Sony has filed a patent for a system to help you beat bosses you're stuck on by giving you hints and pointing you towards microtransactions.
A brief overview of the "In-game resource surfacing platform" outlines a language processing system that identifies an objective in the game you're stuck with and finds relevant solutions, including if there is DLC or other items available in the game's store.
who needs AI when u can make the sheep outbid each other, wargaming just made an auction house in their game where people have to bid on rare or special tanks for ingame currencies , some tanks went for 50-100k gold ( gold is currency only available for real money) , worth 250 euro
An auction in an online videogame for a virtual good(tank model) where wargaming creates arteficial scarcity and decides how many are sold as they control the entire market, is despicable, goes against any rules in a free market, and not even legal in the real world
all they had to do was create the virtual shortage, set a very small amount and sheep consumers were bidding ALL their ingame gold ...
this industry is getting beyond disgusting and im ashamed to even be remotly affiliated with it. New laws are needed this very minute to protect consumers from these predatory vultures
No pixel item is worth 250 euro when the company can just print more whenever they want, its not a rare drop or even an economy, its literaly some pencil pusher setting a number in a database file, and he can add more whenever he wants
This isnt even a new unique tank, its an existing tank painted yellow ...
If it was only the virtual currency u can farm ingame, i might be semi ok with it , but using the real money currency u can only get with real money .... despicable
I don't see an issue. You own a game, you can decide to create a new skin, you can decide to sell it to specific people for any price or just let people bid on it. People are free to decide whether they want to bid on it.
If someone wants to spend 1000 EUR on a skin for their favorite game, more power to them. Why should it matter for anyone else? Why are people bothered that some items in these games will be out of their reach? In the real world, we're used to the fact that we're only willing to spend our money on *some things* while other things are simply *not worth it*.
Games (such as freemium games) that mine money from rich consumers have the advantage that they can be free-to-play even for those who decide not to use any of the "premium" features. Like Wargaming's games - I fondly remember spending some time on World of Tanks as a free player, and am very happy that the game can be funded by rich people who are willing to pay for premium trinkets.
(Of course, the best-case scenario are games like LoL and Dota where there's no advantage you can buy for $$$ that you can't also earn by just playing.)
the thing is, 11-16 year olds can not make such decisons or better yet , should not be in a poisition to have to make such decisions, fuck even many 20-30 year olds dont know how to handle money, have no savings, are in debt, u assume everyone is able to make informed decision, when they are not. A kid doesnt know the value of money.
Nothing is being "funded". They are MILKING as hard as they can, new content production has been postponed, tons of layofs, they are "rebalancing" shit and messing around with numbers for the last 6 months in a bloody xcell sheet , pretending they work hard, its all bullshit. Minimum viable product, maximum gains. Sheep are blind and need to be protected from the wolves
Why should it bother you, that money could go to new innovative games, not fucking macdonalds of gaming spitting out the next dogshit happy meal, making kids gamble and doing auctions ...
wargamings last 4-5 projects failed miserably. riot is making a new 5v5 overwatch shooter :puke: so creative ... and amazing shit being "funded", minecraft pocketed all the money and made a failed card game, epic dunked all their money into the epic store ...
so tell me, what did these wales fund that was worthwhile
the thing is, 11-16 year olds can not make such decisons or better yet , should not be in a poisition to have to make such decisions, fuck even many 20-30 year olds dont know how to handle money, have no savings, are in debt, u assume everyone is able to make informed decision, when they are not. A kid doesnt know the value of money.
Nothing is being "funded". They are MILKING as hard as they can, new content production has been postponed, tons of layofs, they are "rebalancing" shit and messing around with numbers for the last 6 months in a bloody xcell sheet , pretending they work hard, its all bullshit. Minimum viable product, maximum gains. Sheep are blind and need to be protected from the wolves
Why should it bother you, that money could go to new innovative games, not fucking macdonalds of gaming spitting out the next dogshit happy meal, making kids gamble and doing auctions ...
wargamings last 4-5 projects failed miserably. riot is making a new 5v5 overwatch shooter :puke: so creative ... and amazing shit being "funded", minecraft pocketed all the money and made a failed card game, epic dunked all their money into the epic store ...
so tell me, what did these wales fund that was worthwhile
Great, but at the end of the day it all comes to the consumer. The consumer prefers McD Overwach Dota instead of Vanishing of Ethan Carter. The swine want more rotten apples, not gems. Expecting the publishers and devs to stop milking the swine is like expecting the oil industry to stop making fuel while people buy more and more cars per family.
Today I didn't even need to use my AK. I gotta say it was a good day. (c) - Ice Cube
It really doesn't matter to me whether the money is being wasted by the developers or not though. Maybe they use all that money for drugs and hookers - that doesn't mean you can just take away their fundamental right to create and sell their own skin in their own game.
