Would you encourage your child to play with hypercores and mutaplazmids?

Communications Center General Discussion
102

The steps between isk and real money are few.

103

I was actually referring to your statement about CCP putting their development time into something more applicable to the game and the player base as a whole.

Actually they could alternate between doing fixes and adding new content. I mean right now their biggest concern is on removing the daily 5 minute downtime. I mean come on, I’m sure there’s a lot more pressing issues in the game that need to be addressed compared to removing the measly 5 minute DT.

104

Well there is a design issue when people are planning their gaming day around those “measly 5 minute DT”

But on the other side - they have admitted that game as it is has some behaviours that are in there because someone assumed server to be rebooting clean every 24h. behaviour that is a kind of ticking bomb waiting to blow if you ask me (like not clearing caches at all etc.)

So if they manage to not screw it completely up, there may be relevant improvements in server performance happening alongside unlocking requirements to make those maintenances even weekly instead of daily.

One thing I see improvement for sure in their approach is to verify if they didn’t forget about something with that experiment of no dt today. CCP actually making sure they didn;t forgot about something when planning the work to do? Woah huge step forward xD

105

You can submit a ticket (click here or hit F12 in-game and click “Go to Help Center”) and under the Game Play Support → Game Play → General Questions category request in the Description field that the HyperNet is deactivated in your client. You can do this ahead of time if you like and our GMs will enact the request once HyperNet is added to TQ on the 10th of December. You will have to replicate this process for each one of your accounts.

How to remove the HyperNet from the game. CCP Convict wrote that on Reddit.

107

I mean, this is the lovely little wrinkle in the fact pattern, yeah? If not for the ability to purchase in-game currency with real money, there would be no issue here. I don’t think most people would argue that playing poker in Red Dead Redemption is the kind of gambling we’re worried about, because no one really cares about gambling fake money to win fake money.

That being said, in the context of kids, since that’s the OP, I would question how it is a kid would have the ability to purchase large amounts of PLEX to feed this gambling habit. While I understand and even sometimes agree with the notion that the company shouldn’t be so quick to capitalize on poor impulse control, at least with kids, I also have to wonder–where is the parents’ responsibility in all this?

108

You don’t understand my complaint. Or how things work.

The rating is based on the content of the game. Ratings based on what players might do with the game is unrealistic expectation.

The players that misuse the content are dealt with by devs. One example of which is banning.

Ccp are actively enforcing rules. They are not actively enabling adult only behaviour to kids.

Yeah, this wasn’t a problem. Rating agencies and parents are clearly fine with deceitful gameplay and bluffing.

You’ll find this kind of thing in board games for kids and card games etc

But do ccp tell their players to get high whilst they play? Do ccp tell minors to drink alcohol when they play?

So ccp aren’t actively enabling this behaviour are they?

I’d agree this is definitely a bad message for ccp to push. But not for the reasons you think.

I haven’t recognised addictive behaviour because of it. I’ve seen people ruin their own game experience and quit due to burn out. But i have never known anyone to sacrifice their real lives because of it. They just stop playing instead of losing their jobs, family or home.

It’s even less likely to happen now thanks to alpha clones alllowing free to play.

I’d just like to touch on this.

Games of any kind, not just computer games, are addictive by nature. The goal of the game designer is to make it engaging. Those chemical releases you’re talking about are also experienced playing monopoly or watching sports. And sometimes people choose to play sports over being with loved ones.

Just as ‘efficiency’ and ‘laziness’ often align, so does ‘engaging’ and ‘addictive’.

Demonising games in general rather than looking at the individual with the problem is a bad way to think about it. The behaviour around sports (see football hooliganism) is far FAR worse than that of computer games. But we aren’t about to say only adults can play sports.

Right. And if you asked me if it was ethical to have p2w mechanics and peddle it to kids I’d also say it was questionable. I don’t want p2w mechanics in eve either.

It’s questionable to exploit kids perceived need to have the coolest skins on their gun or ship too. It’s just that adding gambling is a whole new level.

