Comment on Gacha games are out of control. Gambling shouldn't be so widespread

ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

• greenskye@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Haven’t played WoW in awhile, but do they now have ‘you can spend unlimited money’ mechanics? Previously it was just stuff like mounts and character transfers and stuff. I know you can also sell tokens for gold, but I thought gold kind of becomes irrelevant at some point. The best gear is bind on drop right? Theoretically I guess you can pay gold for boost runs, which probably counts as an endless money sink.

  I kind of have a mental separation in my head between games with unlimited money sinks (like games with energy mechanics) where you can spend and spend and spend and it never stops, vs games that have a finite of things to buy.

  It can still be way over priced, but there’s a maximum amount of money you can throw at the game. Even Diablo 4, with a relatively huge and highly priced number of cosmetic items has effectively a maximum price (though every new cosmetic increases that price). Vs Diablo Immortal allowing you to spend 10s of thousands of dollars and still need to keep spending. I think unlimited money mechanics should be outlawed or at least fully classified as gambling and regulated accordingly.

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  • ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    I think keeping you addicted so as to continue to paying a monthly subscription is bad on its own, and I don’t think it needs to be qualified by how much you spend overall if they’re still knowingly capitalizing on that addiction in an unregulated environment. But also, while I don’t know the answer to your question for a fact, I would imagine that they do have ways to spend unlimited money in that game if you’re so inclined.

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    • greenskye@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Fair, but given the degradation of gaming these days I think a lot of people who aren’t paying attention have an outdated and understated view of just how bad things are. A parent might be thinking: wow had a subscription, so this game with micro transactions isn’t all that bad, not recognizing just how tuned modern predatory gaming has become at extracting money and addicting its users.

      WoW mostly addicted people to playing (consuming their time), you can go hours and hours of gameplay without inputting more money. But mobile games maximize extracting maximal profit for minimal gameplay. There’s no functional difference between a gacha pull and a slot machine pull. It’s an endless, mindless set of pretty lights where you just hit the buy button over and over and over. If you sat people down and made them watch (with a running cost total) most people would immediately see the resemblance to a casino.

      I think it’s helpful to break things down into more granular levels of predation, just to help clarify how bad it’s getting, even if all of it is problematic.

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• Buttflapper@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  I agree with you, to an extent. I would say it’s a lot more complicated than that with World of Warcraft, which is an MMO, and does not revolve on gambling except in the aspect of random number generated loot. This is probably the majority of looter shooters out there today as well and a large number of other games. Pure chance in just the loot and rewards. Personally, World of Warcraft did not affect me adversely, because I have very strong self-control, and was able to develop very strict limitations for my own personal life which was important in college.

  But I think there’s something you’re definitely missing. Sure, while World of Warcraft can be blamed by some people flunking out of college or high school due to its addictive and fun nature, Have you considered the fact that the world we live in is simply so boring that they don’t want to pay attention to those things? Over a 20-year time span since I have graduated, high school and college has not evolved. It’s the same boring ass mess that it was when I went to school. Unnecessary classes, study only for the test and never use that information ever again, very rarely are their projects and when there are, they are silly group projects in which two out of the four members of your group are lazy and don’t want to do a damn thing. You also are faced with constant demoralizing facts thrown at you from the media and the outside world that your college degree won’t help you get a job, you won’t see any student loan relief, the wealthy elites are in positions of power and rising faster in companies than you ever will be… Reality is so disappointing. So I can understand why these people have trouble paying attention in school and want to turn to stuff like World of Warcraft, theme park MMO that has so much fun and enjoyment in it

  But when we’re talking about a gacha, This feels so much more insidious. Every aspect of the entire game, not just the loot, is gambling, and you’re gambling with real money. Not your time. In World of Warcraft you don’t get a drop, oh well, try again next time. You still paid $15 for that entire month, so you can try as many times as you want on as many characters as you want. But when you pay 50 bucks for Genshin impact and you get nothing, you know what that money goes towards? Absolutely nothing. You lose that money forever. Now you are mentally afflicted with that, and you’re already considering whether or not you should pay another 50 bucks to try and get it again with the gamblers fallacy in the back of your mind that if I pay another $50 I’m already $50 in, so I have a much better chance of getting it now. It’s sickening

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  • nickwitha_k@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    I agree with you, to an extent. I would say it’s a lot more complicated than that with World of Warcraft, which is an MMO, and does not revolve on gambling except in the aspect of random number generated loot.

