Removed by mod

For the same reason people shun gambling: They are designed to be addictive and rob you of something.

People don’t shun gambling. It’s a widely celebrated human pastime that exists in every land, every country, every little burrow and bungalow; hell, even when states try to ban gambling, someone comes along with a cruise ship, packs it with gambling machines and spinning tables, and takes it right off the coast into international waters so that they can continue to gamble.

And all video games are designed to be addictive, and they all rob you of something: your time, specifically. And time is more valuable than money, in fact, money is largely a unit of time measurement.

Regarding gacha, they are designed to be as addicting as possible with a direct line to your wallet, but to me this seems just an aspect of their specific genre; a widely popular genre that many seem to enjoy. Instead of paying $60 bucks and maybe losing hundreds of hours of your life, or maybe not playing the game much at all because you didn’t like it; you pay nothing up front ans can choose to invest more money if you enjoy the game. I don’t see it as worse, only different from the classic-gaming model.

Success in entertainment can be considered from a lot of angles: Financial success, being acclaimed by critics, being able to form a niche but tightly-knit community, being a rare supplier of a niche genre, gaining world-wide renown, etc.

These are each offshoots of popularity; and your list goes from most popular to less popular respectively.

Think of having your spouse/family member forming a real gambling addiction

I don’t see it as being much different than a gaming “addiction,” which seems to be rampant in our society – gacha or not.

Because I can. Who’s going to stop me? YOU? HA!

This is brilliant, and totally not a waste of my time.

I’ll kick things off, I suppose.

A role-playing game should be based on traditional tabletop role-playing games. To truly be considered a role-playing game, a game must have character creation, stats, chance on actions (dice rolls, for example), and turn-based action (true turn-based or some offshoot).

Alright. I did the thing.

The Psycho Wand as a symbol for transient value is intriguing, but it does beg the question: “what is value?” Everything is transient, is it not? From this perspective, how can we say a digital Psycho Wand is more or less valuable than other material possession? Perhaps the answer is to abandon the desire to possess anything at all, but how do we do this when the Western world is built upon fostering this desire from the baby’s rattle to daddy’s new car?

I made a character (nova dragon) but the knock down and slowness destroys me. This is a nostalgia game, which is OK, but let’s acknowledge that.

Mountain Dew and tears.

In the skull/lizard person example, can you extrapolate on why “this creates so many questions” is a bad thing? Is the goal to have no mystery in the games, and somehow this makes the game better? I am not following.

As to why Baldur’s Gate 3 is more popular than Original Sin 2: they’re both made by the same developer, which has always been a smaller, lesser-known studio; Baldur’s Gate 3 piggy-backs off the success of BG1&2 before it, which were both created by different developers and both games were critically acclaimed during the CRPG boom. Divinity has always been a niche series, partially due to the small studio’s lack of advertising and smaller budget, but when you piggy-back off an already highly successful series, you would expect a higher adoption rate; which is exactly what we see with BG3.