OW2 utilizes dark patterns to manipulate players

General Discussion
1

Just like every other major title. Epic just got slammed a huge fine by the US FTC over this kind of stuff.

A dark pattern is something that intentionally obscures, misleads, coerces, or deceives consumers into making unintended or potentially harmful purchases or actions.

A few examples of a dark pattern include, but are not limited to:

-Premium Currency

-Artificial Scarcity of shop items, (cosmetic rarity, battle pass expiration, “this skin is available in the shop sometimes”, etc)

-Weaponizing FOMO with time limited items (goes hand in hand with artificial scarcity)

-Pay to Win

-Pay to Skip

-Infinite Grinding (having to play 7 to 8 months to get a single top tier skin, win 7 comp games to get new rank if at all possible, slow ranking system in general)

-Tedious challenges/requirements that encourage spending to avoid them

-Even the menu is trying to manipulate players by making the Shop, Heroes, and Battlepass the main focus of the game with their respective text much larger than the rest of the menu. Social and career profile are tiny and almost easy to miss.

Google dark pattern games and they will have a whole list of actual dark patterns that are very common in todays gaming. Thats where I took my examples from.

I’m not the kind of guy that raises torches, pitchforks, and calls for blood. I like OW2 and I’ll continue to play it. I just see all of this stuff happening to games these days that it really bums me out. Do you think, with more and more companies being called out for stuff like this, that the practice of putting the player last and their wallet first will ever stop? I just want to earn my cosmetics in this game. Its so bland and dreary. And looking at all of the emphasis on the shop when you enter the game is just so obvious and rash that it almost makes me feel dumb just playing it. Proud to say I’ve never spent a cent and I won’t, but this game needs something more than a broken ranking system to grind for.

Bliz… change the cosmetic system and shop. Its shady practice and not consumer friendly at all. Let us acheive our cosmetics and fix the matchmaking. And dont lock heroes. Thats all.

96 Likes
2

im pretty sure this isnt new to people. dark patterns also come into play with the competetive mode. nearly every remake to how the competetive mode works now in terms of ranks and rank updates is aimed at making ppl play longer sessions or more competetive in general.

its crafted to a point where im pretty sure they hired a lot of new marketing psychologists to help design it all in a way that would manipulate the most amount of people.

28 Likes
3

Oh for sure. Infinite grinding definitely applies to this new comp rank structure. And absolutely agree with the other part. Its actually genius albeit insidious sometimes.

7 Likes
5

Its a manipulation technique that coerces someone into getting something they may not have before. Definitely qualifies. Its a mental game for sure and can be considered a dark pattern.

9 Likes
6

it will only ever stop if there is a global effort to hard ban such practices and hard punishments for when companies try to sneak a way around the guidelines.

this will most likely never happen. and so the gaming industry will more and more just develop into this dystopian idea of a “time stealing machine”. AAA service games will compete for our time and attention in the most agressive and vicious ways, it will only get more and more absurd. this will continue until the videogame bubble bursts and theres a great reset in the market. i dont think we are far away from that. theres already too much games to be played. ppls backlog grows, ppl start to question more and more if spending money on games they never get to play is worth it at all.

6 Likes
7

Literally just stop playing AAA Multiplayer games, and mobile games if you do that. Every other genre of gaming is so much more generous, I also feel like a dumbass just for logging in to overwatch just to get my daily dose of forced advertising in a game I previously bought. I haven’t actually not been on for weeks now checking back every once in a while to see if the fan is less covered in poop.

11 Likes
8
2 Likes
9

It’s manipulative but the psychology only works on people that have too much money or don’t know the value of a dollar.

I could buy most of the store with what I made in overtime last week.

But I’d never pay for an overpriced meal, game, tickets and so on.

There’s no sane reason to spend $20 or more on a 1st person perspective cosmetic.

Especially when you compare how much better value other gamers get for $20 skins in their game that do way more on special effects to transform the hero into a damn near new hero.

While Ow 2 high priced skin recolors you into a mime…

1 Like
10

Part of the reason I liked OW1 was that it was pretty light on the overt manipulations that has become so mainstream in gaming. I gave OW2 a chance, but a lot of the changes particularly around the battle pass have drained a lot of the fun out of the game.

The battle pass missions create this feeling of obligation to play, and essentially create a tie between leisure and real money that is very difficult to ignore and becomes more a source of anxiety than enjoyment. Even though I’ve played OW2 significantly less than OW1 the systems around the game have just left me feeling burned out. I used to play almost daily, even during the OW1 content drought. Now I’ve only played 2 matches in the last week and a half.

