Lived it before. Casinos exist to fuck with your head. What’s been illuminating for me is the P2W video games that adopt so many of the casino strategies to goad people into constantly feeding money into the machine. Once you start picking up on the queues and triggers coming off your cell phone, you can’t unsee it when you’re standing on the floor of the Bellagio.
I find it particularly terrible that these apps are not age restricted at all. You can’t enter a casino before you are 18 but if it is basically a slot machine with kitties on the smartphone, a 10 year old can play them all day long.
I spent like $2000 playing Star Trek Online. Lockbox keys, lifetime sub, all sorts of ships, items, and boosts. They introduced Mark XIV equipment with a gambling-based crafting system. You could spend dilithium (which you could buy with $) to have a chance to upgrade your equipment.
The straw that broke me? Their shitty customer service. I wanted to gear up an alt and give them the Jem’Hadar battleship with the Jem’hadar attack ship so they could launch the attack ships from it as fighters, which you could do if you had both. Problem was some ships were account bound, and some ships were character bound, and I lost track of which was which. I ended up claiming the box for one of them on the wrong character. Easy fix, right? Well not every MMO is run to the same standard as Blizzard. Craptic absolutely refused to help me. So I cut ties.
It was after that, when I experienceced withdrawal, that I read about gambler’s fallacy and sunken cost fallacy and I really analyzed why it hurt so much to leave behind my addiction. I never went back, because I know that whole game is run like a casino. They do everything they can to hook you in.
That’s really unfortunate to hear. I played and enjoyed the game back when it first came out, before they added all the micro transaction stuff. I’ve thought about revisiting it a few times but never have.
this is like someone telling a story of their spiral into alcohol addiction and then you coming in at the end and being like “yeah well I got drunk a few times in college and im fine” lolololol
I’m struggling to see how. At the time the game first came out (when I played it) it was a flat subscription fee to pay, like most MMOs back then. It didn’t have any of the pay to win, micro transactiony gambling bullshit that was described by the person I replied to. It was just the game and the game was fun.
It sounds like it really went full enshitification with lootbox type stuff sometime after I quit so it was a very different experience for each of us.
Lived it before. Casinos exist to fuck with your head. What’s been illuminating for me is the P2W video games that adopt so many of the casino strategies to goad people into constantly feeding money into the machine. Once you start picking up on the queues and triggers coming off your cell phone, you can’t unsee it when you’re standing on the floor of the Bellagio.
I find it particularly terrible that these apps are not age restricted at all. You can’t enter a casino before you are 18 but if it is basically a slot machine with kitties on the smartphone, a 10 year old can play them all day long.
I spent like $2000 playing Star Trek Online. Lockbox keys, lifetime sub, all sorts of ships, items, and boosts. They introduced Mark XIV equipment with a gambling-based crafting system. You could spend dilithium (which you could buy with $) to have a chance to upgrade your equipment.
The straw that broke me? Their shitty customer service. I wanted to gear up an alt and give them the Jem’Hadar battleship with the Jem’hadar attack ship so they could launch the attack ships from it as fighters, which you could do if you had both. Problem was some ships were account bound, and some ships were character bound, and I lost track of which was which. I ended up claiming the box for one of them on the wrong character. Easy fix, right? Well not every MMO is run to the same standard as Blizzard. Craptic absolutely refused to help me. So I cut ties.
It was after that, when I experienceced withdrawal, that I read about gambler’s fallacy and sunken cost fallacy and I really analyzed why it hurt so much to leave behind my addiction. I never went back, because I know that whole game is run like a casino. They do everything they can to hook you in.
Damning with faint praise.
That’s really unfortunate to hear. I played and enjoyed the game back when it first came out, before they added all the micro transaction stuff. I’ve thought about revisiting it a few times but never have.
this is like someone telling a story of their spiral into alcohol addiction and then you coming in at the end and being like “yeah well I got drunk a few times in college and im fine” lolololol
I’m struggling to see how. At the time the game first came out (when I played it) it was a flat subscription fee to pay, like most MMOs back then. It didn’t have any of the pay to win, micro transactiony gambling bullshit that was described by the person I replied to. It was just the game and the game was fun.
It sounds like it really went full enshitification with lootbox type stuff sometime after I quit so it was a very different experience for each of us.
It’s fucked how normalised it is for betting and gambling to advertised.
Yeah, most predatory apps are almost like cheap ripoffs of refined system casinos got down to a science.