Will Black Lion Chests be forbidden in the USA?

Crab Fear.1624 · May 11, 2019

It's just an idea a lawmaker has, not even a bill. But I think this is still relevant:

Jumpin Lumpix.6108 · May 11, 2019

@ChronoPinoyX.7923 said:
@"Jumpin Lumpix.6108" said:Oh really games werent shut down due to ridiculous regulations?
https://tay.kinja.com/final-fantasy-brave-exvius-and-other-mobile-games-to-en-1830199770

Perfect example of a game that relies on lootboxes only for their revenue. No long term plans to keep the game running, didn't even try to make effort for their Belgian audience.

Or perhaps belgium is restrictive and heavy handed. Which is really what it is.

How would you feel if they passed a law to protect children from addictive mmos and now your entire gw2 account is going to be shutdown because the company is closing down. Would you still shrug and say, oh well gotta protect those kids?

ChronoPinoyX.7923 · May 11, 2019

@Jumpin Lumpix.6108 said:
@ChronoPinoyX.7923 said:
@Jumpin Lumpix.6108 said:Oh really games werent shut down due to ridiculous regulations?
https://tay.kinja.com/final-fantasy-brave-exvius-and-other-mobile-games-to-en-1830199770

Perfect example of a game that relies on lootboxes only for their revenue. No long term plans to keep the game running, didn't even try to make effort for their Belgian audience.

Or perhaps belgium is restrictive and heavy handed. Which is really what it is.

How would you feel if they passed a law to protect children from addictive mmos and now your entire gw2 account is going to be shutdown because the company is closing down. Would you still shrug and say, oh well gotta protect those kids?

Well no, that's a different matter entirely. Your argument over that isn't with me, I'm focusing solely on the lootboxes. I'm talking solely about the random rewards, not some topic about addiction on gaming, that's a matter entirely different to what lootboxes are about.

Do you see the difference between Brave Exvius and Guild Wars 2 right now? Both have lootboxes but people in Belgium can still play Guild Wars 2 Right now because this game ain't focused on lootboxes

I'm the person who's literally showing games don't die unless they are designed to die when lootboxes are removed. Addiction is a subject matter that's dependent on the viewer. Youtube gamers for example are game addicts in their own right, but they make their living in gaming, same goes for those in the e-sport area. What your implying is a law where any form of addiction, whether positive or negative, should be illegal. So if someone is addicted to keeping a healthy balanced diet, is that illegal? Is being a gym freak considered illegal? So on and so forth. That's an entirely different can of worms that I'm not touching since I have little knowledge in the science of what constitutes as good or bad addiction. That argument is an argument you picked up with someone else.

Astralporing.1957 · May 11, 2019

@"Zaklex.6308" said:You "could" say that was still gambling, but under the current way it's defined(in the U.S.) that would not be gambling, why someone hasn't done that yet I don't know, but I bet you could make even more money running a casino game with machines like that than a regular casino that has a payout from 0 to 100, since you would probably have the odds of the higher payouts at a lower range than the 1 token one...hmm, maybe that's a business idea.If a casino tried to use the very same methods games use to skirt the gambling laws, the US lawmakers and courts would be very fast to decide someone's trying to circumvent the law. With probably painful consequence in those trying. That is why casinos don't do that.The only reason gaming industry can get away with it so far is because for many people it's still "just games" - nothing to be seriously concerned about. Courts and governments simply did not pay attention to this at all, so it was getting under the radar (for example, in my country, lootboxes are technically completely illegal the way they are in most games. So far, noone seems to be commenting on it however, because, in general it's not (yet) being associated with gambling - even though it fits the legal definition).

It's only very recently that people started to notice this. In time, i fully expect the attempts to introduce some regulations to come more and more often, and with more and more support.

Basically, when the world changes, it takes time for both the law, and (more important) the outlook of those making those laws to catch up. As far as the lootboxes go, we're in just such a period.

Hesione.9412 · May 11, 2019

@trixantea.1230 said:
@"Zaklex.6308" said:
What is worthless that comes out of the BLTC? Nothing, everything that the chest drops can also be bought separately, so everything in that chest has a value...maybe it has no value to YOU, but it does have a value to someone...so your argument there is false. Whether or not you receive something you wanted or didn't want is besides the point, it all still has a value to it, and that item doesn't have to be equal to the value of a key either, it only needs a value, even if that value is $.10, it's a value.
Also, since you're personally already against gambling for other reasons, that makes your opinion biased(which hopefully people picked up on when you stated that), that doesn't mean it's not valid, it just means it comes with a bias against loot boxes already and no matter what anyone says about them you will have a negative opinion. You would probably still have that opinion even if I told you they don't mean the U.S. legal definition of gambling either.

