MudMan

OK, I’ll give you one more go around this loop because the self contradiction is too obvious and I want to see how you parse it, then I’m calling it.

So… why did you say “sounds big”?

Here:

What I’m seeing in this thread isn’t a technical objection so much as an emotional one: people who like inhalers don’t like that the impact, when expressed in familiar terms, sounds big.

Why do you think people are mad that the number “sounds big”?

Is the number big or small?

The headline makes it sound big, we both agree on that. A lot of the response is putting it in perspective: actually, 530000 cars is a small part of the new cars sold in one year (about 5%) and a tiny part of the total car pool (about 0.2%). So why does it sound big? If the implied comparison is with car emissions, shouldn’t it sound small?

The reality is the number isn’t big or small, it is some amount. And the study’s big takeaway isn’t that the emissions are big, so much as that, of the multiple models of inhalers one generates signficant emissions and others don’t, so the emissions from one type may be unnecessary.

So why does the headline make the number sound big?

You spend a lot of time setting arbitrary rules for what is or isn’t misleading, and all of that is entirely fallacious bullshit. Misleading means what it means, you don’t set the parameters for what is misleading.

But the interesting part is you accidentally, explicitly explained why the headline is misleading (i.e. it creates an emotional response about the scope of the problem that is disproportionate to its own unit of measurement, presumably to deliberately generate more engagement with the content). That is a technical objection, not to the number being reported but to how its being reported. It’s an objection on the headline writing technique, which is what people are complaining about.

Now, you won’t acknowledge this, because you’re in too deep and arguing with multiple people about this and you’re not going to just go “huh, I guess that’s a thing” and move on with your day, so there’ll be some mental gymnastics about it. But come on, you do get it, right? At this point it’s not that hard and you have implied that you get it already.

Yeeeeeah, the headline in isolation is a bit misleading and unfortunately this seems in line with some recent Nintendo moves where they go after people who slipped on something adjacent.

I have no idea how things work wherever this guy lives, but over here soliciting remuneration would be the difference between this being a problem or not.

That said, I still hope they lose this and I have so many serious questions about how Reddit wouldn’t be liable if the content is illegal and they didn’t do anything to moderate it. This is a weird one and it’s worth keeping an eye on, although I would imagine Nintendo is hoping the lawsuit itself acts as a deterrent regardless.

OK, so for a start, it’s one thing for multiple people to disagree with you and another for them to be dogpiling. Given that the original poster is not hostile to the headline, I’d say the reaction is… fairly genuine? I can definitely tell you I’m not particularly emotional about it… you’re just wrong on the technicalities of the headline, so people telling you that isn’t that surprising. I’d argue the framing of the headline is actively seeking that outcome, it’s arguably ragebaiting.

Also, I get that you don’t understand why the headline is problematic, but I’m telling you that’s you not understanding how to make a good headline. I’m trying to explain how framing shapes the message, particularly with a headline and particularly online. This isn’t some esoteric thing, it’s something journalists actually study and train about. This headline is meant to cause a reaction and frame the issue a certain way by providing a misleading comparison. That’s bad form.

The conclusion of the paper being reported on is neutral: inhalers emit some amount of pollutants, most of those emisions are caused by a specific type of inhaler, there’s some incentive to find a less pollutant alternative. All good so far, as often with these problems the study itself is fine.

The headline takes that neutral takeaway and frames it a certain way. I actually would believe that the journalist that messed it up did so because they thought “cars are understandable to most Americans” and didn’t think it through. Mistakes happen. Being less charitable, but likely more realistic, the journalist probably thought framing it in terms of “your asthma is as bad for the environment as road traffic” was a deliberate way of increasing impact by providing an out-of-context statistic to generate more traffic. Either way, if I were an editor here I would have asked for a revision to avoid causing that bit of friction and misinformation.

It’s okay to not get that because… well, the flipside of that being a bit of a technicality is that it’s fine to not be cued in enough to know. But it’s weird to double down on how the undesirable outcome they are causing (people are mad at the framing) is what justifies the mistake in the first place. After a few goes around the loop that just comes across as willfully ignorant.

Also, it’s weird that you are asking how they should have phrased it when my first post already provided alternatives. You keep coming across as not having read the stuff you’re responding to, which doesn’t help with the whole “willfully ignorant” thing.

