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I have mentioned it in the past and now here it is, a thread to discuss Lootboxes and how they pertain to gaming and your thoughts on them. BE CIVIL  Please, remember to be civil. These are a hot topic and will rouse all sorts of passionate thoughts. Sometimes you might think the person talking to you has the wrong opinion and it is completely nonsensical. This is a moment where stepping back is advised rather than ad hominens. Lootboxes? I am from 1985, what are they? Loot boxes are in game chests (usually) which you may open once you have acquired enough of a game related currency to win a random prize or prizes. Loot boxes in gaming has gotten more prevalent in recent years and the biggest originator (most popular to start off with) that I can think of are the Team Fortress 2 crates. Before games loot boxes you had such things as trading cards. You would buy a sealed pack of cards with no idea what was in them at the hope of increasing your collection. You may get the card you wanted or you may not. I spent a lot trying to get the WWF wrestling cards back in the late 80s. This still happens with card games like Magic the Gathering and can be discussed here too. Gacha machines also have an addictive streak to them and are fine for discussion here by people more knowledgeable than I. Current Loot Box Madness You may be aware of the Battlefront II lootboxes. These caused a lot of outrage. This is mostly due to the winning aspect of them. People with the money to spend buying currency in game to open lootboxes had more of an advantage over those who could only play the game and grind out the currency instead. This controversy caused a whole big backlash in the gaming media and has gotten the attention of both the government of Belgium and some people in the US. Here is an article discussing Belgium's stance. http://www.pcgamer.com/belgium-says-loot-boxes-are-gambling-wants-them-banned-in-europe/ Here is a video from a US senator calling Loot boxes gambling and predatory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_akwfRuL4os As you can see, Battlefront II may have paved the way for change in this rising gaming trend. With the EU being instrumental in changing Valve's refund policy to benefit consumers, the Belgium government could certainly begin something here as well! Please remember the earlier point, everyone, and feel free to discuss everything Lootbox, Gacha and microtransactiony here in this thread! Cool videos to watch: A short history of lootboxes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTLFNlu2N_M How lootboxes in the new Need For Speed look like:  How lootboxes influence game design: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZC8UEi3oI4o An attorney talking about lootboxes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zXJL459eUY&t=1740s How game devs are lying to players about rng chances because they can as there's no regulation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7kgNExNiO4 Somebody fucked around with this message at 10:37 on Nov 27, 2017 |
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Nov 22, 2017 13:51
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Gonna repost this here cos I still think it's something that's getting massively overlooked when talking about EA. Lets talk about how all this started and how EA have been planning this over the last 10 years. I know a lot of people know about this but it bears repeating here, the video games industry is loving MASSIVE. It wasn't always, but now it's mainstream and targets a huge demographic. You could say on the one side of the spectrum you've got the gamer who buys a couple of AAA games a year and plays some online console with friends late in the evening after work, and on the other is the die hard completionist who engages in online communities and such. This is a broad stroke and there are a lot of colours on the gamer spectrum, but you get the idea. Young kids catching Pokemon, old ladies playing Bubble Witch and Candy Crush, they're all on there. In no way is this me insinuating the age old "casual" and "hardcore" argument, I believe there is no right or wrong way to enjoy games and it's fantastic that what was once a niche hobby is now taken seriously. A lot of critics of EA have been looking at the lootbox/micro-transaction trend and throwing a lot of blame on games like Overwatch for bringing it in to the mainstream, Team Fortress 2 for the monetary "Jackpot" style or even mobile games like Candy Crush and Clash of Clans for the timed lockout mechanic. I feel that while all these games need to be held to account for the current state of gaming none of these are patent zero. I believe this statement is true: - EA have been planning this for 10 years and we would be at this point regardless of what other publishers and developers had done. We need to talk about a long running EA franchise - **FIFA** Soccer (Sorry fellow brits) is the worlds biggest sport and since 1993 EA have been churning these games out year after year. Frequently on the top of the best seller lists and highly anticipated a new one comes out every year like clockwork. FIFA started out as a straight up Soccer simulation, you picked a team and took that team to victory through playing matches until your team was the best in the world. Over time new features were added, like team management, player transfers and multiplayer modes and the game got better and bigger and in 2008 EA sold well over half a million copies dominating the sales charts outside the USA. Then came **FIFA 09**... This version had all the bells and whistles of a usual FIFA game of the time except for one other addition, the Ultimate Team Mode. This is patent zero, this is where this shitshow began. Ultimate Team Mode was an addition where you earn points for playing the regular game, with those points you can buy packs with a number of player cards (out of thousands of players in professional leagues across the world), once you have enough players to field a full team you can play this mode online against friends. This sounds great, kids now growing up and playing on consoles can remember the fun of collecting soccer cards on the schoolyard and now not only can you collect them, you can play with them too! Oh and you can also buy FIFA points to get extra packs if your team is lacking... - By 2010 this had made EA 30m USD in revenue from Ultimate Team mode alone. source - FIFA 13 had pushed that to 200m USD. source) - Finally, this year this has now grown to 800m USD. Yes nearly a BILLION dollars from one game with one mode. source) Since 2008 EA saw the dollar signs in this method of generating additional revenue, getting people hooked on an ecosystem and then teasing every last nickle, dime, pound, penny, euro and cent from players. This is a direct quote from the "800m USD" article above: *"Like Battlefield or Battlefront, our Star Wars game, which are very similar in the depth of play - we can possibly add a similar mechanic to that. We spend a lot of time thinking about it," he said. "Not for tomorrow, but over the next couple of years you're going to see a lot more of that in our portfolio." - EA CFO Blake Jorgensen* Blake admits this is not going away, and in fact it's going to get worse. And he's happy about that.
