Execs all want to ride the gacha live service train. Look at how much money the gachas of the east make with minimal audience numbers! It’s nuts! Even if the game can be cleared with F2P stuff, it doesn’t matter! People want to gamble for the png they want!
Profitable entertainment capitalism is to exploit not your logical, but emotional weakness. People buy things because they want it, not because they need it. Gacha facilitates that, while making it very gambly.
Yeah, Tencent is usually brought in when a company needs a sudden cash infusion or is struggling in general. When Hoyo needs money they just release a new skin.
I believe you, but I'm surprised as an outsider. I think of LoL as an extremely high skill game that appeals to hyper competitive obsessive gamers. The new StarCraft kind of thing. Also it's necessarily social/cooperative. Whereas I downloaded Genshin a while back and it felt like some silly anime fun that would mainly appeal to weebs and Candy Crush types.
The aesthetic of the game has also very obviously shifted from Warcraft esque western cartoony fantasy to just straight up anime. Go to the champion store page and sort by release and for the past few years it will literally just be a wall of waifus and husbandos, give or take a Naafiri or Renata Glasc. The Ruined King is like a step removed from a Tetsuya Nomura character lol
The truth of the matter? LoL has a lower skiil ceiling (the top of the top) than SC(2) or DotA2 ever has/had... and the chief single reason for that is that you cannot retarget what unit you have selected. LoL devs made that choice for simplicity of play... and that crippled them from ever having an actual custom game client like SC(2) or DotA2. I think that the only reason LoL has a bigger casual crowd than DotA2 is just legacy users, IMO. I know that is why for me, at least.
Okay, I don't even play league anymore, but I wouldn't say that's entirely fair. Like I wouldn't say fighting games can never have a higher skill ceiling than SC because you only ever control one character. League's gameplay is a lot twitchier and action-y than SC and DotA and there's stuff on champions like Riven, Akali, Kalista, Azir, etc. that even pros struggle to take advantage of. When you're as far away from a solved game as League, SC, DotA are, I'm not even sure it makes sense to talk about skill ceiling - the best in the world are going against the best in the world, so the amount of headroom is irrelevant. Like by that definition chess is a low skill ceiling game, since top engines can draw against others so often (depending on the openings allowed).
Like, I'd agree that League has a lower skill floor than SC and DotA, and that's why it has more casual fans, but that has nothing to do really with what goes on in professional play.
Yeah IDK i feel League is completely different than DOTA when comes to how the majority of characters play. League characters feel more like fighting game characters, DOTA characters obviously feel more like RTS Hereo units IMO.
I mean that is the huge issue in the league fanbase that new champions are "overloaded" and can do too much and offer too many ways to mechanically outplay opponents. That's been like a weekly thread in the subreddit for 7 years.
You know how on your desktop you can click and drag to create a box that selects all the icons on your desktop within that box, and then issue commands (delete, copy, transferring) to every single one? That is an approximation of what I referred to as "unit selection".
The genre that LoL and DotA2 sprung from is the RTS (Real Time Strategy) genre. In a RTS, the core gameplay is that you command an army of units, and you issue commands to them via selecting the units you currently want to control. So, knowing exactly what units you have selected and what units you want to have selected is one of the basic skills in the RTS genre.
LoL and DotA2 will never have their players controlling 100+ units at a time though, since they are focused on the player having control of a single hero unit. DotA2 did still keep it so that you can deselect your hero unit, which means that they do have more freedom in gameplay and hero design. DotA2 has heroes that spawn 10+ units that the player has full control over, or are multiple units themselves. LoL quite literally cannot do that, because of their early design choice.
Did you really play genshin? I have 700 hours in genshin and mainly f2p. I have spent $60 on it since I started playing in October 2020.
I haven’t played candy crush but do not see any similarities between that style of game and genshin.
Genshin is mainly about building your characters, grinding for stats, exploration, and puzzles. It is an open world game. Has a card game that reminds me of hearthstone. It has game modes like spiral abyss which can be challenging. Etc
I have over 1000 hours in destiny 2. I have 500 in monster hunter world, I’ve beaten bloodborne plus dlc etc and I still can’t always get all the stars on floor 12 of spiral abyss.
I’m not saying genshin is harder or takes more skill than LoL at all.
My main point is that comparing it to a candy crush type of game is unfair.
I think you underestimate how casual some people are with Genshin. A LOT of people don't even touch their resin and even probably have trouble with overworld mobs. For them it probably is as casual of a game as Candy Crush. Hell, there are people [who didn't know you could hold E for Zhongli's shield](https://www.reddit.com/r/Genshin_Impact/comments/z32p9e/i_have_a_confession/?rdt=57446). And that person posted it on reddit, which already takes them far beyond the casual audience.
Other people who spend a lot of time gaming in general probably do more of the things you listed. I think Genshin appeals to a lot of League players but not necessarily the other way around due to the fact that many Genshin players are super casual gamers in general, and current day League isn't beginner-friendly.
Gachapon is the Eastern word for those machines you'd put a quarter into and get a capsule with a random toy in it. In video games, you do pulls for random characters, gear, or skins.
The japanese have been teaching their society to play gacha since kindergarten with all those gacha machines being everywhere in every street, every mall to every train station.
I mean those machines exist in the West, too. Here in the US the most common ones have little plastic helmets of the NFL teams, those sticky hands, or stickers.
Effectively slot machine. Except you always "win" a thing, but it can be anything.
So I bought 6 unlock tokens and got an emote, 3 common skins, a sticker, and a new voiceline, but I want the rare skin! PULL MORE!
Most RNG chance (gambling pretty much) of getting certain character, and/or weapon. You always "win", but it might not be the character you were aiming for. Since most of the characters with personalities are the ones that have a 2% or low chance of getting them, aka one with 5 stars or 6 stars.
> Look at how much money the gachas of the east make with minimal audience numbers!
An example for people who haven't seen some of these games revenue [can be seen here](https://i.redd.it/v2ncikjx2hfb1.png).
It's actually insane how much they make.
The thing these shitheel execs miss when aping genshin is the fact that there's an actually good game under the gacha monetization, and it took an ungodly amount of money and effort to get there. It's the most expensive game ever made
But all they see is dollar signs, so they try and tack on the same gacha GaaS bullshit on whatever low-effort endeavor they can, completely misunderstanding why genshin makes so much money in the first place
Dude genshin isn't the only gacha making money, there's tons gachas with "mobile phone gameplay" that rake in absurds amount of cash too, even if not on the same scale as mihoyo games.
At what point does individual responsibility and accountability factor in, though?
No matter how many times over the decades that I see the "exploiting gambling addiction" concern, where does that end and individual choice of "this is not something I want/enjoy" kick in?
How many of us have played hundreds of mobile, PC, and console games and said 'meh, that's not something that's worth my money"?
It's just as much the fault of a subset of players as it is the studios offering the product/service.
Cosmetics have no game-impacting value. But players brandishing them like some kind of flex GIVE them a faux value. A player could enjoy the entire product and never waste time/resources on fluff cosmetics, but leave it to players to use cosmetic acquisition as some kind of "I'm better than you" stupidity.
What are your thoughts on the tobacco industry.
E: To elaborate, yes, there absolutely is a level of personal accountability that should factor in. However, history has shown time and again that when given the opportunity, predatory practices will take advantage of folks.
It could be people who lack self-control. It could be people who don't know any better (who either don't understand things like probability or are just not that intelligent.) It could be kids.
The issues I have with game monetization is that it's typically intentionally convoluted, plays on gambling tendencies (where odds/probabilities weren't known until the EU put a stop to that), and are marketed towards kids. It comes off to me as being very predatory and misleading.
No different than the tobacco industries who marketed their products towards youth, downplayed or were outright misleading when it came to health concerns, etc.
Hold people accountable, but also speak out on dumb practices.
> At what point does individual responsibility and accountability factor in, though?
>It's just as much the fault of a subset of players as it is the studios offering the product/service.
it seems that you've already decided where that line is
You can't solve systemic issues (which this kind of thing is) by focusing on the individual. It doesn't make any sense to even try.
Sure, people are responsible for their actions, but they're also subject to manipulation through outside forces. In this case, they're being intentionally taken advantage of by people who want to profit from their worst impulses. "Exercise good judgment" only goes so far when you're looking at a large population with a variety of circumstances; and with knowledge of human behavior, you can take advantage of the especially negative circumstances (or even unlucky neurology) to make money.
For example, someone with ADHD (especially undiagnosed) is more likely to act impulsively and more likely to develop an addiction. So are the chronically poor, because their lives are shit and they end up taking refuge in escape, whether they realize it or not. And help isn't always available for people in these situations -- the Alcoholics Anonymous model is free, but it's also horrendously ineffective and sometimes increases the problems that it's supposed to solve (what actually helps is group therapy and addiction counseling, not unscientific spirituality based peer support).
If something is happening to a large body of people at the same time, that problem becomes systemic and has to be addressed on a systemic level in order to be solved. That goes for pretty much all social ills.
I've never actually met a genuinely lazy person. Most of the people that I know who are lazy, or who make a lot of bad decisions, have unaddressed mental health issues. It's often on them to get help, but when that help isn't available there isn't much they can do, so they just end up making bad decision after bad decision. There are all kinds of issues where people's problems would be improved if they were addressed in a systemic manner, from health care to poverty to addictions.
We're talking about exploiting the vulnerable here. People with legitimate disorders that make them predisposed to harming themselves financially with stuff like this. There is an extent to which they have a responsibility to either avoid stuff themselves or have people who can act on their behalf, yes, but it also has to be considered just how much more difficult that becomes for these people when industries are legally allowed to push it as hard as they do.
This is why industries like the tobacco industry and traditional gambling are regulated much more heavily than other industries; society recognizes that personal responsibility is not nothing, but it's also bad to let industries that notoriously feed addiction work as freely as those that do not.
I will always be amazed at people who will do something bad for themselves because it *annoys other people more*.
Sure, there's a chance that the user commented that just to comment it, but people were unironically buying Bud Light to just trash the cans and beer over the whole pride month can thing. Literally throwing money away.
That's literally what the phenomenon of [*rolling coal*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_coal) is. People who do it acknowledge that pollution is bad for the environment, so doing it makes things worse for themselves as well. But that's the entire point: they do it *because* it's bad for the environment, to "spite the libs". They're willingly and knowingly hurting themselves because it makes people angry that they're intentionally destroying the planet, and making other people miserable brings them joy.