Agreed. And I’m hoping the law pulls through on this.

It’s disturbing to think that the mentality of ccp and the devs of other games might be:

Lets cash in on this whilst it’s still legal.

Absolutely right. It is the responsibility of parents to safeguard minors financially or otherwise. It is also the responsibility of teachers to safeguard minors at schools and game devs to safeguard minors that play their game.

But the ‘parents’ argument it’s no excuse for ccp to say:
Look here kids. Look at our gambling game. Don’t you wanna play?

And then say

‘not our problem if they spend their parents money’

And until the rating changes or the gambling removed. That’s what it undeniably is.

109

If you cant recommend it to people you like, then how can you recommend it to anyone else?

110

I understand that addictions of all sorts are an issue in life. This might sound crass or heartless, but I should not have to sacrifice the things I enjoy in my life because others may not be able to enjoy the same things responsibly.

Children have parents. Parking a child in front of a game of any sort that the parent has not vetted first or oversees (at least on occasion) and expecting a gaming company or gaming community or whoever else to act as a parent is unrealistic, ridiculous and stupid.

Finally, if this is such a moral hot button issue for people then feel free to stand up for your position and exercise the right to quit supporting the profits of the company by no longer paying or playing. Or does your moral outrage extend far enough to actually create pain for yourself to uphold your principles?

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111

Sure, but did you care when grinding for XP started to be a thing in MMOs?

Did you care when FarmVille got released,
which changed the whole industry towards exploitation of simpler minds?

If you didn’t, then you should have,
because these also were all about getting people addicted.

The only significant difference is that this is blatantly obvious.

112

I would tell my child that the internet is the inner lining of a bathing suit.

113

Is anyone thinking of even using the new gambling system.

It doesn’t seem all that interesting.

I predict in a few months most raffles won’t finish and people will stop using it.

114

I can’t tell. It’s just another money source for me.
I’d need to be damn certain of a significant amount of ISK, though,
that’s actually exceeding the future price of PLEX.

Which I doubt it would,
because this will send PLEX to the moon.

115

extracted from a Verge article from 2017 (links left intact):
Just a few weeks ago, Belgium’s Gambling Committee took up the most controversial gaming question of the season: are loot boxes gambling? Yes, they said.


 The rush of buying them and rolling the dice on their contents has been likened to the psychological sensation one feels when gambling. That gets even more unsettling when you consider how many underage people play these games, and how much they spend; my own younger sibling, a few years ago, drained $400 from my bank account on Xbox Live purchases.




Hawaiian state representative Chris Lee recently held a press conference where he characterized loot boxes as “predatory gaming,” and is working on legislation to ban minors from buying them. He later added in a Reddit post that “these kinds of loot boxes and microtransactions are explicitly designed to prey upon and exploit human psychology in the same way casino games are so designed.” In Australia, a regulator for the state of Victoria agreed that “what occurs with ‘loot boxes’ does constitute gambling” and that the regulatory body for gaming was “engaging with interstate and international counterparts” on policy changes.

For years, microtransactions have become more and more prominent in gaming as a way of supplementing income for developers, or replacing the revenue gained by selling units — hence “free to play” games that are free to download and play, but make money by selling you small-ticket items or downloadable content in the game itself.

The unparalleled outcry from players, fans, press, and politicians about loot boxes in Star Wars Battlefront II signaled that we were at a breaking point. A flagship title of perhaps the world’s most profitable and famous IP was monetizing through microtransactions and loot boxes so pervasively that it felt openly exploitative. Every aspect of the game was now bent toward facilitating microtransactions. Characters or power-ups can take days worth of play to earn, which makes purchasing them in an in-game store more tempting.




It could take months or years before a final ruling is settled in any jurisdiction, and even then, a global patchwork of differing laws and rulings will need to be reckoned with. But the implications are clear. The law has always lagged behind technology, but sooner or later it’s going to catch up, and tech companies that are used to doing as they please will suddenly have to figure out what life after regulation looks like.

