Fallen London is the best free to play game released in 2009

The study found 35 different techniques over eight domains: “game dynamics designed to drive spending, product not meeting expectations, monetization of basic quality of life, predatory advertising, in-game currency, pay to win, general presence of microtransactions and other.” The examples, several of which run afoul of UK consumer protection regulations, are numerous: Gamers cited aggressive advertising in Candy Crush that targets them when they cannot quite complete a level, or inventory space limits in Fallout 76 and Elder Scrolls Online that make it difficult to enjoy the game.

We try to keep the monetisation very polite, and to stay clear of addictive or exploitative design patterns. Whether despite or because of that, more players than usual ultimately spend money on the game. Last time we checked, it was around 6%. We’ve heard anything over 5% is considered excellent. 

The vigilant Constables and numberless neddy men. The endless flocks of wheeling bats. The smooth towers carved with symbols that make your eyes bleed and hair smoulder. Do these things mean nothing to you?

"There was kind of a sun...and the light that flooded the vineyard was thick as honey and red as port wine. We waited for the sun to speak, but it only watched us in sorrow. I knew then that it was waiting for us. As I woke, I thought that its light lingered somehow in my eyes..."

This is the last time. The walls of the well are studded with chunks of glass-sharp obsidian. You knew it must be so. But if you bleed to death before you drown, it will be for nothing.

Your flesh rips as you fall. Both your arms and one thigh are ragged tatters. You scream with pain and fury into the water. Too much blood! You won't have time to drown. You won't have time to drown.

You arranged your own betrayal. You made yourself a target. The venal and the vicious could not resist it. But they didn't chain you. They beat you and robbed you. Why can they not understand?

As the zeppelin ascends, the Hybrid raises its voice in solemn song. A thrill runs down your spine. For a moment, swept up by the song, you experience a vision: a blazing-bright king of Moon-Misers leading its glimmering subjects on a pilgrimage across the roof and through a door far to the North. Below, in a city that is not London, the citizens point and murmur in fear as their false-stars crawl into the distance and blink out one by one, leaving only darkness behind.

And then the vision is gone. Was it a promise? A daydream? An augury? You cannot know.

After that, life in London settles back into its customary rhythm. The only notable incident, to begin with, is that Mr Fires locks itself in its chambers for a week. Those who live near the Bazaar hear enraged shrieks and sounds of destruction all through the night, and see sullen fires glare in the windows of one of the spires.

....

As the months pass, the star brightens. A dozen times brighter than its fellows. Now, when it passes occasionally over London, it paints the city in a velvety twilight. Every few months, when the star is overhead, the gaslamps dim and the city explodes with joyous activity as light-starved citizens take advantage of the slight ease in the gloom.

Even at other times, when the star is most distant from London, it's still faintly visible. No matter where you are, you can look up and take comfort in the knowledge that someone up there likes you.

You imagine the Hybrid, with its clever alien mind and watchful human eyes, looking likewise down at the deep, dark, marvellous city below and thinking of you. And you bless your lucky star that you still live in a city that beats and burns and bleeds with love that is true.

• Legends of Runeterra (Fantasy Card superior to Hearthstone and Magic the Gathering, destroyed it with a better game and much fairer easier to grind-for-free freemium model)
  
• 'League of Legends: ' Wild Rift (a phone version of the PC game, since they realised the PC version was too complex to make work as a phone app)
  
• Valorant (FPS alternative that is freemium and annihilates Overwatch that is pay-to-play)
  
• Teamfight Tactics (autochess genre, not necessarily superior to autochess but the best for PC for sure, while the phone version is arguably equal).
  

• In February 2023, Twitch streams of League of Legends content racked up a staggering 112 million viewing hours.
  
• League of Legends continues to have an engaged player base, with over 2.4 million active users as of late April 2023.
  
• One popular League streamer on Twitch amassed over 3 million views in just 30 days last November, showing the game’s power to attract audiences.
  
• League cemented its place as the most-watched game on Twitch as of December 2022, beating out all competition.
  
• The highly anticipated 2022 League of Legends World Championship Finals shattered records with over 5 million concurrent viewers tuning in live.
  
• Since its launch in 2020, the mobile version of Wild Rift has proven extremely popular, surpassing 55 million downloads.
  
• In 2021, Wild Rift topped the charts as the most popular game among Chinese gamers, highlighting its international appeal.
  
• With over 150 million registered players globally, League of Legends continues to be one of the most-played online games worldwide as of 2023.
  
• The league attracts gamers of all ages, but data shows most active players are between the age of 21-24 as of late 2023.
  
• Male gamers dominate League’s player base, making up 87% of users.
  
• By September 2022, Wild Rift had smashed through the $750 million mark in total revenue since launch.
  

Dropped arguments: Caring about the users is more important than profit

- I don't see why we should allow the standard to be set where preying on addictive ideas is better than actually enjoying the game without ads every five minutes

, or in this case bashing your head on the keyboard just to win one more game.

Fallen London's slow grind actually encourages to step away from the computer, which might seem counter intuitive, but that's probably better than skipping school and playing for 16 hours like some insane video game addicted folks do.

the large amount of world building *inside* Fallen London. Con can say as much about Arcane as he likes, how much of that can you actually learn by playing through the game? It's not like each character has their entire thousand word backstory printed somewhere. 

Game Tree noted LOL as one of the most toxic communities ever - and a simple video explains why. It's extremely hard for players to work together in the team if they're strangers. 

Riot began with a concept called priming. Past psychology studies have shown that exposing people to certain stimuli, such as particular words, images or colors, can subconsciously influence their later behavior. Lin and his Riot colleagues wanted to see if they could use color to influence League of Legends gamers to act more cooperatively within their five-person teams and display less rude or toxic behavior toward other players.

In one study, called the “Optimus Experiment,” they tested five categories of messages displayed to players in red and blue, with white serving as a baseline for comparison. Among Western gamers, they found that a red message warning about the counterproductive results of negative behavior — such as, “Teammates perform worse if you harass them after a mistake” — led to a bigger drop in players having a bad attitude toward their teammates or insulting other players than the same message displayed in white. A blue message highlighting the benefits of positive behavior also helped reduce toxic behavior.

The experiment turned up some surprising results, too. Lin got some laughs from an audience at the 2013 Game Developers Conference when he revealed data showing how a positive message highlighted in red — “Who will be the most sportsmanlike?” — actually led to an increase in negative behavior.

In another set of experiments, Lin and the Riot team wanted to better understand the spread of both good and bad behavior within the League of Legends community. An early investigation turned up surprising results that flew in the face of expectations based on the “negative bias” concept in psychology; the idea that negative stimuli or incidents linger in people’s memories more strongly than positive ones.

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“When we investigated the spread of behaviors in online communities, we did notice toxicity spreads and spreads quickly, so it stands out in player memories,” Lin says. “What was surprising to us is we found a little evidence that positivity might spread faster than negativity. We’ll be devoting a few resources to studying that this year.”

Though Riot’s experiments lack the pristine conditions of a traditional academic psychology experiment, the sheer volume of behavioral data channeling through Riot’s game servers every day — chat messages and in-game actions from an estimated 27 million daily players — allows the Riot team to collect vast amounts of data very quickly. “It’s not about precision in any data point; it’s all about quantity,” Lin explains. They can test many different experimental conditions simultaneously. For instance, the Optimus Experiment tested 217 unique conditions across more than 10 million games worth of data, with 10 percent of all games acting as controls.

Fallen London is the best free to play game released in 2009