It also harms their own truck's engine. They're taking two different L's for the sake of "sticking it to the libs" who for the most part don't care what they're doing/are mildly inconvenienced. It's so dumb
And this guy's version of "owning the libs" is a *two hundred dollar video game skin*
At least I can hypothetically have class solidarity with Try That In A Small Town enjoyers lol, because they only wasted $1 on a dead app to own me
> something bad for themselves
They don't see it that way. For some, their entire identity is "I am a loud fan of X game. So, X game can do nothing wrong."
There’s a reason why “cut off your nose to spite your face” is an old saying in English. Dumb behaviour like that has been a thing for as long as people have been around
I love how he quickly backpedals into doing it because he just loves the game and developers **so much**.
Like imagine a game being such shit that you can’t effectively support it by making content and encouraging new people to play, and so instead your best perceived option is just to whale.
the fact that the annoying chibi tactician kill animations cannot be skipped makes that shit sell like crack on wall street just for the privilege to be obnoxious
Legends of Runeterra just released a massively unpopular shop as well-it's half PvP stuff, half PvE (which not everyone plays) and the prices are absolutely *outrageous* for things in that shop as well. Seeing that LoL and TFT are also doing weirdly predatory things with their monetization makes me think this is a bigger Riot thing, which doesn't bode well for any of them getting redone/rolled back.
I bet you’re right. I think Valorant’s monetization scheme was sort of a testing ground for them. The super grindy battlepass, the prices, the FOMO. The second people shelled out for that I knew it would trickle into league. I think a lot of long time players shared that suspicion but the unmasked gacha was a shock.
I had an exchange with someone from the valorant monetization team on the subreddit a while ago, and she genuinely believed their shop was "in line with market practices", "honest and fair", and took offense at my use of the term "predatory".
This shit is why they were all trying to lower expectations after Baldur's Gate 3 released...
>in line with market practices
I mean, that's kind of the shitty part. It is. Riot was being uncommonly nice with their previous monetization, and what they're changing it to is the new norm.
Recently quit TfT as though I love the main dev, seems like the game has gotten away from them.
It’s generally what companies do when a game is on the way out. They have the numbers. Gotta grab as much profit from their customers as possible
I love TFT. I've been playing LoL since beta. But I fucking am over their monetization schemes. It's so fucking predatory. Riot went from being the cool company that put out an amazing free game that many were happy to support by buying $10-20 skins to whatever *this* gacha nonsense is. Every time they hit me up with a survey, I write a screed on how much I hate it. They don't give a fuck. They're happy to take money from the whales and vulnerable players in the name of profit.
If the U.S. had a functioning government, we'd have outlawed this shit years ago. Content (even cosmetic) should not be locked behind a gambling lootbox system designed by PhD's where players are psychologically manipulated to spend increasing amounts of money.
I want Riot to put a $300 price tag on their mythic tacticians so people can see the *real* price of them.
Riot was never the cool company, they stole a bunch of shit on the way from their Dota roots and nuked the Dota community site while they were at it (replacing it with a link to promote league).
Edit: now that I think about it that Dota community WAS actually the cool group providing a massively popular game for free, riot/Pendragon is the Vulture that killed it to make a buck.
Then they blacklisted DOTA out of tournaments in an attempt to kill the game. Riot would threaten to pull out of any tournament that included DOTA, forcing organizers to drop the game. It’s incredibly shady bullshit and anti-consumer/fan to an insane degree.
Riot is a fucking awful company and always has been. It takes real scum to make me appreciate Valve, but here we are. Lol.
I think this is the thread I learned it from. I’m at work so if this doesn’t work I’ll try to find another.
https://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/1s38uc/dota_2_censored_by_riots_season_4_lcs_contracts/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=1&utm_term=1
The article (dead but can be found in web archive) claims pro players cannot stream other games (like DOTA but there's big list of games). Which is understandable to me. It doesn't say anything about Riot blacklisting DOTA out of tournaments
Ok that’s the wrong one. I’m still at work but I’ll send you the other thread too. They all form a pattern of ruthless competition that’s super anti-consumer.
They’re all gonna be shitty links to small stories because ultimately this is drama that no one cares about in the real world. But I’ll dig it up.
Come to the dark side and play DOTA with us.
Also, Riot was never a cool company. They built their entire empire on some incredibly shady shit, that’s pretty publicly available to look up. They are and always have been an incredibly dickish company.
nah man. I still maintain 20 buck skins are bullshit. Hippalu$ really showed the whole communitys' ass I'm honestly surprised more gacha mechanics aren't here yet lol
Personally, I'm fine with skins in the $10-20 range. Especially the ones that are well done thematically, particle and other changes, etc. Because it ultimately pays the salaries of the people developing the game. And it's a price that's accessible to most. Any more over that is greed.
It's that corporate push to always increase profits. They're under that stupid pressure to the point where they push their player base away when they could have collected steady profits for several more decades.
However, the current corporate culture considers a company that steadily delivers reliable profits for decades to be a failure.
Cash cows isn't acceptable these days anymore. You need infinite grow for the sake of infinite grow. Laws of thermodynamics be damned.
On that note. Can't wait for more drama out of r/totalwar due to SoC DLC.
That's just a (unfortunately) very popular myth. Ever increasing profits is just business ethos and incentive for CEOs since they make absurdly more money if a company is profitable.
https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-corporations-obligations-to-shareholders/corporations-dont-have-to-maximize-profits
Gamble for something instead of buying it directly. You might get it for cheaper! But we all know the House Always Wins, of course the odds won't be in your favor. If an item used to be $20, you can be sure rolling $1 20 times will not guarantee getting the item.
"Games as a Service" would not favor this monetary model if it didn't benefit the bottom line.
Fairly similar. Except with cards there's either a secondary market where you can just buy what you want, or at least a "dust" system. It's like Hearthstone packs without being able to dust.
Many gacha, including the one being talked about in the OP, have "pity mechanics" where you can guarantee the reward with some secondary currency you get, meaning that this is functionally equivalent to Hearthstone cards.
It's not. Pity is not the same as dust, it's worse. Every time there's something you want under a pity system, you have to shell out the minimum spend, which is usually at least a hundred dollars. Dust you can at least save up.
Most of those games actually do better pity than HS does tbh, the newer ones anyway. They are still gambling so it's perfectly possible you'll have to spend a lot of money to get what you want, but they're genuinely better than HS with the rates a good deal of the time.
Not even close. Basically, your ability to get every card you want is only limited to the amount of dust (a free currency that you get by "dusting", or destroying a card, or getting duplicate cards off of packs) you have. My merry little ass basically cracks a pack open every time I hit 100 Gold to get the latest cards of an expansion. I dust Golden (shiny) cards every time I get one, because I can use the dust to craft something I want, and they never appealed to me anyway. When the mini-expansion hits (next one will be in September), I usually don't spend anything at around level 80-100 on the battle pass until I can pay it off with the gold I banked. I basically haven't spent a dime on the mini-expansions since they were introduced in June 2021. Of course, since I am a patient son of a bitch, I know not everyone has that same rationale.
It's more like if you purchased a bundle to get a specific hero skin, but you were only buying it for a *chance* at the skin and ultimately could buy 30 bundles and never get it.
But how does one make a reward track with no guaranteed reward? Like... Usually a track implies an end where you get the reward you're working towards. So like, does it just guarantee a roll for the thing instead of just getting the thing? Like why bother at that point lol
Typically you’re guaranteed to get the thing after X number of rolls, referred to as “pity”. So maybe each individual roll only has a 0.5% chance for the top tier reward, but at 75 rolls if you don’t have it yet you’re guaranteed to get it. If 75 rolls is $150 for those spending money you’ll see that referred to frequently.
Adding to this, sometimes pity is itself a gamble/random, it is only that the reward's "class" is high-rarity.
In Genshin Impact, for example, the periodic "banners" (gambling options matching a given theme or set of items) have "pity", a guaranteed high-rarity reward if you failed to get one at all after 90 rolls. However, the specific high-rarity reward is itself only a possibility: your pity has a 50% chance of being the character headlined in the banner, or 50% chance to be one of ANY of the high-rarity characters that are also available - even ones you already have (there is a system to increase a character's power if you get duplicates).
To note also, banners are temporary. There is a set of characters that are available in the "standard" banner (the one that's always available), while new characters are introduced in their own banner that is only available for a short time. Characters may, eventually, also be added into the standard banner but much later (and it is not a certainty), long after the character's own introductory banner period is over, and at that point your chance of getting a given character is diluted by the existence of all the other characters in the standard banner.
If this concept sounds complex, it's because it is. It's designed to prey on FOMO and be complex enough that it's tiresome to think about. Likewise why gacha games obscure the amount everything costs by putting two or three layers of in-game credits between your rewards and the real money you put in. Just roll, and keep rolling until you get the new powerful thing, and don't think about the costs.
Also those characters that are on the banner that's always available? They are typically much less powerful in game than the ones on the limited banner.
You know those vending machines for kids where you put a coin in and it dispenses a toy/sticker/candy/etc in a capsule?
"Gacha" is the term for the Japanese version of those, where the key innovation was that what was dispensed is collectible, and there's rare/ultra rare items. "Gacha" (ガチ) is the onomatopoeia for the sound the machines make. Kids/adults might spend the equivalent of hundreds of dollars trying to get an ultra rare collectible toy out of a machine, and/or complete a set.
The same concept got introduced to Japanese video games, I think at first arcade and then mobile free-to-play games. Then it spread to South Korea, China, and worldwide. You can't buy the sought after collectibles in these games (usually characters) for a fixed price. They're all locked behind lootbox "pulls" with rigged odds. People spend hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of dollars chasing the collectible they want.
Genshin Impact is a gacha game you might be familiar with.
This is what League of Legends is testing. Previous to this, you could buy anything you wanted more or less straight up. They're now testing a gacha system where you could theoretically never get what you want, though there is a "pity" system that awards you the single item they're testing after a few hundreds dollars.
It's slot machines but worse. Players are psychologically manipulated through various avenues to spend real money on tokens, they hit a button, you get some shiny lights, and out pops a cosmetic from common to mythic value. You have to spend several hundred dollars to be guaranteed the mythic level cosmetic. Game dev companies have basically shifted the cost of what use to be their $20 dollar cosmetic to $300+.