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Nov 22, 2017 13:56
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Actually OP I bet lootboxes were around in 1985 in the form of trading card packs, unless they hadn't had the bright idea to stuff trading cards into their own packs at this point and were still just bundling them with misc. items such as gum or magazines like troglodytes unaware of the goldmine they sat on (actually actually I have nothing to contribute I just wanted to say I hope booster packs get banned, thanks)
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Nov 22, 2017 14:00
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Insurrectionist posted:Actually OP I bet lootboxes were around in 1985 in the form of trading card packs, unless they hadn't had the bright idea to stuff trading cards into their own packs at this point and were still just bundling them with misc. items such as gum or magazines like troglodytes unaware of the goldmine they sat on (I actually did write about those trading card packs under the 1985 subject header because that is roughly when I started to get them myself)
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Nov 22, 2017 14:11
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Lootboxes seeping into singleplayer games is really REALLY bothering me, it's so stupid. We dodged a bullet (kinda) with Shadow of War where the lootboxes were absolutely pointless. The economy in the new Assassins Creed tho was obviously engineered to push you to buy resources if you wanted to upgrade your gear with you as you leveled. And it's so frustrating and defeating to see this hobby go from "man, super mario is the best" to "wow, i wonder how they are gonna gently caress me in the rear end with this new game" inch by inch without being able to do anything about it. It's kinda starting to look like lootboxes are gonna go away tho if politicians and the like keep getting involved, but greedy publishers are just gonna start to sell items/resources/boosts then where you know exactly what you are getting when you pay and boy howdy you better bet the game is tailored to make them mandatory.
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Nov 22, 2017 14:14
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What is a gacha? It is basically a loot box with less items. You may also see it written as gashapon or gachapon. In asia, these tend to have a few things that make them worse than their western counterparts. Time limited gashapons. Paid player and free player gashas where paid players have better chances. Paid player and free player gashas where paid players have access to items months before free players, if they even ever get them. Chances that are much lower than western games. Instead of a 1% chance we may see in western games, we are dealing with 0.0045% chance or something similar. Quick question, would you roll on a loot box or on a number on roulette? You have better chances at roulette. If you put your money on any number there is 1 in 38 or 2.63% to win. This is better than a lot of western and asian loot boxes. Why should you care about asian loot boxes? When western companies look for new ways to further monetize their games, they have a few options. Other western games, casinos, or eastern games. Western games are a good place since they can just take someone else’s idea and see how those players react to that market. Casinos are a great place to study how influence someone to spend more. They have been doing it for years so why not use some of their ideas. Eastern games are not as good of a place due to some strong cultural differences compared to western audiences. So I am going to talk about two eastern regions and why they may have the systems they do. Mainly japan and china. The idea of loot boxes originally comes from china. You would have internet cafes with pirated software where a lot of people would spend their time. So one video game company developed the loot box as a way to get people on pirated software (playing for “free”) to be able to spend more money in the game. If there is one thing I can say about chinese developers, they love to steal ideas as a starting point then work on them from there. I don’t know where they got their idea of poo poo in a box, but as far as I can tell japan had gachas since the 60s and bandai made it bigger, and america has had it as long as we have had baseball cards. The chinese f2p system is a bit different than western games, and I am gonna generalize here, but the chinese have way less issues when it comes to buying power in video games. Basically confucianism hosed them over something fierce. Imagine if everyone in life is related by being superior and inferior to someone else. If someone is superior, then they are lucky for their position and must have the wealth equal to their status. Transpose this into a video game and although you would expect people in china to treat video games as an escape from reality, those relationships are still in the virtual world. Quite often developers will do things like sell an in game item for a few thousand USD and expect only one person to get it. If your avatar is an extension of yourself, why shouldn’t you be able to spend your money to become better than someone in the