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Lootboxes in FIFA now allowed by highest Dutch court

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Re: Lootboxes in FIFA now allowed by highest Dutch court

#51

Post by goldfeld »

> "Lootboxes" .. "highest Dutch court"

This is either high sci-fi parody or I want another hitech future, because it continually feels that all the technology in the world is only ever useful, successful for the most petty and meaningless ends. There needs to be a law that humanity's ignorance grows quadratically with scientific achievement. Ignorance of course is a proportional quality; when all the information in the world is at your fingertips you are doubly ignorant not to make expedient use of it. Oh, there are government rogue agents with all their noise and misinformation campaigns, sure. But there are also millions of programmers workings on clickbait ads for a living. Clearly some choice and free will is thrown in at some point in the learning curve. An isolated pre-discovery south american native is as wise or ignorant as his means (culture) allow. Our means are the most luxuriant humankind has seen yet. Great responsibilities and all that.. so that we're devolving into incoherent grunts. Yes I'd like a rant.

Maybe TFA is about revisionist high medieval history and FIFAs are kinds of fiefs.

Re: Lootboxes in FIFA now allowed by highest Dutch court

#52

Post by oh_sigh »

roofio wrote: post #38
abcc8 wrote: post #34

I haven't played a FIFA game in probably 20 years so please excuse my potentially uninformed question. Do loot boxes improve the play experience of the game in any meaningful way?

They made a mode where you assemble a team of players from past and present called Fifa Ultimate Team (FUT). You start with a team of players who each of a rating of about 70. EA will release packs that contain star players with much higher ratings. In order to get these higher rated players on your team, you can either grind the game for several hours a day or pay to open some packs that might have the high rated pl…

Grinding the game to open the boxes sounds fine to me, but how is it not a game of chance if you're just paying money to open a box? That's literally a lottery. Even if only 8% of boxes are opened that way, they should just not allow it flat-out.

Re: Lootboxes in FIFA now allowed by highest Dutch court

#53

Post by slg »

dragonwriter wrote: post #45
slg wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of these games have different types of in game currency which can be used to purchase lootboxes. With FIFA, one of those currencies can be bought with money. The other one can't be purchased directly and is earned through playing the game or selling what is received in the lootboxes. This means that a person doesn't need to use real money to participate in the gambling aspect. They can instead gamble their time…

> With physical cards, you had to go to a store and pay at point of sale. No, you didn't; mail-order and then online retail in the hobby games industry has existed as long trading card games have.

Fair enough, but I believe that is a fraction of the business compared to in person sales. Most kids were buying baseball cards or Pokemon cards from local stores. Plus those methods of purchase introduce their own obstacles such as latency. It is much more difficult to form an addiction when there is a two-week turnaround in each transaction compared to the instantaneous clicking of a button.

Re: Lootboxes in FIFA now allowed by highest Dutch court

#54

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

oneoff786 wrote: post #11
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fortnite is its own evil. They only show an extremely small fraction of the items available each day, with no indication of whether they'll return, so that you feel you have to buy things now in case you never have the chance again.

I don’t have any interest in fortnite but I don’t follow why this is bad. These are just skins right? Like no differentiation besides personal aesthetic preference? Couldn’t these be sold with no ambiguity, never ever coming back, and have literally no impact on your desire to buy? Have you ever felt a desire to buy a shirt because it won’t be available to purchase again? Is there really a world where they say “this…

Well, Fortnite doesn't let you customise your appearance at all without buying skins. If you want your character to match your gender, you have to buy a skin. If you want your character to look even slightly good, you have to buy a skin. And then buy a new one in two weeks because you had no idea that they'd give you a better option later and you didn't know how scarce the current week's was.