Previously, most defenders of the loot box economy and its associated trading websites said that since real currency wasn’t being won, no real gambling was taking place. But according to some legal experts, that isn’t strictly true.

In a recent episode of his Robot Congress podcast, prominent video game attorney Ryan Morrison interviewed another lawyer, Marc Whipple, who has experience in the gaming industry. Whipple said that gambling, in “most jurisdictions,” was judged to be such if it had three critical elements: “Consideration, which means you have to pay something to play. Chance, which means there has to be something outside your control that determines the outcome of the game. And a prize. And of course, a prize is something, anything of value.”

Whipple added, with deliberate clarity: “As close as I’m ever getting to giving actual legal advice to strangers on the internet who are not my clients is this: no, it does not have to be money. It has to be something of value, period.”

This discussion neatly lays out where the legal battle lines actually are. The issue has come up a handful of times in American courts, but the industry won those cases because digital objects were determined to have no value. In Whipple’s mind, this was because the judges were not “technologically literate,” and “did not understand what was going on,” instead seeing this very lucrative form of commerce as nothing more than “blips on a screen.”

The answer to this question — whether digital matter should be considered as real as what’s in your pocketbook — affects every aspect of the tech industry. If the virtual is not real, rules are irrelevant; if it is , then we’re badly in need of a digital social contract. With the events of the last few years — from a president’s tweets moving markets, to discourse around online harassment — we’re recognizing, slowly, that what happens online is, for all intents and purposes, real. We cannot simply switch it off.

What happens online is, for all intents and purposes, real

Pursuant to this specific discussion, the American legal framework on gambling is already primed to accept that. The legal test for gambling, here, never required actual currency to be won.

“Value doesn’t mean necessarily mean you like it and you want it. Value means it ‘has value.’” said Whipple. “If you can sell it to somebody, if you can transfer it to somebody
and exchange for some consideration, some payment, I would argue under that most gambling statutes that it is almost certainly something of value. If you can’t, that doesn’t mean it isn’t something of value, it just means it’d be harder to prove,”




A law review article in the aptly titled “Gaming Law Review” made that abundantly clear, with language that was unusually blunt for an academic paper. In her article “Skin Gambling: Have We Found the Millennial Goldmine or Imminent Trouble?” lawyer DesirĂ©e Martinelli analyses the legal landscape as relates to the practice of “skin gambling,” which is the practice of using skins — cosmetic alterations to in-game objects — as the ante for ever rarer ones. One report by the gambling industry analyst Chris Grove estimated that $7.4 billion worth of skins were wagered in 2016, with some significant percentage of that money undoubtedly going to the distribution platform Valve, which sold many skins in the first place.

One report estimated that $7.4 billion worth of skins were wagered in 2016

Valve has since pledged a crackdown on skin gambling, of course, but a broader issue remains: the mentality that let it flourish for so long in the first place.

Martinelli concludes that “the lack of regulation provides the perfect atmosphere for thirsty, tech-savvy entrepreneurs looking to capitalize on the craze” and that “courts may find it necessary to start reining in this millennial goldmine especially if a social policy concern such as underage gambling through e-sports and skins betting arises.”

The implications of this argument go far beyond skin gambling. The question of whether virtual goods have “real-world value” is central to a range of ethical questions about microtransactions, and is at the heart of the loot box question as well. In all cases, the motivation behind each mechanic is quite simply a yearning to make as much money as possible. There are practical reasons for this: blockbuster video games routinely cost tens of millions of dollars to make now, with costs continuing to rise.

It’s difficult to get sales figures on loot boxes by themselves, but they’re normally grouped into a bucket of controversial practices that are known in business jargon as “player recurring investment.” In other words, any penny made from something other than the initial cost of purchasing a game. This can be downloadable content (DLC), microtransactions as a whole, in-game advertising, subscription fees, and of course, loot boxes. As implied by the name, it’s money made from players who keep coming back to a game. Players “recur,” and the amount of time they spend in-game is more or less proportional to how much money they spend.

