The model is extremely standard in mobile games, especially in Asia, where it has been the norm for almost a decade in gacha games, and where people are used to paying and gambling. They all have the same mechanics, or variations of them, Diablo doesn't really do anything innovative here, but it certainly is on the aggressive side.
A lot of the outrage comes from the fact that 1. Diablo is originally a PC-based IP with a PC gamer fanbase, and PC gamers are used to different monetization schemes and generally don't play mobile games. Even without the gambling mechanics, there already was a huge backlash about Blizzard making a mobile Diablo game 2. Diablo is a "western" IP where such monetization schemes are less common and the penetration of PC players is higher compared to other parts of the world where mobile game penetration is higher.
> And can "winning" result in a financial reward
Generally speaking, no. There are no competitions for these kind of games. The only way you could cash out would be to sell your account, which is against the ToS, but commonly done nonetheless.
Remember also how Diablo 3 was released (in most countries) with a real money Auction House, which was later removed because even the devs realized that it hurt the game ?
What's interesting is Diablo Immortal's monetization introduces a level of indirection compared to Diablo 3's Real Money Auction House (RMAH), and I think it's sufficiently distinct to avoid the same fate.
In D3, you could buy equipment directly from the RMAH. This undermined core gameplay mechanisms since any loot you were likely to find would be inferior to whatever was available for pennies in the store. So why bother running the dungeons at all?
In DI, you don't buy gear directly with money. Instead, you buy access to dungeons with guaranteed drops of high level items which are statistically infeasible to obtain any other way. But this still lends plausible deniability: you're not buying your gear, you're just buying a spin at the (very weighted) wheel.
> The only way you could cash out would be to sell your account, which is against the ToS, but commonly done nonetheless.
Interesting. Why would the publisher have such a ToS? Just so they monopolize the revenue from in-game sales? Or is it more altruistic, like preventing new players having an unfair advantage? I would have thought encouraging a secondary market in their game would actually attract players.
I would imagine it's because they want to avoid people building bots and creating businesses around accounts creation and selling. Once you have such a secondary market you get a cheap supply of accounts due to outsourced labor or bots. This devalues the in-game purchases. Why would I spent more money in-game if I can just buy a cheap account?
Add to that lotteries, or pretty much anything that has random outcomes. Even if you don't gamble with cash, but something like Pokemon cards or digital items, there will always be secondary markets that let you cash out. If you want to ban these things, you'd have to ban all randomness.
I regularly play games with gambling (gacha) mechanics and I love them. The short bursts of fun are exactly what I'm looking for in my current busy life. I have nothing against this model of monetization. Gambling is fun. Casinos are fun. I am not a big spender by any means, but I've probably spent ~$2k on these kind of games over the past two years or so. I don't regret it, and for me the fun is in figuring out how to maximize the value of my spending by doing the math for different types of purchases, sometimes even coding up simulations.
The problem starts when it's unregulated and you are tricking kids, or people who are not educated about probability, into spending their money in casinos, and use dozens of psychological tricks to do so and obfuscate purchases. Just like it's easy for kids to get addicted to social media like Instagram, it's easy and dangerous to get addicted to gambling (especially when you see your friends or popular streamers doing it). I believe all of these games should be 18+, at the very least, and come with a big warning sign.
The problem with gambling is that it taps into the dopamine system in ways that people are not aware of, even if they know about probabilities.
The effect is cumulative, and the more the person gambles, the more they will gamble, take risks, create unbalance and spend money.
Now, just like with anything related to dopamine, many people will only have a mild effect. E.G: I've played dota for a while, and never went into full spending mode.
Like you, I think it's ok to gamble once in a while, to pay for the game. After all, it's fun, and the game provides pleasurable moments, but does cost a lot of resources to develop. It's fair to give money to the company making it: after all, other games may be paid up to $60, DLC not included, while free to play are always up to date.
Yet, it's very difficult to evaluate if the tactics used by the game for gambling are twisted or not, and if the game target is going to be abused or not.
For this reason, I do think they should be heavily regulated, not just about the age, but about the nature, and intensity, or the gambling mechanism in place.