(For a similar reason, I really hate the recent fuss around lootboxes. If there's a supposed issue with minors and gambling addictions, then just add a toggle asking for age confirmation before loot boxes are made available to the given account.)
I mean, there's a whole ecosystem of freemium games that thrive on whales and people who don't care about throwing money around. I'm happy the ecosystem exists - even if 95% of the games are crap, there are some enjoyable titles there that I can play as a 100% f2p player.
Trust me when I say this is aimed squarely at those kids who's parents have unwittingly left their debit card details on the account. MANY Kids are incapable of ignoring anything percieved to be 'cool' or designed to give the illusion of winning. I have seen this time and time again during my time with PSN support.
This is just the next evolution of the loot box. It's disgusting and condemns the gaming industry.
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fear of missing out, hidden odds, all pschological researched science and scummery and applied to kids, its deplaurable and undefendable and its funding despicable companiess ran by people with zero morals (riot settling courtcases with harrased and underpayed female employees ) . Anyone involved in it or working at such companies, id shun from the entire industry, preparing for the backlash thats still to come and more and more kids max out credit cards, there will be a reckoning
If kids are such a problem, just install legal checks to prevent them from accessing the microtransaction systems OR say that if they access the microtransaction systems then it's entirely the parent's responsibility. Make it subject to parental approval.
Personally, I think the "kids + lootbox addiction / credit card stealing" stuff is a bit overblown... I've worked profesionally with people active in psychology and computational social choice research, and after that my trust in the studies published in many venues in that field has dropped significantly. There are so many easy ways to twist the data in large studies + the data collection methods are often based on voluntary anonymous surveys, while when one focuses on case studies it's incredibly easy to cherry pick the really disgustingly bad rare cases.
But even if we take that at face value, come on, we have legal casinos and legal prostitution for adults. In the US, it's even legal to buy and bring a gun home. Surely, we can also have legal loot boxes and freemium games for adults.
Microtransactions mess with the balance of a video game. Making video games pay2win and introducing paid luck-based rewards is an anti-consumer strategy and tries to take advantage of people's obsessive and gambling tendencies to maximise profits.
This is one of the times where the government needs to venture into "nanny-state" territory for a bit to protect the citizens from themselves.
Well, microtransactions mostly mess with the balance of games that would not exist without microtransactions. I sure hope the government does not venture into "nanny-state" territory and decide to simply kill off these games to make them perfectly balanced. After all, no game = perfect balance.
who needs AI when u can make the sheep outbid each other, wargaming just made an auction house in their game where people have to bid on rare or special tanks for ingame currencies , some tanks went for 50-100k gold ( gold is currency only available for real money) , worth 250 euro
An auction in an online videogame for a virtual good(tank model) where wargaming creates arteficial scarcity and decides how many are sold as they control the entire market, is despicable, goes against any rules in a free market, and not even legal in the real world
all they had to do was create the virtual shortage, set a very small amount and sheep consumers were bidding ALL their ingame gold ...
this industry is getting beyond disgusting and im ashamed to even be remotly affiliated with it. New laws are needed this very minute to protect consumers from these predatory vultures
No pixel item is worth 250 euro when the company can just print more whenever they want, its not a rare drop or even an economy, its literaly some pencil pusher setting a number in a database file, and he can add more whenever he wants
This isnt even a new unique tank, its an existing tank painted yellow ...
If it was only the virtual currency u can farm ingame, i might be semi ok with it , but using the real money currency u can only get with real money .... despicable
that tank is not just a reskin - it gets quadruple bonus, instead of the regular double premium bonus
also you risk getting teamkilled in that tank regularly, because of ppl hate for it
Well, microtransactions mostly mess with the balance of games that would not exist without microtransactions. I sure hope the government does not venture into "nanny-state" territory and decide to simply kill off these games to make them perfectly balanced. After all, no game = perfect balance.
If a game is only viable by using such a profit model then it should not exist in the first place. Abusing people's addictions and obsessions should be discouraged. You are supposed to sell a product that has value, not actively trying to get people hooked on luck-based rewards or manipulate them into spending small amounts of money regularly. There are people that have spent many thousands of dollars on mobile pay2win bullshit games, people need to be protected by their government.
Well, microtransactions mostly mess with the balance of games that would not exist without microtransactions. I sure hope the government does not venture into "nanny-state" territory and decide to simply kill off these games to make them perfectly balanced. After all, no game = perfect balance.
