That there’s still a group of alliance attacking horde at this damn hour and when I say anything about it i keep getting idiots tell me to turn off warmode instead of trying to be helpful.
Aside from that players generally are terrible in this game and while I haven’t played LoL, I can’t imagine people being much less toxic in there despite all the attention they get for it.
All thanks to having this stupid crossrealm stuff and whatnot, people don’t have to act nice because everything can be pugged anyways so you dont need to worry about your reputation
I dislike mounts like the yak, traveler’s tundra mammoth and water strider because they’re simply better than other mounts in utility, taking away from the feeling of choice of optimal mount
It’s more that until recently most consoles were banned from import in China, thus people had phones to game on, since they didn’t have access to Snes, Playstation and so on.
Shops can be ordered not to sell to certain people. They are unable to sell alchohol before certain times, or to people whom are already drunk.
Take-aways do pay some of their taxes into schemes/projects to tackle obesity and may be forced to have calorie limits soon.
Casinos have a whole host of rules and regulations that the mobile and loot box markets do not have, including an upcoming limit on max bets on gambling machines.
As Zanmarea pointed out, as a matter of fact: Yes. Many bars will stop serving you if you’re visibly smashed, won’t sell booze before a certain hour, etc. And casino gambling has a number of limits to at least curb the mega-extremes.
The problem with lootboxes et al? There are NO limits. No consumer protection at all. Yet they’re very clearly tapping into the same habit-inducing mechanisms we see in gambling machines and so on. It’s actually quite wicked. Clever, but wicked.
These practises also push out more traditional, and far more consumer friendly practises, like… being able to just buy what you want. I was gob smacked when I played Titanfall 2 and realised:
A) There were no lootboxes.
B) Cosmetics could just be bought upfront for a fixed price tag, not even with ‘EA bux’ or some crap.
C) The cosmetic pricing was far more appealing than most games I’ve played. £3 for a whole pile of camos and player cards. £7 or so for an alternate titan model complete with unique execution animations and guns.
Sadly however, this probably earned far less money than it would have done with a slot machine system like, say, Overwatch. There’s a reason slot machines are nicknamed the ‘one armed bandit’.
It made me realise just how many games depend on lootboxes or a similar system, barring the player from just buying outright what they want. It’s why I have a grumble with Hi-Rez stuffing skins into boxes that contain 300 other possible items in all their games.
We’re not demanding companies ‘stop catering to the weak’ (Which is in itself an absurd line of thought), we’re demanding they stop being heads with blatantly predatory monetisation designed specifically to suck wallets dry from people who have gambling habits. While screwing over everyone else who DOESN’T want to gamble.
It’s not a matter of ‘people should be able to stop themselves’ since gambling addiction is a very real thing, and people often need help to keep themselves away from it or to condition themselves to not indulge in their addiction. A bit hard to do that when 99% of games they can fit in their pocket nowadays are literally slot machines. Easy to condition yourself to not go to a casino, bit hard to stop yourself using a phone.
As for kids, definitely a real issue. Last year we had quite a few articles pop up noting that cases of children found gambling has increased drastically over the last year or two, and it’s plausible that loot boxes or similar ‘gambling’ systems in games are acting as a gateway to gambling for real. And the trouble is, even if you keep that stuff out of ‘kids games’, let’s be real, how many kids play GTA Online? Or Overwatch? Etc?
I really hope more countries just outright classify lootboxes as gambling, which it so blatantly is. As it stands only one or two have done it, and unfortunately those countries now face gutted versions of games as a result.
It really is. I bought a -ton- of crates in swtor over the years and towards the end I had the exact same talk with myself I had in the betting shop. That “why are you doing this. Stop. No, you damn fool. Well I guess you didn’t need food this week. Or this month. Maybe you can sell your body.” talk.
It’s exploitative of a certain mindset and they damn well know it.
At least with SWTOR crates you CAN earn cartel coins at a reasonable rate. I don’t feel compelled to buy them since:
A) I can get tons of cartel coins via sub, my authenticator, or RAF referral links.
B) You can outright buy what you want 99% of the time. Either with coins or just waiting for someone to post the thing on the auction house for credits. It’ll usually cost millions of credits, but if you buy a free free crates then sell the contents you’ll be able to afford nearly anything anyway.
Compare this to most alternate titles where:
A) The only way to get free crates is to grind for hours.
B) The only ‘economy’ or market that exists is one made by the developers, usually with a pitiful currency rate for duplicates.
I bought 30 OW lootboxes once, didn’t get anything I wanted and only got enough credits to buy ONE skin that I wanted. I basically paid £25 for one skin. Honestly they’re why I haven’t bought much in HotS since it went to the 2.0 method, replacing upfront price tags on skins for ‘blizz bucks’ and loot boxes. I even hate Hearthstone for a similar reason.
But it’s a card game so it’s fine!
Except with an ACTUAL card game you at least get a tangible thing in a physical collection. In Hearthstone, you don’t. There’s no monetary value to the cards at all.
At least with the Pokemon TCG, the main way to get cards in the digital game is buying packs in real life, which come with a QR code to get the same pack/box set in the game, packs won’t necessarily have the same contents though. You can then trade these digital packs like a stand in for currency on the player trading post for specific cards you do want. On top of that, you can buy unused QR codes off popular card selling sites for literally pennies.
So yeah, I’m lumping Hearthstone in with the other slot machine games. Particularly with the power creep that tends to occur between expansions, the removal of adventures (The only sure fire way to get specific cards for a fixed price) and the too frequent rotations (With only ‘Standard’ being taken seriously and ‘Wild’ being left as a dumpster for old sets, not comparable to MTG modern or similar at all).
Low level BG. I don’t mind dying in pvp BG, on the rare times I do pvp I go into them expecting to die because A) that’s what happens and B) I suck at pvp. These are two things I long ago accepted as a fact of my gaming life. I will never be good at anything pvp related (except SNAP, I’ll kick your ar5e at SNAP).
However when you’re constantly put up against a pre-made twink team that not only wins but then actively camps the spawn point, it becomes a bit peevy. Can I at least get out the gate before dying, even if just a smidge.
Also, when did druids suddenly decide they could become murlocks. This is not OK.
The people? Yeah. And we do enact consequences on them through voting and having the power of a nation divided into 3.
This argument eventually loops down to whether you are pro-anarchy or pro-government, and since I’m the latter I think that on fundamental level we need some degree of taxation and restraints on freedom in order to have a functional society.
heads with blatantly predatory monetisation designed specifically to suck wallets dry from people who have gambling habits. While screwing over everyone else who DOESN’T want to gamble.![:imp:](https://d1bg94bbsh66ji.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/imp.png?v=6" ":imp:")
![:no_good_woman:](https://d1bg94bbsh66ji.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/no_good_woman.png?v=6" ":no_good_woman:")