Feeling pushed away by “Player Retention” events?

So Pokémon Unite got an update today to add a Halloween event. They changed around the gimmick of one of the quick match maps and add some themed rewards to earn and buy. Something new and different to keep players interested.

Except I feel like this might be the last thing that makes me finally push away soon enough. I actually had another post I’ve been brewing around in my head about “obligaming“ and micro goals and OCD where you feel obligated to check in often and presented with a constantly rotating list of small to medium level tasks that are attainable but their continuously refreshing nature is giving me burnout.

And yet my OCD completionest has me begrudgingly returning and continuing to stick it out thinking ”I’m close to finishing one of the larger goals.” As it is, I have a few games I’m checking in on each day and I’m seeing these trends that are pushing me away with “features and improvements”

* Pokémon Unite - As I said at the start, today was a new Halloween event. But even before that the release on mobile included changes with normal event structure and was a point prompting my earlier thoughts on this. Each Tuesday introduces a new two week timed set of tasks challenging you with specific tasks ranging from play multiple matches in a specific role to doing side objectives in matches. They had these before the mobile season but the rate of refresh is wearing me out.

Also the battle pass changed up where it may have less levels (it is a slightly shorter time frame) but you also earn less to it with the daily missions this season. 100/day down to 80 vs still 100 points per level. In addition to the weekly missions, you can get just over 1,000 points per week this season where I could get 12-13 levels a week last season. But I’m also at level 48 of 60 with 2.5 weeks to go. So chances are once I unlock space suit Gengar, my Pokemoba time may be over.

* World Flipper - Yep, the pinball gotcha game snagged me. Thankfully for $0. But it’s another case where they’re rolling though overlapping events to try to give fresh content but I see it as too much to keep up with. I’m actually done with all the story content (so far) and recently S+ ranked all the regular and Ex missions. So it’s just repeatedly farming the events and co-op bosses to keep leveling things up and unlocking items and characters. Even more since this is the English language release of a game that has been out and already went through various timely events, one of the previous side events was Christmas themed and one of the new ones that just started is New Years. Yeah… timely.

* Animal Crossing New Horizons- Another case where I see this 2.0 update coming and I think that might be my time to punch out. My year two with ACNH has basically been finishing up 2nd tier collections. Already have all the fossils, bugs, fish, and deep sea creatures in my museum. Now it’s bug & fish models (which I have the triples of each bug and just short two November fish and a December fish) and now just 5 more pieces of art. That and two more Nook quests to completely 100% (one more villager birthday and a bunch more KK concerts for the 100 concert quest). It’s again a case of it’s easy to do a quick set of rounds each day while watching TV but I feel even the free additions may tip me over.

Those are kind of the big three that the steady pace of “new things to do” is actually having the opposite effect on me. There are a few others I also recognize I keep coming back to even while questioning why (cough Harry Potters Hogwarts Mystery). But the common thread that I think so far has kept me from deleting them is they’re something where I can easily pick up my iPad or Switch, tap at for a few minutes while watching TV, and put down until the next day.

And who knows, maybe typing this whole thing out may be the catalyst that does make me finally delete these gnat like annoyances that are starting to form an encompassing swarm.

Quite interesting.

I'd say if they are causing you so much hassle, why are you still playing them? Gaming is meant to be enjoyable. If you do not enjoy them, get rid.

To maybe summarize some of what you’re talking about, getting into a F2P game (and especially an Asian F2P game with gacha elements) is basically like taking on a part-time job. It turns gaming into an obligation, since you have to show up each day to farm those daily quests. If this stresses you out too much, or sucks away too much free time from playing other video games that are actually finite and/or memorable, maybe ease off the F2P games.

Also it bears repeating that F2P games are using a lot more psychological tricks from casino game design than people might think. The business of keeping people sucked in and playing/spending every day is much more core to the F2P design process from an early stage than, say, whatever the design process was for Hades or Ghost of Tsushima or whatever.

I've done a handful of mobile games in my time, and what Bison says is pretty much true for that as well. Suddenly you have a bunch of timers to think about every day. You don't have to be available right as those timers hit 0:00, but if you care about progressing in an efficient manner, it feels like you're wasting time if you're not keeping track of your timers.

Every time, after a month or so, i look at all the resources i meticulously gathered and delete the game. At some point, I start to realize that i've been filling my head with timers eventhough the game itself doesn't give me all that much entertainment. It's mostly something to tinker with on the go. That's not important enough to get access to my brain. Sudoku & Picross is my mobile game of choice right now. I'm done with timers, puzzles are fun.

@onemanarmyy:

Sudoku & Picross is my mobile game of choice right now. I'm done with timers, puzzles are fun.

I feel like I have to relearn this every time I get a new phone. "Maybe this time I'll want to play something more complicated on the go... No? OK, sudoku, solitaire, etc. it is!" That's not necessarily saying F2P or psychologically manipulative games can't be simple, but there is some correlation between fancy graphics, catchy soundtracks and addictive behavior. Have you seen modern slot machines?!

As a gacha player I need more of these at all times.