If a game is only viable by using such a profit model then it should not exist in the first place. Abusing people's addictions and obsessions should be discouraged. You are supposed to sell a product that has value, not actively trying to get people hooked on luck-based rewards or manipulate them into spending small amounts of money regularly. There are people that have spent many thousands of dollars on mobile pay2win bullshit games, people need to be protected by their government.
I have the right to buy and drink alcohol even if there are addicts whose lives are ruined by alcohol. Companies are allowed to sell alcohol in spite of its negatives. The rule here seems to be that "people are responsible for their own alcohol consumption".
On the level of principle, the situation with microtransactions and loot boxes is precisely the same. I have the right to play games with microtransactions and to buy microtransactions, even if there are addicts whose lives are ruined by it. Companies have the right to create and offer such games in spite of the negatives.
I believe we should live in a world where the rights of the capable are not limited by the shortcomings of the less capable. If needed, apply taxes and use the money to offset some of the negatives (like with the high taxes on alcohol). It's the same reason I'll always be in favor of legalizing marijuana even if I don't smoke it myself.
"people are responsible for their own alcohol consumption", complete bullshit, a bar owner is LIABLE and LEGALLY OBLIGATED TO REFUSE alcohol to drunk people
so ur argument is fundamentally flawed
same way a game company should be liable for the financial destruction of a kid/parents credit card for VIRTUAL goods, the lootbox was not developed for your game enjoyment, it was purely researched and developed to take ur money one euro at a time by pencilpushers and sales psychologists and marketing peepz. Period
U make it sound like the world is full of 99% capable people, when reality has shown there is maybe 9% capable and 90% completely brainwashable through peer pressure, addvertizements and herd mentality and big companies know this from the zero moral marketing companies they hire.
why do u think the wealth of the top 5% of the world equalds 90% of the rest of the world ...
My argument is that "A supermarket is not liable if you buy 10 bottles of vodka and drink them all and die." So I disagree that my argument is fundamentally flawed. I mean, even fucking gambling is allowed - a system where there's a trivial mathematical proof showing that it's simply a net negative for the consumer - because the idea is to let people be in control of their own lives. How is an adult gambling any better than an adult spending $ on microtransactions or loot boxes? (Hint: it's not.)
Destroying one's own life? Allowed. Destroying someone else's without them having a say in it? Not allowed. It really should be that simple.
On a related note, regardless of how the laws are setup (since they do differ from country to country), how will the population ever learn to deal with these things if you let the government prevent them from ever exposing themselves to any option that might harm them? I mean, we could isolate everyone in a bubble where there's nothing that can hurt them, but where's the fun in that?
in your world, we would live in a mad max world with that way of thinking , its the job of the 9% still sane to stop the wicked get away with their shit, u keep mentioning and hiding behind the word "adults" when u know full well most of these free to play games are targetted to minors, like the banks used to say, get and enslave them young, give them a free credit card and account when they turn 16... despicable
You say "most of these free to play games are targeted to minors". I disagree with that statement. Many are targeted at individuals who are willing to pay large amounts of money for the satisfaction of having something unique in their favorite game - a behavior which might be considered unhealthy in some cases.
But more importantly, even if that statement was true, I disagree even more fundamentally with the logic that "since some/most of these free to play games are targeted to minors, we should shut them all down - including those that are doing nothing bad."
There's more I could say on this, but I think we might be diverging from the original post a bit... I just wanted to provide an opinion that might be the minority here, but still deserves consideration. It's more of a philosophical question at this point anyway.
Your arguments are utterly flawed because a minor cannot easily go buy 20 bottles of vodka. I'm not entirely concerned about adults spending money on pathetic and pointless microtransactions for the epeen factor - I'm talking about kids who don't know any better, and parents who either are too ignorant or too stupid to control their credit cards.
I've dealt with the aftermath first hand, repeatedly, and I promise you, while it is definitely not always the parent's fault, it is ALWAYS the fault of the developer/platform, that makes buying these things so damned easy.
There is absolutely NO reason these things cannot be refunded. It is a non-existant item of no value, and if it should be refunded within say, 14 days - it should be. Maybe autoban accounts that abuse this feature for a week or something. But by FAR the biggest issue is the utter lack of spending limits. Noone with an adult brain should be buying thousands of punds/dollars/whatever of Fortnite points, or whatever else there is. Common sense tells us this is probably either an error, or a problem - and like the landlord of a pub being responsible for serving a drunk more alcohol, publishers should be made to be legally responsible for ensuring overspending cannot happen.
Fuck their profits, if they have to rely on the greed, ignorance or complete lack of willpower to make money... then they're clearly abusing people to make their profits.
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:puke: so creative ... and amazing shit being "funded", minecraft pocketed all the money and made a failed card game, epic dunked all their money into the epic store ...