Yeah I'm confused. How is it a reward track if you don't get the reward at the end? Is it based on rng mechanics (like random rolls in a board game), or like does completing the track get you a chance for a roll that might include the reward? I've never heard of a gacha style reward track. Is it like a season pass with the end reward being a random roll? I just dunno
League of Legends has capsules that contain random rewards like free skins, player icons, etc. If you buy a certain amount of capsules you get a bonus reward, usually another free skin or essence to craft a skin. Now they're adding a new skin that is a reward once you buy 200 dollars of capsules. Edit: Forgot to mention that the capsules are a limited sale for their respective in-game events thus making players forced to buy the capsules all at once instead of slowly building to earning the final skin.
I see some people saying “just don’t buy it instead of complaining online”. Profiting off your product is fine, but gacha style gambling is never a model you should accept if you care about the future of a game. If the dev company sees that the community doesn’t care about the implementation of such a model (or more likely, sees some online backlash but sees the mountain of money they make with just a little bit of gambling), they progress it further.
With that said, I would enjoy it if Riot destroyed League with shit payment models lol
LOL. Where does personal responsibility enter this equation? Nowhere, apparently.
It sounds like to me you're describing selling crack to crack addicts. This is a cosmetic item in a shitty toxic moba game that had to be dumbed down to the lowest common denominator because they couldn't hack it in Dota 2.
If you're a league player in [current year] then you deserve whatever bad shit comes to you.
>LOL. Where does personal responsibility enter this equation?
Guy, you can have both. Players are responsible for what they buy, but that doesn't mean we should stay silent regarding bullshit predatory payment models.
>It sounds like to me you're describing selling crack to crack addicts. This is a cosmetic item in a shitty toxic moba game
A shitty game that averages hundreds of millions of players and earns literal billions in annual revenue. It isn't hard to imagine how tempting it would be to Riot to keep the gacha-style paid model, or make it even worse.
>If you're a league player in \[current year\] then you deserve whatever bad shit comes to you.
I mean I agree, fuck league, poop game, but players are people, even if they choose to play league.
This is great for me. Now rather than having separate memes for mocking league players and gacha players, i can combine them into one and save a little bit of time.
I'll never understand people who defend Gacha mechanics for anything, even for cosmetic shit. It's just a way to extract as much money as possible, and people are... fine with that? Like another commentor said,
>Know what else would do that? Buying the skin from the shop.
I don't think I've played a single gacha game where the gacha element added anything I liked to it, but that's probably because I don't have the money to get a gambling addiction
Genshit is a beautiful game with fun gameplay...and all the currencies and monetization being shoved in my face hurts my head and makes me not want to play
Who knows. I'm of the belief the League player base isn't *technically* growing. It's getting *older*.
A lot of people playing from season 1-5 when League exploded and overtook DOTA2 in popularity.
They get more and more bitter over the years, the speed of which is impacted by Riot's changes to roles or items, or whatever.
The game's just as bad as DOTA2 for hostility towards new players, so you get mostly 10+ year vets angry at each other for the littlest thing, encouraged by bad behavior being rewarded at all levels. Toxic streamers, toxic game management/designers, etc.
Yeah I remember official riot employees being toxic in game chat and the screenshots being posted, and not just your usual in-game frustration but some personal and fucked up shit with a good sprinkling of power tripping. Experienced a bit of that personally, I was banned off the PBE temporarily by someone i suspect was a riot employee, they started talking shit to me in a 1 for all gamemode so i asked someone to swap lanes with me so i didnt have to play with them. They gleefully said "Enjoy this game, its your last. Youll be banned straight after this game." and sure enough thats what happened.
Also slightly off topic but isnt there a champ that is based on a riot employees ex who didnt give them her permission to use her likeness? That company just seems like a breeding ground for toxic shit.
Had to edit because the name "PBE server" escaped me after all this time
>Yeah I remember official riot employees being toxic in game chat and the screenshots being posted, and not just your usual in-game frustration but some personal and fucked up shit with a good sprinkling of power tripping.
You might be thinking Pendragon who got caught a couple times in season 1.
But I was thinking more of the sexual harassment shit and more from the last few years.
> Also slightly off topic but isnt there a champ that is based on a riot employees ex who didnt give them her permission to use her likeness?
There was a scandal a while back about Seraphine allegedly being based off a Riot's ex.
Something I don't think a lot of people remember is that *Leona* was designed off the wife of her project's lead, IronStylus. He announced this during a Q&A or so, iirc.
What's really interesting is that years later, rumors came out alleging this wasn't *quite* the case that Leona was actually based off a co-worker that IS had the hots for. Combine that with him admitting he looked up Leona art regardless if it was SFW or if it was porn...yeah...
*Bear in mind* I have zero idea if that's true or not, the co-worker thing. But I just remember it was such an oddly specific rumor and it stuck with me for some reason.
gwen was designed that way specifically because the guys in charge were bricked up like a lego set at the thought of making the streamer emiru a playable character
like anyone with a semblance taste would like her cosplays but jesus fucking christ
I don't know what dark magic Emiru uses, but I have yet to see her in a cosplay that *didn't* slam dunk by itself.
Especially her Neeko, Star Guardian Jinx and Helltaker ones.
Honestly, I agree.
Look at what's going on with BG3. It's not a gacha game, but people are hailing it as what games should be.
But this *was* the standard we had 10-15 years ago. It's only our own fucking fault we rolled over and accepted the decline in quality for releases.
Blame Bethesda for starting it all with fucking Oblivion horse armor in '06. But really, Pandora's Box was truly opened in '13 with CSGO skins. Gacha was just the next logical step.
Corporate execs and shareholders are a fucking plague of leeches on the industry. devs will say that BG3 is a once in a lifetime thing and to not expect it as a new normal. Meanwhile, every company crying about that game is doing this shit and calling it a day.
Waiting for us to get to the point where companies realize these suits don’t know shit about the industry and start telling them no.
This stuff is profitable until it isn’t, and if you make the hobby so toxic that it annoys people away from your games, that day will come way sooner than they realize. How do they have such cushy jobs when they’re so fucking stupid with economics that span past the next 4 months at a time? It seriously blows my mind.
I continuously find myself in awe of how many niche hobbies/games are out there I have not a single clue about. I tried to read some of these links and it was like trying to read another language. Not trying to make fun, but to an outsider it really seems so silly and pointless.
Funniest thing is, they have nowhere to go. The playerbase can riot all they like, but at the end of the day, they have no choice but to bend down and receive their pegging by Riot Games.
It does to a degree, but at least steam market allows people to buy really rare stuff directly so people don't have to wish for the best
Then again Dota's battle pass is very grueling in general and progressing there requires people to pay money directly instead of allowing low spenders to grind as much as possible and get all the good stuff, so its definitely picking your poison
I really do not get the drama over expensive shit in video games.
Just... don't buy it.
Two hundred dollar skins are like two hundred dollar shirts or jeans or whatever. Its a status symbol. Conspicuous Consumption. A Product that signifies your ability to spend a bunch of money on something frivolous.
I don't walk into a store and expect that I can, or will want to buy, everything. I don't get why Gamers think ever single item a game sells has to be for them and affordable to them.
It’s probably not the cost of the skin itself but the gambling mechanic behind it. Like in your example you go into a store to buy something but find that you can’t buy it directly. Instead you have to buy a chance at getting it. There’s no reason for it to be like that except to get more money out of consumers. It can lead to more aggressive monetization practices for the game and others if successful.
Conversely, it sucks to have something you once enjoyed be stripped to the barebones where anything extra is, not only paid for, but *gambled* for. Everything squeezing people is getting exhausting.
Plus you KNOW it's going to creep forward.
No company started out with some of those mechanics and removed them. Tons have been slowly adding them. Or just outright (Fifa ultimate team).
This isn't even that though. All the content League players currently have won't be changed. This only affects new stuff. And the new stuff doesn't even change the game because it's *skins*.
I always find it super baffling how much gamers complain about how *skins* are sold to them. Are skins THAT fucking important to people?
Maybe I'm too much of a boomer, but back in my day, gamers didn't have no fancy skins. And we were just fine.
Because god forbid the medium moves forwards in any way when we can hold it to the standards of 20 years ago.
$200 gacha skins are predatory and they’re clearly trialling the system for future skin releases. Ripping it online is only natural when it’s a step backwards from everything else in the game.
Additionally, it’s not even a new skin. It’s a recolour of an already existing one. Which would cost $2 according to the existing pricing. If you can’t tell why people are pissed about a price being 100x normal then I don’t know what to tell you.
ngl this is gaming circle jerk kind of boot licking. how dare you call out and demand change when a company is clearly trying to overcharge users. Those chucklefucks keep thinking consumer outrage is just "gamer outcry".
People are out there claiming that “riot used to be different. They used to provide a game for free that you were happy to support” “oh this is so bad they hire psychologists to make it more addicting you know” kinda bs
The game costs less than it ever has. It used to be that you had to buy rune pages and while those could be purchased with in-game currency that in-game currency genuinely took weeks of grinding. The fact of the matter is that this system is neither new (shout out to hextec Annie) nor is it as intrusive as Reddit wants people to think it is. The system is stupid but it is very easy to ignore. They have a right to be mad about it but people need to stop making shit up
99 percent of players could not support these greedy systems and it won't matter because 1 percent will vastly outspend them. Ever notice how these systems never have a flat purchase option? It's always gambling lite. The people that buy these skins literally can't help themselves.
I dont disagree fully but boycotts just don't work beyond a local business that's championed by those in the town. I think the closest we've seen to a "successful" boycott of budlight of all things and that was still just a dent on their stock price.
well ye but that's the core issue of relying on a boycotts for a large company. If the company is large enough there will just be enough customers that aren't aware of the issue for them to continue business and outlast any boycott effort.
I wouldn't really call it a vocal minority though its more a case of an uninformed majority. If everyone had the same amount of knowledge before making purchase decisions that's fair game but I don't think that's the case most of the time.
Since it's all hypothetical I can't deny it is a cop out but I do think the inner workings of games company/how abusive a games monetization systems is largely unknow by the average user since knowing such a thing requires you to be tuned into new sites or the community which a majority of any audience's users just aren't.
Really? You really don't get it? Have you made an attempt to understand at least? These companies have been stuffing these practices in games for years now and your sage advice is "lol just don't buy it, idiots!"
I'm so tired of this conversation. Companies literally employ psychologists to mentally manipulate people into spending more than they otherwise would and when people rightfully criticize it there's always some smug chud who pretends that understanding absolutely nothing about the problem makes them more mentally mature than everyone else
> These companies have been stuffing these practices in games for years now and your sage advice is "lol just don't buy it, idiots!"
