How Block Blast harvests its players for ad money

52 points by motionlessveloc 7 hours ago on hackernews | 13 comments

MDTHLN | 3 hours ago

> The lethal puzzle is a generator, and any rule can ask for it.

Ashamed of myself for getting halfway through the article before realising it was AI written.

iamacyborg | 2 hours ago

Hah, you can literally tell from the subheader.

> Rules downloaded from their server decide your pieces, your score and your ads. One waits for an expensive ad, then asks for a hand you can’t place.

wafflemaker | an hour ago

I wouldn't be able to tell. No load bearing or is not x, it's y.

I actually don't mind if it's good enough, informative and not overly long.

Haven't really read anything super well written (in terms of language and form) lately, other than a really fun hn comment summarizing Trump's War.

But I just haven't read that much lately.

swiftcoder | an hour ago

The tell here is the "One ..., then ... <negative>". This is "not X, it's Y" with the clauses reordered.

For some reason the current crop of LLMs are really insistent on generating contrast between two things in every statement.

The problem is that the "it's not X it's Y" construction is very useful, and shows up a lot in human-written text.

Freak_NL | 20 minutes ago

I started reading on the assumption it was posted here because it was interesting, but this paragraph cinched it:

> 1. You finished your last three rewarded ads. Every time a rewarded ad starts, the rule pushes false onto a list and keeps the latest three (lines 174–183). If the ad SDK reports that the reward was earned, it flips that entry to true (191–199). The check needs all three to be exactly true:

Pointlessly spun out prose. Pointless headers everywhere. Pointless lists. Yes, we understand what a list of booleans is, and that the game looks for a state where the last three are true. No need to spell it out like that.

Why do people post crap like this? Why do people post it to Hacker News? There is some merit to dissecting an attention sink ad-driven game, but this article just makes me feel like my attempt to grasp the meaning and writer's views fails every time — like I'm trying to grasp stalks of grain in a field, but my hand keeps passing through them as if they were holograms.

I would very much like to read people's thoughts with a forbearance for awkward prose, bad spelling, or suboptimal outlining, instead of that I get rewarded by text where the human who prompted it is suddenly absent.

Fuck this new AI world.

Jaxkr | 3 hours ago

The fact that impossible puzzles are generated to bait rewarded-ad views is something I've always suspected in mobile games, but I dismissed it as a skill issue on my end.

quikoa | 2 hours ago

> Apple does let apps download JavaScript updates like this, which is how tools like Expo Updates work, as long as the update doesn’t change what the app is. Whether changing your pieces based on ad prices fits that is up to Apple.

But there is no way for Apple to verify "as long as the update doesn’t change what the app is" right?

wodenokoto | an hour ago

I’m a bit unsure why they want to change gameplay based on the value of the ad.

It’s not like I get sucked into the game and decides to watch more expensive ads (which is the mechanic of golden berries or whatever)

As far as I understand the rule, high value players are more likely to die - but why?

Timshel | an hour ago

They want to ensure you watch it.

If you tend to watch ads and have a high score then when killed it's likely you will watch the ad to revive.

wodenokoto | an hour ago

I guess there’s just a lot I don’t know about this ad market. Is the high value ad only available to show for a limited time?

[OP] motionlessveloc | an hour ago

The original video on Instagram is worth a watch: https://www.instagram.com/p/DecfvksvHiW/

MisterMunchkin | 43 minutes ago

Holy shit that is evil.