Re: Lootboxes in FIFA now allowed by highest Dutch court

#55

Post by zdragnar »

dragonwriter wrote: post #45
slg wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of these games have different types of in game currency which can be used to purchase lootboxes. With FIFA, one of those currencies can be bought with money. The other one can't be purchased directly and is earned through playing the game or selling what is received in the lootboxes. This means that a person doesn't need to use real money to participate in the gambling aspect. They can instead gamble their time…

> With physical cards, you had to go to a store and pay at point of sale. No, you didn't; mail-order and then online retail in the hobby games industry has existed as long trading card games have.

I think the point stands: there is an aspect of delayed gratification in the waiting a week for money then getting away to go the store, and possibly waiting until you got home to open them. Mail order was worse, as postage added more waiting time and cost.

Having it instantly accessible from your phone makes it so much easier to lose impulse control.

Re: Lootboxes in FIFA now allowed by highest Dutch court

#56

Post by yakak »

mFixman wrote: post #39
ChicagoBoy11 wrote: post #8

This is so disheartening. I work as an admin in a school that serves all grades, and the impact that this stuff has on kids is very real. I've witnessed first-hand a grown in sort of a "gambling" culture amongst kids, as early as elementary school. While loads of us may have had fun experiences trading cards and whatnot, this all still happens with kids but with a much more overt monetary component. Part of me, thoug…

I'm sure my parents would disagree that Pokémon trading cards weren't a giant money sink designed to take their money. I can see a lot of problems with giving children access to credit cards, but I honestly fail to see how loot boxes are different from trading cards marketed to children. My high school enacted and enforced a ban on all card and board games because some parents were worried about child gambling; I'm s…

I'm not sure how to feel about collectibles, I bought a lot of baseball card packs and didn't open them as an "investment" as a kid. Probably they beat inflation, but the market would be lower if people like me could ever be bothered to sell.

In the case of digital "assets" though, I don't find it so legitimate. AFAIK, they can change their ToS whenever they like or cancel this version of the game, etc.

Perhaps a shrewd system would pretend to be indifferent yet force them to escrow money for obligations related to hosting these assets and eventually make them wonder why they didn't just print cards and be done with it as complicated civil cases begin to emerge.

(But should we really let the human endeavour degrade to the point where bartering pointless collectibles is where the smart people get allocated? I kind of agree with the IRS that we should add disincentives.)

Re: Lootboxes in FIFA now allowed by highest Dutch court

#57

Post by lapetitejort »

BrS96bVxXBLzf5B wrote: post #48
mFixman wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure my parents would disagree that Pokémon trading cards weren't a giant money sink designed to take their money. I can see a lot of problems with giving children access to credit cards, but I honestly fail to see how loot boxes are different from trading cards marketed to children. My high school enacted and enforced a ban on all card and board games because some parents were worried about child gambling; I'm s…

This definitely isn't a universal experience and there are definitely a lot of trading card horror stories, but for me + friends growing up the purchase of trading cards had a different place in life. They were like one of life's small rewards you had a chance of rolling whenever going into a shop with a parent/guardian. Being at the checkout, putting on the little kid puppy-dog 'pleaseeeeeee' and the adult deciding…

One small caveat: digital collections of lootbox items can be admired, organized, displayed, and in some games traded to other players. Of course, all these actions are dictated by the software for the most part, and can be arbitrarily restricted. I won't be able to seal a fancy digital hat and donate it to a local museum.

Re: Lootboxes in FIFA now allowed by highest Dutch court

#58

Post by SkyBelow »

mFixman wrote: post #39
ChicagoBoy11 wrote: post #8

This is so disheartening. I work as an admin in a school that serves all grades, and the impact that this stuff has on kids is very real. I've witnessed first-hand a grown in sort of a "gambling" culture amongst kids, as early as elementary school. While loads of us may have had fun experiences trading cards and whatnot, this all still happens with kids but with a much more overt monetary component. Part of me, thoug…

I'm sure my parents would disagree that Pokémon trading cards weren't a giant money sink designed to take their money. I can see a lot of problems with giving children access to credit cards, but I honestly fail to see how loot boxes are different from trading cards marketed to children. My high school enacted and enforced a ban on all card and board games because some parents were worried about child gambling; I'm s…

I feel they are very similar, but do have a few key differences. If these differences matter enough to make a moral difference is something we can discuss.