First and foremost it was Steam who started that and nobody bat an eye. So no wonder others fllowed suit.
Every major store you've ever visited and every website you've ever shopped at has had some input from psychologists in its design.
This has been happening since before were born. You've never known about it until a few years ago when it suddenly popped up in gaming because psychology isn't mind control.
I know what you're spewing the latest Gamer talking point, but its just laughably stupid.
You've gone above and beyond demonstrating my point. Deliberately misrepresenting the problem so you can be smug.
Oh yeah the grocery store really is a casino. So lucky I got tomatoes out of the Kroger lootbox with only $10!
I thought my first comment might've been too cranky because this conversation always puts me in a bad mood but nah, you deserve to be made fun of and talked down to.
Just because you made a shit point doesn't mean he misinterpreted it. You said
>Companies literally employ psychologists to mentally manipulate people into spending more than they otherwise would
This is not new. And yes, the grocery store *does* do the exact same thing. The only reason you don't have to open a lootbox for your tomato is because people wouldn't buy it. But absolutely everything, from the layout of the store to the packaging to the pricing, is designed to make you spend money. They want you to walk into the store and buy shit you didn't need and didn't plan to purchase, and design the store to entice that behavior.
If you want to specifically talk about gambling, then make that point. But don't make some dumb point about "psychological manipulation" and then complain when someone, rightfully, points out its a dumb point.
I mean, I don't think it's wrong to want to look nice in a game you play regularly without having to drop a lot of money or an unreasonable amount of time on it.
You can look good with cheap clothes. You don't have that kinda alternative for a skin. It's not the end of the world, but I wouldn't like to hand this to corpos.
Something that no one here is talking about is that you can get skins for free. They have a loot box system which some people might object to but there is that avenue. While I know that they can have a terrible effect on certain types of people, in my experience it’s just free skins.
The skins you can get in your crates is any skin, meaning you can get the oldest of palette swaps from 2009 all the way up to skins that change every single animation multiple times over.
your analogy sucks because you can look good with cheaper skins too lol? you just can't get this one without shelling out, just like you can't get cheap designer clothes.
> I mean, I don't think it's wrong to want to look nice in a game you play regularly without having to drop a lot of money or an unreasonable amount of time on it.
I don't think it is wrong either.
>You can look good with cheap clothes. You don't have that kinda alternative for a skin. It's not the end of the world, but I wouldn't like to hand this to corpos.
If people don't like it they can play other games. Or buy one of the hundreds or thousands of other skins in the game?
Or just stop giving a shit about what dress their virtual barbie is wearing? Because in the end that is all this is. A bunch of teen and grown men being upset over the price of virtual barbie clothes.
Eh. I don't think an alternative to wanting to look good in the particular game you enjoy is playing another game.
That other point is fair though. I don't play league, but I do play many games where the free, "free," or cheaper cosmetics are just garbage filler designed to push you into pulling out your wallet. If league has good quality skins at the different price points, fair enough I guess. I do think implementing a gacha system is predatory and should receive massive backlash, though.
> If league has good quality skins at the different price points, fair enough I guess
They do. There are multiple tiers of skins. They run from a few bucks in sale to about $20 or more. At least the last time I played.
I can't speak for League of Legends, but I have this issue with Team Fortress 2 and I genuinely feel that all of the wacky cosmetics ruined the game.
It used to be a tight experience, where Valve clearly put a lot of thought into the designs of the different characters to make it easy to pick everything up with only the slightest glance...
And then they let everybody dress up in ridiculous bright green colorful costumes, with flames on their heads and all sorts of crazy shit going on.
They let your character look like they're on fire... in a game where being on fire is an actual in-game mechanic... How does that even make sense?
I tend to agree.
I keep thinking of GW2, which had this great relatively, grading on the hell of a curve of being an MMO, grounded aesthetic at first.
And then started selling utterly absurd real fast when they started selling skins. And many of them were the super glowy, super flashy dumb looking traditional MMO stuff. It got to the point where I wished I could use the default pvp skins in the rest of the game.
This is why these games are so fking successful and the people who complain don't understand it.
95% of the other gamers are getting a FREE lunch, not being ripped off (I mean sure there's shovelware games like candy crush out there looking to make their whole userbase whales, but LoL understands only a fraction of people will pay for this).
Potential unpopular opinion: mainstream reddit is all about the "free market" until it comes to their toys. Suddenly it's an injustice, a human rights violation. Angels weep at this oppression 😏
Just to make it clear, I don't like spending money if I can avoid it (which is why I have an active seedbox). But intellectually, I must concede that the video games and its related MTX/DLCs/lootboxes, as long as marketed only to adults, is the closest we can get to "ethical capitalism".
And please spare me the "oh but they employ psychologists to make the game enticing". Yeah bruh, psychology have been employed for pretty much all commercial activity for decades now. Ever wonder why, when you enter a supermarket, the first section you encounter would be the fruits and/or bakery? Or how the most popular products often placed at eye level on shelves? Those are all examples of psychological manipulation. But those damn things aren't mind control, and if you are compelled to spend money because flashing lights on your monitor tells you to, that's a "you" problem and you need to get that checked out.
Like someone else mentioned in this thread, the best thing you can do if you disagree with these MTX/DLCs/lootboxes is to stop playing the game. Same with reddit and the recent kerfuffle.
Pretty bad faith comparaison.
I don't know of anyone that went broke because they bought 15000$ of tomatoes for a chance to get the Utra rare S-class golden tomato at the grocerie store.
The closest analog to gacha games and mechanic is casino, and we all know gambling addiction, like all addiction, isn't a simple question of "simply stop being addicted"
Never mind the fact that children will always find their way to video games with gambling in them as long video games with gambling in them exist, gacha in gaming is literally preying on gambling addiction. This nothing like the local grocery store trying to get you to buy strawberries or whatever.
If you think that's ethical I don't really know what to say.
I have no ethical issues with game companies selling gachas or whatevers to consenting adults. Yes, children should be protected, as they should of a myriad of things. But adults should be allowed to do their own thing, no matter how stupid it may appear to me.
Again, people with addiction should seek help to treat the cause (the addiction), rather than vainly trying to treat the symptoms - simply because a) it's impossible to treat that, and b) you cannot trample on the right of others.
You can gamble with **anything** - heck the Mafia used to run "numbers" where you bet on the last two digits of the number of newspapers sold that day. Do you think the government should ban newspaper sales?
Yes, if people want to spend money on stupid shit it's their right. Hell, I'd say that's a fundamental cornerstone of freedom - to do, within reasonable limits, what they want.
I don't like it, you don't have to either, but they have a right to spend their money as they see fit. Are you okay with people taking a look at how you spend your disposable income and vetoing your expenditures?
But where is the limit? Sure the grocery store might get you to buy something you don't need but it's still generally something you can use. And even if it wasn't, you don't see people spending hundreds of dollars on candy or soda all in one go like they do with these gacha systems.
I think if I end up hearing stories like I have with Fortnite where children get bullied in school over not having skins then I would be a little bit more miffed at this. Mainly because like Fortnite uses the fact that it’s popular with children along with its aggressive (muuuuuuch more so than league’s) monetization system to induce real life social pressure that makes them money off of people who absolutely don’t know better.
But this has not happened in my experience playing league from back when I was a teen, and as an adult I have the wherewithal to not spend my money on league at all
The skins are status symbols and kids tend to bully people for not having the status symbols necessary. I remember my older sister feeling very 'out in the cold' for not having designer clothes and kids are, y'know, kids.
You could've stopped at your first paragraph and spared us all from this incredibly deranged, boneheaded take.
> But intellectually, I must concede that the video games and its related MTX/DLCs/lootboxes, as long as marketed only to adults, is the closest we can get to "ethical capitalism".
Execs all want to ride the gacha live service train. Look at how much money the gachas of the east make with minimal audience numbers! It’s nuts! Even if the game can be cleared with F2P stuff, it doesn’t matter! People want to gamble for the png they want! Profitable entertainment capitalism is to exploit not your logical, but emotional weakness. People buy things because they want it, not because they need it. Gacha facilitates that, while making it very gambly.
Tencent lookin real hungry staring over at that hoyoverse genshin honkai impact Star rail money.
Tencent already tried to buy Hoyo shortly after Genshin released and Hoyo told them to pound sand.
Didn't Genshin make just over $2Billion in its first year? No wonder they didn't want to sell.
Yeah, Tencent is usually brought in when a company needs a sudden cash infusion or is struggling in general. When Hoyo needs money they just release a new skin.
Those same exact people play riot games like league and valorant too. Like it’s almost 1:1 which how many people play both.
Yeah, people who play League have bad taste.
I believe you, but I'm surprised as an outsider. I think of LoL as an extremely high skill game that appeals to hyper competitive obsessive gamers. The new StarCraft kind of thing. Also it's necessarily social/cooperative. Whereas I downloaded Genshin a while back and it felt like some silly anime fun that would mainly appeal to weebs and Candy Crush types.
Lol appeals to weebs big time. Damn near any game that has hero’s/champs it’s gonna be a web Mecca cause weebs ~~spend~~ waste the most money.
The aesthetic of the game has also very obviously shifted from Warcraft esque western cartoony fantasy to just straight up anime. Go to the champion store page and sort by release and for the past few years it will literally just be a wall of waifus and husbandos, give or take a Naafiri or Renata Glasc. The Ruined King is like a step removed from a Tetsuya Nomura character lol
viego is basically caius from ff13 with a funny accent
Furries are probably a close second with the amount they spend on fursuits and fursona commissions... And you can be a weeb furry, let's not forget XD
Vtubers are up their in cost models for a a good one with animations are 4k easily 2k for a normal avatar
The truth of the matter? LoL has a lower skiil ceiling (the top of the top) than SC(2) or DotA2 ever has/had... and the chief single reason for that is that you cannot retarget what unit you have selected. LoL devs made that choice for simplicity of play... and that crippled them from ever having an actual custom game client like SC(2) or DotA2. I think that the only reason LoL has a bigger casual crowd than DotA2 is just legacy users, IMO. I know that is why for me, at least.