game just like you do in real life. Generally, not many people are upset about this. Japan is a bit different due to not having the full strength of confucianism that china got, but it is still there. They love time limited events that make you want to spend now or miss the chance of getting the item. But main difference between a japanese and chinese gacha is that in china you can normally out right buy power while in japan they will give you horrific odds unless you paid and even then those odds would look odd in a western game. Those odds would not look out of place in a casino. These systems were designed in order to maximize profit, but as companies often do (or china in general) they don’t care about their users. Just their money. People often say that is just business, but gambling addiction is a lovely thing for adults and most of these games are not aimed at them. They are aimed at children with some access to someone's money. There are quite a few documentaries about how hosed up japan's economy is and part of what came out of that were NEETs. Not in Education, Employment, or Training. There is an underclass in japan who have given up on the system or the system gave up on them that live in small booths inside of internet cafes. A lot of these people are addicted to games or f2p games or gachas and have issues getting out of this situation because of it. Japan isn’t really dealing with this issue, as is the japanese way of ignoring unsightly things, but one japanese game actually got their government to take a look at gachas. That was granblue fantasy. What the japanese government did was make it so people had to stop lying about what was in the gashas and got the government involved due to rampant fraud. There is a lot more to it, such as multiple companies doing the same or worse, but I’ll get into that in later post. China has also seen some government intervention recently due to gambling addiction in video games and blizzard got a lot of the attention. So blizzard changed how they did loot boxes. Instead of selling you loot crates, blizzard in china gives you packages you can open when you buy in game currency. In the old system, you would buy loot boxes and get special currency. In the new system you buy currency and get free loot boxes at about the same rate as you would in the old system. Open 10 boxes and get 2000 credits? Now you buy 2000 credits and get 10 boxes. The numbers made up but you get the idea. You still have the same The main deal with both countries is that game companies now have to report your chances of getting any specific item. This still doesn’t prevent them from giving you lovely chances or finding loop holes around that law. Blizzard did all of this for overwatch china instead of just posting drop chances (blizzard pls). All of this poo poo has one more thing in common. Statistics. When designing these systems, you run the same math for gambling casinos and their profitability as you can on these gachas. The company's goal is to get you to buy more and they would pump oxygen into your home and give you free drinks if they could. Even to minors. In closing, here is an enemy named gachapon from mega man 4.  TLDR: poo poo in a box is gambling Third World Reagan fucked around with this message at 15:10 on Nov 22, 2017 |
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Nov 22, 2017 14:20
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Thank you Aceclown and Third world reggin for two ridiculously insightful and interesting posts.
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Nov 22, 2017 14:33
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Dongattack posted:The economy in the new Assassins Creed tho was obviously engineered to push you to buy resources if you wanted to upgrade your gear with you as you leveled. No, not at all, actually. I'm still only about 1/3 done with that game and I have been constantly swimming in crafting materials, and I haven't even ever gone hunting for them. Ubisoft may be lovely but AC:Origins is actually very good about having the microtransactions be truly optional. You can pay for cosmetics and OP weapons, or you can get some OP weapons for "free" from having a Uplay account, or you can just play the game and have no problems at all. Also all the cosmetics/OP weapons can appear in the "ingame" loot boxes, which you can buy with ingame money. I think perhaps they saw the Loot Boxalypse coming and specifically dialed it back.
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Nov 22, 2017 14:40
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Anything but a corporate product having to survive financially on its own merit.
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Nov 22, 2017 14:44
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precision posted:No, not at all, actually. I'm still only about 1/3 done with that game and I have been constantly swimming in crafting materials, and I haven't even ever gone hunting for them. That's not my experience at all. I also played to about 1/3, playing in normal completionist fashion, not spending drachma on anything other than upgrading gear and i hit a point where i saw that it was impossible to have enough drachma to upgrade all your weapons with you as you leveled and shelved the game.
