this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2023
164 points (99.4% liked)

PC Master Race

14975 readers
501 users here now

A community for PC Master Race.

Rules:

  1. No bigotry: Including racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia. Code of Conduct.
  2. Be respectful. Everyone should feel welcome here.
  3. No NSFW content.
  4. No Ads / Spamming.
  5. Be thoughtful and helpful: even with ‘stupid’ questions. The world won’t be made better or worse by snarky comments schooling naive newcomers on Lemmy.

Notes:

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Brilliant insight. They probably are tracking metrics on what will encourage people to buy stuff the most too

[–] themoonisacheese 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Activision owns patents on the following:

  • A system that tracks what store items you might be interested in, and places you in matches with high-skilled players who own that item, making you associate the item with high skill

  • A system that places you against lower-skilled opponents immediately after you bought an item, making you associate making a purchase with being better.

From here to "they want you to look at other players and how expensive their shit is" is only one step. Honestly at this point I'm even surprised they're not faking it entirely, making other players just happen to be wearing expensive skins on your screen even if the actual account hasn't bought that. It's not like you can check anyway.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Bloody hell this is some nefarious brain hacking type stuff.

[–] themoonisacheese 2 points 1 year ago

Indeed. It also has the inherent side effect of making the game pay to win, because if you don't pay you get put in hard matches against the skilled people who paid, and if you do it puts you against weaker opponents. This is why micro transactions should be banned straight up, even if they do not impact gameplay. Belgium had the right idea.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

I experienced this first hand playing wow. The team will straight up send out email surveys asking if players would be willing to pay x for y service with different people getting different prices. They calculate these things to extract as much money from the dedicated fans as possible. I went back to playing the private servers.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Probably looking at the wardrobe to see what people like looks-wise with what's in-game already. Then ensure they push more of that into the store.

Never open the store.