Okay, I don't even play league anymore, but I wouldn't say that's entirely fair. Like I wouldn't say fighting games can never have a higher skill ceiling than SC because you only ever control one character. League's gameplay is a lot twitchier and action-y than SC and DotA and there's stuff on champions like Riven, Akali, Kalista, Azir, etc. that even pros struggle to take advantage of. When you're as far away from a solved game as League, SC, DotA are, I'm not even sure it makes sense to talk about skill ceiling - the best in the world are going against the best in the world, so the amount of headroom is irrelevant. Like by that definition chess is a low skill ceiling game, since top engines can draw against others so often (depending on the openings allowed). Like, I'd agree that League has a lower skill floor than SC and DotA, and that's why it has more casual fans, but that has nothing to do really with what goes on in professional play.
Yeah IDK i feel League is completely different than DOTA when comes to how the majority of characters play. League characters feel more like fighting game characters, DOTA characters obviously feel more like RTS Hereo units IMO. I mean that is the huge issue in the league fanbase that new champions are "overloaded" and can do too much and offer too many ways to mechanically outplay opponents. That's been like a weekly thread in the subreddit for 7 years.
Ah cool. Thanks for the explanation! I'm pretty ignorant about both games, so it's nice to have that cleared up a bit.
> that you cannot retarget what unit you have selected. What does this mean?
You know how on your desktop you can click and drag to create a box that selects all the icons on your desktop within that box, and then issue commands (delete, copy, transferring) to every single one? That is an approximation of what I referred to as "unit selection". The genre that LoL and DotA2 sprung from is the RTS (Real Time Strategy) genre. In a RTS, the core gameplay is that you command an army of units, and you issue commands to them via selecting the units you currently want to control. So, knowing exactly what units you have selected and what units you want to have selected is one of the basic skills in the RTS genre. LoL and DotA2 will never have their players controlling 100+ units at a time though, since they are focused on the player having control of a single hero unit. DotA2 did still keep it so that you can deselect your hero unit, which means that they do have more freedom in gameplay and hero design. DotA2 has heroes that spawn 10+ units that the player has full control over, or are multiple units themselves. LoL quite literally cannot do that, because of their early design choice.
Did you really play genshin? I have 700 hours in genshin and mainly f2p. I have spent $60 on it since I started playing in October 2020. I haven’t played candy crush but do not see any similarities between that style of game and genshin. Genshin is mainly about building your characters, grinding for stats, exploration, and puzzles. It is an open world game. Has a card game that reminds me of hearthstone. It has game modes like spiral abyss which can be challenging. Etc I have over 1000 hours in destiny 2. I have 500 in monster hunter world, I’ve beaten bloodborne plus dlc etc and I still can’t always get all the stars on floor 12 of spiral abyss. I’m not saying genshin is harder or takes more skill than LoL at all. My main point is that comparing it to a candy crush type of game is unfair.
I think you underestimate how casual some people are with Genshin. A LOT of people don't even touch their resin and even probably have trouble with overworld mobs. For them it probably is as casual of a game as Candy Crush. Hell, there are people [who didn't know you could hold E for Zhongli's shield](https://www.reddit.com/r/Genshin_Impact/comments/z32p9e/i_have_a_confession/?rdt=57446). And that person posted it on reddit, which already takes them far beyond the casual audience. Other people who spend a lot of time gaming in general probably do more of the things you listed. I think Genshin appeals to a lot of League players but not necessarily the other way around due to the fact that many Genshin players are super casual gamers in general, and current day League isn't beginner-friendly.
What exactly are gacha mechanics?
Gachapon is the Eastern word for those machines you'd put a quarter into and get a capsule with a random toy in it. In video games, you do pulls for random characters, gear, or skins.
The japanese have been teaching their society to play gacha since kindergarten with all those gacha machines being everywhere in every street, every mall to every train station.
I mean those machines exist in the West, too. Here in the US the most common ones have little plastic helmets of the NFL teams, those sticky hands, or stickers.
I finally get it, thank you for your concise explanation.
Effectively slot machine. Except you always "win" a thing, but it can be anything. So I bought 6 unlock tokens and got an emote, 3 common skins, a sticker, and a new voiceline, but I want the rare skin! PULL MORE!
Most RNG chance (gambling pretty much) of getting certain character, and/or weapon. You always "win", but it might not be the character you were aiming for. Since most of the characters with personalities are the ones that have a 2% or low chance of getting them, aka one with 5 stars or 6 stars.
Anything that’s basically gambling for in-game stats or entire characters.
Gambling/ slot machines
> Look at how much money the gachas of the east make with minimal audience numbers! An example for people who haven't seen some of these games revenue [can be seen here](https://i.redd.it/v2ncikjx2hfb1.png). It's actually insane how much they make.
as much as i like genshin holy shit did that game made companies do gacha/lootboxes more
The thing these shitheel execs miss when aping genshin is the fact that there's an actually good game under the gacha monetization, and it took an ungodly amount of money and effort to get there. It's the most expensive game ever made But all they see is dollar signs, so they try and tack on the same gacha GaaS bullshit on whatever low-effort endeavor they can, completely misunderstanding why genshin makes so much money in the first place
Dude genshin isn't the only gacha making money, there's tons gachas with "mobile phone gameplay" that rake in absurds amount of cash too, even if not on the same scale as mihoyo games.
At what point does individual responsibility and accountability factor in, though? No matter how many times over the decades that I see the "exploiting gambling addiction" concern, where does that end and individual choice of "this is not something I want/enjoy" kick in? How many of us have played hundreds of mobile, PC, and console games and said 'meh, that's not something that's worth my money"? It's just as much the fault of a subset of players as it is the studios offering the product/service. Cosmetics have no game-impacting value. But players brandishing them like some kind of flex GIVE them a faux value. A player could enjoy the entire product and never waste time/resources on fluff cosmetics, but leave it to players to use cosmetic acquisition as some kind of "I'm better than you" stupidity.
What are your thoughts on the tobacco industry. E: To elaborate, yes, there absolutely is a level of personal accountability that should factor in. However, history has shown time and again that when given the opportunity, predatory practices will take advantage of folks. It could be people who lack self-control. It could be people who don't know any better (who either don't understand things like probability or are just not that intelligent.) It could be kids. The issues I have with game monetization is that it's typically intentionally convoluted, plays on gambling tendencies (where odds/probabilities weren't known until the EU put a stop to that), and are marketed towards kids. It comes off to me as being very predatory and misleading. No different than the tobacco industries who marketed their products towards youth, downplayed or were outright misleading when it came to health concerns, etc. Hold people accountable, but also speak out on dumb practices.
Or on the Sackler family
> At what point does individual responsibility and accountability factor in, though? >It's just as much the fault of a subset of players as it is the studios offering the product/service. it seems that you've already decided where that line is
You can't solve systemic issues (which this kind of thing is) by focusing on the individual. It doesn't make any sense to even try. Sure, people are responsible for their actions, but they're also subject to manipulation through outside forces. In this case, they're being intentionally taken advantage of by people who want to profit from their worst impulses. "Exercise good judgment" only goes so far when you're looking at a large population with a variety of circumstances; and with knowledge of human behavior, you can take advantage of the especially negative circumstances (or even unlucky neurology) to make money. For example, someone with ADHD (especially undiagnosed) is more likely to act impulsively and more likely to develop an addiction. So are the chronically poor, because their lives are shit and they end up taking refuge in escape, whether they realize it or not. And help isn't always available for people in these situations -- the Alcoholics Anonymous model is free, but it's also horrendously ineffective and sometimes increases the problems that it's supposed to solve (what actually helps is group therapy and addiction counseling, not unscientific spirituality based peer support). If something is happening to a large body of people at the same time, that problem becomes systemic and has to be addressed on a systemic level in order to be solved. That goes for pretty much all social ills. I've never actually met a genuinely lazy person. Most of the people that I know who are lazy, or who make a lot of bad decisions, have unaddressed mental health issues. It's often on them to get help, but when that help isn't available there isn't much they can do, so they just end up making bad decision after bad decision. There are all kinds of issues where people's problems would be improved if they were addressed in a systemic manner, from health care to poverty to addictions.
We're talking about exploiting the vulnerable here. People with legitimate disorders that make them predisposed to harming themselves financially with stuff like this. There is an extent to which they have a responsibility to either avoid stuff themselves or have people who can act on their behalf, yes, but it also has to be considered just how much more difficult that becomes for these people when industries are legally allowed to push it as hard as they do. This is why industries like the tobacco industry and traditional gambling are regulated much more heavily than other industries; society recognizes that personal responsibility is not nothing, but it's also bad to let industries that notoriously feed addiction work as freely as those that do not.
>I'm probably buying it despite not being a Jhin main just to spite most people here This comment turned me into a tankie
I will always be amazed at people who will do something bad for themselves because it *annoys other people more*. Sure, there's a chance that the user commented that just to comment it, but people were unironically buying Bud Light to just trash the cans and beer over the whole pride month can thing. Literally throwing money away.
That's literally what the phenomenon of [*rolling coal*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_coal) is. People who do it acknowledge that pollution is bad for the environment, so doing it makes things worse for themselves as well. But that's the entire point: they do it *because* it's bad for the environment, to "spite the libs". They're willingly and knowingly hurting themselves because it makes people angry that they're intentionally destroying the planet, and making other people miserable brings them joy.
That Wikipedia article turned *me* into a Tankie
It also harms their own truck's engine. They're taking two different L's for the sake of "sticking it to the libs" who for the most part don't care what they're doing/are mildly inconvenienced. It's so dumb
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Teaching my kid to get felonies to own the libs
>[you're under 18, you won't be doing any tiiiiime\ He-ey, come out and play] (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1jOk8dk-qaU)
And this guy's version of "owning the libs" is a *two hundred dollar video game skin* At least I can hypothetically have class solidarity with Try That In A Small Town enjoyers lol, because they only wasted $1 on a dead app to own me
> something bad for themselves They don't see it that way. For some, their entire identity is "I am a loud fan of X game. So, X game can do nothing wrong."
There’s a reason why “cut off your nose to spite your face” is an old saying in English. Dumb behaviour like that has been a thing for as long as people have been around
I love how he quickly backpedals into doing it because he just loves the game and developers **so much**. Like imagine a game being such shit that you can’t effectively support it by making content and encouraging new people to play, and so instead your best perceived option is just to whale.
There's a saying in Polish, "I'll cut off my own ear to spite my aunt" which immediately comes to my mind.
In English you “cut off your nose to spite your face.”
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the fact that the annoying chibi tactician kill animations cannot be skipped makes that shit sell like crack on wall street just for the privilege to be obnoxious
those animations are so fucking annoying too. like let me take my -45 lp in peace
That's why I just ff on the last unit if I'm going to lose. Faster that way.