I can relate, I s'pose. I'm the fucking alien weirdo that had the most fun with Destiny in its vanilla state and mostly fell off of it once The Taken King released. That's right, I played that game solo, never raided, yet had all three characters at peak power at all times in over 1600 hours of gameplay and I quit playing it because the game got good. The audacity!

I've had the same thing with Destiny 2. I really enjoyed it for about 2 months but found it just didn't have those hooks for me the same as the first game did (and it was harder to find time to keep three characters in lock step with each other) and despite its current state being clearly the most teeming with content and ways to stay engaged with the game like season passes and seasonal events, not even the sense overload that is seeing that game running on a PS5 after hours and hours of seeing that franchise on a base PS4 can convince me it's worth my time to try and figure out what's going on.

Likewise, I am not a competitive FPS player at all (though I was decent at the original Destiny's PvP sometimes) yet got hopelessly sucked into Apex Legends for a couple seasons, hitting 100 on the battle pass both times. But as they started adding characters and released a new map (and made adjustments to old ones when they returned) I found myself less and less interested because I had to constantly re-learn the game and I was already the sort of person who played whatever characters I wanted to complete challenges for (and it took me forever to beat them) so I never had a main character or anyone I was super attached to. That made the constant adjustments to the meta and characters' abilities/traits just impossible to keep up with, and by season 5 or so I was uninstalling the game to make up space despite putting 400 hours into a style of game I'd almost never even give a chance, let alone find myself enjoying.

I loved the CTR remake, but I found the battle pass stuff overwhelming and time consuming, so I stopped playing it entirely, which was really disappointing to me. I couldn't ignore it, either; I felt compelled to attempt the daily and weekly challenges and it wasn't a fun way to play the game. I would've been playing it every day and I meant to go back when they finished updating it, but I never got around to it.

Contrastly, I've been playing Brawlhalla for about a month now. I've put around $200 into it and almost completed the entire battle pass that was halfway through when I started. The goals they give you are engaging and point towards fun things to do and new strategies/techniques to learn. There are a few missions I don't think I'll be able to complete because I'm not good enough at the game yet, but they do a really good job at making it fun to work through with regular enough rewards. The daily missions outside of the battle pass can be swapped out if you don't like a particular one, they don't expire and you can hold up to three at a time, so there's not so much pressure to get them done quickly. The viewer rewards on Twitch are the worst part of the whole system.

I'm at a point in my life, where I just want to play a game to have fun. I don't want to play a game due to FOMO or obligation. Those things tend to drive me away quickly. I mainly stick to single player games these days, but I do have a couple multiplayer games that I can just pop in, have fun for a bit and then leave without feeling like I have to grind it out.

The last time I played a game like that, I was in college. Apparently Planetarion is still going.

I also play a lot of Pokémon Unite currently, as I do these types of games in general. I just try to not look into it all that much when they have like 17 things going at once. I got back to Genshin and found out that they had yet another branch of daily missions by accident. If I miss on some skin or something, I probably won't miss it that much. I just wanna have fun in a video game.

I don't feel that way at all. I realize that developers these days aim to maximize player FOMO but also you choose to engage in it, and the obvious answer here would be to stop playing gacha games if you can't come to terms with it. Especially cosmetics in games like Apex Legends mean absolutely nothing at all and obsessing over them is just dumb. I do think that there is value in daily challenges that just like achievements they encourage you to play games a little different than you tend to. If there is a daily challenge to get x kills with the shotgun, I might be more inclined to pick up a shotgun if I come across one, and that helps the game feel fresh.

Its funny that Picross came up because I’ve actually gone through a few of those already. Latest one I was playing had a pretty good history of updates but I stopped checking in after it had gone over 2 months where I had finished all the content and there hadn’t been any more updates.

And that felt good. A part of my brain likes when I can leave something finished. But also yeah, World Flipper is getting deleted for a similar reason that I did finish the story and EX version of the available levels and the Skinner box has lost any draw for me in spite of their efforts to offer ”exciting new side events”.

Pokemon Unite was a catalyst for finally expressing these thoughts because the side mission stuff went from pretty easy incentives to try and learn map features or play other classes (it got me to find I also enjoy Lucario and such and not just Snorlax 24/7) but it was when the quantity of things to do was steadily increasing and the time frames were reducing that tipped me over. And the “rebalancing” of Battle Pass progression also made me rethink and decide to finish out the current one that’s almost done before I hang it up while still on a mostly good note.

I’m still having fun with Pokémon Unite matches. It’s just that the career player progression side that I’m slowing down on. And it’s when I see them adding those things that they use to try to keep things fresh and retain interest that it has the opposite effect on me.

I have a friends who just couldn't get off the Destiny hamster wheel and just had to have everything, but I've never been compelled with any off that crap.

I've always been a bit odd when it comes to cosmetic items once I found what I like and don't really ever change, timed & seasonal events or battle passes are pretty much useless for me.

I played Warframe solidly for about three months none of the timers made me play the game any more or less after seeing pretty much everything in the game I just put the game down.