icepotato.6037

I'm a long-time player who is more than happy to pay up for gems on a fairly regular basis. I love this game, and I love supporting its development. When pets came out, I was really excited for the skins. Don't get me wrong, I want all of those skins and I'm still prepared to pay a reasonable amount of money for them. Right now, I'm not going to buy them. The industry is continuing to talk about the practical effects of lootboxes on people, and I'm moving more and more towards the camp that loot boxes are inherently exploitative. Even when they're just for aesthetic items. You can make the argument that its up to people to exhibit Personal Responsibility, that they need to show restraint and self control, but the fact is that not everyone who plays games is physically able to show that kind of restraint and quite frankly we should be worried about exploitative mechanics that cost a ton of money. BLC keys are bad. They are! They're a horrible gamble, getting ticket scraps is awful, and I think that as laws around the world start to catch up, you might find yourself in a legal mess that's as bad as the moral mess wrt to the BLCs. You can resell the contents of those chests, and it's an effective way to build up gold/gem reserves that come towards a cash value, and that's where the gambling element starts to poke out its head. Adding new, randomized, paid-only loot boxes is similarly going to get you stepping into some dangerous territory. Legally, ethically, whatever. I think there are mitigation you can make - disclosing any drop rates, letting skins be transferable, dropping the price and removing the time pressure. But even with those mitigations, I think it's time to take a careful look at what's happening in the mobile game world, what's happening in Japan and China with regulations, and how people are reacting to similar mechanics in other games. A storm is brewing here. You can get caught off-guard by it, or you can be proactive and start asking what mechanics are actually dangerous and begin the move away from those. We love this game. We buy stuff from the Market. We will continue to buy stuff. If you see a revenue drop because you move away from RNG lootboxes, you should really interrogate why that is. Are people buying to support the game? Or are people buying to support a compulsion?