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Nov 22, 2017 15:03
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VideoGames posted:Before games loot boxes you had such things as trading cards. You would buy a sealed pack of cards with no idea what was in them at the hope of increasing your collection. You may get the card you wanted or you may not. I spent a lot trying to get the WWF wrestling cards back in the late 80s. This still happens with card games like Magic the Gathering and can be discussed here too. For me there are two main points of failure in the common comparison of loot boxes and the collectable stickers/cards. One: The entire purpose of collectable stickers is to collect them and fill your album. When you buy them you get a physical item, which you are free to then trade like for like with other people. This is the point of sticker collecting. That is not the case with loot boxes. Loot box items are an enforced secondary expense on top of the cost of a game that is meant to be played. More and more the goods you paid the retail price for are being carved off and put behind the loot box/micro transaction wall, negatively effecting the actual product you purchased. Two: Collectable cards and stickers don't put you under active psychological pressure and manipulation to keep trying. Yes, of course you want to complete your collection, but they aren't exerting influence while you do other things. There are whole game mechanics designed purely to either make you frustrated/envious of other players, or to make you feel like you are wasting your time playing the core game. There is obvious and definite intent to make you feel you have to keep trying the loot box roulette wheel, even with purely cosmetic items. To me the loot box and sticker album comparison would only work if when buying your stickers every single pack you opened had a load of blank cards that you had to then pay the company an additional fee to replace with random stickers which could still be 'swaps'. Oh, and In Australia the Victorian Commission for Gambling and Liquor Regulation have said that loot boxes are definitely gambling by their legal definition. A lot of companies and publishers in the industry must be absolutely seething at EA for their overreach exposing them to the regulatory light.
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Nov 22, 2017 15:04
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How much weight is there to the assertion that encouraging government regulation of lootboxes will, in turn, lead to government regulation of other forms of game content? That seems like it could be a problem, especially given the general ignorance surrounding the hobby in general by people who aren't involved in it themselves. The mainstream still views video games as toys for children (whether or not they're wrong is another discussion) and I don't see there being a huge leap from "video games have gambling and are promoting it to children, we should ban that practice" back to "video games have violence and are promoting it to children, we should ban that practice" and then to "video games have [X] that [Y] group dislikes for [Z] reason and are promoting it to children, we should ban that practice." I've generally tried to avoid the outrage hype train regarding lootboxes given how distasteful much of the arguing against them has been. Reddit in particular was incredibly transparent at their attempts to hide "EA IS RUINING MY VIDEO GAMES!!" behind "THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!" - that's especially ironic given Reddit's sordid history. Further, the gaming community has 100% earned its reputation as being unwelcoming and toxic, and I find it difficult to stand with my ~noble gamer brethren~ and ~fight for a change~ when they're just as likely to tell me to kill myself if they think I made them lose at Overwatch or something. The days of camaraderie in the hobby are long gone for numerous reasons, and the outrage-of-the-week tendencies of enthusiast gamers have made it very difficult to take any given thing seriously. As for the games themselves, I've only played a couple of non-mobile games where lootboxes had a significant effect on my experience: Fortnite and Battlefront 2. The former was free and the latter cost me $5 for ten hours of time via Origin Access (which was an incredibly generous offer that nobody ever seems to talk about when it comes to that game) and by the end of that trial period I'd have likely not purchased the game one way or the other. Shadow of War and AC: Origins had similar systems but it was entirely possible to ignore them. In particular, I'm not sure how the earlier poster who mentioned Origins ended up so resource-starved that they felt the need to buy currency, but this didn't come up at all during my time with the game. The actual "lootbox" items are offered for free daily and can be purchased with a moderate amount of ingame currency that can be accumulated without a huge amount of effort. I don't see any problems with that sort of arrangement.
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Nov 22, 2017 15:06
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Dongattack posted:That's not my experience at all. I also played to about 1/3, playing in normal completionist fashion, not spending drachma on anything other than upgrading gear and i hit a point where i saw that it was impossible to have enough drachma to upgrade all your weapons with you as you leveled and shelved the game. Wait, your first post was about crafting materials, you're talking about gold? It is very expensive to upgrade Legendary weapons, yes, but you should be finding weapons constantly, you should never need to upgrade, and since the cost to upgrade stays static at around 3000 per Legendary, you should only upgade every 10 levels or so. If you're trying to tell me that you were having trouble staying alive because your weapons were too low level, I simply don't believe you, or you might have not been upgrading your actual base damage (which is what I was talking about; upgrading Bracer, Breastplate, etc.) If you shelved the game because your weapons were level 10 and you were level 12 and your brain couldn't handle the disparity, I don't think that's the games fault. And again, when you find a new weapon, it always drops at your current level. Instead of spending 3000 to upgrade a Legendary, you can just outright buy a Rare of your current level for like 700-900, and Rares are very nearly just as good. The game is not at all difficult, so there's no push to always have Legendaries and upgrade them every time Bayek gains a level. I'd suggest you un-shelve the game, it's quite good.
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Nov 22, 2017 15:10
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Ludicrous G. Gibs posted:As for the games themselves, I've only played a couple of non-mobile games where lootboxes had a significant effect on my experience: Fortnite and Battlefront 2. The former was free and the latter cost me $5 for ten hours of time via Origin Access (which was an incredibly generous offer that nobody ever seems to talk about when it comes to that game) Being able to pay $5 for a trial version that allows access to the first three single-player missions and multiplayer for a limited time is "incredibly generous"?
