Sounds like California needs to try out the ligma OS because they can suck my nuts.

Nailed it.

The fun part is that a lot of trading cards have their roots in the early movements for cigarettes. Same idea for the most part, except it was typical for pinups instead of monsters or magic. You bought tobacco to get the cards, so tobacco became popular amongst kids. If you wanted to collect em all, you would buy more boxes of cigarettes, so imo it’s even more of a parallel than just calling out TCGs

The fact that the idea swapped to hooking kids on gambling is honestly a no brainer, especially since the cards were the things helping sell the cigs anyhow.

I think there are a few schools of thought towards this type of thing. Me personally, I would want a challenge despite my due diligence and I’m often the person disappointed when I nuke a boss.

However, you will have people that intentionally do the extra stuff so that they are op. Those individuals would hate that if they spent a lot of time doing this and the boss isn’t a breeze they would feel as if their time was wasted doing that content.

A game that comes to mind that recieved a lot of flak for that kind of scaling was last epoch. Every boss gets a shield as you lower their health and it makes having powerful gear, especially in lower areas, feel like less of a boon.

Personally, I think the answer is to move away from pure stats being the indicator of difficulty. Just bumping up health based on level would make a boss feel insane if you dumped most of your levels into less combat oriented stats in the games that have them. So you would feel weak despite being “high level”. The answer to it is having mechanics of a fight be challenging despite your level. If you mess up or ignore a mechanic, you are punished. However, if you’re strong enough you can afford to make those mistakes more often while the fight isn’t just a push over.

This, of course, requires way more effort and actual game design with fun combat so that the game doesnt make bosses feel like a chore or just gimmicks. The easy answer is to just buff stats, which is why most games just make enemies a sponge in high difficulty.