1 Like
11

Fomo is one of the defining dark patterns. What are you on about

5 Likes
12

Would also add in that bp progression is showed to you 2 times, after each game, and when you open pass separately in the menu, you know to make you feel good double about it i guess each lvl up you got ?

Also the grind… like i played warframe, f2p grind is not scary thing to me, but overwatch is something else. They time gated option to grind, not time to get items in game, that is just ridiculus

3 Likes
13

Hey I made a thread just like this! Good to see others are noticing the same things.

2 Likes
14

No dude, that’s not OW, that’s WoW.

15

“Dark pattern” really sounds like you’re trying to push this as an “evil” subjective narrative rather than approaching it as an objective one.

Not a “bad” decision intrinsically. Allows for a company first standpoint, and reduces possibility or reasoning for refunds if purchased consciously.

Again, not a bad thing outright. There are far more egregious and actual unethical examples of this than what we’re seeing here. It’s manipulative, but all marketing is, are we going to get upset over this but not the fact McRib which is going away “for good” for its 16th season in a row?

Funko fills up landfills with discarded bobbleheads to force an illusion of scarcity. But it’s bad that bundles and BP’s go away?

If pay to win actually existed in OW2, sure.

Again, not an objectively bad thing to incorporate. It’s not as if paying for 80 tiers of BP’s hurts someone else’s experience or the game as a whole.

If you feel forced to do this, then you’re ignoring the exit door surrounded by neon signs behind you.

Again, pushing the idea you’re forced to grind for bread crumbs you don’t need is very much a subjective take. I personally (subjectively) don’t even focus on the challenges, most of them are completed without even realizing it. Objectively you have choices on how to approach the game, even with the engineered psychological pulls.

Again, welcome to humanity as a whole. Advertisement and “marketing” has been around since our pre-civilization ancestors using stances, noises, and colorful flora and fauna to draw attention to themselves for mating or better life opportunities.

Is this a “dark pattern” or is it simply what humans have always done since forever?

1 Like
16

It’s manipulative of your time too, which is the bigger impact to the majority of the playerbase who are F2P.

Forced win/loss streaks, 7 win mechanic (let me get to 7 wins just to see my new rank), rank decay on season start… all of these are included in the game to ultimately get you to spend more time on it. Even if you never spend a dime you are still valuable as an F2P player spending your time… looks good for player numbers (and thus shareholders), and most importantly the game needs to be healthy for the whales to spend spend spend.

12 Likes
17

Keep in mind that Epic got hit specifically because they were accused of doing all this to children. That’s a whole different ball game than with adults.

I don’t think the OP is claiming that Blizzard needs to be sued by the FTC, but just bringing up that there’s a world of difference between the two because of that alone. OW isn’t marketed to children to the same degree that Fortnite is.

And to be clear, I’m not saying I like Blizzard’s monetization scheme nor am I saying it’s okay because it’s an older demographic, but that it being done to children makes it worse by default, and that’s what really put Epic over the line in the FTC’s eyes.

1 Like
18

None of these would be a problem if people didn’t care so much about damn pixel cosmetics. Its a game, why do people care about skins so much. I didnt install overwatch to play a fashion dress up simulator. That’s how I enjoy games like Genshin Impact and other games with monetization so much, skins and other cosmetics mean nothing to me. It’s sad people forgot what games are supposed to be.

19

You do understand its called social engineering ? You do understand they use it in mainstream narrative ?

Some time I wish people would put that same thinking power they got to see behind gaming industry curtain into real life Government/ Corporation and Mainstream.

What a wonderful world we would have and a real democracy where every citizen take part into decision making without the need to be manipulated into obediences.

Oh wait … We have those folk in real life to , they call them Conspiracy Theorist, Fringe , Crazy PPL or other negative word I wont use here.

20

People have always liked “playing dress-up” in videogames, well before the age of microtransactions. The Sims was one of the most popular games of all time at the time of its release. MMOs back in the day had people who built entire careers out of giving people nice stuff to wear.

Most people want to look good, in single-player games but especially in multiplayer titles, and developers and publishers saw an opening to exploit with that want.

1 Like
21

It’s very much a “poor man’s mentality.”

The concept of flexing has been around forever, it’s a way to signal higher social status than one truly has. The irony is that most of the people who do this, spend all their money on stuff to signal status with and end up being broke.

Similarly with intangible stuff like skins, there’s an aspect of being able to say they could “afford” to spend the money is supposed to be impressive in itself, just like how low class people think having the latest iPhone or leasing a luxury car signals their wealth.

1 Like