I believe he threw away the gem and deleted his account.
I would at least attempt to open a ticket and get a refund!
I wouldn’t use the real money gambling industry as a model, other than maybe to raise the age to buy certain IAP to 21. You can waste just as much money betting online, and no one will stop you other than to show you a get-help phone number.
The answer is to add mandatory warnings everywhere like cigarette packs and force them to exhaustively document the odds on everything. I also would cap maximum spend per month to a reasonable amount, like $500.
Okay, but what on earth would capitalism even be with those kinds of responsible safety regulations meant to curtail addictive tendencies and human greed?!
Regulation is not actually anti-capitalist. In fact, many economists believe regulation is required for a stable growing market, because it protects consumers from being over-exploited and thus exhausted.
Imagine your wacky uncle managed to spend all his money on Diablo Immortal, got thrown out of his house, and had to move in with your parents. What effect would his victimization have upon everybody in his circle of friends and family? How are those people likely to view any sort of monetized F2P game in the future? This has a ripple effect, too. You see your friend playing Candy Crush and proselytize about the evils of F2P games, etc.
Meanwhile if the game had been regulated from the start your uncle would be out $500 and certainly chagrined, as that is a very poor value for the entertainment he got, but his life would not be substantially damaged.
This needs to come from the government. If not regulated, they will get worse. And they could be so much worse than DI.
Testify.
This is one of many valuable things a functional government could provide!
This is my thinking as well, @stusser, but I wonder if that isn’t already the case. I’m guessing there’s someplace in the legal fine print, far beyond the ken of you or me, that the odds of winning the lottery are spelled out, yet people do it anyway. I wonder if somewhere in a casino is a posted notice in some impossibly tiny font detailing the odds for each game, much like a tightly folded wad of paper in a bottle of medicine details the health risks. And I’m guessing somewhere in that EULA screen no one reads is some mandated ass-covering legalese.
Part of me thinks it should be written larger and more clearly, like the health warnings on cigarettes in the UK that say SMOKING CAUSES CANCER in big letters. But people are bad at math, and showing them the numbers probably won’t help. Besides, gambling preys on hope, not rationality. :(
So, yes, as you said, it comes down to certain companies profiting from --and therefore exploiting – human weakness. Until we figure out the best compromise between protecting people from themselves and curtailing their freedom to do self-harm, the best I can do is not play Blizzard’s games. It’s not much, but it’s all I’ve got.
-Tom
I get your point, but I have to disagree. It’s a matter of degree, not kind, perhaps, but FOMO and conspicuous consumption and keeping up with the Joneses have been parts of the consumer landscape since there was one. There might not be quite the same immediate barrier-free loop like you can get with Internet gaming, but products, marketing, and design focused on getting people to spend money they don’t have? It’s there, for sure.
The monthly cap is an important part. We don’t want to simply inform consumers but also protect them. A $500 monthly cap per single videogame is completely reasonable and should be seen as non-controversial by everybody (except the companies making them). Then you just scale it up with inflation over time.
Selfishly this will also lead to better games, as they will be designed towards satisfying the majority and keeping them playing (and paying) rather than whale-hunting.
Everybody wants consumers to maximize spending on their goods/services, and it is indeed just a matter of degree. They charge what the market will bear. Thing is, when you’re dealing with addiction, the market can bear a heck of a lot. How much can you charge for cocaine?
I like the cut of your jube, @stusser, but it’s probably not as easy to just cap revenue per customer given the other analogs for spending which aren’t similarly capped.
I imagine opponents arguing that conspicuous spending in gaming is no different from going nuts on expensive cars or luxury handbags, and that paying money to be powerful and unique looking in-game is the future of keeping up with the Joneses, while at the same time handwaving the active steps the industry takes to inculcate habit-forming behavior.
I’m certainly for some form of regulation, it’s just that a one-size fits all may not be appropriate for either industry or customer.
$500 monthly cap per game, that size fits the entire industry. Spending $500 in a single month on one game is a ton of money. $6000/year. That’s going crazysauce in of itself. Anyone seriously arguing against it is working for a gaming company.
The difference is while $6k/year is a ridiculous amount for a single game, it won’t actually put most people on the street in a cardboard box. It’s a high cap.
I agree that the industry should, at the very least, voluntarily implement some sort of caps like @stusser advocates. It would signal that at least some semblance of a heart still beats within the corporate chest of gaming.
They will never do that. Too much money on the table, they won’t willingly walk away. Self-regulation will not happen.
Warning labels on cigarettes are ineffective. Even the FDA admitted it.
So are max spending laws, in politics, anyway. :(
It’d probably be easier to just ban all IAP that don’t meet a strict definition of an expansion pack. Even then, you’ll probably end up with games that give you guaranteed randomly generated new skins and weapons you don’t care about along with that random gem pull…
Do other hobbies cap what you can spend per month? Golf? Basketball? Knitting? D&D? Collectible cards? Skiing? Why should games be different?
I believe in having strong parental controls/consent for spending for kids. But for adults? Let them spend what they want to enjoy the hobbies they enjoy.
PS - I also agree that the odds for getting stuff from random boxes should be listed in very obvious places. This is, of course, different than what is required for real-world things like collectible cards.
We fundamentally disagree on that. No videogame can deliver $500 of value in a month. Regulation is the only way to stop this train.
That’s a very judgy statement. You have no idea what people value. You know what you value, of course, but you can’t possibly have enough knowledge of the global population to make that sort of statement.
There are plenty of tales of rich people bankrolling wars in EVE Online. They obviously get value out of it - nobody is forcing them to spend thousands/tens of thousands of dollars.
It’d be like me saying that nobody could possibly spend more than $500 a month on golf, because I don’t really play golf. But I’m sure there are people who spend way, way more on their golf hobby than that.
There’s a critical difference between spending money on a chance to obtain a golf club and always obtaining a golf club when you pay X dollars. Predictable rewards don’t build Pavlovian conditioning and addiction the way randomized rewards do. It’s not how much money you spend, it’s how the system abuses human psychology to take your money.
Stusser is saying that the amount spent on a digital good does matter, not just whether it’s randomly earned. At least I read it that way.