Re:The most downvoted comment in Reddit's history
by scotty79 on Monday November 13, 2017 @12:05PM
(#15687924)
15k is more than my whole entertainment budget of the last decade including all the hardware and electricity and transportation.
Re:The most downvoted comment in Reddit's history
by hawski on Monday November 13, 2017 @01:01PM
(#15688438)
Many of those "whales" have certainly a gambling problem. Of course there may be a few rich enough people, but they also probably have some problems. It's sad that their weakness is exploited this way.
Re:The most downvoted comment in Reddit's history
by falcolas on Monday November 13, 2017 @01:13PM
(#15688564)
Well, when you consider that gambling (or opening loot boxes) hits some very primitive reward centers of our brain... is it any surprise?
Video games are simply abstracted skinner boxes to begin with; loot boxes with their carefully tuned Vegas-esque lights, sounds, and reward percentages just amp up the "push a button, maybe get a reward" to the Nth degree.
And yeah, it is sad. It's probably even worse than sad.
Re:The most downvoted comment in Reddit's history
by razakel on Monday November 13, 2017 @09:12PM
(#15692072)
>Video games are simply abstracted skinner boxes to begin with; loot boxes with their carefully tuned Vegas-esque lights, sounds, and reward percentages just amp up the "push a button, maybe get a reward" to the Nth degree.
My dad, who was a gamer in his youth, always described gaming as getting addicted to "flashing light boxes".
It was only once I was old enough to go to a bookie's and watch someone feed £20 after £20 into a fruit machine that I saw what he meant.
People want to play good games, and by all accounts, Battlefront is a good game; it has solid core mechanics and lots of Star Wars fanservice. EA just mucked it up with the shoehorning of the gambling, pardon, loot crates into the progression system.
So, what's a player to do? If they boycott the game, they are depriving only themselves of an experience they would probably enjoy for 40-60 hours. Add to that the fact that EA is looking at the huge profits they get out of lootboxes from a few "whales", and the loss of even half of their playerbase would barely touch their bottom line.
Voting with your wallet only works when someone else isn't voting with their orders of magnitude deeper wallet (for example, one player put $15,000 into Mass Effect 3 multiplayer cards). And in the end, how can you really fault those big spenders? They're just out to have fun too, and $15,000 could easily qualify as someone's 10% entertainment budget?