My Life As A Gamer: "Games As Service" Is Predatory & Degenerate

"Games As Service".

That's a very fancy way of saying "Making you do bothersome, tedious bitchwork before you can play the actual fucking game (including those you pay for)."

As with more obvious examples, all of which are mobile trash, such as the smartphone-based gacha games, the business model here is based around making you waste your time on things you don't want to do and have no business doing in order to maximize your odds of success doing what you're actually there to do. The gacha games are more honest in that they let you throw money at them up front to speed this shit up or skip it entirely; implementations such as in MMORPGs are just displaying contempt for your audience.

I've talked at some length about Shadowlands, so let me use some previous examples to illustrate the point.

Battle For Azeroth and Legion had an Infinite Grind system (respectively, Azerite and Artifact Power); you needed to do this grind to get your main source of Borrowed Power (Azerite Armor/Artifact Weapons) powered up enough to let you complete in a viable manner in what you want to do. This was inspectable; other players could click on your character frame and see if you had these powers or not, prompting them to accept or reject you from raids or PVP teams and thus soft-locking you out of endgame content. Therefore, you did the grind if you wanted to go do anything that was relevant at the time.

(This is where GAS intersects with the player culture of "Best Or Benched", but that's for another post.)

The Infinite Grind has diminishing returns, in the form of making it take more and more points to get a new level of power while the amount gained for doing X activity remains the same. (This also functions as a catchup mechanic, so those coming in late can get up to speed fast.) In both of the aforementioned expansions, hardcore raiders and PVP players spend part-time and full-time sessions online grinding out all available sources of said Grind rewards every day, promoting dysfunctional and degenerate habits in the elite cohort- habits then pushed by the metagame on to the population at-large. ("You must have 54 Traits on your primary weapon by Nighthold's release or you're benched.")

The alternative to this soft timegating (and that's what it is; heavy diminishing returns to create a Pareto-optimal state where sensible players know where it stops being worth it to grind in a day or week) is brick-to-face hard timegating (hard caps per day or week to doing a thing), and these are now in the game again due to the soft measures not working as intended.

That's right, four years of soft limits proved insufficient to keep the leading cohort--the people who define what is normal and acceptable for everyone else--from diving deep into behaviors that are deleterious to themselves. Why? Because the results of those behaviors maximize their odds of success in playing the actual game, and deriving the prestige for that success.

This is not trivial. The top world guilds get corporate sponsorships, allowing the members to get paid to play the game and avoid having to work a real job, and the ambitious among them can take advantage of that situation to expand their personal brand for greater business opportunities. Well-known players like Bajeera, Swifty, Sco, Sloot, Nagurra, etc. all get opportunties for sponsorship or game-related contract work (such as sport-casting esport events, something Sloot and Nagurra did and did well enough to do it multiple times) This also includes massively better results in crowd-sourcing direct support by livestreaming (plenty of tips and payouts due to sharing channel membership revenue) and merchandise sales.

In short, a small handful benefit from this and it's not just Blizzard. The majority who behave in this manner do not, and it contributes to the ongoing issues Blizzard has with maintaining and growing their primary metric: Monthly Average Users.

The contrast is a player population that only logs in for a few hours a week to raid or do PVP, then disappears; we call this "raid-logging" and the devs regard this as a very bad thing for some reason. They want people on daily doing chore and other bitchwork because that MAU metric somehow goes up when they do this and HQ is happy.

It's predatory because the devs know and desire the degenerate effects, including the second and third order effects, but because it's not flat-out gambling like loot boxes it's brushed off as "Just The Way It Is". There is no healthy middle; either you're all-in as Hardcore Lifestyle or you're Summertime Casual Player that shows up for a month or so twice a year overall. That's the end result of GAS in the MMO space, and with WOW still being the leader you can count on this degenerate influence being present for years to come.

There is nothing wrong with raid-logging, other than showing you that your game doesn't have a healthy gameplay loop. Adding GAS mechanisms doesn't solve that problem; it's like solving your energy issues by taking up Crystal Meth- you'll be going, at the cost of your long-term health and well-being, and at the end you'll just be a broken wreck unworthy of respect.

There is a better way to address the matter. Tomorrow.