None of those things have anything to do with gambling addiction. Why is this so hard to understand for you? Gambling exploits a weakness in the addict’s brain in ways that losing a ship does not. It creates a compulsion to just keep playing one more round, one more round, on and on until they suffer financial consequences for it.
EVE is about making decisions about risk and dealing with the consequences.
Again, why something this basic so hard for you to understand? A gambling addict is not capable of making rational decisions when it comes to gambling. EVE has always been about making in-game risk vs. reward decisions, until now it has never been about encouraging gambling addicts to suffer real-life consequences so that CCP can make some easy profit.
SJW
Well you’ve certainly demolished your own credibility here…
Sorry, a minute ago your point was “players can and will do with real-world money and suffer real-world harm”, which occurred in all my examples. Now it’s “weakness in gamblers brain”, which is pure supposition on your point. None of the generally-assumed triggers for the typical gambling addict are present in this HyperRaffle mechanic.
Not one of you grannies has linked anything showing any correlation at all between this kind of activity and real-world harm. Not one of you has linked anything at all showing minors playing EVE and spending harmful amounts of RL money. Not one of you has recognized that worse things happen in EVE every day, but you’re fine with all those.
All I’m seeing is the same people who chanted “RPGs will lead to demon worship!”, back in the day.
DEMONS! and MURDER!
(PS: After experiencing many years of RPGs and MMOs, I can however state that it did lead to a lot of demons. Getting murdered. So maybe they were on to something.)
Old news to me, thanks. You might notice that buried in that article is the phrase:
“Whereas experts used to think of addiction as dependency on a chemical, they now define it as repeatedly pursuing a rewarding experience despite serious repercussions.”
So that means that in effect, ganking is gambling. Exploration is gambling. Running combat sites for the occasional loot drop or escalation is gambling. Scamming and loot-ninjas are gambling, and all these things are addictive.
I mean seriously, c’mon guys. You’re flapping your arms all over the place here without even realizing what the real issue is. Gaming is addictive, and many aspects of gaming are “gambling”.
If you had a clue what you were actually even implying by all this “oh noes an RNG loot mechanic childrens will suffer!” hand-wringing, you’d be asking for online gaming to be banned altogether.
Your article also, BTW, completely misses out on referencing the various mechanisms that some studies have shown affects the “gambler’s high” - virtually all of which are missing from the HyperNet proposal.
But hey, keep flapping your arms and waving your hands. The exercise is good for you.
Why is this so complicated for you? The “harm” of PLEXing a ship and dying is limited, it doesn’t drive the person to PLEX another ship and lose it as fast as possible, and then another ship, and another, etc. It’s theoretically possible for someone to suffer a significant financial loss over it but not very plausible. With gambling, on the other hand, it encourages addictive behavior and repetitive losses, with the addict unable to step away even when they are spending a harmful amount of money on their addiction.
None of the generally-assumed triggers for the typical gambling addict are present in this HyperRaffle mechanic.
Lolwut? CCP literally created an in-game lottery.
Not one of you has linked anything at all showing minors playing EVE and spending harmful amounts of RL money.
Well yes, it is in fact hard to provide evidence of people spending money on a feature that does not exist yet. But there’s a reason in-game gambling is the target of legal bans.
You must have read one of my earlier posts around time when the Mutaplasmids were introduced. But you must be aware about differences, not only similarities.
Article is about general scientific outlook on the problem.
Did you noticed the tickets have letters and are shown in the HyperNet? It could have been just ticket, without any number or letter, do you know why it have those? Its for gambler to develop behavioral reactions. Then they will feel they control the outcome when they will choose some ticket starting with X and it will win, next time they will feel their lucky X is there and will choose it and feel they will win because they control the outcome. The way tickets are shown is string of letters, when the winning will be chosen, its all shown in pretty graphic animation where gradually they are filled. The feeling of “near miss” will encourage the gambler to spent more on the activity. But it did not really had to have this animation.
Exactly. TBH I really don’t understand why people feel like this is a controversial thing to argue. The entire point of F2P cash shop mechanics is to make them addicting and exploit the “whales” who spend tons of money on the cash shop. The people making these games have researched the best ways to exploit addiction and they are absolutely taking advantage of that knowledge.
How about looking at the actual numbers before you start a moronic moral panic.
Yup.
Indeed.
Correct.
In fact, all of these are examples of risk seeking behavior…which is what gamblers are. A person who gambles to excess is someone who is a risk seeker. They seek out risk. Engaging in risky behavior enhances their welfare (admittedly in a perverse way).
