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Counter-Strike's player economy is in a freefall

polygon.com

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Re: Counter-Strike's player economy is in a freefall

#121

Post by breppp »

eru wrote: post #114
breppp wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't most of our technology based on technologies invented to maximize killing in world war 2, or alternatively as a way to maximize monetization in sleazy ways?

World War 2 took at most about a decade (depending on who you ask). The history of development of our technology is much, much longer. I doubt 'most of our technology' is based on anything that happened in WW2.

The general sentiment is still true, the reasons for engineering and (often science) are not always nobel (pun intended)

Re: Counter-Strike's player economy is in a freefall

#122

Post by voidUpdate »

beeflet wrote: post #14
adrr wrote: post #9

Gambling mechanics for anyone under 18 should be banned. Children can't buy lottery tickets or hit tables in Vegas. Its crazy they can buy loot boxes that real life value.

they can buy pokemon cards. To be honest, I don't think CS:GO or TF2 or the like are pro-gambling. You learn pretty quickly as a kid that the best way to get good items is through trading, not gambling.

I'm honestly really not a fan of the collectable trading card type of games (MtG, Pokemon TCG, yu-gi-oh etc). You have to pay to have a chance of getting a good card, which makes the whole thing pay to win. It should be perfectly acceptable to print off the cards at home ("proxies") so you can actually make a set that works for you, without having to pay more for having specific cards that you want to complete your ideal deck.

I personally often go to the huge bins of "shit tier" cards that my local game stores have, because I like to have some pretty cards (I often use them as bookmarks), but I don't play the game itself, so the actual mechanical value of the cards is meaningless to me

EDIT: I feel the same way about things like Warhammer. I don't know about other games, but in Warhammer at least there is a limit on how powerful an overall army can be, so sure it may not look as visually good, but just having tokens that say "squad of soldiers" or "mega death tank of doom" should be perfectly acceptable too

Re: Counter-Strike's player economy is in a freefall

#123

Post by nottorp »

uvaursi wrote: post #47
tetrisgm wrote: post #5

I play CS. This is good. The gambling economy and the creator economy of people pumping their marketplaces and gambling sites is really toxic. It extracts money from kids, all for a nice skin. Making them more affordable is going to make this more fair and sensible.

Remember back in the day when we just downloaded skin packs from some random Geocities website with obnoxious red text on black background and after going through the install.txt written in broken English/Italian, lo and behold your AK47 now had a proper arctic camo skin and it was so much cooler? What was wrong with that? Doesn’t gaben have enough money for his super yachts and sword collections?

It really depends on playing the games for fun or to replace social interaction.

Most lootbox gambling apps are targeted towards the latter use.

Re: Counter-Strike's player economy is in a freefall

#124

Post by gquere »

tetrisgm wrote: post #5

I play CS. This is good. The gambling economy and the creator economy of people pumping their marketplaces and gambling sites is really toxic. It extracts money from kids, all for a nice skin. Making them more affordable is going to make this more fair and sensible.

I doubt it's going to change anything, this manipulated market will adapt and continue to extract money from kids. The cynic in me could even say that this change was pushed by Valve to take a bigger cut of the skin market (most trades are supervised by 3d parties). Coffeezilla investigated one of the many casino sites, there's a lot more to it.

Re: Counter-Strike's player economy is in a freefall

#125

Post by pdw »

teiferer wrote: post #67
Fade_Dance wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I propose any company that flagrantly violates the intent of a ruling like that is sent to a special judge who operates in the same manner - bring forth a penalty while explicitly looking for every violation and arcane loophole to punish the company with. It's "technically" just, after all.

You mean "special prosecutor". Judges don't try to find things, they only decide which of the parties before them claiming different things is right.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigating_judge_(France)

Re: Counter-Strike's player economy is in a freefall

#126

Post by toenail »

rkomorn wrote: post #98
toenail wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, no. Even a perfect quantum computer can only attack a key if its public key has already been revealed on-chain, which is only the case for a small amount of coin. The other QC attacks rely on cracking a private key after it was broadcast, and before the transactions make it into a block.

You lost me... What is the difference between an abandoned wallet and a non-abandoned one in this scenario?

Technically, "abandoned wallets" is not something that exists, all you have are "unspent outputs" of transactions. For QC attacks to work the public key to a private key has to be revealed, for modern addresses that only happens when you spend coins, not when you send them somewhere.

I guess some people call early P2PK (pay to public key) addresses "abandoned", but we simply don't know if somebody still controls them.

Re: Counter-Strike's player economy is in a freefall

#127

Post by bilekas »

uvaursi wrote: post #47
tetrisgm wrote: post #5

I play CS. This is good. The gambling economy and the creator economy of people pumping their marketplaces and gambling sites is really toxic. It extracts money from kids, all for a nice skin. Making them more affordable is going to make this more fair and sensible.

Remember back in the day when we just downloaded skin packs from some random Geocities website with obnoxious red text on black background and after going through the install.txt written in broken English/Italian, lo and behold your AK47 now had a proper arctic camo skin and it was so much cooler? What was wrong with that? Doesn’t gaben have enough money for his super yachts and sword collections?

> Doesn’t gaben have enough money for his super yachts and sword collections?

Steam is still a business, but of all the gaming industry, Gaben is one of the highlights, steam try hard to be extremely pro consumer. Refunds with no questions asked if you've played less than 2 hours of the game, requiring publisher and developers to explicitly state the AI generated content thats in the game to name just 2.

Re: Counter-Strike's player economy is in a freefall

#128

Post by close04 »

eru wrote: post #107
ehnto wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is an easy technical problem to solve, but the liability of abuse when sharing user content with other users is not palatable. It is also not impressive to others, not a status symbol, and that's actually the purpose of skins in the modern day. No one grinds 1000hrs of warframe for a skin just because they think it looks cool, they think it makes THEM look cool. They want people to be impressed that they had $2…

And making it cheaper wouldn't fix anything, I guess?

Making status symbols cheaper means they're no longer exclusive or grant status. So people go looking for other exclusive status symbols.

Re: Counter-Strike's player economy is in a freefall

#129

Post by msh »

mrheosuper wrote: post #91
smt88 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Close to 0% of children do their own grocery shopping and buy their own boxes of cereal

And 0% of children having credit card to buy lootbox (My country requires you to be over 18 to have one)

Where I am from kids can get a debit card that can be used online at age 13.

Re: Counter-Strike's player economy is in a freefall

#130

Post by gquere »

beeflet wrote: post #14
adrr wrote: post #9

Gambling mechanics for anyone under 18 should be banned. Children can't buy lottery tickets or hit tables in Vegas. Its crazy they can buy loot boxes that real life value.

they can buy pokemon cards. To be honest, I don't think CS:GO or TF2 or the like are pro-gambling. You learn pretty quickly as a kid that the best way to get good items is through trading, not gambling.

Look at the "meta-"game mechanics: you play a few games, you get a guaranteed case drop. This circa $3 case could contain anything, a $0.2 skin or a rare $2500 knife. When you open it a casino-like wheel goes over all the items and selects one randomly. There are hundreds of YT/twitch channels that open cases all day long and their target audience is children. It's gambling, and it's gambling for children.
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