#loot boxes

[roivas7]

I like shotguns

[gacha-incels]

exact example of why the so called “generous gacha” (oxymoron) games still get players addicted to gambling. The special animation that plays when a consumer acquires the highest-grade rarity character or equipment has been studied and perfected. It is to give the player a huge, and very short, high grade dopamine rush. The player will always chase this feeling, some will get more addicted than others of course but every single one of these games relies on this. Why do you think after nearly a decade the game Fate/Grand Order will update summoning animations for “extra special” characters but has not updated the basic fighting animations of already released characters in years?

Just “dispensing” a character will not give this type of rush, so consumers like in the first screenshot will still chase that high. This has the possibility to affect their entire life if they get completely addicted. Gacha games (and it’s the exact same for western games’ “loot boxes”) are always hostile to their userbase due to how the games themselves function. It doesn’t matter if it’s the most generous gacha game in the world. In fact I find this attitude much more dangerous than someone playing one of these gamblers while understanding that they are exploitive by nature. You can see the strange way the “generous gacha” gamers react to the game exploiting them when they see the monthly sensortower estimated revenue. Limbus Company fans were extremely happy upon seeing the game’s $800k earnings recently-it was able to earn this much by implementing the game’s most predatory banner that also added a nostalgia-bait “announcer” to the gacha for the first time. If you play these gacha/lootbox games the least you can do is not fight over which one is the “most generous”. Not only is it absurd but also extremely embarrassing to see people go to bat so hard for a game that is quite literally exploiting its playerbase. It seems even worse for franchises that did not include gacha in their previous installments- they are introducing fans who want to see more content to the most exploitive type of game. Typically most Japanese gachas are like this (FGO, Fire Emblem Heroes, etc) but Limbus Company falls under this category as well.

[askagamedev]

Recently, Nexon was fined for manipulating drop rates of loot boxes so that some items effectively had a 0% chance of appearing. Because of how many samples it would take and the associated cost of buying a loot box to get samples to prove something like this, are there ways for the player/user to determine if something like this was occurring in their game of choice?

There's no way for a single user to do it by herself in that case. The best means of approach is to collect aggregate data. Since unopened loot boxes are fungible (i.e. all loot boxes are functionally equivalent until opened), it doesn't matter if one person opens a thousand loot boxes or a thousand people open one loot box apiece. Thanks to the combined powers of statistics and math, we can calculate the sample size we would need for an average result at a given confidence level and interval step.

Mathematically, I believe we expect a sample size of ~381 draws to have a 95% confidence rate and an error margin of +/- 1%. The more precise we become, the higher the necessary sample size becomes (e.g. a 99% confidence rate with an error margin of +/- 1% requires around 660 draws). If players tracked and aggregated all of their combined results from the same loot boxes, they could run statistical analysis on them and see whether the results lined up with the posted odds.

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[disgustedorite]

Man. I've seen posts making fun of China for cracking down on gaming addiction, but having looked at how they're combatting it, it's really obvious that they're actually targeting stuff like loot boxes, which, being akin to slot machines, actually do cause harmful addictions and that I think we can all agree should be regulated

Like, China's legal requirements that they put on developers to specifically combat gaming addiction are literally just loot box regulations, and damn good ones at that. Daily limits to how many loot boxes can be opened, transparent probabilities, mandating that rewards are given after a certain number of loot boxes are opened, no loot box-exclusive items, I think every country should legally require those things!

[the-fandom-crossroads]

Every Chinese Censorship Gaming Regulation Mihoyo Ignores!

China's game censorship board tightened regulations back in 2021. It led to 4 character skins being altered. But nothing else has come from the new regulations even though genshin breaks multiple other rules in this memo. Join Terry in discussing those broken rules and the reason Mihoyo can ignore the "recommendations" of the ccp.

While trying to research topics for a possible winter holiday video I fell down the censorship rabbit hole. I hope you found this interesting! Chinese censorship is complex and changing all the time.

But it is important to know that Genshin is Not at risk of actually being banned. Mihoyo would just have to make more changes to line up with new rules.

For example in the last 12 hours NPPA announced new regulations that might take away 90 wish pities. They want to lessen gambling and spending on gatchas. They also want to extend the monthly spending limits to adults. We'll see if these regulations actually go into effect. But if they do it would greatly change how wishing works in genshin.

[jimquisition]

EA has ducked government intervention in the UK, and intends to use predatory loot boxes in FIFA perpetually.

[bearlyfunctioning]

Comic #266: - Am I still a gamer? - Website links: here! Part of me yearns for a game good enough to waste an unhealthy amount of time on. The more reasonable part knows I don't have time for that these days!! It does hurt to see the game franchises I used to be so invested in, change to the point where I can bearly enjoy them...

[valtharr]

Tumblr won't let me reblog the original post, so here:

Donkey Kong was - in its original form - a game that required you to pay 25 cents (which, in 2023 money, is closer to 75 cents) whenever you needed to use a continue.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not defending gachas and loot boxes here, I just think it's incredibly reductive and "rose-tinted glasses"-y to pretend like video games don't have shit like it baked into their DNA. At least when you die in a mobile game and get told "either wait an hour, watch an ad, or give us money", you're given a choice. Arcade games were often deliberately designed to be hard as balls, just so people would sink more money into them (which probably eventually led to a lot of sunk-cost-fallacy vicious cycles a la "I already spent so much on this, I can't stop playing now!"). When home consoles became the norm, because they were more convenient and lent themselves better to new game types, like RPGs and adventure games, arcades pretty much died out, and yes, so did these business practices, but only because they didn't have the technological means to get more money from the player after the initial purchase.

Again, not saying these modern business practices are good, just pointing that it's a bit hypocritical to criticize them while praising the "good old days", when a lot of early classics - Space Invaders, Donkey Kong, Pac-Man - were literally designed not to be products you paid for once and then owned, but essentially services you had to keep paying for whenever you wanted to play them.