Be Excellent To Each Other

Am I right in thinking that you won't know what's in a loot crate until you buy it and open it?

I strongly suspect that's the case, yes.

That's what defines a 'loot crate' and is pretty much why they're so fucking horrific. If you're buying a 'loot crate' and you know the contents up front then you're just straight up buying the contents.

Good point, well made.

They're basically gambling for children. Or just gambling for everyone else.

BUT CLEVERLY NOT CATEGORISED AS GAMBLING SO NOT SUBJECT TO ANY OF ITS RULES AND REGULATIONS.

(There's some technicality whereby what you get out of them can't be exchanged for real money, or something, so not straight-up gambling from a legal perspective. The design of them, the way they open with light and sound shows, the 'reward' structures around them, the rarity levels etc - they borrow huge amounts of design cues from modern video slot machines.)

Yes, it does seem like a very clear way of trying to fleece people for a hell of a lot of money on top of a full price game.
Unfortunately I've already asked for this for my Birthday and it's a bit late to change my mind so I'll just have to see how it goes.
I expect that they'll end up having to tone down the cash grab quite extensively.

None of this is new. Panini sticker albums have run the same business model targeted at kids for decades, albeit without providing you with an actual game to enjoy along the way.

Broadly similar, sort of, ish, but I'm not convinced you're comparing apples with apples.

Have you seen the pyrotechnics and design structures around lootboxes in games? This isn't opening up a few crappy stickers out of paper packets in the school playground, and the 'rewards' are almost infinite, getting a 'full collection' in a game like Star Wars Battlefront 2 isn't like filling out a Football '84 album.

You’ve clearly forgotten the reaction a kid gets when he finally gets the holographic World Cup sticker

Shinies and the stickers that were not rectangle shapes were the best most special thing in the world.

While I don't agree with the way this sounds, there's no excuse for what I've just read on Twitter.

One of the devs is getting threats for his safety from idiots online.

If you don't like the game mechanics, don't buy it!

I was that kid, I have clear memories of Football '82 - '85 Panini sticker albums, and yes it was quite exciting, but I also remember never going particularly nuts over it either.

I think it's disingenuous at best to try to make a clear equivalence between that 'system' and what we see now see some 30+ years later which is an ultra-refined and very deliberately designed system of pseduo-gambling using every single trick in the book, to entice folks to sink large amounts of cash into something that masterfully steers clear of being 'gambling' by any currently recognised definition, and yet is clearly exactly that.

Absolutely this! Anyone making excuses for the refined loot box system these games are using is being a twat. It's horrible slimy nonsense and about as anti consumer as a practise can get. It would be bad enough in a free to play game because it would still be psychologically manipulative, but in a full price game that's absolutely guaranteed to sell by the bucket load because people would buy a shoebox full of dogshit as long as it was shaped like fucking r2d2? That's psychologically manipulate and sickeningly greedy. Fuck this shit, fuck it right in the ass.

It's really pretty

And it's certainly shiny and whizzy when you open a loot box. You don't have to buy them, though, you can earn them as you play.

And I've seen my first Vader player.

Spend dat money!

It's almost like the designed it like that specifically to make it more alluring!

I'm slightly worried for you people if you find a loot box that exciting.

You shouldn't worry about 'us people' because we probably don't. You should worry for the people with compulsive tendencies who might already struggle to resist gambling mechanics in general because they're the ones being exploited here.

Isn’t the entire progression system linked to the loot boxes?

I thought there weren’t any additional weapons/skins/cards/whatevs unlocked through traditional levelling up and it was just dependant on what you get in a loot box which you earned through in game points.

Is that not the case?

Also, the fact that they let you earn a few is one of the tricks. I bet when you open them there is a convenient way to buy more in the same menu.

In Destiny 2 you get free ones for levelling up, and you have to go to the in game vendor which sells them for real money in order to open them.

That's my understanding. The one potentially positive aspect is that apparently all content that would've usually been paid DLC will now be free for everyone with this loot box bullshit replacing all the usual methods EA would use to try and grind extra cash out of people. Of course that means they'll tilt the entire experience towards people buying loot boxes (see the ongoing screaming about the 'price' of unlocking Luke/Vader) so as to 'replace' the money they'd otherwise have got from the other avenues.