What is the difference? Ignorance? Foolishness? Both?
And how many people under the age of 18 play eve. That frequency chart back upstream says very few. There is a term for freaking out over very rare events, it is called a moral panic.
Ultimately yes. Some people need to learn that the hard way by undocking in a blinged out ship and having their hard work vanish in an explosion of pixels.
Risk taking is risk taking. Now perhaps sometimes it is done due to foolishness or just plain old vanilla ignorance. But it could also be due to risk seeking behavior.
Uhhh…no, it could very well be the same thing.
Actually no, there is a rational process here it is just one that most people consider bad. The gambler is risk seeking–i.e. the risk of the gamble provides a boost to their welfare. Most of us feel the exact opposite. When presented with say $50 via a sure thing and an expected $50 via a gamble ($0 with probability 0.5 and $100 with probability of 0.5) the gambler will always pick the gamble while the risk averse will pick the sure thing. Of course, something like EVE can let us engage in some degree of risk seeking with little downside, “Meh it is just ISK.” Yes, the potential connection to using RL money is a potential problem. But these problems are not really new in that a kid could use RL money to get a bunch of PLEX and then do things that causes much of the resulting ISK/ISK value to end up in another players hands and CCP benefits.
Nice snuck premise.
Hmmm…I doubt it. Please provide some support for this. My guess is gambling addicts are at best a small share of any gambling endeavors profits since risk seeking behavior is not that common. Especially young people who just do not have that much money to begin with.
This really is sounding more and more like a moral panic.
Thank you for demonstrating your ignorance of how addiction works. Gambling addiction is not just a preference for risky strategies in game theory examples, it’s the inability to stop gambling even when it is hurting them. The gambling addict doesn’t just make the riskier choice and walk away when they lose, they bet again to try to make up for their loss. And then they bet again because it’s just $20 they’re betting, that’s not much money. And then they bet again because now they’re $100 down for the night and need to make up for it, and surely the dice are going to be in their favor now because they’ve used up all their bad luck. And then they bet again because they finally won, and they need to celebrate the win. And so on until they’ve lost all their money, run up their credit card debt, and have to beg for money to avoid getting evicted from their apartment for failing to pay the rent.
Please do some basic research on how gambling addiction and addiction in general work before calling it a “rational process”.
Your guess is 100% wrong. It is a well known fact of the industry that F2P cash shop games make the vast majority of their money from a handful of “whales”, while most F2P players spend very little if any money before quitting the game. Now, you could theoretically argue that the “whales” are just extremely wealthy and not addicts, but the fact that F2P developers are putting all of the standard tricks casinos use into their cash shop mechanics suggests that the goal is to get addicts to over-spend and not to convince billionaires to spend $1,000 in the cash shop because $1,000 is nothing to them.
Which fits with my description…please don’t be such a dogmatic doofus. And such a screaming helicopter parent.
Which fits with risk seeking behavior…
Still risk seeking behavior…the point is that the risk is what encourages them, it brings them a welfare improvement given their preferences. You and I look at it and think exactly the opposite.
Still fits with risk seeking behavior. That is what a gambler is. One who seeks out risk. Just as an alcoholic will seek out alcohol. Sure it is destructive, but that doesn’t make it irrational in the sense that we can understand it and even predict it.
Of course it is a rational process. Please describe an irrational process? Random? Sorry that follows some basic rules of mathematics too. Persistent gambling is a rational, yet destructive, process. Just because it is rational or has some rules to it does not make it good. We can clearly define and even predict an addicts behavior…that is the epitome of rational (albeit destructive) behavior. Hell people can even be rationally “irrational” think of a fan of a given sports team that is doing badly…wouldn’t it be rational to switch to another team?
And how much of an issue is this. How many suffer from gambling addiction? How many young people play the game? How many would go on to become gambling addicts? There is literally nothing empirical here just alot of carrying on about potential risk to…1 person? 10? 100? 1,000? 0?
Serioulsy, this thread should be renamed to 21st Century Reefer Madness.
The game allows to diminish risks, cloak, directional scanner, local., etc. and then only getting the loot, or not, the reward comes after extensive use of skills first, so its more like scoring a goal in a match. Or actually sometimes its even being described as work… The losing part makes you seek knowledge about how to avoid losing.
Which any of those mechanics are present in the raffle? None. Its the risk part pure and immaculate. Short route to developing unhealthy habits and then addiction.
Big difference between FFXIV and EvE…
You dont/cant get GIL from swiping your credit card without Absolutely doing RMT.
