MudMan

Hah. I like the witch trial logic there. “If you like this thing it proves the thing is evil brainwashing because nobody would like it otherwise”. May as well dunk them in water and see if they drown.

The thing is, this sort of online panic has absolutely had an influence. The industry has moved away from lootboxes, even in cases where they make sense (see the Marvel Snap example) because they’ve become terrible PR, and the panic has led to multiple countries exploring new regulations or applying existing gambling regulations, whether that makes sense or not.

So you don’t have a lot of influence, but you definitely have some, and the unintended consequences of that influence lead to things like Brazil being on track to roll out invasive age checking procedures in gaming spaces without getting much pushback from the wider international gaming public because they’re all too excited about the anti-loot box lip service they’ve added on the side.

So maybe don’t let yourself too off the hook. There was a slippery slope here and you are one of many gleefully going “weeee!” on the way down. Your aggressive stance here sure had more of an impact than all the “told you sos” I’m about to send if and when Steam starts requiring people provide some type of personal ID to log in.

All loot boxes are chance based, but first of all, I don’t know which laws you’re talking about. Brazil’s? Guessing the US because when somebody has a case of the default human it’s typically an American, but who knows.

But also, I’m not a US lawyer, but I seriously doubt US gambling laws requires all games to have a flat probability, mostly because… that’s not how games of chance work anywhere, and definitely not how blind boxes work anywhere and blind box products are not gambling anyway, which is the entire point.

It’s still a non sequitur and I still have no idea what you’re trying to say.

I did not say “less predatory”. I don’t agree that current trends on monetization are any more or less predatory than loot boxes. Hell, you don’t seem to think they’re any more or less predatory, either, given your assessment of grind.

I think you may have misread the point I was making. You should give that quote block another look.

But to reiterate, no, it’s not “wildly preferable” to grind through a battlepass than to have loot boxes. I prefer loot boxes, honestly. I know I’m not gonna grind to the end of a pass each season, even in the games I do pay regularly, so I would much rather have a randomized pull and get something fun every now and then.

And of course that’s all for incidental engagement reward nonsense, which is pointless anyway, paid loot boxes are fundamental to certain games. I liked CCGs when they were made with paper and I still do now. If you ask me I’d much rather have the randomized mishmash of decks you get from loot box-driven Hearthstone than the rigid meta you get in Marvel Snap because they are bending over backwards to still monetize just as hard while not having randomization because people keep whining about it.

And hey, you don’t have to play Hearthstone if you don’t want to, and if people are concerned about the effect on kids that’s what age ratings are for, doesn’t affect me. But I don’t think it should be banned and I sure as hell don’t think the alternative is “wildly preferable” at all. You don’t have to agree, but that cuts both ways, and I don’t appreciate people trying to make their preference a matter of law.

Did you respond to the right thing? This seems like a non sequitur, so maybe the threading got messed up?

Yeah, but I actually like multiple games built around blind boxes, and I sure don’t like you telling me what I can like.

You’re just passing your own tastes as morality and I don’t care for that any more when it’s gamers pushing their preferences than when it was pearl-clutching moms and politicians trying to score cheap points.

I mean, there is plenty of justification for it in that blind boxes allow for a random distribution of items while still controlling rarity and allowing for balance, which is why every single videogame in existence that does any sort of randomized or widespread lootable equipment does loot tables. It’s not just a very useful technique, it’s a fundamental one you engage with constantly. If you want to make a case for monetization of randomized loot being beyond some line we can have that argument, but the method is useful and it won’t be “figured out”, it predates videogames altogether.

Frankly, it’s not even the worst option out there. The sad irony of the entire moral panic is that the part that got figured out is an alternative monetization-to-engagement pathway. Several, in fact. Overbearing regulation of loot boxes is no longer a dealbreaker because everybody knows how to do seasonal cosmetics and battlepasses now, so all the features of paid loot boxes can be done without the randomized elements people latch on to.

The part you can’t quite get is the outright advantage that loot boxes will sometimes give people decent stuff without having to grind, which all the current alternatives don’t do. I’d take randomized tables over mandatory grind any day, but I certainly don’t want to ban either.

It’s not easy to avoid unless you live in Vegas. I live right above a gambling establishment. Nobody bats an eye and it’s fully government-sanctioned.