    The way that the drops are is literally the same approach as a slot machine but with more steps to take up your time with boring shit and require more of your life to be dedicated to it so that there is less risk of you getting distracted by things like hobbies or games with finite stories with quality writing. A one-armed bandit might snag a handful of whales that spend all of their time feeding the machine. The Wrath of the Lich Bandit gets a much larger percentage of its users in front of it for a larger amount of their time, increasing the ratio of addicts/whales caught. Add in expansions, real money auctions, etc and you’ve got something much more fucked up than anything on a Vegas casino floor.

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  • Ashtear@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    This reads like “the only moral Skinner box is my Skinner box.”

    Also sounds like you haven’t played in a while. The addition of real currency to gold trading creates an even more direct pipeline from one’s wallet to in-game gear dice rolls. Guilds selling raid gear is even more common now, and with crafting orders, a whale can spend to reroll secondary stats on crafted gear.

    With the way Warcraft is throwing currencies at players now, it’s clear Blizzard has taken more than a few cues from how gacha and other live-service outfits are doing things these days. Plenty of opportunities for ruinous, addictive behavior.

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    • Buttflapper@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Also sounds like you haven’t played in a while.

      No, I’m a current member of World of Warcraft.

      The addition of real currency to gold trading creates an even more direct pipeline from one’s wallet to in-game gear dice rolls. Guilds selling raid gear is even more common now, and with crafting orders, a whale can spend to reroll secondary stats on crafted gear.

      It has literally always been like this. Where have you been? People were selling power leveling runs through stockades back when the game first started. They were selling BOE gear for gold, and that gold was obtained with a credit card through gold selling websites. The introduction of wow tokens just changed the recipient of the money from Gold farmers to Blizzard entertainment. I assure you that most people who are active players of the game are not buying tons of gear with gold that has been obtained through their credit card, and even if they were, it doesn’t affect you at all. The guilds that sell runs through challenging content, they have always been doing that, since the very beginning. I remember back in burning crusade people spamming chat that they would carry you through black temple near the end of the expansion. So there’s not like some new shift towards that. It’s always happens like that. The only thing that has shifted is that now, more than ever, you can play the game on your own and get your own gear. The introduction of solo delves has made it possible to gear up your character completely on your own without any additional help from others

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      • Ashtear@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        Come on. We both know that legitimizing the RMT system increased the number of gold buyers and normalized the process. Not only does it now capture the players who were both a) squeamish about paying unproven third parties and b) had no recourse if they did get scammed, it’s also a far more convenient process. We know the gold-for-gear (and other services) market exploded in size because Blizzard was finally forced to make systemic changes to fight/redirect services spam. Service sellers are everywhere, and there was a point they were in your whispers, your mailbox, your chat. It’s nothing like it was 15-20 years ago.

        No, gold buyers are not most players (and no, I don’t care that some players are doing it). Most gacha players aren’t whales, either. My point is that yes, your game is also chasing the whales right now and will continue to design systems to do so.

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    • yamanii@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      This reads like “the only moral Skinner box is my Skinner box.”

      It is, MMO players have been doing this to gacha games for years now, it’s just pot calling the kettle black.

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    • Goronmon@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Good luck figuring out how to avoid labeling every game every made as a “skinner box”. It’s basically a jaded person’s definition of what video games are at their core.

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      • Ashtear@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        It doesn’t have to be jaded. As with the original quote I riffed off of, these particular Skinner boxes don’t have to always be pure evil and can provide net-positive outcomes, as long as we’re clear-eyed about the consequences of participating. The latter part is what I’m trying to drive home here. Consumer behavior psychology is part of every major live-service game.

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  • ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    You could throw most of this same argument back at gachas. They’re just gambling because the world sucks, or something…

    No, my understanding is that the reason people get addicted to this stuff is that we evolved to gather finite resources when they’re available, even if it’s rare, so we’re prey to systems like this that can control that rarity. WoW absolutely did this, just without putting a price on each interaction.

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• Goronmon@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Without being a gacha game, World of WarCraft is guilty of a lot of the same stuff.

  I’m not a fan of trying to poison the well on this discussion by trying to bring in a lot of secondary issues and try to broaden the issue to the point of uselessness.

  The biggest issue with gambling is the ability to lose your money.

  Sure, you can waste time with World of Warcraft. But I can also waste time playing too much Baldur’s Gate 3, or Civilization, or by binging shows on Netflix.

  But none of those allow me to spend thousands or tens of thousands by gambling on mechanics within the media itself.

  How about we focus on that issue first?

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  • ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Because I’d say the addiction is the issue. The biggest issue with gambling is the addiction. If you’re not addicted, you’re not spending time or money beyond your means. So I’d rather not broaden it to how much money it sucks out of you when the addiction is the issue. It all relies on the same principles that we know to be worth legal regulation when it’s acknowledged as gambling.

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