CWillis on LARP Ingression Protocol

Another great post Grim. You should do this more often. I suffered from the completionist compulsion. Gaming used to be a big part of my life. As I think back on it, there was a definite progression in the industry to take advantage of this particular human quirk. The Battlefield franchise was my main addiction. If you know anything about that franchise, it was billed as a squad based shooter with different character classes that players could choose to build a balanced squad and work together toward team based objectives. I loved the game and made many virtual friendships amongst regular squadmates. In the first few iterations, the unlocks and awards seemed to come fairly naturally as a result of simply playing the game the way it was meant to be played. However, as the franchise aged, things began to change. There were battle boxes and season subscriptions for sale that yielded new weapons, skins, or abilities outside of earning them through gameplay. That was the first signal that things were going awry. The next thing was a progression system in one of the later games that seemed to be completely disconnected from the original gameplay mechanics. In order to progress through a weapon or class unlock tree you would have to do crazy things like camp a capture point in order to get 5 headshot kills with a sniper rifle within 25m of the objective. Not only is this very hard to do, you can imagine, but it completely takes the sniper class out of the role it was designed for and makes that player useless to the squad. This is just one example of many head scratching unlock challenges that resulted in essentially having to choose between trying to win by playing the game as intended or trying to move through the progression tree to unlock better weapons and abilities. There was much discussion and gnashing of teeth on the Battlefield forums about how inept and enraging this particular edition of the game was, but then something weird happened. The next version came out and the progression system was not only not “fixed”, but in many ways was worse. It finally dawned on me that we weren’t dealing with the same people at the top any more. This game had been created by people with a unique idea and vision, but had been slowly taken over by marketing shitheads and bean counters. The jacked up progression system was intentional. They wanted me to spend round after round camping an objective to try to complete ridiculous challenges. Either the frustration keeps me returning to the lobby to try to finish the challenge hour after hour, or I give up and buy the battle box with that unlock in it. They win either way. It was no longer about playing the game the way it was intended. Once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it. It changed gaming for me. I wasn’t a customer or consumer, I was a stooge to be fleeced. To be fair, Battlefield was just doing what everyone else in the industry was doing. That was a big part of my going cold turkey on gaming, and I bailed on social media at about the same time and for mostly the same reasons. Last thing, quitting gaming was hard, but not as hard as I thought it would be. Self discipline is a muscle. The more you exercise it the easier it gets.