Sooo my room mate invited me to play Total War Warhammer 2 with him (RTS game based on fantasy warhammer). It was his all time favorite game, and I had played it a bit. Think 2k hours for him, 100ish for me. But I had mostly been playing the Vampire Counts, and he jumped around a lot, mostly playing the Empire as he loved their lore and how they played. Him picking the empire was kind of a dick move because they spawned very close to vampire counts, so odds were he was going to crush me mid game.

But the thing is, he had mostly played against AI, and he had never played AS the vampire counts. If you ever play as the vampire counts in that game, you quickly realize there is only one good strategy, one that the AI never uses. You can get completely free skeleton soldiers. The game normally hard caps you with negatives around 2k soldiers (2-3 full armies). They aren’t great soldiers, but you can do upgrades for them to make them acceptable, and they mostly will function as meat sponges to bog down enemies while your generals do most of the killing. It’s not something I looked up, it’s just super obvious when you play as them that there is no purpose to any other units.

On turn 25 he thought something was wrong when he saw 5 armies attack a neighbor of his. He knew something was terribly wrong when 10 entered his territory at a point in the game when he had 2 1/2. There was shouting, there were accusations, there was mad giggling. As my room mate was thrusted full force into the zombie apocalypse. His soldiers killed thousands of skeletons, early game heavy infantry backed by mortars and arbalesters. The K/D was terrible for me. He had been focusing on building the bones of an unstoppable late gate death ball of heavy infantry and artillery, so his units were strong. But it still needed 30 turns to be invincible. But I kept winning, because his units ran out of bullets and mortar shells before I ran out of skeletons.

Then the fun thing about Vampire counts is, if you win a MASSIVE battle with tens of thousands of deaths… you can instantly recruit skeletons from that grave site! With each battle my army replenished, my generals grew more powerful, and he grew more annoyed.

After another bloody defeat of his final army, killing like 7k skeletons just to see mine raise from the dead, and his capital under siege, he resigned.

Despite his thousands of hours he said it was equally the most fun and most tilting game ever. But I just felt like I was playing lore accurate necromancers :D But when he was like “You must be cheating the game must stop this some how” and I’m just like… nah fam, game busted. I did feel a little bad. Then went back to giggling when he insisted he could win and then all his units ran out of ammo again.

Only 300? XD

That game is nothing but grind after like 20 hours.

That makes sense! The list of dark games probably is most helpful to be like “here’s a list of games made to be addictive, what features that we spoke about are present in the games on this list?”

100%, it’s why I’m more pulled towards RTS games these days.

Like to “catch up” and compete in say a card game… you have to spend money. They are not designed for you to catch up on time.

An rts though? I can catch up to most of the folks if I want to.

I mean, games without memory didn’t. Because once you turned off the game, it was all gone. This is more referring to if you have spent $200 on a game, and have like special event stuff in it, you’ll struggle to give it up.

But again, this is all part of bigger pictures. If it has this + grinding + time lock things + micro transactions it’s a problem. Games with just a couple of the features still have a high score of like 3+ and will be good games. Some of the things it asks about are only problems paired with other mechanics, while some categories are by themselves enough to be a problem.

Haha good call out, but yeah I play this way on purpose and jump from freemium game to freemium game. I’ve gotten pretty good at jumping as soon as it feels like money is the only way to make progress, but to be clear I used to not be good at it and have wasted a few hundred dollars on stupid p2w games. I really want to try to stick to these nicer games now that I have a cool website to help me find them.

Oof yeah I sometimes get drawn into idle games. It’s weird to be pulled into those, because just the constant feeling of accomplishing something short circuits my brain, combined with “Oh I should check in on my game once a day, or I’m not accomplishing things”. Usually once I stop playing for a few days I go “oh, why did I care?” But it feels real bad in the mean time.

Someone shared it with me the other day and I fell in love so had to share!

I’m sure it worked for some people, but for me my brain just picked up the super obvious patterns before picking up much spanish.

It really is, and it kills me when there are legit good games under there.

