Perhaps you missed the part where starting a lottery requires buying an item from the F2P cash shop using real-world money? Even if you buy it for ISK from the person who did pay with real money it’s still a F2P cash shop purchase.
Dead horses.
“It’s gambling” Yep. So is throwing dice with your pals.
“It’s a casino” Not even close.
“It’s an illegal raffle” CCP disagrees
“Addiction!” Be better space buddies. Help your fleet mate get that monkey of their back.
“Hypocrisy!…” I guarantee that CCP is taking this step in part to cut out underground Eve gambling related RMT. If you think that the iwi and somerblink bans stopped that junk, you’re being a rube. CCP creating a facility for this gets it away from people who are legitimately victimizing gambling addiction.
“Money’s worth…” Stop it. This kind of thinking is what will let tax authorities claim their cut of our spacebux. Shut your hole about this.
And guess what: “throwing dice with your pals” is illegal, it’s just not an enforcement priority as long as you keep it small in scale and limited to your friends having an occasional party night. Try “throwing dice with your pals” as a for-profit business and see how long it lasts before you get arrested.
And this is CCP providing a facility. Effectively they keep the dice on hand. You choose to pick them up, or not. It’s not illegal to have dice is it?
“My casino is just providing a facility that has some dice and cards, we have no control over what people do with them”.
That argument would be laughed out of court because it is very clear that CCP, like the casino, is running a gambling system for the sole purpose of gambling. They are not just in possession of something that could in theory be used for gambling, they are handing a fully implemented gambling system (including handling all of the cash transactions) to the customers and saying “here, do some gambling”.
1 Like
It’s been an interesting read.
In the UK, and within the past few months, a number of papers have published through Government channels. The situation in the UK is muddled with respect to lootboxes (which I don’t think HyperNet qualifies as, but IANAL[1]).
The Gambling Commission themselves state that, whilst lootboxes and similar do not fall within the scope of the 2005 Act, “…in-game items obtained via loot boxes are confined for use within the game and cannot be cashed out it is unlikely to be caught as a licensable gambling activity”. So even they are not perfectly clear on the legal status themselves. [2]
There’s a detailed discussion entitled “Immersive and addictive technologies” [3] published in the UK by the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee which briefly covers lootboxes, along with some recommendations.
Ultimately, it’s currently impossible to argue a watertight case (in most jurisdictions) for either side of the legal debate on lootboxes because (1) The overwhelming majority of us are not laywers specialising in this area; (2) The law in many countries is currently unclear - as stated by the law-makers themselves.
At the end of the day the law-makers will eventually clarify the situation for us Pleb’s. Until such times, the only certainty is legal uncertainty.
Of course, we all have a right to moral objection or acceptance - but that is purely opinion based.
[1] For younger readers, an oft-used acronym from back when Usenet reigned supreme and Gopher was a ‘thing’
[2] http://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-8498/CBP-8498.pdf
[3] https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/cmcumeds/1846/1846.pdf
1 Like
Poor, poor venturous gamers.
You aren’t betting against CCP. They aren’t a casino.
You’re buying a game that is equivalent to a poker set. Do the shops that sell poker kits, or dice, or card games have gaming licenses? No.
No, but a shop that merely sells dice/cards/etc does not host a poker game, enforce the rules of the game as you play, convert cash into poker chips for use in the game, pay out prizes to the winners, etc. CCP, on the other hand, is doing these things. They are not merely providing items that could be used by their customers for gambling purposes, they are actively engaged in every aspect of running the gambling activity.
If they charge money for cores and skins they have real life value.
Something has real life value if people are willing to and do pay $$$ for them.
How is this so hard for people to comprehend?
Drugs actually have laws prohibiting their sales however every time police make a huge bust they always proclaim the street value of the drugs; should we tell police drugs don’t have real life value merely because a law says you can’t sell them?
CCP said the cores are bought from CCP directly instead of being bought in game for isk.
1 Like
^ Go save a whale. 
It only has value if it can be both bought and sold. If you are dumb and I sell you a piece of lint for $500, good luck trying to sell that lint to anybody. Is it suddenly worth $500 because that’s what you paid for it? No. Because you can’t sell it for that.
Same concept as your car depreciating as soon as you pull it off the lot.
Police announce the “street value” of drugs to get a headline. In the end, it’s all just conjecture.
CCP said you can get the cores either via the in-game market for ISK or via the NES (likely though plex, but we don’t know yet).
The only way to get them through the in-game market for ISK is to buy them from someone who spent money in the F2P cash shop to get them.
It only has value if it can be both bought and sold.
And things in EVE can be bought and sold. CCP has set a market for cash transactions in their F2P cash shop where items can be bought for cash or sold for the cash-equivalent PLEX. You can disagree about whether or not you think those prices are right but the situation here is a grocery store with loaves of bread sitting on the shelf and regular customers, not some random lunatic paying money for lint.
propose to call it ‘HyperBet’.
Legally… no.
Legally, it’s all CCP’s property the whole time. It’s data on their servers. What you pay real-world cash value for is access to that date, via purchasing a license (subscription) from CCP for access to a wider array of database entries (Omega status), or you pay them to change values in their database (how many PLEX your login has attached to it in their system). In this latter case, once they’ve changed that value in their tables, the rest of it is all just you altering performing operations you’re allowed to perform, in their code, on fields they allow you to manipulate.
That’s it. There’s never any real ‘sale’, because nothing ever actually changes hands: it’s all CCP’s, and they hang onto it the whole time. All you can do is change what login that specific data is associated with.
That doesn’t remove all of the other potential legal pitfalls, and it doesn’t in any way alter the potentially deleterious effects of what amounts to training people’s brains into gambling addiction, but no, nothing within the EVE client is really ‘bought and sold’.
1 Like
but you just did sell that lint for $500. How is it suddenly not worth $500 anymore? Because you’ve got your money?
Cars… yeh that’s a bit of a grey one. Some cars do depreciate as you roll them off the lot, but occasionally they go up in value as well. Just the other day I saw a 1990 Cooper S up for auction with a met reserve of £30,000. I know they weren’t going for 30 grand when new.
Well, let’s see… a 2002 Cooper S shows a retail value of £14,705 - £21,160. So let’s be generous and assume the higher end of that.
So, that amount, put through the Bank of England’s inflation calculator, yields a 2018 value of £33,814.60.
Obviously, I don’t have the hard numbers to do the math for the 1990 Cooper S, but it does seem that adjusting for inflation, it might have gone for the equivalent in 1990 £ of 30k in 2019.
Think the only good thing about this is a chance at unique ships but you can bet the same tactics the 1% will do their just get them all anyways buying 60% to 80% of tickets.
Not the point. These will be on the in-game market almost instantly, because everything that sells on the NES gets bought and marked up in-game.
Wrong. Things players purchase in EVE can’t be sold for RL cash. Thus, they only have value in game, and there’s no way to convert a purchase into RL money out of the game without getting banned.
Sure, you got your money. The guy who bought the lint now has lint. He wants to sell it, he’s SOL, unless he finds someone equally stupid.
If you buy a house, then the market crashes, and you try to sell it, you’ll often find it’s not worth what you paid for it. So can you still claim something is a $1 million house when you can only get $350,000 for it? Not really. Good luck selling that to your insurance company.