In EvE you can, cause you can buy PLEX with RL Cash, sell on market or use in the NES, with no 3rd party interaction at all. You can also use ISK to buy PLEX from market then sub your account.
In FF, you have to swipe your card for a monthly sub, or swipe your card for Crysta for X amount of cash to sub with or use in the Mog Cash shop. Gil you have to earn in game killing mobs, crafting, and using the in game Market system…the only way you get in game cash is by grinding. Also in reference to the Gold Saucer, you can only buy 1000 tokens with GIL, after that you can only gain more by playing the various games of chance, and those Tokens have no place anywhere but in the Gold Saucer.
This Hyper-garbage, the devs could of spend their time more useful on other things needed. Especially since it requires RL cash to operate unlike the FFXIV Casino.
What about it? My guess is the vast majority of players are risk averse.
And then there are players who do things that are very much in line with risk seeking. Moving a freighter full of 10 billion ISK in cargo is quite consistent with risk seeking. Now, if it is actually just plain old vanilla ignorance the person will likely not do it again. But a risk seeker might find the idea of moving so much cargo value thrilling and do it again despite losing his ship and half the cargo.
Sure, but the idea that only gambling addicts are going to play or that it is going to create gambling addicts is actually a snuck premise–i.e. you are sneaking in the very premise you are trying to demonstrate is true. Please stop being Ben Shapiro, he is terrible at using snuck premises.
Are you ****ing kidding me? This is one of the dumbest things I’ve seen on this forum, and I had expected better from you.
Your example game does not apply to gambling addiction in any way because you’re comparing two scenarios that both have the same equal and positive expected value. If you play 10,000 instances of the game either strategy will get you to approximately the same result and both will be positive. And this makes it a completely unrealistic example, nobody is going to let you play a “game” where they hand you as much free money as you want and all you have to decide is how you want the bills arranged.
A more realistic scenario is this: you can pay $5 to play a game with a 50% chance of zero payout and a 50% chance of $8.
The rational choice is to do the math, recognize that the game has a negative expected value, and refuse to play even once. The house always wins in the long run so why throw away money?
The irrational but mostly harmless choice is to play once or twice because it’s a silly game and you can have a laugh about the outcome either way. This is the farthest a normal person will go, in the absence of addiction once they’ve had a bit of fun they just walk away and end their losses.
The irrational and harmful choice, the choice made by the gambling addict, is to play the game and keep playing. Every play of the game has an expected value of losing $1, but because of the way addiction works they keep doing it. They have a compulsion to keep playing “just one more round” over and over again until they are forced to stop.
But please, keep telling me how “rational” it is to keep gambling even once it has cost you divorce, homelessness, etc.
But I want to dedicate something to those who really like to gamble, who like to put the life in the fate’s hands.
O Fortune, like the moon you are changeable, ever waxing, ever waning, hateful life first oppresses and then soothes as fancy takes it; poverty and power it melts them like ice fate – monstrous and empty, you whirling wheel, you are malevolent, well-being is vain and always fades to nothing, shadowed and veiled you plague me too; now through the game I bring my bare back to your villainy fate is against me in health and virtue, driven on and weighted down, always enslaved. so at this hour without delay pluck the vibrating strings; since Fate strikes down the strong man, everyone weep with me!
You failed to take my statement in the context that it was responding to. I was responding to the ‘think of the children gambling of any type in game is a gateway to irl gambling’ crowd. They were saying that it doesn’t matter if there is no rmt involved because any gambling mechanic in the game would train children to be gambling addicts in real life. To which I call bs because most games have some gamble esque mechanics and some have actual in game gambling. I don’t see a majority of people whom played games as suddenly gambling addicts. Nor do I see a bunch of people complaining about many games marketed at children with foofy themes but some gamble mechanics in them.
Not seeing the problem doesnt mean it doesnt exist.
The National Council on Problem Gambling (NCPG) and other sources note the following statistics. 15 percent of Americans gamble at least once per week. Approximately two to three percent of Americans meet the criteria for problem gambling . That’s around 6 million adults and about a half million teens.
People are divided into age groups such as:
• 16-24 year olds – who show the most susceptibility (1.4%)
• 25-34 – tend to gamble less than their younger and older mates (0.8%)
• 35-44 – are also at a higher risk (1.1%)
• 45-55 and older – only 0.3% or less.
By Gender
The sharpest contrast we see is in the statistics that differentiate people by gender:
• Men – 1.2%
• Women – 0.1%.