I work on video games (not on the design side but programming) and had to implement some on those systems on several mobile games. I agree with the comment above that it’s hard to draw the line between gambling addiction and à faire amount of random that brings fun to a game. Diablo 2 has already those kinds of random behavior to retain your attention and trigger dopamine rushes but without trying to grab cash from you.
The only solution to me is legal regulation, companies won’t listen as it brings money and most people like to play them. Features like battle pass for example are pretty moral and a good balance between making the game profitable, having a rétention and not milk users.
I hope EU will flag lootboxes based games as casino games globally and that other big countries will follow (like Korea, Japan and USA) to stop this trend and force designer to find better mechanics.
Also users should also be educated to pay for a game that they enjoy. Nowadays with all the free services, it’s harder to make users pay for something they can get for « free » elsewhere. So it’s a complicated issue.
> Features like battle pass for example are pretty moral and a good balance between making the game profitable, having a rétention and not milk users.
The problem with battle passes is that they rely on you having a massive player base, and require an incredible amount of effort to develop and keep running. For a game like diablo that's clearly not a problem but for anything that's not a top 10 game on their platform it is
> I hope EU will flag lootboxes based games as casino games globally
I don't think this (specific) categorization is necessarily the right approach. The problematic part with casino style games and gambling in general is that cashing out provides a real money incentive, which is not present here. Calling these games gambling is kind of like calling piracy theft - the intention is right but there's an important difference. We haven't got a category for them yet.
> Also users should also be educated to pay for a game that they enjoy.
On one level yes. On the other, f2p games are popular for a reason. Excellent games providing a social experience has a network effect, and if your conversion rate is 2% you don't succeed as a game by monetising better, you succeed by increasing your audience. A f2p game could be a profitable game if the active playerbase all paid $2-3 each but the _second_ you introduce a barrier there you lose many players who won't pay, their friends who might pay etc etc.
How do you stack up this opinion (ban 'immoral' video games) with the idea that drug prohibition is widely considered a spectacular failure?
Banning games like this will only drive the whales into black markets, which are more expensive, more dangerous, and benefit criminal enterprises by definition.
Many of the deaths from heroin, for example, are due to contamination with fentanyl (which boosts the potency). A company who was liable to their customers (ie: not a criminal enterprise) would be much less incentivized to lace their product, and if they did, there would be someone to prosecute instead of an entire black market to wag a finger at.
Anyways, I agree, this is an extremely exploitative design. What I don't agree on is using legal regulation to shape society into something moral. Historically, that's only made things worse.
I don't think you can compare these mechanics to heroin, which is physically addictive. A fairer comparison is social media and timelines/newsfeeds, which use very similar mechanics, including randomness, to give people their dopamine rush and make them come back. Hence all this social media addiction we have. The main difference is that no money is (directly) involved there, only indirectly through ads.
With $100 a month you can do a lot of things. (And I'm not even talking about the regions of the world where you could survive a month with that amount). Just think how may games you could have bought on Steam for that money!
Those gambling games are extremely overpriced in comparison!
But they still make that money. Guess how: By addiction, and other psychological tricks to make the price seem OKisch, even it's absolutely not.
Even the most expensive game productions could make a good revenue back than just by charging a one time fee of $40 to $60.
Now with those gambling games they made $100 a month on you… Continuously.
The whole business model is a ripoff, clearly immoral, and should get banned completely ASAP.
> Just think how may games you could have bought on Steam for that money!
I don't see the difference. Whether I pay a "subscription fee" of $100 per month or I buy two new games per month, why does it matter? Why do you think that buying two games a month is necessarily more fun than paying a subscription fee for the same 2-3 games? For me it isn't, and there aren't even enough games I would be interested in buying in the first place.
You can run the same kind of analysis on different game mechanics and strategies on games not designed to rip you off. They actually tend to be far more interesting because gambling games rarely have any meaningful degree of complexity and the singular strategy you are actually optimizing for is how much you have to sink into the game to succeed something you can probably figure out for a given game in about 30 seconds of analysis.
Basically you have a bad habit not that far off from smoking cigarettes that will probably eventually lead to dangerous overspending the first time you have an economic downturn at the same time as emotional stress. Despite such games being in general tasteless and boring you have convinced yourself its "fun" because you have trained your brain to release dopamine when you do it and can't tell the difference being joy and dopamine the same way a crack addict can't tell the difference between chemical stimulation and actual joy.