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Nov 22, 2017 15:10
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There is always a chance that people in government may not understand a topic and create bad legislation. After all, they are just people. So what happened in america was the ESRB was created due to the government saying "regulate your selves or we will." So they did. That is why we have age rating based on violence in video games. The ESRB is a non government regulation board that is made by game companies for game companies. When the ESRB fails to regulate, then government probably should step in, which is what we are facing now. If the ESRB regulates properly, then we may have a special rating for gambling or loot boxes on games that should warn parents if they should buy it or not. That would be ideal. That probably won't happen since the ESRB has their heads up their rear end. So you can expect some sort of legislation to be done here. My thoughts on that were a large non us western market (EU) would do it first, causing companies to either design two systems for different markets or design one system that complied with all markets. Some game companies already have to do things like this like when a game featuring nazis gets released in germany. As for the trading cards = loot boxes argument, some things to keep in mind If you buy trading cards, you might find something of equal value or good value If you buy loot crates, you might not find anything worthwhile because they are designed to have very few things inside that you want, especially if they are time limited or series boxes If you did not get the trading card you want, you may trade or sell that to another person as you have gained some worth If you did not get the item from a loot crate, most games only have one option for you to exchange the value you put into it which is selling your account, something game companies tell you that you can not do Trading cards last until they are thrown out by your mother Loot box items last until someone shuts the servers down
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Nov 22, 2017 15:18
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Fame Douglas posted:Being able to pay $5 for a trial version that allows access to the first three single-player missions and multiplayer is "incredibly generous"? $5 for a trial version that allows ten hours of unrestricted early access to the main draw of a new full-priced AAA game - the multiplayer - along with a month of actual unrestricted access to numerous other high-quality games is, indeed, incredibly generous. I've paid more for shorter games that were less fun. Meanwhile, if you're concerned about the single-player aspect of the game being restricted in the trial then I can understand that. I wasn't interested in that side of the game, and I'd point out that you shouldn't be surprised to be expected to pay the retail price for a full single-player campaign if that's what you're there for. In any case, I certainly found the Access trial to be more generous than the "pay $60 if you want to see what the multiplayer in this is like, because demos aren't really a thing anymore, or wait until the price drops and most of the population is gone," "pay [X] for this unfinished alpha of our game that we may or may not get back to" and "pay us, we promise we'll eventually make a game!" models that the industry has gravitated toward.
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Nov 22, 2017 15:19
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precision posted:Wait, your first post was about crafting materials, you're talking about gold? It is very expensive to upgrade Legendary weapons, yes, but you should be finding weapons constantly, you should never need to upgrade, and since the cost to upgrade stays static at around 3000 per Legendary, you should only upgade every 10 levels or so. You are super hostile for some reason suddenly? I really don't think that's called for dude. I never mentioned crafting materials, but resources, which does include drachma, but i guess i could see you getting confused. I had a cool legendary spear, a cool legendary shield and a dope sniping bow i wanted to keep playing with. But even if i hoarded everything to sell i quickly reached a point where it seemed to me impossible to keep getting enough drachma to keep the weapons with me. Why would it be so hard to keep the best gear going if not to push whales to buy resources with real money?
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Nov 22, 2017 15:21
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Ludicrous G. Gibs posted:$5 for a trial version that allows ten hours of unrestricted early access to the main draw of a new full-priced AAA game - the multiplayer - along with a month of actual unrestricted access to numerous other high-quality games is, indeed, incredibly generous. I've paid more for shorter games that were less fun. Meanwhile, if you're concerned about the single-player aspect of the game being restricted in the trial then I can understand that. I wasn't interested in that side of the game, and I'd point out that you shouldn't be surprised to be expected to pay the retail price for a full single-player campaign if that's what you're there for. Origin Access isn't the worst deal, but let's not act like having to pay a monthly subscription fee to get access to some old games that I personally don't care about and three days of limited early access to new releases is somehow "incredibly generous". Personally, I just played the free beta. But even that I wouldn't call "incredibly generous". Dongattack posted:But even if i hoarded everything to sell i quickly reached a point where it seemed to me impossible to keep getting enough drachma to keep the weapons with me. It's this, AC: Origins seems comparatively very stingy with currency compared to previous entries in the franchise. But I wouldn't criticize it too much for this, still okay in my book.
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Nov 22, 2017 15:26
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Third World Reggin posted:If the ESRB regulates properly, then we may have a special rating for gambling or loot boxes on games that should warn parents if they should buy it or not. That would be ideal. That probably won't happen since the ESRB has their heads up their rear end. Is children especially getting drawn into this even really a concern? I sort of assume this would affect mostly adults who wouldn't care about above existing.
