Pray to Win

With the Year Beast event going on in Dota 2 at the moment, to celebrate Chinese New Year, there has been a lot of talk about pay-to-win, and how it's really bad for a game to be perceived that way. If you haven't had a chance to play it yet, it is a regular game of Dota, except every 5 minutes, a strong unit called the Year Beast spawns for each team, and it is quite powerful. The Year Beast can be controlled by spending points, and points can also be spent to upgrade the beast. That doesn't sound too bad, except the only way to earn points is to win games when you or someone on your team has purchased a $26 item, if you play a Year Beast match win or lose(of which there is only one every 3 hours), trash some of your in-game cosmetics, or if you pay real money to purchase points from the store. Realistically, without paying any money, you are at a huge disadvantage against a team where people have paid money. As you'd expect, there was a lot of anger in reaction to this event. Although by winning a Year Beast match, you don't get anything other than more in-game cosmetics.

What I wanted to write about today are those "pray-to-win" games. A quick Google search shows that nobody else has come up with this term, so I'll explain it. It's a game where you have little to no control over the outcome, so all you can do is pray that what you want to happen happens. Examples include slot machines, the lottery, and the good ol' family favourite: Snakes and Ladders. I was speaking to Geoff about it, as he organised a board games day for his wife's extended family, and he was looking at picking up a copy of Snakes and Ladders. I asked him why, as the game has pretty much no element of skill in it (unless you are really good at manipulating dice rolls, in which case, maybe you should be hitting the craps tables instead). He replied that it's really good at keeping young children entertained.

I thought back to some of the games we played as children. One of the games I played with my siblings quite often was Mario Party 3. Oddly enough, one of my favourite mini-games was Merry-Go-Chomp, in which each player selects a colour on a spinning wheel to stand on. The wheel will then spin and a chomp will choose one at random and eat it. Any player standing on that colour will lose. The winner is the last remaining character. This is a pray-to-win game, and the only reason thath it was my favourite is because for some reason, I was always incredibly lucky at the game, and it was pretty much the only game in which I was guaranteed to beat my brother.

Maybe that's the appeal of pray-to-win games - everyone has an equal chance to win (except I guess things like the lottery, as the people who spend more money on buying tickets have a higher chance to win, but you get the idea). In regards to Snakes and Ladders, Geoff said that one thing it also does is teach kids how to lose. In the case of S&L, you are never really playing against the other players, all you are playing against is the game itself. So if you land on a snake, it's not because one of the other players is targeting you. This means that children will be less likely to fight with other kids about the game (unless there is cheating involved). If someone else manages to get to the 100th square before you, then you congratulate them, and that's the end.

I really want to play Mario Party now. I completely forgot what I was going to write about. I want to have a Mario Party party for my birthday, but you can only have 4 people (5 if you play the Bowser mode where one person plays Bowser on the Wii U gamepad). And since the game modes can go for hours, it's not the type of game where you can really just take turns. So for a party game, it's not very good at parties!