Thursday, August 4, 2022

Consider this before you refer your loved ones to RAID

Recently RAID expanded their referral system to motivate players to bring more of their friends/family to play RAID and spend money.

Please consider the below before you recommend RAID to your loved ones. These are from different RAID players on what happened to their family or friends after their recommendation.

3 Tiny stories

One player recommended it to his friend and said that now he is playing every day multiple hours even during work. Significant negative impact on RL.

One player said he hates himself and is ashamed that he spends so many hours playing, actively hiding that info from his friends and family.

One player who got his friend to play RAID said he regrets it because his friend ended up spending a lot of money in the game.

Player Quotes

Quotes from different RAID players:

  • I wouldn't want to inflict that onto anyone whose well-being I cared about.
  • My cousin's exact words to me "you have put me in a financial trap"
  • I would only recommend this game to people I hate
  • Letting people know you play this game is equivalent to informing them you smoke in the car with kids
  • I would never in a million years recommend this game for anyone in my friends/social groups. It is addictive, in a wrong way
  • When i tell my friends i play raid they just look at me and laugh.. its embarrassing AF
  • I can not in good faith recommend it to anyone.
  • Never in a million years
  • I love them. Why would I ruin their lives after I've ruined mine?

Extremely skilled in creating addiction

Plarium, owned by  Aristocrat, is an Israeli game developer with offices in Israel, the United States and Ukraine. Aristocrat Leisure Limited is an Australian gambling machine manufacturer.
They have extensive data and knowledge to create addictive behaviors and exploit human weaknesses, basically converting regular people into addicts.

There was a voting

Online poll results asking RAID players if they would recommend the game to their friends or family were by large a "NO" as shown on the picture below.

What many RAID players are doing

Many RAID players who want to collect the referral rewards but don't want to recommend the game to their friends or family are creating fake accounts and using various 3rd party tools like Bluestacks macros to automatically play and level up those fake accounts on a constantly running computer.

I saw estimates around 50 days - 2 months that these fake accounts have to be played to gather the rewards. It is a tedious and ridiculous thing to do but some of those players who are fully addicted or fully invested (already spent a lot of money) choose to do it. 

And this system probably supports the bot farms helping them get extra quality champions making it easier for them to create and sell accounts.

Not telling you what to do

You do whatever you want - this blog post only suggests to consider = think about the potential consequences.