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Nov 22, 2017 15:30
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Dongattack posted:You are super hostile for some reason suddenly? I really don't think that's called for dude. I'm just saying, if that was their intent, they completely missed the mark because you can and should use weapons 10+ levels below your "player level" and you will still do fine. And if that was their intent the cost to upgrade a Legendary from level 1 to level 40 wouldn't be the same as it is to upgrade it from Level 39 to Level 40, which it is. I think you're just wildly overestimating the "need" to upgrade. It makes very little difference except in increments of, as I said, 10+ levels.
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Nov 22, 2017 15:30
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precision posted:I think you're just wildly overestimating the "need" to upgrade. It makes very little difference except in increments of, as I said, 10+ levels. Okay, that might be true, i didn't experiment that far with it. I just saw myself constantly running out of drachma with Ubisoft whispering "hehe why dont you just buy some then? hehe" and went "no i think i will rather have a big ol meltdown instead thank you" and moved the game to a harddrive dedicated to abandoned games 
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Nov 22, 2017 15:35
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Avalerion posted:Is children especially getting drawn into this even really a concern? I sort of assume this would affect mostly adults who wouldn't care about above existing. I would say yes when talking about Fifa Ultimate. I completely forgot about those Ultimate packs until Aceclown mentioned them.
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Nov 22, 2017 15:37
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Dongattack posted:Okay, that might be true, i didn't experiment that far with it. I just saw myself constantly running out of drachma with Ubisoft whispering "hehe why dont you just buy some then? hehe" and went "no i think i will rather have a big ol meltdown instead thank you" and moved the game to a harddrive dedicated to abandoned games The more annoying issue is that some of the cosmetic packs aren't included with the season pass. They can gently caress right off with that. I'm not paying $15 for a flaming horse on top of the season pass 
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Nov 22, 2017 15:42
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I think Dead Space 3 was the first game I played that had microtransaction loot boxes- you pay a dollar, get a resource pack, and it has a bunch of weapon crafting parts in it and a random super high level attachment for your guns. To EA's credit, these things are tied to your account and so they persist between save games. Starting a new file will give you a new copy of the resources you paid for on your other save, and so on, forever. They are not strictly one-time use. Well I guess they decided that was too generous because they sure don't do it anymore. Now all this poo poo is one-time use because they know it has the tiniest chance of getting you to rebuy it later.
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Nov 22, 2017 15:44
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Dongattack posted:Okay, that might be true, i didn't experiment that far with it. I just saw myself constantly running out of drachma with Ubisoft whispering "hehe why dont you just buy some then? hehe" and went "no i think i will rather have a big ol meltdown instead thank you" and moved the game to a harddrive dedicated to abandoned games I think that's kind of the problem inherent to placing the option for microtransactions as a means to speed up SP games. Even if it was never the designer's intent for the player to eventually need to spend additional money in order to advance, the mere perception of it creates a lot of unnecessary ill will. And in cases where the designer did intentionally slow down character advancement to encourage more microtransactions, either by their own volition or from orders up on high, well that's lovely too and antithetical to good game design. So you have the presence of something where the most favorable thing you can say about it is, "it's not that bad" rather than "it's good" or "it's a positive aspect to this game," and everybody knows this and hates it.
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Nov 22, 2017 15:45
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Third World Reggin posted:So what happened in america was the ESRB was created due to the government saying "regulate your selves or we will." So they did. That is why we have age rating based on violence in video games. The ESRB is a non government regulation board that is made by game companies for game companies. In fact looking at http://www.esrb.org/ratings/ratings_guide.aspx one of the factors that can give a title an AO rating is already "gambling with real currency", but I guess since you can't get real currency back they conveniently don't consider it gambling.
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Nov 22, 2017 15:48
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CJacobs posted:I think Dead Space 3 was the first game I played that had microtransaction loot boxes- you pay a dollar, get a resource pack, and it has a bunch of weapon crafting parts in it and a random super high level attachment for your guns. To EA's credit, these things are tied to your account and so they persist between save games. Starting a new file will give you a new copy of the resources you paid for on your other save, and so on, forever. They are not strictly one-time use. That's because they do this poo poo incrementally to avoid the outrage we just saw. Go back to whenever it was Oblivion shat out the first horse armour and the situation we have today would be unimaginably terrible. But to an awful lot of people who either don't know, or don't remember how it used to be, this poo poo is normal now. Unless the regulators do something this stuff is just going to keep getting gradually more exploitative and more damaging to the core game experience.
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Nov 22, 2017 15:49
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Collateral Damage posted:Ideally any game that has a real money element other than the initial purchase cost should carry an ESRB Adults Only rating (or PEGI 18 in the EU). That would end the practice real quick since kids (and their parents' money) make up a significant part of most games' sales demographic. Most major stores don't even carry AO rated games at all on principal. Wal-Mart, GameStop, basically everything except for specific online stores. Forget losing out on kids money, they lose out on ALL money once it hits AO.