Ubisoft recently reported that for the first time, the company made more money from these microtransactions than it did from from digital sales of the games themselves. Not only that, but microtransaction sales had grown at a significantly faster rate than those overall unit sales compared to the previous year (83 percent compared to 57 percent).

More sensational individual stories have hit the wires as well. Kotaku interviewed a man who’d spent over $10,000 on microtransaction payments. In an interview with Waypoint , game developer Manveer Heir said that during his previous employment at BioWare, he had “seen people literally spend $15,000 on Mass Effect multiplayer cards." The reason, he said, was both profit and retention. Keep the players playing for longer, and thus paying for longer. The numbers, just from individuals, can be eye-watering.

But the entire lucrative enterprise depends on these goods being categorized as “not real” or having “no value.” This is, unsurprisingly, the mindset of game developers at large, and it’s supported by at least a few regulators worldwide. The New Zealand Department of Interior Affairs, which oversees its gambling licensing, told me that it “is of the view that loot boxes do not meet the legal definition of gambling.” The Australian state of Queensland, meanwhile, disagreed with its southern counterpart in Victoria on the question. At the heart of such opinions is whether virtual loot is real and valuable.

Tim Miller, the executive director of the UK Gambling Commission, reinforced that point in an interview with Eurogamer’s Vic Hood, emphasizing that he doesn’t believe loot box proceeds are “valuable” — an opinion that could transform the future of gaming. If they are deemed “valuable,” mechanics strewn through countless games on every platform, might end up being criminalized or strictly regulated in the US and abroad. Regulators could raise questions about card games and tabletop role-playing games that bank on similar mechanics with much tighter profit margins.




This is a battle for the soul of gaming; we’re at a crossroads where the industry has to choose who and what it wants to be.




Loot boxes are only one kind of microtransaction, but they’re often discussed as a unit because all microtransactions rely on similarly seductive sales techniques. They also permit theoretically unlimited revenue to be drawn from a game. Cajoling and enticing players onto that limitless funicular track of spending raises serious ethical issues, especially where our youngest players are involved.

Because of the moral panics that have been weaponized against everything from Dungeons & Dragons to Grand Theft Auto in the past, everyone who works in or around the gaming industry has a certain, marrow-deep revulsion to arguments that smack of “what about the children!?” But children aren’t the only ones harmed by a gambling economy; their cases are just especially egregious. It is long past time to stop reliving the culture wars of the last three decades and move on. Many of the people complaining about loot boxes now are the very same people who play and adore games, not right-wing religious extremists who want to obliterate everything we love.

Seeking to ban a specific revenue-generating practice that is inessential to artistic expression is very different from banning games on the basis of content — or banning them altogether. If we can have the debate on those terms, rather than the apocalyptic ones we’ve been saddled with, something good might come out of this whole mess.

The future could still be one in which we — consumers, regulators, developers, and critics — develop an entirely new ethical framework around microtransaction economies and the sale of digital content. Perhaps it will require government intervention, or perhaps it’ll take the form of industry self-regulation. Either way, the industry could come out the other side of this acrimonious debate, and its forthcoming legal battles, not just intact, but better than it was before.

(source: https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/19/16783136/loot-boxes-video-games-gambling-legal)

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116

I won’t be using it. It’s hard to predict what sort of things will interest a gambler though. On the purely mathematical value side (people who pay attention to ‘expected value’), only fairly rare items would be sensible to raffle off. Anything with a fair bit of supply, you can’t corner the market and someone who doesn’t want to bother running raffles for single items will undercut the raffle (since raffles have higher overhead).

On the “lottery ticket buyer” side of things, people will often drop what they consider “affordable” amounts on a chance at a big win, even if it’s a ridiculously small chance. So if some clever players start raffling off things worth a lot of ISK, and fairly widely desirable, for a relatively small-ish buy-in, then the raffle market could take off.