"Many items within are also available in the Gem Store, though some rare items are exclusive to the chest, and a good portion of the items are Account Bound."Source:

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Black_Lion_Chest

I can give you exemples about it but anyway.. my 2 early points still stand:

If a player doesn't need an item he got from the lootbox and can not trade, he will either delete it or let gather dust in one of his bank tabs. Either way, his money is wasted on an item he does not want/need with a tricky way from Anet to sell it. This is why I'm saying that all BL Chest loot must be tradable.

Also, If anyone spend 1.56$ on a chest and was unlucky to get a value of 0.10$, there has to be a problem with the transaction: the customer did not get his money's worth and the company has taken money they don't deserve. To remove this kind of situation, the chest must contain in every random roll at the very least the equivalent item/gold/gems of 1.56$.

Hearthstone for example managed to reduce these issues by gaving players at least one garanteed rare item within each box and adding something called "pity timer" which increases your chances to get legendary items the more you open lootboxes. I am not saying that Hearthstone business model is perfect but it's still better that the Black Lion Chest system.

My opinion is not biased as you claim here. I'm just criticising these issues with the Black lion Chest and trying to suggest solutions. It'll only be biased if I say something like : "Remove lootboxes from the game altogethger".

Re the value of the chest contents. If every chest had to contain at least the gold value (at current TP/gemstore rates?) in a BLC, that would likely cause a negative (from Anet's perspective) hit on the gemstone. Why use gems to buy transmutation charges when it becomes highly likely you'll get them from a BLC? T5 and T6 mat TP prices would also take a hit, as those would also have an increased likelihood of being a BLC reward.

Changing the contents of the BLCs to any alternative scenario has effects on the ingame marketplace (gems, gold).

Zaklex.6308 · May 11, 2019

@AlexxxDelta.1806 said:
@Zaklex.6308 said:
@Naxos.2503 said:
@"Leo G.4501" said:I'd imagine if relegation gets too stringent or if they cannot replace the stream of revenue with an equivalent source (because AAA games cost money and just breaking even doesn't cut it), they will simply stop marketing to kids.
There will still be the E for Everyone games and the T for Teens games but a majority of the "juicy" AAA games that kids these days crave might just become MA+. One might say "Ah! you'd cut off a huge demographic and deeper into profits" well, things like Amazon/Steam/digital downloads make it so it may not be important to market games in your brick-and-mortar locations and if kids end up getting their parents to buy whatever games they want, even the MA games, you just push kids to play the same games illegally but no one is going to prosecute a kid for playing a game...
That and the demographic for video games seems to continuously broaden. Games once considered baby/kids focused still appeal to adults+ which could be due to the west infantilizing its citizens (see: politically correct, anti-bullying nanny-state antics or the daycare-like universities being combated now) or just that media itself is so accessible and tailored to the user's desires.

Technically, we've already seen that trend starting even, most of the well known triple AAA games recently released are Indeed for mature audiences. I dont really know if it's specifically due to those specific concerns though, or if it's Simply where their target demographic really is.

One thing that would be rather interesting would be to see if Nintendo (a japanese gaming company, thus in a country where the culture of gachapon is promiment and accepted), whose main target audience is generally a Younger age, or at least accepting to all, actually uses lootboxes of a sort. I must profess genuinely not knowing, I dont think so, but there is still a possibility they follow the trend. If they dont, then it'd give a bit more point toward Publishers who are mindful of their target audience when monetizing.Then again, Nintendo has always been rather on it's own, doing things it's way

@Zaklex.6308 said:
@Naxos.2503 said:
@Zaklex.6308 said:
@Naxos.2503 said:
@Ayrilana.1396 said:
@Naxos.2503 said:There is so much straw in defense of that system that I could fill 3 barns of it.
The defense for lootboxes amounts to :-Because you enjoy it-Because you dont trust the government to stop there-Because you dont care how it affects others
The defense against lootboxes amounts to :-It's based on losing system (Odds are -never- in the customer's favor)-It's predatory, preys on weak willed people and reinforce their weakness-It exploit basic psychology against players (sunk cost falacy)-It is completely unregulated, with no accurate odds displayed in a majority of cases
I dont want to bring morality into this, but I kind of have to : The device is with the intent of Exploiting, whether weak willed or not. It exploit a normal person by tempting them, and encourage them to continue spending to get what they want after they've already spent money failing to get it without knowing the odds, and that's without getting into people doing it while misinformed (underaged, or lacking knowledge). It then exploit psychology to elicit a prideful defense of the system based on the idea that since the person sunk so much money in it, they -have- to back it, or risk being made a fool of (aka, owning up to it). It's based on a psychologic trick, similar to social engineering and cons.
People arent calling for bans. People are calling for -Limits-. If you cannot admit that limits are good to have in -anything-, I'm sorry to say your country well deserve the problems it's constantly saddled with. Casinos are regulated. TV shows are regulated. Alchohol is regulated. Food is regulated. Schools are regulated. Cars are regulated. And this applies to the US. The only thing that is Not regulated as far as I know are guns (and we all know where that ends up, the news mentions tragedies several times a year, when they dont mention common gun violence every month) and games. One might think regulating games would not be so hard, they're not part of the US constitution are they ?