Ooh, that's me!. I used to open every damned chest in Diablo II, despite most containing rubbish, collecting it all up to sell as other players would sail on by to go and grind the next boss.

I did buy a few keys once to use on the crates in Rocket League, just out of curiosity, and it's basically a flashy one-reel slot machine and it rolls in some item you didn't want. Won't be doing that again.

Also, bear in mind that Battlefront is rated 16. Even if the youngest players are 16, (yeah, it's Star Wars. People let young teenagers play CoD and GTA, so you might get 10 year olds playing this) then they're too young to gamble conventionally. (Waits patiently for the first "10 year old buys £4000 worth of virtual Star Wars tat" news story")

The other thing that sucks about these systems is they make the games less interesting. I mean, tying your progression to something essentially random in this game... How boring is that? Not your skill, or even your perseverance.

The new Shadow of Mordor game makes the central mechanic of the game completely pointless. Why bother messing with the Nemesis system when you can get Orcs out of boxes that are better.

i am tempted to get this.. Do I have to wait till Friday now?

Why would you have to wait?

isn't it out friday unless you pre-ordered?

Apparently, following the "customer feedback", they've dropped the price of Luke and Vader by 75%

Christ, so it is. This is like the perfect storm of modern gaming bullshittery.

dammit, i am off ill too

It's almost like unfettered capitalism isn't great after all

Lol, and it's not even if you pre-order the normal version; you need to pre-order the £70 "Elite Trooper Deluxe Edition" because of course you fucking do.

So I suspect if you went into Game you could still get in on it early Kov but you'd need to buy that £70 edition; or you could buy the same version online I assume.

I ain’t touching this game with a bargepole, especially at full price. I played the original multiplayer and whereas it was fun for a couple of hours it soon got boring real fast. I honestly couldn’t play more than one round of AT-AT assault before jacking it in.

I might grab it when it's super cheap just for the campaign.

And reduced the credits you get for completing the campaign directly because of it! Man, what a shit show.

https://www.vg247.com/2017/11/14/star-w ... paign/amp/

I don't think I'd have time to put 40 hours into a game to unlock a thing. Having an option to get there quicker seems reasonable.

You can’t buy it outright. You can only buy RNG loot crates. Thus, thence and therefore you’ll never know how much money you’ll have to spend before you get the thing you want. This is unacceptable.

I don't play Forza to drive a Focus, I want to powerslide a Venturi around Monaco in a cloud of cocaine in whilst a supermodel gives me road head and MONEY CANNOT BUY THAT EXPERIENCE?

Red letter? He'll need a French Letter, AMIRITE?

One of the more depressing things to come out of all this was a post on Reddit (which I can't find now, naturally) from someone claiming to have worked on a previous big publisher game with lootboxes. Their chat was that they'd seen the numbers involved and a tiny amount of idiots/victims generated a massive fuckton of cash from buying this shit. So the upshot is that even if like 90% of the playerbase completely ignores loot boxes this will do nothing to discourage publishers from going all in on it. The single only thing that would stop this is of all the 'normal' players refused to buy the game entirely, thus removing the reason for the 'whales' to want to play either. And that's never going to happen because gamers are fucking idiots in this regard.

ETA: assuming all this is true obviously.

I am absolutely confident that it is.

Yeah, they're called 'whales'. Mobile gaming obviously uses this mechanic too. They even create customised items based on the personal information they can scrape from them.

Yeah, I mentioned that terminology in my post and I know this is all totally A Thing in mobile gaming for sure; I just didn't want to make the same claim for something like a loot-crate fuelled console game without anything to back it up.

There''s a load of pension funds and the like invested in EA, so we'be got to buy this to keep the old folk up and running

There was quite a good Jim-Quisition video about this.

For our circle of gamers none of us are buying Battlefront 2, whereas without the pay-to-win shit it would have definitely been on the list for us all to maybe buy it for Saturday night multiplayer shenanigans.

That is not the case - you get both. They're still done via loot crates but you get some for levelling up and the things you get in them are fixed. I think I read that you don't get much when you get to the later levels.


That's not what this is.


Not that I noticed, but I wasn't looking that hard.


£70?!

80 quid for a computer game?

Y'all need jesus.

Does he get a discount?