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Nov 22, 2017 15:55
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While kids buying loot boxes is definitely a problem, I'd like to see some hard numbers because I think adults with poor impulse control are the biggest revenue source. There's that guy who spent 2 million on a lovely mobile game and those guys who spent $10k plus on Mass Effect boxes. Kids with their parents credit cards has been a pervasive phrase since the days of AOL charging by the hour (and phone sex lines before that) but in reality since parents can and will contest charges or simply take away the credit card/delete it off the console, I believe it's not really the biggest or best source of loot box revenue.
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Nov 22, 2017 16:01
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Shadow of war is already 18+ so I don't think marketing to kids is really their primary concern. But then I also think of Fifa and the like as "dad" games, don't know how many kids actually play those and are competitive enough to care about pay to win schemes.
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Nov 22, 2017 16:11
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I think part of my problem with things like lootboxes and gachas is how ridiculously expensive they usually are compared to games themselves, normal DLC such as expansions. For example- I gave Fate/Grand Order a try once and if you were to have none of the gems necessary to pull from the premium gachas, you would need I think 3 gems to pull a single card. To buy 36 gems, enough to pull 12, costs $24. That's $2 a card for a random card, which isn't even guaranteed to be a character card because the game is mechanically weighted down with stuff like "crafting essences" and such. I could pay $72, more than the price of a full retail game, pull 36 cards on FGO, and possibly not even get anything I want, nor would what I get necessarily be enough to carry me through that game. The comparison to trading cards and the like is quite apt. I don't collect things like that now, but I did as a kid. I think I didn't mind that because the rates didn't feel too bad. Doing a quick Google search, if I wanted to today I could buy a single pack of Pokemon cards for $4-$5. If rates like that were similar without skewing the odds or balance to increase purchases, I think I wouldn't feel so bad about this type of microtransactions, but the expenses typical for them right now are not reasonable (in my opinion). A benign example of microtransactions I have encountered are the ones in Final Fantasy XIV. FF XIV lets you buy certain special outfits, emotes, things like that. All the equipment you can buy with real money has no stat benefits and therefore is meant to be used cosmetically, and there are no lootboxes- you just buy the one you want. There are cool items and costumes to earn in the game itself, and real money items are separate (you can't buy in-game earned items with currency, you can't earn real money items in-game). Small missteps such as having the items be pay-to-win with busted stats could have put me off the game, but this is a reasonable system. To be fair, FF XIV does have microtransactions at about the rate of $25 to level a class up to level 60, or to finish the main story, but the game isn't balanced around doing such things. It feels like the intent of that is to let people skip content if, say, their group of friends needs a healer and they want to be able to contribute right away.
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Nov 22, 2017 16:12
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We need a final solution for the gambling problem. --Greeting from Germany Fame Douglas posted:Being able to pay $5 for a trial version that allows access to the first three single-player missions and multiplayer for a limited time is "incredibly generous"? Yeah, man, we used to be able to get entire cd/dvds completely full of shareware games and demos like once a week. Now, apparently, you have to pay for the privilege of trying a demo?  To me, a good f2p game is basically "here's a demo, you can play it forever if you want, you can also buy the rest of the content we provide with cashgold", which is basically what a shareware game was, and then you'd buy extra episodes and expansions. D&D online did this, and I played that for like 2 years straight when it went f2p. I don't think they had any lootboxes either. I wish other online games would embrace that model, over a constant subscription or shoving lootboxes/MTs down your throat.
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Nov 22, 2017 16:34
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Children are a concern since raising a child on a gambling type game helps create gambling addicts. They are more susceptible than adults. As for adults being the most income source, yah. I got stories about Age of Wushu I should write up some time. Even when you have a system that is f2p with f2p loot boxes, these systems are not designed in a vacuum. They are built in a way that makes you want to gamble some more. Now put a child in that game where they may not have developed enough to understand what they are doing. But you kinda have to remember these people were kids once and may have developed a gambling addiction then as well.
