. “Run your own business” games supermarket, vending machine business, pot shop business, coffee shop empire. I love unwinding with a game like those after a full day of work.
I like playing Civilization and feel attacked haha
League of fucking legends. Why… The repetitiveness and toxic community especially… Just dont get it.
Kingdom Hearts. Goofy and Sephiroth in the same room together breaks my brain, and not in a fun way. I played the first game when it came out on PS2 and decided it wasn’t for me.
I’ve seen story breakdowns of the other games on YouTube and figured I’m not missing anything. Lots of setups and plot hooks that don’t go anywhere or go somewhere stupid.
That mobile game where you slowly build up a city, train lots of troops, launch attacks on other players’ cities, form alliances and so on, before getting soundly thumped by the Koreans.
From a personal perspective. Those have such a low investment requirement for the basic gaming loop.
Over the course of the day there will be small unavoidable breaks, 5-15 minutes long during which there isn’t much to do. Cant really boot up a PC for more serious gaming session with such a small time even if I’m near a PC at that time, usually not.
But there’s always a smartphone within reach. So this sort of random town building games are perfect to kill few minutes, pretty much same as killing some time doomscrolling or watching some YT videos.
I just keep mindustry paused on my phone and build bits of factory when I have time.
That’s a good approach too. I’ll try that one out as well.
Reversed Front? Jk - I know Korea isn’t part of China yet
Dark Souls/Souls likes in generals. If I want to bang my head against the same problem endlessly and get hopelessly frustrated, I’d just do my day job
Well… You’re not supposed to do that in those games though, so that could be why you don’t enjoy them
When I discovered Tunic is secretly soulslike I died a little. Never picked it back up.
You saved me some pain. Thank you friend
In the settings they have a no fail mode. I was reluctant at first, but the game is so incredible and such a great puzzle game it was still amazing just larping that damage mattered while playing for the story.
I was so excited for Tunic, and then when I finally played it, it was such a letdown. The art and music are amazing, but it’s so cryptic and difficult.
Roblox
I wanted to test it, but my computer at the time had a small C drive, and Roblox couldn’t install on other drives.
Later I learned that I’m probably far too old for it.
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Sports games based on real teams. It makes me feel like I’m playing an ad. Oh yeah and if there are actual ads too. 😪
Give me fake teams, fake players, even fake cities? and you have activated my interest.
Yeah, but building a dream team is so fun if you’re a fan of the sport. Or if you’re doing a challenge like only U20 players or only African players… etc. This wouldn’t be anywhere as good if everyone was fake.
Extraction shooters. You work your ass off to get gear, only to lose it to some griefing asshole hiding in a dark corner. Assuming you actually don’t lose your gear to players, server wipes are almost mandatory to keep people playing and to try and level the playing field. They’re like a worse battle royal.
What about single player ones? Zero sievert and escape from duckov.
Bonus is that they have difficulty options to choose if you want to lose your stuff on death or not. Downside is that I think balancing a game around both of those being options is difficult and feels a bit off.
Would be interested in a coop one tbh, ZS2 apparently doing coop.
EFT single player is a hoot. Ive played the shit out of it.
No idea, looks painful to run it on Linux so I haven’t bothered trying.
People who like abusive relationships like this kind of stuff. Life is bad enough in the real world for me
Meta progression is what ruins these games imo. Back in my day (😮) we just played for points and knew they were worthless. And everything but your own skills reset after every match. And cosmetics were free because players just enjoy making them for eachother.
But there’s not much to sell there, so no money being spent to trick you into getting addicted
This is a hard one as I generally just ignore games that don’t appeal to me, so I forget they even exist.
But I guess games that have FOMO mechanics that don’t respect your time and push you towards playing every day.
Likewise I am a point in my life where I can see one gameplay video and be like yep not for me. But I sometimes question how it could be for anyone
WoW.
It was a boring grindfest when it came out. Why are people still playing this outdated, frankly boring, game 22(?) years later?
I’ll be honest, the repetitive loops had enough of a variety that it caught me by the balls back in 2006. Felt like your effort would eventually pay off in a couple of days, which was infinitely faster than anything out of Korea by then - those grindfests were already fine tuned to hell to suck as much time as possible
Now it’s trash. At launch and even during TBC it was an awesome social space with lots of content. The streamlining they did to make the “boring” parts easier like group finder killed all socializing. Now it’s just clicking a queue, do the dungeon / raid. Don’t say a word and go back to daily quest grinds. Super boring.
It was always grindy and relief entirely on “number go up” dopamine to keep people coming back. It’s continued success has killed all innovation in the mmo space for decades. It is a blight
Always pissed me off when Mythic sold out to EA, and then DAoC just imploded. I loved that game. A realm vs realm (PvP) that actually mattered to the rest of the content, and had something for everyone, really.
They didn’t have “two teams of all the same classes and skills” they had THREE teams, and the play style for all three really was wildly different from each other, from how magic worked for each, to how different classes could do things better.
It really was well thought out, and graphically well ahead of its time, too.
Somebody complained about GTAV online which I’ve played a lot, and the feeling is the same. Someone, in charge of development, doesn’t understand their own product. I pretty much only played on PS4 in a super-cheesing crew, which made the game as cooperative and social as the 30-going-on-13 gen-pop properly public public sessions never were.
I want to downvote you but that means it’s a good answer. Remember to sort by controversial
Any gacha game.
I’ve tried to play them, but many play themselves and are loaded with microtransactions and you’ll hit a wall. I much prefer unlocking things from progressing or doing skillful things within the game.
