Post #590034

Here's a question. #askFedi Kidlet plays Roblox, and there's a game he plays called "Anime Card Clash". Seems like a fairly straightforward deck-building game (not my cup of tea, but whatever). The thing that has caught my attention is that by playing the game, you earn card packs, and then you can open them to see what cards you get. The problem is that you get *vast* numbers of card packs - we're talking at least thousands, if not tens or hundreds of thousands. You then 'open' these packs by clicking the "auto-open" button, and leave the game running for many hours while it churns through opening those packs and adding cards to your collection. This is raising red flags in my brain. The player does absolutely nothing while this process goes on for hours on end (my kid usually watches youtube or TV while it's happening, and has sometimes left the PC running when they've gone to school, which I'm less than pleased about), and I'm left wondering what possible purpose this has in game design. The thought occurs to me that it's hiding something nefarious going on in the background, that the developers want you to leave your PC on and running their code for such lengths of time. Crypto-mining was a thought, but the GPU isn't working super hard (going by audible fan speed). A quick search online hasn't revealed anything. Can anyone suggest paths of inquiry to follow to figure out what's going on? (It may just be bad game design, but I'd rather know for sure)