A few of the key differences, in no particular order:

1. Trading card games come with base sets that have guaranteed cards and are useful for playing the game. This makes it TCGs better.

2. CCGs can be traded to others or sold. This one I'm unsure about.

3. Loot boxes are wrapped into games and are often designed to appeal to players in a much more intrusive way than TCGs . This makes loot boxes worse.

4-1. Some loot boxes have no impact on gameplay. These make loot boxes better.

4-2. Some loot boxes have an impact on gameplay larger than the impact of buying TCG boosters. These make loot boxes worse.

5. Loot boxes are often purchased through currency systems made to separate the buyers understanding of how much they are paying. This is why games often make you buy some currency and then use that currency to buy loot boxes, with some games have layers of currency in between. Compare this to TCG boosters which are sold in stores for specific dollar amounts. This make loot boxes worse.

6. You can buy specific cards you need directly from other players, while most loot box systems require buying more loot boxes until you get the specific item desired. This one is related to 2 and I am also unsure about.

7. Loot boxes are often built into games on ones phone and use tactics to encourage worse spending habits. This make loot boxes worse.

Overall my personal opinion would be that loot boxes as a whole are worse than TCGs, but the better done loot boxes are comparable or slightly better (less predatory) than TCGs while the worse loot boxes are much much worse (more predatory).

Edit: One way to look at it is that the more predatory loot boxes are an extension of TCGs that doubled down on the worse parts, which might be enough for it to cross a person's personal moral threshold.

Re: Lootboxes in FIFA now allowed by highest Dutch court

#59

Post by blockwriter »

ChicagoBoy11 wrote: post #8

This is so disheartening. I work as an admin in a school that serves all grades, and the impact that this stuff has on kids is very real. I've witnessed first-hand a grown in sort of a "gambling" culture amongst kids, as early as elementary school. While loads of us may have had fun experiences trading cards and whatnot, this all still happens with kids but with a much more overt monetary component. Part of me, thoug…

I played Magic: the Gathering competitively growing up, and me and all of my contemporaries revered the idea of gambling. Loot boxes may be a different beast, which I would think would actually lead you more toward making simply bad financial decisions, like buying status items that you do not need and cannot afford with debt you will struggle to pay back. My adolescent milieu went on to have mixed results with regards to their participation in society. I think the gambling that Magic: the Gathering players revere is actually preferable to these items, which are a purchase and seem to discourage analysis of the value proposition or expected value of the act of purchase.

Re: Lootboxes in FIFA now allowed by highest Dutch court

#60

Post by slg »

kregasaurusrex wrote: post #29

As a kid I used to play the Yu-Gi-Oh trading card game a lot, and the odds for getting cards of certain rarities were published on the packaging so you knew how many packs on average it would take to hit a super rare/ultra rare card. There were 8 commons and one rare slot per pack which had a 1:5 chance of being a super rare, 1:12 for an ultra rare, and 1:23 for a secret rare.[0] Additionally the cards had actual uti…

>The article says that "92 percent of the FIFA boxes are not bought with real money, but unlocked via football matches and are therefore simply part of the game of skill." which implies players can expect to get a reasonable number of good players to build a team with and a team constructed of said players on aggregate would not provide a significant competitive advantage.

It has been years since I played FIFA so maybe things have changed, but this quote is misleading which means the implication you got from it is incorrect. The FIFA lootboxes aren't uniform. There is a wide variety of different packs and they all have different odds and come with different costs. It is very easy to earn the cheapest versions with the worst odds. No one spends real money on those. The real money proportionally will go to the more expensive packs with the best odds and therefore can lead to an imbalance in play because those 8% of packs account for much more than 8% of the rewarded value.

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