Not every country is the US, friend. Including, you know… Brazil.

But hey, at least you have the intellectual honesty to include all the IRL blind boxes people actually like in your assessment. You still have this pretty much backwards, but at least it’s consistently backwards.

That’s not sarcasm, I do think that’s better than the baseline of “make the game mechanic I don’t like illegal, but keep all this 100% analogous stuff I do like” vibes-based approach to demanding regulation.

I still disagree super hard that “bad for our psyche” is the bar for banning stuff. Age ratings, sure. But I would very much prefer to keep tobacco, pot, alcohol, porn and yes, Magic the Gathering and Hearthstone available for anybody mature enough to make that choice by themselves.

Yeah, I’m kinda with you. I played a lot of it, in the tens of hours, but I didn’t finish it. It may be at the peak of self-indulgent simulation for simulation’s sake in open world games.

I think I’m glad it exists. Somebody had to do this, like somebody had to do CJ getting fat when he eats and slim when he runs, right? That’s a fun thing for someone to have done in a successful mainstream game release.

But there’s a reason that didn’t show up elsewhere, and that’s also a good thing.

I mean, it’s a very nice looking game, which may have something to do with it having about ten times the budget of your average game from a major publisher (the term AAA is now entirely meaningless and I refuse to use it without clarification). Guessing that helps.

I’m not sure “clean and sharp” is a positive value, though. This becomes a problem because I don’t know what people mean, and people often don’t know what they mean, either. Good picture quality doesn’t need to be “sharp”. Things that are in focus realistically aren’t impossibly pin-sharp, that’s a videogamey thing. Shadows definitely aren’t ever sharp. And of course the picture you presented is anything but sharp, since it’s… well, a pretty low-quality 1080p image, so the trees are blobs, the hair is a grainy mess and distant models are blobby.

OK, here’s a true fact I would think is common knowledge but it may not be: A slightly older game on higher settings often looks better than a newer game on lower settings. Remedial performance options are often very compromised and not really meant to be used. Expensive features can look bad on minimum settings and newer games can be built around more expensive stuff and look off when those settings are toggled off. Lower resolution rendering of a better looking image can produce worse results than higher res output for a worse looking image for a number of reasons.

That doesn’t mean newer games look worse, though. It’s just the nature of the beast in PC gaming and it has been for forty years. That’s why it’s always been cool to go back to old games when you update your hardware.

Yeeeah, I’ve encountered this argument a few times, particularly when this issue was more salient and, I’m not gonna lie, it’s absolutely baffling.

As in, it seems to imply that gambling is better because there’s a chance of winning something of genuine monetary value.

Which, let me be clear, is the exact opposite of how this works. The possibility of recouping losses or winning money is the actual problem with gambling. The potential monetary reward is a major component of gambling and one of the meaningful reasons why loot boxes are… nowhere near as bad?

Digital loot boxes are typically not allowed to be translated into actual money by design, both as a security measure and because that’s how actual gambling works. Betting for real money is way worse than buying some digital thing that only has value inside a game. Because, you know, in that scenario you know you’re spending that money and it’s not coming back, it’s just a matter of spending it on what. You’re not getting enticed with the fiction that you’re investing money or not actually spending it because you could potentially get it back. That’s why kids aren’t typically allowed to bet in a casino but they still get to buy Magic the Gathering packs (and let’s be clear, the fact that Magic has a thriving gray market around it makes it worse than digital loot boxes as well).

I try to keep this conversation respectful but, honestly, hearing this argument is one of the surefire ways to know the person talking about this has no idea what they’re talking about.

Even if you took the hardcore view that loot boxes are outright gambling, gambling isn’t illegal for adults. Why would loot boxes be treated more stringently than online casinos, even in your scenario?

Also, it doesn’t incentivize age verification systems, age verification systems are now mandatory. They are needed to be able to sell any games marketed at adults, including porn games, games with loot boxes and presumably any other game with an 18 and up rating by their official ratings board.

The loot box panic has mostly been another variant of the “will someone thing of the children” violence panic of the 90s. Just like then, age ratings and parental controls should have been the solution, but because gamers were too busy being angry and self righteous online they went with it to this point.

