Lootboxes and the general virtual in-game currencies are what pushed me away from NBA2K. I really enjoy the game, but I don't want to be constantly told to pay more and more for the game that I've just paid $70 for. I stopped playing after a few weeks and I don't think I'll be buying this year's edition.
EA reportedly under criminal investigation in Belgium due to FIFA's loot boxes
101–110 of 164 posts
Re: EA reportedly under criminal investigation in Belgium due to FIFA's loot boxes
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
And another thing I hate about the yearly releases of CoD and BF: The previous versions more or less die when the new ones are released. As someone who play games on macOS, the delay before the Mac/Linux versions are released makes it so when you get to play the games, most of your friends play the next version or something else. I've stopped buying games like CoD and BF because of this. It seems only Blizzard and Va…
Name a single Blizzard game with official support of Linux. They are also had banned accounts for playing their games through Wine, but they've stopped 5 or so years ago.
I don't think there are any native Linux games from Blizzard.
I mentioned Linux in the "Mac/Linux" because Linux too suffers from the sometimes more than a year late releases of these games.
Re: EA reportedly under criminal investigation in Belgium due to FIFA's loot boxes
#103Mandatory disclosure: I am a programmer working for EA and the following are my personal opinions. I do not represent EA in any official capacity. It's my strong opinion that the whole loot box phenomenon makes games as a whole worse. For me, it's not the gambling aspects of it, per se. I am an avid Magic: the Gathering player and never decried the way its loot boxes (boosters) work. It's the fact that, the way these…
Here's my anecdote. I tried playing Quake Champions, because I remember enjoying Quake 3 as a mid-to-late teenager, and on paper, that type of game should be incredibly up my alley. I found the experience of the initial load screen dumping you directly into the daily loot box screen so offputting that I actually couldn't even enjoy playing the game proper. The very act of just opening the game was so nakedly manipula…
This. When I launch a game I want to play the game. I don't want to crawl through screens of advertising for loot boxes and daily deals. I understand if it's a MMO or something but why does firing up a basketball game now force me to navigate through loads of ad screens before I can ever play the game?
Re: EA reportedly under criminal investigation in Belgium due to FIFA's loot boxes
#104Mandatory disclosure: I am a programmer working for EA and the following are my personal opinions. I do not represent EA in any official capacity. It's my strong opinion that the whole loot box phenomenon makes games as a whole worse. For me, it's not the gambling aspects of it, per se. I am an avid Magic: the Gathering player and never decried the way its loot boxes (boosters) work. It's the fact that, the way these…
"For me, it's not the gambling aspects of it, per se. I am an avid Magic: the Gathering player and never decried the way its loot boxes (boosters) work. It's the fact that, the way these boxes have been handled by many games noticeably warps the design goals of the game from "make an engaging experience" to "motivate the player to buy more loot boxes".
What I mean is that many modern games have loot boxes or microtransactions permeating its design to such a degree that most features seem planned around how they motivate players to spend more money in-game."
Star Wars Battlefront 2 at release was a perfect example of this. The entire experience was built for someone to either grind incessantly and/or spend real money to acquire currency to unlock items as only weapon mods were acquired via accumulated experience and not loot crates. Even the awarding of credits were loosely tied to performance. The "level" of a hero/trooper/ship was the number and rarity of star cards you had, not how much you had used them. There was no shared marketplace so the only way to get a certain emote, or pose, or star card was getting lucky and pulling one. It was often the case that you would pull items for troopers/heroes/ships that you would barely (or never) use.
As a result of all of this you ended up with things like "rubber banding" where players would use a rubber band on their joystick to prevent themselves from being booted from game modes. This had a particularly harmful effect on the Heroes vs. Villains game mode, as its small number of participants (4v4) and scoring via target system meant having one or more "rubber banders" on your team put you at a severe disadvantage and wrecked the experience.
Re: EA reportedly under criminal investigation in Belgium due to FIFA's loot boxes
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, it's easy to drop money on packs and either get a pack of duds or (less often) an amazing player. I tend to get quite lucky spending a few hundred pounds in total, but there are videos of YouTubers dropping £1000+ in a day and barely getting anything interesting. A workaround would be for EA to simply officially sell the game's "coins" instead of packs in affected territories.. but then you'd have the opposite e…
> A workaround would be for EA to simply officially sell the game's "coins" Preventing this kind of workaround is already part of many gambling laws. They usually define the payment/stake/wager as a very generic term like "anything of value". For example, in NV (as a stereotypical representation of a locale allows gambling), the law defines[1]: >> “Representative of value” means any instrumentality used by a patron i…
Preventing this kind of workaround is already part of many gambling laws. They usually define the payment/stake/wager as a very generic term like "anything of value".
