The endgame of Mobile games

 Suffering from success

So 'Diablo Immortal' is a pretty obvious smokescreen as far as shady gaming schemes go. A game designed to be a total social pariah, ruin the respectability of every face involved with it, be the reviled monster poisoning the industry specifically so that Diablo 4 can drop doing considerably less scummy things than it, and look like a grand resurgence for the companies quality standards. Hell, they'll probably still make it a pay-to-win cesspit, but it just won't be as pay-to-win as Diablo Immortal was, which is an improvement, I guess. But inbetween now and then, we have to deal with this ugly exercise into the absolute extremes of video game greed and the societal excrement who support and reward Blizzard for going around mugging their consumer base and calling it a solid marketing move. One such extreme from this development became frightening clear; the whale amongst whales.

Whale is a term used to describe the sorts of individuals who spend their exorbitant wads of money into Free-to-Play games in order to jump ahead of everyone else. They are referred as whales, because the size of their purchases pretty much cements them as single sources of heavy revenue that makes them more valuable players than others the petty 'plankton' who drop a dollar or two once a month. So essentially paying money makes you a player that the developers want to cater their content more towards in order to curry more favour and attention. Just like real life, the richer you are, the more bottom-feeders you ascertain; in this instance it's the developers. Games like Diablo Immortal thrive off the existence of Whales by creating heavy money sinks that players can drop their money into in a play against the odds to get the best stats. Pay-to-Win, as it's most commonly known. (Although pay-to-not-play, is a common refrain; considering most of this stuff revolves around paying to skip the process of earning the accolades.)

Of course, when you invest heavily in pay-to-win it's going to upset the balance of the game as players with larger wallets can invest more money to surpass the efforts of players who can't afford to spend hundreds of dollars rolling a virtual die. They push far above the free-to-play players, and then you get into a virtual arms-race of who can spend the most money to get atop those other spenders in what should ideally be a never ending cycle of idiots falling for the most obvious cash-grab scheme in the world. But this has usually been where interest from the common audience drops off, because no one really cares who ultimately tops the pile. But as curiosity would be served, recently we've had an account of exactly that scenario presented by a content creator who managed to push themselves to that precipice and had their game time suffer because of it.  

Yes, we're talking about a man who, by his own words, spent around about $100,000 all on trying to get the optimal character in Diablo immortal so that his clan could rule the meta game as the 'Immortals' of his server. It's a pretty old-school method of content creation where the draw of the creator is their skill rather than their Charisma; but listening to this man speak for any amount of time will demonstrate that he has a lack of both, which is probably why he likes pay-to-win games so much. (I'm being deliberately venomous. I'm sure the guy has some skill with these sorts of games to be able to utilise the spending as he has. Does that make him a good person? No. A smart one. No. But one worthy of even the slightest modicum of respect? Still no.) But reaching the top of the pile inexplicably ended up putting his current favourite pastime in jeopardy.

You see, putting himself in the Pay-To-Win category allowed him to play the PVP battlegrounds modes for Diablo Immortal over and over again to rack up over 300 straight wins and less than 10 losses. He could just steamroll over everyone with less powerful gear than him. He could be the big fish in the tiny pond, soaking up all the water and making sure the stats of his character outshone anyone else in the world. Until it got to the point where the game's matchmaker realised that this player is too good for even the best players in the game and bracketed him off in a custom made pool of players which seems to consist of only him. Meaning that our man couldn't que for more Battlegrounds because the game couldn't find enough players of a equal win/loss ratio to pit him against. Cutting him off from what he himself considers his 'favourite activity' in the game. Bummer.

Even worse than that, a bug within the structure of the gameplay made him unable to que his clan into a contest to defend their position, or maybe they were already queued? The system was really unclear on that matter, and that's kind of the problem. Being the biggest clan on their server, not knowing what they're doing to defend their position is kind of emasculating for a breed of player which is obviously driven by the vapid desire to enforce their archaic concepts of masculine supremacy on others. Basically, I'm saying that Blizzard's distinct lack of comprehensive design decisions (because they were too busy hyper-focusing on running the gem market) wasn't serving their most important customers; the numbskulls with more money than brain wrinkles. Which is just typical, isn't it? Blizzard are such a mess of a company that they can't serve their established fanbase or the rich rubes they're trying to replace them with. Just a trainwreck of customer support.

Of course, the person we're talking about here did put over a hundred thousand into the game, meaning that when he made a big stink about it online, Blizzard did get around to promising him a personalised fix in the next few days; but that was only after passing him around fang-less customer support reps for weeks on end. Turn out all the money in the world only translates into respect when you make a public statement which might ward off other whales. Of course, Blizzard could give less of a crap if you aren't a wealthy player, that makes you less than scum to wipe off their shoes. Because that's who Blizzard are nowadays. Nakedly and unabashedly twisted to serve the biggest potential returners and step on all those desperate to support a company they used to trust years ago. Big Blizzard are, no surprise, not your friend. 

But this has really laid out the very extremes of Mobile Gaming that we never really think of. How does the service have to mould to cater to the top of the pile? The king of the kings; the Immortal of this ecosystem? And what does it mean to win in a pay-to-win environment? Is it being better than everyone else? Because our guy here apparently is driven by a desire to just crush people poorer than him all day, without any real challenge or danger to his own position due to the exorbitant amounts of money that he's spent, which might spell out more regarding his own personality than I think even he has considered. If the endgame is supposed to be a mad crawl to the top that is feasibly never supposed to end; how do you reconcile devising a social interaction game where the chief goal it to isolate yourself from your peers atop a pile of money? And how is a studio supposed to work to benefit the king's experience alongside trying to encourage their just as wealthy opponents to forever topple them? Are you the protagonist at that point, or the antagonist in the grand tapestry of this online world? And at the end of the day, is there any difference?