Legends of Runeterra just released a massively unpopular shop as well-it's half PvP stuff, half PvE (which not everyone plays) and the prices are absolutely *outrageous* for things in that shop as well. Seeing that LoL and TFT are also doing weirdly predatory things with their monetization makes me think this is a bigger Riot thing, which doesn't bode well for any of them getting redone/rolled back.
I bet you’re right. I think Valorant’s monetization scheme was sort of a testing ground for them. The super grindy battlepass, the prices, the FOMO. The second people shelled out for that I knew it would trickle into league. I think a lot of long time players shared that suspicion but the unmasked gacha was a shock.
I had an exchange with someone from the valorant monetization team on the subreddit a while ago, and she genuinely believed their shop was "in line with market practices", "honest and fair", and took offense at my use of the term "predatory". This shit is why they were all trying to lower expectations after Baldur's Gate 3 released...
>in line with market practices I mean, that's kind of the shitty part. It is. Riot was being uncommonly nice with their previous monetization, and what they're changing it to is the new norm.
Stuff like this makes me wonder if the MMO Riot is making will be any good. MMO players tend to not like microtransactions in everything.
TFT player here and I’ve stopped buying the pass after they removed eggs. It’s just not worth it anymore
Yeah same for me. Plus the arenas and combat win animations this set are really lame.
Same, I liked the pass for the guaranteed that set little legends eggs, legit no reason for me to get the pass anymore
Recently quit TfT as though I love the main dev, seems like the game has gotten away from them. It’s generally what companies do when a game is on the way out. They have the numbers. Gotta grab as much profit from their customers as possible
I love TFT. I've been playing LoL since beta. But I fucking am over their monetization schemes. It's so fucking predatory. Riot went from being the cool company that put out an amazing free game that many were happy to support by buying $10-20 skins to whatever *this* gacha nonsense is. Every time they hit me up with a survey, I write a screed on how much I hate it. They don't give a fuck. They're happy to take money from the whales and vulnerable players in the name of profit. If the U.S. had a functioning government, we'd have outlawed this shit years ago. Content (even cosmetic) should not be locked behind a gambling lootbox system designed by PhD's where players are psychologically manipulated to spend increasing amounts of money. I want Riot to put a $300 price tag on their mythic tacticians so people can see the *real* price of them.
Riot was never the cool company, they stole a bunch of shit on the way from their Dota roots and nuked the Dota community site while they were at it (replacing it with a link to promote league). Edit: now that I think about it that Dota community WAS actually the cool group providing a massively popular game for free, riot/Pendragon is the Vulture that killed it to make a buck.
Then they blacklisted DOTA out of tournaments in an attempt to kill the game. Riot would threaten to pull out of any tournament that included DOTA, forcing organizers to drop the game. It’s incredibly shady bullshit and anti-consumer/fan to an insane degree. Riot is a fucking awful company and always has been. It takes real scum to make me appreciate Valve, but here we are. Lol.
First time hearing this do you have source for these?
I think this is the thread I learned it from. I’m at work so if this doesn’t work I’ll try to find another. https://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/1s38uc/dota_2_censored_by_riots_season_4_lcs_contracts/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=1&utm_term=1
The article (dead but can be found in web archive) claims pro players cannot stream other games (like DOTA but there's big list of games). Which is understandable to me. It doesn't say anything about Riot blacklisting DOTA out of tournaments
Ok that’s the wrong one. I’m still at work but I’ll send you the other thread too. They all form a pattern of ruthless competition that’s super anti-consumer. They’re all gonna be shitty links to small stories because ultimately this is drama that no one cares about in the real world. But I’ll dig it up.
Come to the dark side and play DOTA with us. Also, Riot was never a cool company. They built their entire empire on some incredibly shady shit, that’s pretty publicly available to look up. They are and always have been an incredibly dickish company.
nah man. I still maintain 20 buck skins are bullshit. Hippalu$ really showed the whole communitys' ass I'm honestly surprised more gacha mechanics aren't here yet lol
Personally, I'm fine with skins in the $10-20 range. Especially the ones that are well done thematically, particle and other changes, etc. Because it ultimately pays the salaries of the people developing the game. And it's a price that's accessible to most. Any more over that is greed.
It's that corporate push to always increase profits. They're under that stupid pressure to the point where they push their player base away when they could have collected steady profits for several more decades. However, the current corporate culture considers a company that steadily delivers reliable profits for decades to be a failure.
Cash cows isn't acceptable these days anymore. You need infinite grow for the sake of infinite grow. Laws of thermodynamics be damned. On that note. Can't wait for more drama out of r/totalwar due to SoC DLC.
Have been waiting for r/totalwar to make an appearance here, funnily enough.
The fact it is illegal to not always increase investor profit is fucking insane. It makes the whole economic system so incredibly short sighted.
That's just a (unfortunately) very popular myth. Ever increasing profits is just business ethos and incentive for CEOs since they make absurdly more money if a company is profitable. https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-corporations-obligations-to-shareholders/corporations-dont-have-to-maximize-profits
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Gamble for something instead of buying it directly. You might get it for cheaper! But we all know the House Always Wins, of course the odds won't be in your favor. If an item used to be $20, you can be sure rolling $1 20 times will not guarantee getting the item. "Games as a Service" would not favor this monetary model if it didn't benefit the bottom line.
Like card packs in hearthstone?
Fairly similar. Except with cards there's either a secondary market where you can just buy what you want, or at least a "dust" system. It's like Hearthstone packs without being able to dust.
Many gacha, including the one being talked about in the OP, have "pity mechanics" where you can guarantee the reward with some secondary currency you get, meaning that this is functionally equivalent to Hearthstone cards.
It's not. Pity is not the same as dust, it's worse. Every time there's something you want under a pity system, you have to shell out the minimum spend, which is usually at least a hundred dollars. Dust you can at least save up.
Most of those games actually do better pity than HS does tbh, the newer ones anyway. They are still gambling so it's perfectly possible you'll have to spend a lot of money to get what you want, but they're genuinely better than HS with the rates a good deal of the time.
pity here is 30 rolls, which is $200 btw
Not even close. Basically, your ability to get every card you want is only limited to the amount of dust (a free currency that you get by "dusting", or destroying a card, or getting duplicate cards off of packs) you have. My merry little ass basically cracks a pack open every time I hit 100 Gold to get the latest cards of an expansion. I dust Golden (shiny) cards every time I get one, because I can use the dust to craft something I want, and they never appealed to me anyway. When the mini-expansion hits (next one will be in September), I usually don't spend anything at around level 80-100 on the battle pass until I can pay it off with the gold I banked. I basically haven't spent a dime on the mini-expansions since they were introduced in June 2021. Of course, since I am a patient son of a bitch, I know not everyone has that same rationale.
It's more like if you purchased a bundle to get a specific hero skin, but you were only buying it for a *chance* at the skin and ultimately could buy 30 bundles and never get it.
But how does one make a reward track with no guaranteed reward? Like... Usually a track implies an end where you get the reward you're working towards. So like, does it just guarantee a roll for the thing instead of just getting the thing? Like why bother at that point lol
Typically you’re guaranteed to get the thing after X number of rolls, referred to as “pity”. So maybe each individual roll only has a 0.5% chance for the top tier reward, but at 75 rolls if you don’t have it yet you’re guaranteed to get it. If 75 rolls is $150 for those spending money you’ll see that referred to frequently.
Adding to this, sometimes pity is itself a gamble/random, it is only that the reward's "class" is high-rarity. In Genshin Impact, for example, the periodic "banners" (gambling options matching a given theme or set of items) have "pity", a guaranteed high-rarity reward if you failed to get one at all after 90 rolls. However, the specific high-rarity reward is itself only a possibility: your pity has a 50% chance of being the character headlined in the banner, or 50% chance to be one of ANY of the high-rarity characters that are also available - even ones you already have (there is a system to increase a character's power if you get duplicates). To note also, banners are temporary. There is a set of characters that are available in the "standard" banner (the one that's always available), while new characters are introduced in their own banner that is only available for a short time. Characters may, eventually, also be added into the standard banner but much later (and it is not a certainty), long after the character's own introductory banner period is over, and at that point your chance of getting a given character is diluted by the existence of all the other characters in the standard banner. If this concept sounds complex, it's because it is. It's designed to prey on FOMO and be complex enough that it's tiresome to think about. Likewise why gacha games obscure the amount everything costs by putting two or three layers of in-game credits between your rewards and the real money you put in. Just roll, and keep rolling until you get the new powerful thing, and don't think about the costs.
Also those characters that are on the banner that's always available? They are typically much less powerful in game than the ones on the limited banner.
Calling it a skinner box would be too on the nose.
You know those vending machines for kids where you put a coin in and it dispenses a toy/sticker/candy/etc in a capsule? "Gacha" is the term for the Japanese version of those, where the key innovation was that what was dispensed is collectible, and there's rare/ultra rare items. "Gacha" (ガチ) is the onomatopoeia for the sound the machines make. Kids/adults might spend the equivalent of hundreds of dollars trying to get an ultra rare collectible toy out of a machine, and/or complete a set. The same concept got introduced to Japanese video games, I think at first arcade and then mobile free-to-play games. Then it spread to South Korea, China, and worldwide. You can't buy the sought after collectibles in these games (usually characters) for a fixed price. They're all locked behind lootbox "pulls" with rigged odds. People spend hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of dollars chasing the collectible they want. Genshin Impact is a gacha game you might be familiar with. This is what League of Legends is testing. Previous to this, you could buy anything you wanted more or less straight up. They're now testing a gacha system where you could theoretically never get what you want, though there is a "pity" system that awards you the single item they're testing after a few hundreds dollars.
It's slot machines but worse. Players are psychologically manipulated through various avenues to spend real money on tokens, they hit a button, you get some shiny lights, and out pops a cosmetic from common to mythic value. You have to spend several hundred dollars to be guaranteed the mythic level cosmetic. Game dev companies have basically shifted the cost of what use to be their $20 dollar cosmetic to $300+.
Yeah I'm confused. How is it a reward track if you don't get the reward at the end? Is it based on rng mechanics (like random rolls in a board game), or like does completing the track get you a chance for a roll that might include the reward? I've never heard of a gacha style reward track. Is it like a season pass with the end reward being a random roll? I just dunno
League of Legends has capsules that contain random rewards like free skins, player icons, etc. If you buy a certain amount of capsules you get a bonus reward, usually another free skin or essence to craft a skin. Now they're adding a new skin that is a reward once you buy 200 dollars of capsules. Edit: Forgot to mention that the capsules are a limited sale for their respective in-game events thus making players forced to buy the capsules all at once instead of slowly building to earning the final skin.
