Live Service slop often use multiple tactics to extract money out of their players. Riot Games claims that free cosmetics don’t bring enough money, and should be removed. League of Legends is one of the most egregious example of a Dark Gaming pattern. The whole game is in fact designed to take every single pattern into account. This can maximize addiction and ruin the lives of gamers, who could be playing an actual video game for once. We at Infinite Start will cover Riot’s plans.
The Honeymoon ends
Many games often shower you with hundreds and thousands of rewards for just login in. While innocent gamers will perceive this as the company being a great friend to them, its actually just an abusive tactic to get you hooked. By providing tons of free stuff by logging in, a company is able to “reward” their players for playing in the daily. That way, their ecosystem can grow a habit to login daily, boosting their player count. People who play online games are often hooked to the idea of competing for rewards, and League of Legends also provides that too.
At the end of each season, players are able to receive very rare unique skins, provided they reach very high ranks of course. This is a technique to also boost player count through FOMO, “You won’t be getting this very cool skin ever if you don’t grind”. By doing this, you have two choices, grind your life away on a subpar game, or buy it from a roulette. That’s right, Riot is now planning to make the game into a gacha, at least for skins. But be sure that eventually this might be the case for Champions too, bordering the game into a hellish Pay to Win.
Back in the days people remember the Rune system, the game actually did start as a Pay to Win, but they did backtrack. League of Legends, however, isn’t a game that deserves any pardon, they just updated how to get money off unsuspecting players.