At least with actual gambling I have theoretical chance, at least momentarily to actually win money... With lootboxes outside Valve and maybe some others there is no chance to get it back.
This looks nicely done, but for anyone interested I'd like to mention that these courses aren't something that can replace learning the fundamental concepts and theories behind ML/RL, for which there exist excellent books and courses that focus more on math and theory. I would go there.
These courses teach you how to call a library and use an API. You get nearly the same thing from just looking at the docs. Please don't say you "know RL" after this.
IMO the best intro book is Sutton's [1], it's extremely accessible (little math background needed) and covers all basic concepts. Work through David Silver's course (search youtube, it overlaps heavily with the book above) and then you are ready for something more advanced like [2] and you can start reading and implementing research papers.
I think the idea is not to replace learning the theory or math, but rather to just postpone it. Learning the practical aspects of an engineering discipline can provide the necessary motivation to study the theory/math, and this is the oft ignored factor. I also think there is some benefit in learning a topic using the tool that you will actually use in production (if that is possible without adding unnecessary complexity in the syllabus).
I personally learned DRL from David Silver's course and Sutton & Burto back in the days. They were the only good resources around and I liked them very much. But I think that with the advent of high-level frameworks in DRL, there are better learning paths.
I do intend to teach the theory/math in a later installment of this series, but I wanted to do it by showing students how to implement the various classes of algorithms e.g. Q-learning (DQN/Rainbow), policy gradients (PPO) and model-based (AlphaZero) using RLlib. This would kill two birds with one stone: you can simultaneously pick up the theory/math and the lower level API of the tool that you will be using in the future anyway.
Opposite experience for me. I barely know anyone who uses FB marketplace, FB groups, or messenger. The only use case for Messenger is keeping in touch with "old people" who used it with me 10-15 years ago. That's like 2-3 people who are left and haven't moved off yet
In my experience, the FB ecosystem, other than Instagram and WhatsApp, is totally irrelevant to the younger generation.
If FB didn't own Instagram and WhatsApp I think it'd be dying in the next few years. These acquisitions are IMO what's keeping it relevant.
The last point is important. In my experience it's mostly about status. RSEs are always seen as inferior to researchers (research scientists) who supposedly come up with the "big ideas" while RSEs merely implement the stuff they're told to do.
In reality the line is much blurrier. There can be no innovation and iteration without implementation of ideas and the RSE work is just as important.
But unless this view changes, nobody wants to be an RSE.
According to a quick search for the case of researchers, and the stereotype of most staff in academia across the board being underpaid, this means academic researchers would have even less incentives/perks/reward, because now they have one less beneficial status differential.
Is there some way to make human respect feel like it's not a zero sum game? The world may never know.
> Is there some way to make human respect feel like it's not a zero sum game?
Respect is non zero sum but status is definitionally a positional good. If you’re number 1 someone else isn’t. There can be uncertainty about status but ambiguity always collapses eventually. Everyone can be treated with respect but there will be a prestige or dominance hierarchy in any group of humans, subtle as it may be.
I actually wouldn't mind being lower status than the scientists, so long as my particular expertise was respected and I had a reasonable degree of autonomy within my domain.
I did tech support at a university for a bit. I certainly wasn't as high status as the professors, but they mostly respected me and the value I provided (especially when you do things like help them recover that next book they were working on, or whatever).
Not just viewed, but literally called an assistant in the official title.
I am a licensed professional engineer (mechanical) and I work in academia (though my work is varied and does involve some code), my official title (in french) is "Professionnel de recherche", which translates to Research Professional. It is my understanding that in most of the english-speaking world, this position (someone that works for a research lab, who is qualified above the technician level, but not a PI nor a postdoc or student) is called "Research Assistant".
I write "Research Engineer" on my résumé/linkedin, because TBH for most people who don't have much experience in academia, "Research Assistant" sounds like an admin assistant (secretary).
I'd argue the position of software engineers/ programmers being those that implement the thinking of the business/science thinkers isn't unique to academia.
Agreed. In the special case of currencies, demand follows belief. If people believe in an assert they will accept it for trade, which may in turn crate demand. This leads to a cycle where more demand often strengthens the belief.