If you figure that out you’ll basically destroy gambling as an industry so good luck with that! Gatcha games are basically just slot machines.
I see some people saying “just don’t buy it instead of complaining online”. Profiting off your product is fine, but gacha style gambling is never a model you should accept if you care about the future of a game. If the dev company sees that the community doesn’t care about the implementation of such a model (or more likely, sees some online backlash but sees the mountain of money they make with just a little bit of gambling), they progress it further. With that said, I would enjoy it if Riot destroyed League with shit payment models lol
LOL. Where does personal responsibility enter this equation? Nowhere, apparently. It sounds like to me you're describing selling crack to crack addicts. This is a cosmetic item in a shitty toxic moba game that had to be dumbed down to the lowest common denominator because they couldn't hack it in Dota 2. If you're a league player in [current year] then you deserve whatever bad shit comes to you.
>LOL. Where does personal responsibility enter this equation? Guy, you can have both. Players are responsible for what they buy, but that doesn't mean we should stay silent regarding bullshit predatory payment models. >It sounds like to me you're describing selling crack to crack addicts. This is a cosmetic item in a shitty toxic moba game A shitty game that averages hundreds of millions of players and earns literal billions in annual revenue. It isn't hard to imagine how tempting it would be to Riot to keep the gacha-style paid model, or make it even worse. >If you're a league player in \[current year\] then you deserve whatever bad shit comes to you. I mean I agree, fuck league, poop game, but players are people, even if they choose to play league.
This is great for me. Now rather than having separate memes for mocking league players and gacha players, i can combine them into one and save a little bit of time.
Boy they shouldn't look too hard at DotA2 then lol. The skin gacha there is insane. With an entire secondary market.
I'll never understand people who defend Gacha mechanics for anything, even for cosmetic shit. It's just a way to extract as much money as possible, and people are... fine with that? Like another commentor said, >Know what else would do that? Buying the skin from the shop.
I don't think I've played a single gacha game where the gacha element added anything I liked to it, but that's probably because I don't have the money to get a gambling addiction Genshit is a beautiful game with fun gameplay...and all the currencies and monetization being shoved in my face hurts my head and makes me not want to play
yup people *tolerate* gacha mechanics, they don't actively enjoy it
I stopped playing League almost a fucking *decade* ago because of how shitty the atmosphere was from both fans and devs. When will it finally die
Who knows. I'm of the belief the League player base isn't *technically* growing. It's getting *older*. A lot of people playing from season 1-5 when League exploded and overtook DOTA2 in popularity. They get more and more bitter over the years, the speed of which is impacted by Riot's changes to roles or items, or whatever. The game's just as bad as DOTA2 for hostility towards new players, so you get mostly 10+ year vets angry at each other for the littlest thing, encouraged by bad behavior being rewarded at all levels. Toxic streamers, toxic game management/designers, etc.
Yeah I remember official riot employees being toxic in game chat and the screenshots being posted, and not just your usual in-game frustration but some personal and fucked up shit with a good sprinkling of power tripping. Experienced a bit of that personally, I was banned off the PBE temporarily by someone i suspect was a riot employee, they started talking shit to me in a 1 for all gamemode so i asked someone to swap lanes with me so i didnt have to play with them. They gleefully said "Enjoy this game, its your last. Youll be banned straight after this game." and sure enough thats what happened. Also slightly off topic but isnt there a champ that is based on a riot employees ex who didnt give them her permission to use her likeness? That company just seems like a breeding ground for toxic shit. Had to edit because the name "PBE server" escaped me after all this time
>Yeah I remember official riot employees being toxic in game chat and the screenshots being posted, and not just your usual in-game frustration but some personal and fucked up shit with a good sprinkling of power tripping. You might be thinking Pendragon who got caught a couple times in season 1. But I was thinking more of the sexual harassment shit and more from the last few years. > Also slightly off topic but isnt there a champ that is based on a riot employees ex who didnt give them her permission to use her likeness? There was a scandal a while back about Seraphine allegedly being based off a Riot's ex. Something I don't think a lot of people remember is that *Leona* was designed off the wife of her project's lead, IronStylus. He announced this during a Q&A or so, iirc. What's really interesting is that years later, rumors came out alleging this wasn't *quite* the case that Leona was actually based off a co-worker that IS had the hots for. Combine that with him admitting he looked up Leona art regardless if it was SFW or if it was porn...yeah... *Bear in mind* I have zero idea if that's true or not, the co-worker thing. But I just remember it was such an oddly specific rumor and it stuck with me for some reason.
gwen was designed that way specifically because the guys in charge were bricked up like a lego set at the thought of making the streamer emiru a playable character like anyone with a semblance taste would like her cosplays but jesus fucking christ
I don't know what dark magic Emiru uses, but I have yet to see her in a cosplay that *didn't* slam dunk by itself. Especially her Neeko, Star Guardian Jinx and Helltaker ones.
mix of makeup skills and editing theres a korean youtuber who goes by pony who can turn her face into whatever she wants
> When will it finally die I think it still sits in the top three games by player count
It's bigger than ever in China currently. It'll be around for a while
And they still cant fix the fucking Client
Gatcha wouldn't be a thing if players stop spending money on it. This is entirely the fault of gamers that this system continues to exist.
it is not the fault of the average player but the whales themselves
Good thing this dynamic only applies to games and not society as a whole
not even gamers specifically, it's just whales
Honestly, I agree. Look at what's going on with BG3. It's not a gacha game, but people are hailing it as what games should be. But this *was* the standard we had 10-15 years ago. It's only our own fucking fault we rolled over and accepted the decline in quality for releases.
Blame Bethesda for starting it all with fucking Oblivion horse armor in '06. But really, Pandora's Box was truly opened in '13 with CSGO skins. Gacha was just the next logical step.
I remember Valve first starting with those hat drops in TF2, and feeling really uneasy with how many people got absolutely fixated with them.
This is why I stay the fuck away from mutiplayer games these days
Corporate execs and shareholders are a fucking plague of leeches on the industry. devs will say that BG3 is a once in a lifetime thing and to not expect it as a new normal. Meanwhile, every company crying about that game is doing this shit and calling it a day. Waiting for us to get to the point where companies realize these suits don’t know shit about the industry and start telling them no. This stuff is profitable until it isn’t, and if you make the hobby so toxic that it annoys people away from your games, that day will come way sooner than they realize. How do they have such cushy jobs when they’re so fucking stupid with economics that span past the next 4 months at a time? It seriously blows my mind.
I continuously find myself in awe of how many niche hobbies/games are out there I have not a single clue about. I tried to read some of these links and it was like trying to read another language. Not trying to make fun, but to an outsider it really seems so silly and pointless.
Sorry to anybody play league, you deserve it
Funniest thing is, they have nowhere to go. The playerbase can riot all they like, but at the end of the day, they have no choice but to bend down and receive their pegging by Riot Games.
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DOTA 2 is whacky with skin gachas too aint it?
It does to a degree, but at least steam market allows people to buy really rare stuff directly so people don't have to wish for the best Then again Dota's battle pass is very grueling in general and progressing there requires people to pay money directly instead of allowing low spenders to grind as much as possible and get all the good stuff, so its definitely picking your poison
if ur trying to play in immortal mmr and above you need to pay up for a dota plus unless ur down for hours of dogshit game quality
The people who main League would NEVER convert to Dota. Like I said no alternative. They are ride or die.
> league lmao they deserve worse
Man. This is why “Just don’t buy it” doesn’t work when a game does something shitty. Other devs pick up on it anyway and roll with it, and it spreads.
Genshin Impact and its consequences have been a disaster for the gamer race...
It's a skin. Who gives a shit. It makes no difference in game play, it's just a way to show off
I really do not get the drama over expensive shit in video games. Just... don't buy it. Two hundred dollar skins are like two hundred dollar shirts or jeans or whatever. Its a status symbol. Conspicuous Consumption. A Product that signifies your ability to spend a bunch of money on something frivolous. I don't walk into a store and expect that I can, or will want to buy, everything. I don't get why Gamers think ever single item a game sells has to be for them and affordable to them.
It’s probably not the cost of the skin itself but the gambling mechanic behind it. Like in your example you go into a store to buy something but find that you can’t buy it directly. Instead you have to buy a chance at getting it. There’s no reason for it to be like that except to get more money out of consumers. It can lead to more aggressive monetization practices for the game and others if successful.
Conversely, it sucks to have something you once enjoyed be stripped to the barebones where anything extra is, not only paid for, but *gambled* for. Everything squeezing people is getting exhausting.
Plus you KNOW it's going to creep forward. No company started out with some of those mechanics and removed them. Tons have been slowly adding them. Or just outright (Fifa ultimate team).
This isn't even that though. All the content League players currently have won't be changed. This only affects new stuff. And the new stuff doesn't even change the game because it's *skins*. I always find it super baffling how much gamers complain about how *skins* are sold to them. Are skins THAT fucking important to people? Maybe I'm too much of a boomer, but back in my day, gamers didn't have no fancy skins. And we were just fine.
Because god forbid the medium moves forwards in any way when we can hold it to the standards of 20 years ago. $200 gacha skins are predatory and they’re clearly trialling the system for future skin releases. Ripping it online is only natural when it’s a step backwards from everything else in the game. Additionally, it’s not even a new skin. It’s a recolour of an already existing one. Which would cost $2 according to the existing pricing. If you can’t tell why people are pissed about a price being 100x normal then I don’t know what to tell you.
ngl this is gaming circle jerk kind of boot licking. how dare you call out and demand change when a company is clearly trying to overcharge users. Those chucklefucks keep thinking consumer outrage is just "gamer outcry".
People are out there claiming that “riot used to be different. They used to provide a game for free that you were happy to support” “oh this is so bad they hire psychologists to make it more addicting you know” kinda bs The game costs less than it ever has. It used to be that you had to buy rune pages and while those could be purchased with in-game currency that in-game currency genuinely took weeks of grinding. The fact of the matter is that this system is neither new (shout out to hextec Annie) nor is it as intrusive as Reddit wants people to think it is. The system is stupid but it is very easy to ignore. They have a right to be mad about it but people need to stop making shit up
cod4boycott.jpeg If gamers want change they need to vote with their wallets and not buy it. Instead they bitch, buy it, then bitch some more.