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Nov 22, 2017 16:34
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Avalerion posted:Shadow of war is already 18+ so I don't think marketing to kids is really their primary concern. But then I also think of Fifa and the like as "dad" games, don't know how many kids actually play those and are competitive enough to care about pay to win schemes. tons of kids play FIFA and its a game that is very popular outside of normal "gamer" demographics Dongattack posted:Okay, that might be true, i didn't experiment that far with it. I just saw myself constantly running out of drachma with Ubisoft whispering "hehe why dont you just buy some then? hehe" and went "no i think i will rather have a big ol meltdown instead thank you" and moved the game to a harddrive dedicated to abandoned games nah the new AC is very good and the microtransaction poo poo barely effects it at all. I have never at any point felt pressure to buy something in game beyond the initial purchase of the game itself. its pretty easy to earn in-game currency but that doesn't even matter because you are constantly being given new weapons at your level. Earwicker fucked around with this message at 16:48 on Nov 22, 2017 |
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Nov 22, 2017 16:44
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I wonder what credit card companies think of all this? On the one hand, they want people to be in debt, but they want people to be in debt that can be at least mostly, eventually, paid off. The average adult is in enough debt from car payments, house payments, etc, if they rack up a few grand in gaming debt it becomes vastly more likely that's a few grand the CC company has to take a bath on. That's why you generally can't use your credit card at the casino unless you're already gently caress You Rich.
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Nov 22, 2017 16:52
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exquisite tea posted:I think that's kind of the problem inherent to placing the option for microtransactions as a means to speed up SP games. Even if it was never the designer's intent for the player to eventually need to spend additional money in order to advance, the mere perception of it creates a lot of unnecessary ill will. And in cases where the designer did intentionally slow down character advancement to encourage more microtransactions, either by their own volition or from orders up on high, well that's lovely too and antithetical to good game design. So you have the presence of something where the most favorable thing you can say about it is, "it's not that bad" rather than "it's good" or "it's a positive aspect to this game," and everybody knows this and hates it. This is my main issue with loot boxes and microtransactions too. I actually bought Shadow of War (I'm part of the problem sorry) and it's definitely a good game, I'm enjoying it. But for all the protestations from the devs that they balanced it to not require microtransactions, there's that bit in the back of my mind that questions if that is the honest truth and I will always feel that way about it. Is the layout of this game, the spacing between fast travel points, the pacing of the missions and the speed at which levelling takes place done for balancing and to give a good sense of progression vs effort, or is it there to push towards spending money to skip the tedium? I honestly don't know and that suspicion is always present. Also, I've seen this excuse more than enough: "it's to help players who value their free time". Playing games is how you spend your free time. If the player isn't enjoying spending their free time on a thing that's designed to be a fun way to pass free time, then there's something really hosed up about the design philosophy behind the game. It's like a restaurant adding sawdust to their food and then claiming that because they respect "customer choice", they're offering them the option to have meals without the sawdust for a nominal fee. Also, let's assume there's an element of honesty to this argument: why does this imply requiring that player to pay for it? How about a difficulty level selection? Why not implement cheats? Why not add options that tweak levelling progression? System Shock was developed in 1994 and had the ability to tweak the battle difficulty (how hard enemies are to kill and how much damage they deal), story difficulty (ranging from a 7-hour hard time limit to complete the game to basically being a walking sim with no barriers to progress), puzzle difficulty (ranging from "click the panel to solve" to really annoyingly difficult mini-games) and Cyberspace (obviously, how difficult the cyberspace mini-game sections were). Put simply, the fact that they charge for these "options" is proof that respecting player choice has nothing to do with it. There are a tonne of ways to tweak a gameplay experience without nickel and diming them for it and deliberately engineering the experience to push players towards the digital marketplaces these games always include.
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Nov 22, 2017 17:01
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precision posted:On the one hand, they want people to be in debt, but they want people to be in debt that can be at least mostly, eventually, paid off. The average adult is in enough debt from car payments, house payments, etc, if they rack up a few grand in gaming debt it becomes vastly more likely that's a few grand the CC company has to take a bath on. does the amount of money people spend on video game microtransactionsm really even come close to the amount that people spend on things like clothing, jewelry, home goods, etc when it comes to credit card debt?
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Nov 22, 2017 17:02
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Earwicker posted:does the amount of money people spend on video game microtransactionsm really even come close to the amount that people spend on things like clothing, jewelry, home goods, etc when it comes to credit card debt? For whales, I'm sure it does. As a general average, I doubt it.
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Nov 22, 2017 17:04
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precision posted:While kids buying loot boxes is definitely a problem, I'd like to see some hard numbers because I think adults with poor impulse control are the biggest revenue source. There's that guy who spent 2 million on a lovely mobile game and those guys who spent $10k plus on Mass Effect boxes. I'm personally fine with Overwatch loot boxes because they only contain cosmetics that have no influence on the game. In an hour of play you can usually get one or two boxes so it doesn't feel like a grind either. I think it's a delicate balance between something that can be called progression in an arena shooter and feeling like you're being exploited. EA definitely pushed it too far. Collateral Damage fucked around with this message at 17:09 on Nov 22, 2017 |
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Nov 22, 2017 17:06
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| # ? Apr 26, 2024 10:22 |
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Also I suggest thread be renamed The Lootboxalypse.
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Nov 22, 2017 17:10
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