The issue with most crypto tokens is that its demand only exists within the closed crypto ecosystem in the form of liquidity, not in the real world. This makes is much easier to shake belief.
We're going to college at the worst time in our lives. When I was in college I did exactly what you described. I didn't really cheat much (I remember just one time), but all I cared about was grades and getting a job. I couldn't have cared less about learning or retaining anything. And I didn't learn much. This strategy worked out well for me, but it was a huge waste of time.
I'm in my 30s now and I would absolutely love to go back to school to learn. Now I feel like I'm in a position where I can appreciate academic material and concepts because I understand how they relate to the real world. Please give me those advanced graph algorithm, database, and real analysis classes that I couldn't appreciate 15 years ago due to a lack of real-world experience.
Us students would generally love to learn too. The problem I often encountered was engineering professors did research first and foremost with teaching a second priority. It often felt like if the teacher isn’t putting in the work why should we? Conversely, my business teachers cared far more for us students and I believe people put far more effort in.
Exactly this. I've noticed in my classes there's less cheating when people respect the professor. It's honestly not hard to get that level of respect from your students; just clearly put in effort for your classes.
Far too many have just been screwed over time and time again from professors who reuse old (usually outdated) course content and whose lectures don't actually add anything to the textbook or slides.
Anecdote time: I took a class where a module taught Python 2.7 in Fall 2021, and I know it was taught again in Spring '22. My professor literally read the slide content to us in lectures, that was it. I found out that a professor wrote all the course content in 2017 and it's just been passed around by all the professors who got assigned to teach that class. The same assignments have been used, and apparently they've been published to every "student assistance" platform around.
Thanks. I know that all the raw material is available to me, but it's just not the same. It's different when you can completely focus on studying, be part of a community with a bit of peer pressure, and have a social circle that goes through the same experience. You don't get the this from online courses, reading books, or MOOCs.
I think a big part of this is split attention, but I also don't feel comfortable taking 1-2 years off my job in the middle of my career just to study.
Yeah, I had a blast attending “lockdown university” during the deepest part of covid in 2020. Grades only for fun points and just taking classes and doing assignments that I thought would be beneficial.
> I'm in my 30s now and I would absolutely love to go back to school to learn.
You love the idea of doing something you’re not doing now. I see further down in another comment, you dismissed the idea of learning from free online resources.
If you were in your 30s and in school, you’d love to be able to go off in the and work with your hands — or something else to distract yourself.
I didn't dismiss the idea of learning from online resources. I constantly work through online courses/lectures and books. I only noted that the experience is inferior to going to college where you can completely focus on learning with a group of peers, and where you are held accountable.
I'd love to have the "college experience" again now, but this time with a focus on learning instead of a focus on getting good grades. Focusing on good grades (over learning) is the rational choice as a young student and I don't regret doing so, but now my goals are different.
It's not a waste of time, only caring about grades and getting a job is the most efficient use of time. I would've loved to learn too, but when passing classes impact the rest of your life, cheating and taking easier classes to maximize GPA are the right choices.
The "right" choices? For who? It seems like engineering culture has suddenly become rife with this exploitative mindset with zero regard for honor.
When you're faced with a public scandal at your hands as CEO after you've cheated your way up the ladder, are you going to admit fault and take a loss for the sake of society or are you going to make "the right choice" for the business and double down on your deception?
No idea what the author is trying to say. It's just a clickbait title with a rant and no content.
"The end of big data" but then goes on to rant about how they bought "big data" products and ends with "Big Data is finally starting to live up to its potential" - this is below Medium quality.
A lot of the outrage comes from the fact that 1. Diablo is originally a PC-based IP with a PC gamer fanbase, and PC gamers are used to different monetization schemes and generally don't play mobile games. Even without the gambling mechanics, there already was a huge backlash about Blizzard making a mobile Diablo game 2. Diablo is a "western" IP where such monetization schemes are less common and the penetration of PC players is higher compared to other parts of the world where mobile game penetration is higher.
> And can "winning" result in a financial reward
Generally speaking, no. There are no competitions for these kind of games. The only way you could cash out would be to sell your account, which is against the ToS, but commonly done nonetheless.