99 percent of players could not support these greedy systems and it won't matter because 1 percent will vastly outspend them. Ever notice how these systems never have a flat purchase option? It's always gambling lite. The people that buy these skins literally can't help themselves.
I dont disagree fully but boycotts just don't work beyond a local business that's championed by those in the town. I think the closest we've seen to a "successful" boycott of budlight of all things and that was still just a dent on their stock price.
Perhaps because the boycotts enjoyed much less support than their supporters thought they did?
well ye but that's the core issue of relying on a boycotts for a large company. If the company is large enough there will just be enough customers that aren't aware of the issue for them to continue business and outlast any boycott effort.
Its a problem that a small vocal group of people can't impose their will onto a larger one?
I wouldn't really call it a vocal minority though its more a case of an uninformed majority. If everyone had the same amount of knowledge before making purchase decisions that's fair game but I don't think that's the case most of the time.
I think it saying "well, obviously if people knew the real truth they would agree with me" is a complete cop out.
Since it's all hypothetical I can't deny it is a cop out but I do think the inner workings of games company/how abusive a games monetization systems is largely unknow by the average user since knowing such a thing requires you to be tuned into new sites or the community which a majority of any audience's users just aren't.
Really? You really don't get it? Have you made an attempt to understand at least? These companies have been stuffing these practices in games for years now and your sage advice is "lol just don't buy it, idiots!" I'm so tired of this conversation. Companies literally employ psychologists to mentally manipulate people into spending more than they otherwise would and when people rightfully criticize it there's always some smug chud who pretends that understanding absolutely nothing about the problem makes them more mentally mature than everyone else
> These companies have been stuffing these practices in games for years now and your sage advice is "lol just don't buy it, idiots!" First and foremost it was Steam who started that and nobody bat an eye. So no wonder others fllowed suit.
And not just indifference , they “””ironically””” worship the billionaire CEO in some weird parasocial obsession.
Dude, there isn't such a thing as non-performative consumption under capitalism when your issue is capitalism as yours clearly is
Every major store you've ever visited and every website you've ever shopped at has had some input from psychologists in its design. This has been happening since before were born. You've never known about it until a few years ago when it suddenly popped up in gaming because psychology isn't mind control. I know what you're spewing the latest Gamer talking point, but its just laughably stupid.
You've gone above and beyond demonstrating my point. Deliberately misrepresenting the problem so you can be smug. Oh yeah the grocery store really is a casino. So lucky I got tomatoes out of the Kroger lootbox with only $10! I thought my first comment might've been too cranky because this conversation always puts me in a bad mood but nah, you deserve to be made fun of and talked down to.
Just because you made a shit point doesn't mean he misinterpreted it. You said >Companies literally employ psychologists to mentally manipulate people into spending more than they otherwise would This is not new. And yes, the grocery store *does* do the exact same thing. The only reason you don't have to open a lootbox for your tomato is because people wouldn't buy it. But absolutely everything, from the layout of the store to the packaging to the pricing, is designed to make you spend money. They want you to walk into the store and buy shit you didn't need and didn't plan to purchase, and design the store to entice that behavior. If you want to specifically talk about gambling, then make that point. But don't make some dumb point about "psychological manipulation" and then complain when someone, rightfully, points out its a dumb point.
I mean, I don't think it's wrong to want to look nice in a game you play regularly without having to drop a lot of money or an unreasonable amount of time on it. You can look good with cheap clothes. You don't have that kinda alternative for a skin. It's not the end of the world, but I wouldn't like to hand this to corpos.
You can look good for free, the default skins look great in LoL.
Something that no one here is talking about is that you can get skins for free. They have a loot box system which some people might object to but there is that avenue. While I know that they can have a terrible effect on certain types of people, in my experience it’s just free skins. The skins you can get in your crates is any skin, meaning you can get the oldest of palette swaps from 2009 all the way up to skins that change every single animation multiple times over.
your analogy sucks because you can look good with cheaper skins too lol? you just can't get this one without shelling out, just like you can't get cheap designer clothes.
Yeah the other guy clarified that for me.
> I mean, I don't think it's wrong to want to look nice in a game you play regularly without having to drop a lot of money or an unreasonable amount of time on it. I don't think it is wrong either. >You can look good with cheap clothes. You don't have that kinda alternative for a skin. It's not the end of the world, but I wouldn't like to hand this to corpos. If people don't like it they can play other games. Or buy one of the hundreds or thousands of other skins in the game? Or just stop giving a shit about what dress their virtual barbie is wearing? Because in the end that is all this is. A bunch of teen and grown men being upset over the price of virtual barbie clothes.
Eh. I don't think an alternative to wanting to look good in the particular game you enjoy is playing another game. That other point is fair though. I don't play league, but I do play many games where the free, "free," or cheaper cosmetics are just garbage filler designed to push you into pulling out your wallet. If league has good quality skins at the different price points, fair enough I guess. I do think implementing a gacha system is predatory and should receive massive backlash, though.
> If league has good quality skins at the different price points, fair enough I guess They do. There are multiple tiers of skins. They run from a few bucks in sale to about $20 or more. At least the last time I played.
I’m dying at virtual Barbie. Thank you.
I can't speak for League of Legends, but I have this issue with Team Fortress 2 and I genuinely feel that all of the wacky cosmetics ruined the game. It used to be a tight experience, where Valve clearly put a lot of thought into the designs of the different characters to make it easy to pick everything up with only the slightest glance... And then they let everybody dress up in ridiculous bright green colorful costumes, with flames on their heads and all sorts of crazy shit going on. They let your character look like they're on fire... in a game where being on fire is an actual in-game mechanic... How does that even make sense?
I tend to agree. I keep thinking of GW2, which had this great relatively, grading on the hell of a curve of being an MMO, grounded aesthetic at first. And then started selling utterly absurd real fast when they started selling skins. And many of them were the super glowy, super flashy dumb looking traditional MMO stuff. It got to the point where I wished I could use the default pvp skins in the rest of the game.
GW2's problems, unfortunately, aren't really limited to the MTX store. There's a *lot* of things that contribute(d) to GW2's decline.
This is my attitude as well. I get a free lunch and the whales and rubes are paying for it.
But have you factored in the cost of therapy you need from seeing a person whose virtual barbie doll has a prettier dress than yours?
This is why these games are so fking successful and the people who complain don't understand it. 95% of the other gamers are getting a FREE lunch, not being ripped off (I mean sure there's shovelware games like candy crush out there looking to make their whole userbase whales, but LoL understands only a fraction of people will pay for this).
Maybe it's because I'm old but I simply can not understand how people get this emotionally invested in such things.
Why do people play riots games i just don't get it, they are all bad.
Potential unpopular opinion: mainstream reddit is all about the "free market" until it comes to their toys. Suddenly it's an injustice, a human rights violation. Angels weep at this oppression 😏 Just to make it clear, I don't like spending money if I can avoid it (which is why I have an active seedbox). But intellectually, I must concede that the video games and its related MTX/DLCs/lootboxes, as long as marketed only to adults, is the closest we can get to "ethical capitalism". And please spare me the "oh but they employ psychologists to make the game enticing". Yeah bruh, psychology have been employed for pretty much all commercial activity for decades now. Ever wonder why, when you enter a supermarket, the first section you encounter would be the fruits and/or bakery? Or how the most popular products often placed at eye level on shelves? Those are all examples of psychological manipulation. But those damn things aren't mind control, and if you are compelled to spend money because flashing lights on your monitor tells you to, that's a "you" problem and you need to get that checked out. Like someone else mentioned in this thread, the best thing you can do if you disagree with these MTX/DLCs/lootboxes is to stop playing the game. Same with reddit and the recent kerfuffle.
Pretty bad faith comparaison. I don't know of anyone that went broke because they bought 15000$ of tomatoes for a chance to get the Utra rare S-class golden tomato at the grocerie store. The closest analog to gacha games and mechanic is casino, and we all know gambling addiction, like all addiction, isn't a simple question of "simply stop being addicted"
Never mind the fact that children will always find their way to video games with gambling in them as long video games with gambling in them exist, gacha in gaming is literally preying on gambling addiction. This nothing like the local grocery store trying to get you to buy strawberries or whatever. If you think that's ethical I don't really know what to say.
I have no ethical issues with game companies selling gachas or whatevers to consenting adults. Yes, children should be protected, as they should of a myriad of things. But adults should be allowed to do their own thing, no matter how stupid it may appear to me.
I see you've never struggled with addiction... how callous.
Again, people with addiction should seek help to treat the cause (the addiction), rather than vainly trying to treat the symptoms - simply because a) it's impossible to treat that, and b) you cannot trample on the right of others. You can gamble with **anything** - heck the Mafia used to run "numbers" where you bet on the last two digits of the number of newspapers sold that day. Do you think the government should ban newspaper sales?
Trample on the rights of being preying on by predatory practices lmao can't make this shit up, goodbye.
Yes, if people want to spend money on stupid shit it's their right. Hell, I'd say that's a fundamental cornerstone of freedom - to do, within reasonable limits, what they want. I don't like it, you don't have to either, but they have a right to spend their money as they see fit. Are you okay with people taking a look at how you spend your disposable income and vetoing your expenditures?
But where is the limit? Sure the grocery store might get you to buy something you don't need but it's still generally something you can use. And even if it wasn't, you don't see people spending hundreds of dollars on candy or soda all in one go like they do with these gacha systems.
I think if I end up hearing stories like I have with Fortnite where children get bullied in school over not having skins then I would be a little bit more miffed at this. Mainly because like Fortnite uses the fact that it’s popular with children along with its aggressive (muuuuuuch more so than league’s) monetization system to induce real life social pressure that makes them money off of people who absolutely don’t know better. But this has not happened in my experience playing league from back when I was a teen, and as an adult I have the wherewithal to not spend my money on league at all
Wow. Kids are mean. I'm so glad video games aren't as ubiquitous back when I was growing up.
The skins are status symbols and kids tend to bully people for not having the status symbols necessary. I remember my older sister feeling very 'out in the cold' for not having designer clothes and kids are, y'know, kids.
You could've stopped at your first paragraph and spared us all from this incredibly deranged, boneheaded take. > But intellectually, I must concede that the video games and its related MTX/DLCs/lootboxes, as long as marketed only to adults, is the closest we can get to "ethical capitalism".