This is a very weird post, in that my only recourse is to point you back to the post I already made. Did you only read the first line and posted the rest of it without reading anything else? The argument of the post you’re responding to isn’t about the number of cars being high or low, it’s why reporting the number in relation to the number of cars at all isn’t good practice.

Seriously, go back and treat the previous post as your response. It will do wonders to understanding why its “breaking my brain” (it’s not) and why I’m “dogpiling” (I’m not).

It’s also only 5% of the new cars registered in California alone, by your own data.

And that’s why it’s bad to compare things to cars. Framing is an argument. Comparing something to the equivalent car emissions frames the issue a certain way. By providing an absolute number of cars it makes it seem like it impacts emissions the same as a significant chunk of the car industry (it does not, it is, again by your count, 0.1% of the total).

The headline “Inhalers drive carbon emissions equivalent to 530,000 cars each year, study shows” reads very differently to “Inhalers drive carbon emissions equivalent to 0.1% of the cars sold each year, study shows”, which in turn doesn’t read the same as “Inhalers emit 2.5 million tons of CO2 each year”. All of which don’t cover the main takeaway from the study, which is that specifically metered dose inhalers are surprisingly pollutant and more research should be done on how to effectively replace them.

I can’t tell you how easily they could switch to low emission inhalers, but I can tell you what a bad headline looks like, and this is one.

“New” is a bit of a stretch, I already owned all of those on GoG. But hey, if them cherry picking which games they’ll vow to patch themselves helps them get a marketing hit I’m all for it.

Also, Expedition 33 launched in there, along with the newer Tomb Raider games. Am I a bit mad that they didn’t go for it at launch and made me get it on Steam instead? I am. Still glad there’s a DRM-free option, though.

Yeeeeah, I think we’re good here.

But you’re not describing a loot box. That’s not how loot boxes work.

I mean, for one thing, 1 in 4 doesn’t mean you should get a payout in the fourth try. You could buy a hundred things with a 1 in 4 chances and never win. Random means random.

But precisely for that reason loot boxes sometimes implement “mercy rules” that increase the odds on repeated tries to prevent people being frustrated because squishy human brains are bad at understanding probability intuitively.

But the way look boxes work is by having a loot table, which associates a list of possible outcomes to a weight and runs a random check against that table each time. It’s how it worked on pen and paper Dungeons and Dragons in the 70s and it’s how it works in monetized loot boxes today. Different implementations can have different odds, each game can offer different box types with different probabilities, but if we’re talking about loot boxes we’re talking about that.

I don’t know what game you were playing. I suppose a loot table with 75% of nothing and 25% of a single hardcoded item is still a valid loot table, but it’s overly simplistic and now how it’d typically be implemented. If you’re playing some game that gives you an on-screen representation of a paid item under those rules and you can show that they are misrepresenting the odds you can and should go flag them in front of whatever body regulates advertising in your country, as well as to whatever platform is offering the game. It’s very likely that it’d be breaking multiple regulations entirely unrelated to gambling, both public and private. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen (mobile games in particular are full of really gross design people aren’t following up on enough), but that isn’t a typical implementation and not the base complaint people have.

And again, can’t stress this enough, it’s probably already illegal regardless of whether loot boxes run on gambling rules or not.

Sure, but this isn’t a digital version of a casino game. It’s a digital version of a blind box. And there is no rule to say that trading cards or collectible card games need to have equal possibilities of yielding a specific card. That is very much the opposite of how that works. Physical blind box offerings absolutely use different probabilities and different content rarities.

So yeah, if you make up the categorizations, the rules and the mechanics we can be talking about whatever you want, but in the real world that’s not even close to how this works in either physical or digital form, which I guess explains the confusion.

For the record, multiple games offer a readout of the possibilities of getting a particular type of thing. I, you may be surprised to know, haven’t checked the probabilities being accurate in all of them, but I’m gonna need some specific proof of someone fudging them, because that’s a problem of false advertising at that point, forget gambling rules that don’t even apply.

Also, 1% is a HUGE drop rate for rare items in loot boxes, both physical and digital. 1% is, as it turns out, 1 in 100. Lots of games, collectibles and other types of blind boxes feature way more than 100 tries at opening a loot box, even for fully unmonetized ones. If anything there’s a bit of a cognitive bias there, where people are very bad at instinctively understanding how percentages work, which makes disclosing loot box percentages a bit of a challenge.

Look, I’m not sure what games you play or your understanding of how any of this works but, respectfully, you’re misunderstanding it pretty deeply.

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.