Idle games can have lots of addiction inducing dark patterns:
1) resources you can buy with real money;
2) massively increased rewards due to active gameplay;
3) daily gambling rewards;
4) reset-based system when you're grinding to reach some some level, only for everything to be reset for some incremental reward.
Worst offenders I tried are NGU idle (overwhelmingly positive steam rating), Trimps, the perfect tower, which aren't actually idle, but rather incremental.
A good rule of thumb is - if having a bot for a game would put you in a massive advantage then it's not an idle game, but rather an incremental game - a genre that is designed to be played for 'idle' amounts of time (forever basically) but actively, so will likely feature as many dark patterns as possible to keep you glued (and paying).
On the other hand, here's a game like Melvor idle - true idle in spirit with little differentiation between online and offline, no resets, no gambling, yet still with plenty of depth around optimization. Relaxing, yet engaging.
When you have a full programming environment for automating the game... and taking advantage of that is the point of the game... you get to avoid some of the nastier dark patterns and treat it like a puzzle to solve at whatever pace you want, because every pace is rewarding.
What you describe us what put me off most idle games, or rather incremental games. Especially the reset mechanics just seem like laziness to create an "infinite" progress when its just the same loop over and over.
Going to check out Melvor sounds exactly what I have been looking for! Thanks for sharing.
Personally, I think resets are fine, they provide a feeling of scaling / progress in games which have little (and match the idea of “ascensions” in roguelikes).
However lots of incrementals require way too many such resets, and the activity after a reset is frenetic, neither of which is something I’, interested in.
That’s not even a monetisation thing, I recall a web-based one with no ads (and very, very sparse graphics) which had this exact issue, you had to reset the entire thing all the time in order to progress, it was very frustrating.
I got horribly addicted to NGU for a while and had to purge my game file to get myself to stop wasting time on it. Ugh. Idle games just feel like a dopamine fix, compared to truly good games that give the satisfaction of mastering game mechanics or seeing character/story development.
Yeah incremental games are like crack to some people. I had major addiction with NGU as well, but then I gave myself unlimited resources and saw firsthand that the grind never ends. That made me loose interest.
I spent the $10 on Melvor and it's far and away the best idle game I've ever played. The upfront cost and no microtransactions at all means the game can be balanced around actually being fun.
1) resources you can buy with real money;
2) massively increased rewards due to active gameplay;
3) daily gambling rewards;
4) reset-based system when you're grinding to reach some some level, only for everything to be reset for some incremental reward.
Worst offenders I tried are NGU idle (overwhelmingly positive steam rating), Trimps, the perfect tower, which aren't actually idle, but rather incremental.
A good rule of thumb is - if having a bot for a game would put you in a massive advantage then it's not an idle game, but rather an incremental game - a genre that is designed to be played for 'idle' amounts of time (forever basically) but actively, so will likely feature as many dark patterns as possible to keep you glued (and paying).
On the other hand, here's a game like Melvor idle - true idle in spirit with little differentiation between online and offline, no resets, no gambling, yet still with plenty of depth around optimization. Relaxing, yet engaging.