Ah, maybe I'm misunderstanding the concepts involved, but coins in FIFA are more directly convertible into the end result, more like buying a currency. With "coins" you can buy players directly in the game for a known value on a marketplace (you can also buy packs, but this could be disabled).
With the current system (where you buy "FIFA points") you can only use the FIFA points to open packs of "random" players, which is where the gambling element comes in.
Re: EA reportedly under criminal investigation in Belgium due to FIFA's loot boxes
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is that in their pursuit of profit they are creating slot machines with the actual game on the side. Then they are crippling the game so that you have to use the slot machine to have any sense of fun while playing the game. Therefore there are two choices: Either they get regulated as other slot machine makers around the world, including being taxed as both a slot machine maker and as a slot machine opera…
Which games are you talking about that require you to open loot boxes in order to have fun in the game? The most popular games that I can think of with loot boxes, Hearthstone, Dota 2, Overwatch, CS:GO, PUBG, all either have strictly cosmetic items in the loot boxes, or have ways of getting the loot boxes free through gameplay. Saying that major developers are creating games that require you to buy loot boxes in orde…
This is false. Hearthstone is a huge money pit and the items that drop in Hearthstone are not cosmetic, they are cards you use in the core game, just like Magic the Gathering but with no real money market.
Re: EA reportedly under criminal investigation in Belgium due to FIFA's loot boxes
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
That seems like a hack that won't hold up in court. Now it's still loot box gambling, but with the n+1 th box instead.
I actually think it will hold up quite comfortably, as no court will be able to tell when exactly it starts being gambling.
I can see how this can work in the US, but courts in Belgium (and Europe in general) do not stop at technicalities and they can absolutely consider it gambling without having to define the exact boundaries of gambling.
Re: EA reportedly under criminal investigation in Belgium due to FIFA's loot boxes
#108I’m the parent of a teenager who has struggled with an unhealthy obsession with features like this. A kid who is 14 or 15 is able to intellectually understand how to use these game systems, but at the same time he or she is often lacking the type of sophisticated understanding that an adult would have (e.g. that gambling can be addictive and therefore restraint and self-observation is required). They greatly overesti…
This is another area where the arbitrariness of the 18 year majority limit is exposed: 18 year olds are not neurologically adults. That doesn’t happen until like 25-29.
As I understand it, it's 25-29 for men specifically, and women reach maturity much faster.
Re: EA reportedly under criminal investigation in Belgium due to FIFA's loot boxes
#109Video game publishers have been trying consistently to implement a "less for more" attitude when it comes to their products. The whole lootbox trend on a whole was the peak of having their cake and eating it (wanting to "chase whales" like the free to play model but charging full price for the product). The only surprising thing about this is that there hasn't been a lot more push-back a way earlier.
That’s not true at all. Video Games have been growing with such a strong trajectory that what consumers expect at a bare minimum in a new release is a large increase in risk for a game publisher. For example Super Mario World was made by less than 20 people and sold for $69.99 at launch in 1990. That’s nearly $140 in today’s dollars. Now take into account that a modern AAA game has at a minimum a 150 person staff, wi…
This argument is missing the average amount of unit sold now versus then. Without it these numbers are meaningless.
Edit: As an illustrative example, if we neglect economies of scale we should be paying 5,000-10,000$ for our personal computers.
Re: EA reportedly under criminal investigation in Belgium due to FIFA's loot boxes
#110Mandatory disclosure: I am a programmer working for EA and the following are my personal opinions. I do not represent EA in any official capacity. It's my strong opinion that the whole loot box phenomenon makes games as a whole worse. For me, it's not the gambling aspects of it, per se. I am an avid Magic: the Gathering player and never decried the way its loot boxes (boosters) work. It's the fact that, the way these…
Yes, I have been thinking this for a while as well. The issue isn't the microtransactions themselves, but the natural incentives associated with them.
If you are old enough to remember coin operated arcades, they operated on the same principle. Just one more coin and you can beat this boss! It really hurt the game mechanic in a lot of cases, but I'm sure it improved profitability.
I really hate seeing this trend come to games that I presumably own.