There’s a lot of ‘straw’ in the way you’re portraying those arguments that defend them.

I've literally used Jum's main arguments throughout the thread. I'm perfectly willing to adjust my post, should someone provide a better formulated defense. I dont want to sound unfair, but some of the arguments I've read made me That annoyed, especially considering how nonchallantly they were written. I'm not going to say there arent good arguments to lootboxes, many of them Financial. Lootboxes have an inherent benefit to the company that uses them, which may in turn be used to bolster a game's future content, but that's a -may- at best. It can just be used to fund another product for example.

I'd like to add that as of yet, I've not seen anyone who defend lootbox agree that oversight and regulations are needed, which to me is baffling : Food itself is regulated, it is checked, it can be traced, it has standarts, it has parts of the governments assigned to constantly check on how it's produced/imported/distributed/priced. And thanks to that, you know that when you buy meat, you're not buying cat meat.

You want to compare gaming to food, that is like comparing apples to oranges...instead you should compare gaming to movies, two forms of entertainment, and the only regulation that movies have is a ratings system...which is not enforced by any government regulation or law. Gaming also has a ratings system in place, and it's not enforced by any government regulation or law...so we can logically say since movies are self-governed with an age restriction and so is gaming, then nothing needs to be done by the government as far as laws or regulations go...that's comparing apples to apples.

You're correct in a sense, except that technically, it isn't games that are under scutiny, but a part of games that equals to Something which is regulated differently than games are. Therefore, it infers that indeed, comparing apples to apples is what the government is trying to do : if lootboxes are recognized as gambling, then it should be regulated as such. Again, gambling laws already exist in the US. Whether or not they should is a matter of opinion in the end, none will agree, but that's the logic they're going with, which is sensical.

If you want me to explain why in particular I put an emphasis on food in my diatribe, it's because food is Something everyone is familiar with, and is omnipresent. Nobody would want it to be unchecked, for sanitory reasons among other things, It was also one of the easiest example to work with : as I mentionned, when you want to buy meat with an unregulated system, you have no way of knowing where it comes from, what's it's made of, what is in it, and what animal it was, therefore you might just end up buying a package named "Meat" and actually buying cat meat. Obviously Something extreme, but it carried the point I was trying to make that much more effectively : checks are needed in everything, otherwise you end up with loopholes and abuses, sometime with varied degrees of serious consequences. What may seem trivial now to many will end up becoming a much larger issue overtime the later it is adressed. And contrary to many who call for outright bans, that is not what the bill is about, the bill is about transparency, and applying existing regulation to something which falls under it.

The problem most people don't understand when saying loot boxes are like gambling is that we, the U.S., has a legal definition of gambling in the Federal Register, and loot boxes don't match it. I looked it up once before just to confirm it(when the whole Belgian thing came up) and I've kept repeating it every time this comes up in the U.S., The Federal Register, which is a book that contains all Federal regulations has several that are about gambling, but the relevant basically states that in order for a game to be considered gambling it has to have someone put money into it without a chance of getting anything in return...in other words, you don't win something every single time you play the game, that is gambling in it's truest sense. As far as I know all loot boxes would not fall in this category, unless there's a game out there that actually allows someone to buy a loot box with the potential of it being empty, then that would be gambling. So as long as you get something from a BLTC, even if the value is 1/100 of what you paid for it, that still is not legally gambling in the U.S., you are guaranteed to win something, regardless of value. A system like that doesn't need regulation by the government, it doesn't fall under the gambling definition, so they would have to change the definition first and I can't see that happening. It also means this freshman Congressman doesn't even know our own regulations, nor does his staff, otherwise someone would have pointed out to him that he would have to get the definition changed first.

Also, it's not even a bill yet, just a proposal, at this point in time it is nothing more than talk, probably to get some publicity and nothing more from my point of view.