I don’t know Silver Lake, but in the thread Schreirer made when breaking this someone suggested they are not specifically in that business. Which makes sense, that’d be an absolute waste of 50 billion, they’re definitely not getting that money back by breaking EA up. They have very, very little marketable IP or assets, considering their major moneymakers are all licensed games, at least outside the Battlefield franchise.

Silver Lake owned GoDaddy for a while. They owned Dell for a while. They seem to have a history of buying companies in big deals, taking them private for a while, then having them go public again later.

I have no idea what that process looks like, but this a) seems to fit their pattern, and b) seems to match other big tech companies that they’ve bought and continued to be a going concern indefinitely.

I don’t know that “good news” is how I’d describe it, but it doesn’t mean EA is done, at least up front.

Well, you do need to hire someone, get them set up with access to the text database and then you need to implement the updated lines in-game and test and then bug fix anything that breaks anything, presumably. And then make the patch, submit it and have it go live, although for China presumably that’d be Steam-specific and have no actual first party approval process?

The headline is either confusing or a touch clickbaity. It’s mixed for Chinese language reviews specifically. The overall (and the English reviews, too) are at Very Positive.

But hey, fair, they messed up with the localization and apparently some bits of the launch. It’s gonna get you on the user reviews.

When were those days again?

I whined about the FF7 localization for years. Eventually met one of the guys in charge for separate reasons and whined at him about it. We were both quite old by then.

Some local games media in the late 90s and early 2000s here had a policy that no localization or bad localization would knock 1 to 2 points off the review score automatically, regardless of how good or bad the rest of the game was.

He did address it to the single largest individual investor. Unfortunately that also happens to be the one guy he’s supposed to be trying to get fired.

Guessing he’s not going to be game, and I doubt the multiple investment groups making billions out of this thing are much more concerned, especially since despite this information beign publicly available, none of them are even mentioned in the petition itself either.

The fact that people keep linking me to this guy’s video only reinforces my suspicion that getting traffic to this guy’s Roblox-focused Youtube channel is far more of a goal here.

It would, but I saw a link here like a day ago on a site I’m not familiar with, clicked through it once on a different computer than I’m on now, read it and moved on with my day, so finding it again may be as hard for either of us, I’m sorry to say.

It seems like it can make some drives disappear from the system under heavy use and under some cases make SMART misbehave.

It’s pretty bad, but so far direct reports are apparently only coming from Japan, so it may be a regional thing. Definitely a wait and see scenario.

Having read a proper report on this earlier today, that headline is infuriating.

From the concept of a “gaming SSD” to the implication that the drives are being physically damaged… Maybe there’s a reason why written gaming media died, you guys.

No, it wasn’t.

Look, I know big numbers are hard and human brains don’t want to parse them, but come on.

You’re talking about an article on Dexerto, a medium that I’m sure has done great work between its founding and my just realizing they exist right now. There are a few other articles online, most in smaller sites or in aggregators.

You are talking about a massive social-media-meets-gaming-platform the size of Twitter on a good day, orders of magnitude bigger than the reach any of this crap got. This is nothing. It’s a PR stunt from a few youtubers, which I hate that I have now focused on enough to understand.

I agree that it’s designed to drum up attention. Just not that this attention is meant to be effective at anything at all beyond, one suspects, driving viewership, because it sure as hell isn’t targeting anything that may cause any action.

Maybe this is why people don’t pay attention to Roblox despite being as large as Steam. The dissonance is just too large. It sucks, because despite the remarkable trivialization of the issue there should be way more eyeballs on this. Real eyeballs. Eyeballs attached to hands holding pens that can sign proper regulations, or at least scare some knee-jerky intermediaries.

Somehow a thousand assholes with customer support addresses managed to ban half of the smut on Steam, but these people figured out they’d gather a hundred times as many signatures and point them at the one person in the entire planet guaranteed to ignore them.

I am tired. I don’t want to think about this anymore.

By design in that, as I said above, this doesn’t seem like a serious attempt to generate any change but rather a bit of a tantrum from users that don’t necessarily want meaningful changes to the crap Roblox does.

Think more Modern Warfare 2 boycott than “EU regulators looking into loot boxes”.

Considering that the whole thing stems from drama stirred by Roblox streamers and youtubers who make a living from Roblox itself I’m not feeling particularly tinfoily.