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Diablo 4's new mount costs more than the actual game
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this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2024
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Genshin is good in some aspects, but it shows how desensitized we are that we accept the egregious gambling and the endless grind that only exists for the sake of retention. Can Genshin players really talk shit about this when in average it takes around $200 to get one single 5* character? Even if you are not paying that yourself, the game is built that way to exploit those who do.
The world was big enough and rich enough that I could mostly ignore the dungeons and never really feel like grinding. I just kinda wandered around chasing quest-lines and having fun. I didn't sweat the 5* heroes and never really had a problem with the PvE aspect of the game. Admittedly, I wasn't doing end-game content or playing anything remotely competitively.
Sure. Its a game full of psychological landmines. And if you're in your 30s and you've learned how to dance through the bullshit, then its easy. But if you're playing this game as a twelve year old and constantly getting spammed by the Wallet Inspector to give up another $20, less so.
But... I can't do anything about that. What really gets me is that the country where this game is produced (China) has better and more comprehensive regulations to limit exploitation of end-users than the countries where the majority of players come from (Japan, Korea, USA). I believe there was even some amount of controversy in how hard the western-oriented interfaces sold in-game purchases, relative to the domestic versions.
You can avoid the grind at first since the game is PvE, but the further you go the more the game demands you to increase the World Level, and the more grind you need to do to get each character playable at that level.
I didn't max out my World Level because at some point it felt like undoing my work of powering up the characters, but the game definitely pushes you that way. Not only story quests, but doiing Abyss levels for more free currency requires high level characters.
That's not even mentioning Artifacts which have so many layers of randomized stats that you could be basically grinding forever to get one which has exactly the stats you want.
I can never shake off the feeling that if Genshin wasn't gacha, if you could get characters from quests and weapons and artifacts from exploration, it would be a much, much better game, even if it was smaller and shorter. But more and more, this seems to be the kind of game that companies want to make.
China seems to be showing a bit more pulse than many countries as far as reining in lootbox games goes, but it's still not enough, and it doesn't seem the benefits of these efforts can be seen worldwide.
I mean, enough would be loading these senior executives and marketing directors into a cannon and firing them into the ocean. But I agree, even the most stringent rules always seem to be attacking the edges of the problem.