You're correct again in that it is actually the crux of the debate : Is lootbox actually gambling if you receive Something each time you play, instead of lose when you fail to reach your target goal. One might argue that it would be relatively easy to design a slot machine that cost 10 tokens to play, with a prize ranging from 100 tokens to 1 token. In that particular case, you'd still get Something in return for your investment, it just wouldn't be Something that fits the original investment you made. I think one could say that would still be gambling in that case, since getting the lowest possible reward is not considered "winning", you get a prize Worth less than what what you originally paid in token amounts. I think the debate over lootboxes is around that general gray area.

You "could" say that was still gambling, but under the current way it's defined(in the U.S.) that would not be gambling, why someone hasn't done that yet I don't know, but I bet you could make even more money running a casino game with machines like that than a regular casino that has a payout from 0 to 100, since you would probably have the odds of the higher payouts at a lower range than the 1 token one...hmm, maybe that's a business idea.

Maybe my google-fu is failing but can you please link me an official ruling by a U.S

government

agency stating that lootboxes don't fit the current legal definition of gambling there? I would think that if it was set in stone, senators wouldn't bother proposing bills about it. Unless the good federal lawmakers of old were so far-sighted, that they predicted the emergence of new tech and the legally grey areas it introduces of course.

Hard mode : Don't link me anything related to ESRB or ESA, I'm already aware of those two

private

organizations and their perfectly unbiased stance on the issue. The fact that they are both ran by prominent gaming industry lobbyists is purely coincidental of course. I mean, why wouldn't I believe a wolf, dressed as a shepherd, trying to convince the poor sheep that wolves are totally innocent herbivores?

@Astralporing.1957 said:

@Zaklex.6308 said:You "could" say that was still gambling, but under the current way it's defined(in the U.S.) that would not be gambling, why someone hasn't done that yet I don't know, but I bet you could make even more money running a casino game with machines like that than a regular casino that has a payout from 0 to 100, since you would probably have the odds of the higher payouts at a lower range than the 1 token one...hmm, maybe that's a business idea.If a casino tried to use the very same methods games use to skirt the gambling laws, the US lawmakers and courts would be
very
fast to decide someone's trying to circumvent the law. With probably painful consequence in those trying. That is why casinos don't do that.The only reason gaming industry can get away with it so far is because for many people it's still "just games" - nothing to be seriously concerned about. Courts and governments simply did not pay attention to this at all, so it was getting under the radar (for example, in my country, lootboxes are technically completely illegal the way they are in most games. So far, noone seems to be commenting on it however, because, in general it's not (yet) being associated with gambling - even though it fits the legal definition).

It's only

very

recently that people started to notice this. In time, i fully expect the attempts to introduce some regulations to come more and more often, and with more and more support.

Basically, when the world changes, it takes time for both the law, and (more important) the outlook of those making those laws to catch up. As far as the lootboxes go, we're in just such a period.

To answer AlexxDelta.1806:Are you familiar with the Code of Federal Regulations(CFR), https://www.govinfo.gov/app/collection/cfr/ it's huge, and Google no longer shows the direct link to where the exact definition is on the first search page...I also don't have time to scroll through all of the pages to find it. I did find the link way back when this was subject was first brought up when Belgium first started talking about and I posted the link on these forums. The CFR is a collection of Regulations that govern almost, if not, everything...it has a ship load of legal definitions for subjects that laws deal with, including a specific definition of what constitutes gambling, which is only about 20 - 30 years old, so it's not that ancient.

To answer Astralporing.1957:The CFR is a collection of Regulations that govern almost, if not, everything related to legal definitions for subjects that laws deal with, including a specific definition of what constitutes gambling, which is only about 20 - 30 years old, so it's not that ancient, though that is before the time of loot boxes.

AlexxxDelta.1806 · May 12, 2019

@Zaklex.6308 said:
@AlexxxDelta.1806 said:
@Zaklex.6308 said:
@Naxos.2503 said:
@"Leo G.4501" said:I'd imagine if relegation gets too stringent or if they cannot replace the stream of revenue with an equivalent source (because AAA games cost money and just breaking even doesn't cut it), they will simply stop marketing to kids.
There will still be the E for Everyone games and the T for Teens games but a majority of the "juicy" AAA games that kids these days crave might just become MA+. One might say "Ah! you'd cut off a huge demographic and deeper into profits" well, things like Amazon/Steam/digital downloads make it so it may not be important to market games in your brick-and-mortar locations and if kids end up getting their parents to buy whatever games they want, even the MA games, you just push kids to play the same games illegally but no one is going to prosecute a kid for playing a game...
That and the demographic for video games seems to continuously broaden. Games once considered baby/kids focused still appeal to adults+ which could be due to the west infantilizing its citizens (see: politically correct, anti-bullying nanny-state antics or the daycare-like universities being combated now) or just that media itself is so accessible and tailored to the user's desires.