Yes agree with you. .
This is great advice imo, also if your goal is to play less so you can use your time more productively.
I think keeping a budget is something very important too. There’s a way to have a healthy gatcha experience, and this post is still the number one thing I recommend to new players. You need to keep a budget to enjoy the game.
Time spent in the game is tricky for me though, that I used to be pretty bad for. I recently used a screen management app to keep track of my playing time. I went from 8 hours a day to 4 hours a day, and recently to 2h a day.
Maybe I get less farming done now, but I’m ok with that. I’d rather enjoy the game than treat it like a job.
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Great advice. Here is a video that talks about this in somewhat greater length: The Psychology of Freemium - YouTube
Never gamble the mortgage money. Simple and easy advice.
Most things in life can be enjoyed in moderation but there will always be people who cannot moderate. It’s a sad world to see people fall into addictions but they will always happen. Addictive personalities will find something usually.
Most of us have vices easily available as well (drinking, gambling, narcotics, food etc etc) and even if you ban them that doesn’t stop them. Prohibition doesn’t work after all.
The best we can do is try to to help the people who need it, when they need it.
You can regulate industries as much as you’d like but ultimately you can’t protect people from themselves. You can support and help but you can’t stop them going and doing something if they want to.
Not that these companies can’t help on that. Definitely there should be a way to set a monthly budget or stop people buying another gem bundle if they have bought 2 already or something. Give a cool off time so people aren’t pulling from the portal in the heat of the moment. Going Tilt because of bad breaks never leads to good decisions.
I am 100% finished spending.
- No VIP
- No POV
- Nothing
My love of M:TG got me into this, but now that I’m back to playing M:TG with 4 of my 5 kids (the 8 year olds are scary good for their age)… This game just isn’t fun enough to be worth it anymore. At the time I was playing and having fun, it was worth it.
I’m just to the point where it’s not fun at all.
The hardest part is letting go of the social aspect of this game. As a hermit and social-media recluse, it’s probably easier for me than most. Doesn’t mean I don’t love you all any less.
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Just make it so you can’t spend any money. I don’t know if there’s a way to turn that off in Apple or google but you can set a card up and have it on a bank account with no balance and no overdraft facility. So any attempt to spend will get declined.
This will help you to get out of the habit and just play the game. If the game itself is driving you to spend then yes, quitting out will be the easiest for you.
That said Magic the Gathering is just as bad. I’ve seen kids drop hundreds on packs chasing cards. Which they then make obsolete so the cycle starts again.
With Card Kingdom, I don’t need to worry about that 
I don’t care if I spend 90 bucks on a single card, it is the precise card I want.
I’ve got the disposable income… but if I don’t play for awhile… I still have the card.
The game has changed so much since I started playing in '94, even as I’ve played sporadically over the past 20 years it’s turned into an interesting and complicated mess with new win conditions and extremely powerful cards.
That said, the art is still awesome, the cards are still tangible and no game company is going to stop supporting it and cause me to lose all of my hard-earned ‘progress’
Oh I get that but it’s still just wasted money.
Like people who do the Panini football Sticker albums every year. They generally cost between £500 and £1000 to do. Each year.
So why do we do it? Because it wastes time and collecting things fulfils some primal urge to have stuff.
So buying pixels or cards doesn’t matter really. It’s just something to do to pass the time and stave off boredom.
If it’s no longer doing those things then time quite rightly to move on.
I play Warhammer 40k and have thousands of pounds worth of stuff. I justify it as being my main hobby and it has a social aspect too but really I just like collecting it 
And that’s how I feel about M:TG. Some cards evoke nostalgia. Some are nice to look at. Sometimes it’s fun to put a deck together to play solitaire.
Mostly, though, it’s something fun to share with the kids and occasionally play with friends.
But Games Workshop are no different really. They make the rules for units broken so we rush out and buy it only to nerf them later. Heck now there’s a lot of older stuff they are removing from the game so some people will soon have collections they can’t even use in the latest rules set.
Digital gaming is no different. The difference is I have pixels rather than a model. All of these “hobbies” are basically just mechanisms to extract cash from your pocket to theirs.
If you can have fun in the process then why not.
That’s the key though…in all aspects of life self restraint is needed. My army just had a big box release and I got one whereas a lad in my club got 3 and then complained he had no money for food so had to sell 2. But he clearly knew his budget for the month and did it anyway.
People be people I guess
And, with these games, you receive no tangible value. They’re only generating revenue with no value produced. Heck… one of the reasons I hadn’t quit yet was because I enjoyed the forum. Then I realized that it was just compulsive discussion about a game that had long since lost its lustre for me.
Then it was the sunk cost issue that I struggle to part with-- not because I mourn the loss of dollars… but because I don’t want my partner to be mad at me “you wasted all that money and don’t even play it” sort of junk. She probably wouldn’t yell at me, she’d just be glad I stopped spending.
I’m just tired of logging in, getting 1-3 pop-ups to spend to buy things, feeling tempted because “yeah that could help me to XYZ”— only to realize afterward that I still friggin hate the game 
I’ll admit, I got sucked in. I was a sucker-- knew it even as it was happening. But it was fun and I enjoyed it, so I played along… The forum perpetuated it, the social relationships perpetuated it… heck, even as I said, outside pressures even perpetuated it.
But at some point, a man is just done with ‘a thing’ and moves along.
I will say that, for me, M:TG is less compulsive or addictive. No pop-ups, no imagined social pressure… just “hmm… if I want to improve my deck, I can. Or I can use one of my other ten thousand plus cards to do it differently…”
I’m no stranger to excess. My kids have literally millions of legos. A whole room for loose legos, plus another for the storage of custom & store-bought builds.
The other thing that I realize is that, the more I’ve withdrawn (as mentioned before, life has hurt this past year), the more I’ve been able to feel like creating & writing again.
So… yeah, at the least, I’m done spending.
Probably more.
Didn’t realize this spending addiction thing was such an issue.
I can certainly get hooked on a game, hooked enough that I might want to buy something here and there… but when I heard people talking about how they were spending thousands of dollars on this game?
I would never. Could never. Can’t even begin to comprehend…
I like the game itself, but it’s not worth that much money. No game is, at least no game I’ve ever heard of.
Incoming hate posts in 3… 2… 1…
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