I actually predict it will take people a few months of experimentation and balancing to get the value proposition correct, and then there will be a pretty brisk market in raffle tickets. CCP probably should have attached a minor ISK sink to it (if they haven’t already, I haven’t explored all the mechanics).

117

I won’t be using it at all.

Despite what other’s say, in my opinion it’s gambling and the house always wins.

118

So you posted a couple walls worth of legalese that mostly comes down on the “gambling must be limited” side. Unfortunately a bunch of elected officials all clamoring to grab a piece of the public’s attention and get themselves quoted does not ‘prove’ anything about the issue.

The “rush of buying and opening these boxes”? Do you get a rush from them? I sure don’t. Is this proven anywhere, or just a sound-bite to make it seem very dramatic?

“Inessential to artistic expression”? If it’s the process that primarily funds the entire game, then it is very essential to artistic expression - without it the game likely won’t exist.

“Predatory marketing”? So alcohol, fashion wear, cosmetics, cars
 these don’t all advertise and conduct marketing in a way that is intended to prey on the vulnerabilities of people who want ‘cool stuff’?

To me, this issue looks a lot like censorship. I bet there are a lot of people out there who think sexual content is entirely irrelevant to games and other media, and would like to see it removed “because of the vulnerability of children and people with addictions”. I bet a lot of people think the same about violence, and foul language, and crude humor.

In fact, quite a few people would believe, and can actually prove, that internet gaming is not a healthy activity for a big chunk of the population - children and adults alike.

Before you jump on the road to the world of “Demolition Man” and hit the gas, you may want to step back and think about just what you’re opening the door to.

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119

Any unconscious process is irrational by definition.
Any bias that infer with your judgement is therefore irrational even though you consider your judgement as rational.

That’s the reason some ignorant people claim that “correlation does imply causation” and can even link articles that specifically state that they are wrong, because they can’t accept to be wrong and rather be irrationally right. It’s the same reason solstice keeps insulting people when he is proven wrong. They behave exactly like children when they want their mom, and will keep behaving so until they learn to deal with their insecurities.

That means, all their posts on the forum become irrational the moment someone corrects them. So the process “someone corrects him → he go full retard” is irrational.

Not sure if it’s useful to the discussion though.

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120

Maybe not, but an insightful commentary nonetheless.

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121

You might not feel it, but that’s because you (presumably) aren’t a gambling addict. The “rush of buying and opening these boxes” is exactly the thing that gambling addicts are feeling and how they will describe the experience of loot boxes.

“ Inessential to artistic expression ”? If it’s the process that primarily funds the entire game, then it is very essential to artistic expression - without it the game likely won’t exist.

EVE worked just fine with a $15/month subscription price funding the entire game, there was no need to turn it into a F2P cash shop. Nor do other games require a funding approach that is fundamentally hostile towards the customer and guarantees a lower quality product.

“ Predatory marketing ”? So alcohol, fashion wear, cosmetics, cars
 these don’t all advertise and conduct marketing in a way that is intended to prey on the vulnerabilities of people who want ‘cool stuff’?

Yes, you have discovered that the entire marketing industry has major ethical problems. But the fact that other things also need to be regulated, if not banned entirely, does not mean that we should ignore gambling.

122

In fact it does.
If you live in a “free market” country, then what is important is the market, not the client. If you get killed by the product, it’s bad because you can’t consume it anymore.

In a capitalist country, there is no morale. There is just benefit.

Now if you are in a non-capitalist country and you accept to regulate the products based on the health impact.
You understand that any product can become a poison ? People can be poisoned by water (that’s called rowning), by nitrogen or carbon dioxyde, which you find in the air but in higher proportions will prevent oxygen from fixating on your hemoglobin. A regular daily excess of sugar, salt, fat, will kill you, while if you have none you will die of starvation.
Most of the tools you can buy can be used as weapon to kill people.

I agree that trying to use people’s weakness is bad, unethical. But it’s also very hard to prove, just because there is one mechanism that does it, does not mean it was in place TO do it.

Now 
 I just don’t give a single fck about this. Maybe it will be useful.