make it so that when a level ends, the player has a "go to the next level" screen, where the continue button is greyed out with red text "cannot progress until you find all 8 secrets: 2/8 found" with completely arbitrary numbers. there are no secrets, the player can just press the button anyways, but now they think that they have to find them, and are trying to think what things that they've found qualify as "secrets". EXCEPT at a random mid to late game level, where there are ACTUALLY secrets to find. always make sure to subvert the player's expectations in the dumbest, most frustrating way, so that at every twist and turn, they find something that makes the game marginally worse of an experience.
The fact you are doing this with an online game scares me... That being said, I feel like it would be very funny to give people pseudo multiplayer through exposing variables from the database like position, health, etc. plug those into a body and you now have multiplayer with ragdolls. or you know just leak peoples IP addr, commit to the bit