For a few months I played a cool monster catching game where it was like 5v5 style. The amount of cool combos you could do, the emergent game play with that many, each monster having own unique abilities and moves, etc. was so cool! PVP was really good because once you were proper placed, the games were close and often times came down to either a choice in game or realizing a mistake in team building “Why did I only bring one party member that can counter X?? As soon as they got focused down I got rolled by a team built around it!”

But the pve battles would get harder and harder, but the monsters you could catch weren’t getting stronger. So to continue in the main story you had to do events to get new ones, or… that lovely gacha shop. Eventually in the story the ability to catch new monsters was just removed. You could go back to the early parts to catch the old monsters, but there was maybe one in the main story that was any use once you were to where catching was disabled. Oh and evolving the monsters required you to do events which took… energy! Oh also chapter 1 of the story didn’t require energy to play, and had ability to catch monsters… but later on it did require energy.

So it opened with this really cool game where you could catch monsters, the fights were fair based on what you could catch, and overall was a fun time. Then slowly but surely every team member would need to be replaced by Gacha monsters (that could only be leveled up by gathering materials from events), and all the infinite play game modes would run out of content, leaving only the game modes that require energy.

UGH.

Yeah I did the Spanish for months and it was like “You’re so high level!” but I realized as soon as I stepped back that I mostly had just gotten good at playing their games because they were formatted where the answers were generally obvious, to where I felt like just memorizing key words then trying to read children’s books would have been more helpful.

So yeah they for sure use a dozen dark patterns. Making you feel like your account is valuable, making you feel bad for skipping, giving you bonuses for playing on their schedule, and making you feel better at the language than you are.

Oh no! That’s so annoying, maybe can help her quit by finding a better version of the game.

Like stupid match 3/candy crush trash has a million free clones.

They said they’ll expand to steam eventually, but sounds like they wanted to focus on mobile to start because it has biggest player base and most of the dark patterns are industry norms for mobile.

Very much so :( I’ve played some genuinely really fun games in the top list, but the instant you start playing you can feel what they are about.

Like I’ve been playing Warhammer 40k Tacticus. It’s really cool!.. I’ll probably play it for another week or two at most. Every action I take brings up a suggestion for me to buy something. Everything requires energy. There are about 50 different currency types. I get alerts that I’ve completed quests… that I can’t turn in because they are quests only available if you buy the premium Battle pass. Or the ULTIMATE battle pass. Like you unlock a new character and instantly it pops up like “Congrats on your new character, would you like to spend $20 to level them up so they’re not useless?”

It’s fun because I’m still unlocking more story content at a decent clip, but as soon as it’s a day between 20 second lore drops I’ll have to uninstall. Which sucks, because the game play is fun and interesting since it’s modeled after the mechanics of 40k with the customization of a video game.

So yeah, very sad.

I mean I think this site goes with “overly broad so you can pick what you want” approach.

Also the way I’m viewing it, is each individual item is a thread of a dark pattern. Weaved into normal game play it’s completely fine. It’s just when all the threads of a category come together is it a pattern designed to trigger addiction and over spending.

Like competition is listed under a category, but if that’s the only item in the category, it still has a stellar score and rightfully so and isn’t listed as a dark pattern.

Well 1 dark pattern doesn’t ruin their score or make a dark pattern game. Because like games with random loot where every piece is viable and goes for a fun build like a rogue like is wonderful, but it’s a thread of a dark pattern. Alone it’s not scary, and can be fun. Combined with time gates, terribly low drop rates, and pay to skip? Suddenly we have a very nasty dark pattern.

I mean it is a dark pattern. It drives us to play more even when we’re not having fun. How many times have we all done a dungeon 10+ times, not because it’s fun, but because we want it to drop the thing?

But at the same time, if that’s the “only” dark pattern, that’s probably fine! And it’ll most likely get a high score of 3+ on the positive side. But if you combine the random loot with time gate, pay to skip, pay to win, etc. then the score rightfully craters.

I think the site is good because it empowers us to pick what we actually want to deal with.

I’ve had maybe 3 phones in last 10 years?

Not a bad strat!

… So am I the only one that whenever I want a new phone, I just look for highest rated phone under 100 dollars? Been doing that for years, generally it’s just always just like top of the line models from 3-4 years ago.

Been doing it for years and I’ve never really had any complaint with my phones.