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Penny Arcade - Comic - oVoid
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Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Penny Arcade - Comic - oVoid
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
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The US ban operates on the assumption that you would put the whole egg plus internal plastic container in your mouth
It didn't help that they got caught still importing them under false labels a couple more times. Ferrero almost had to pull all their products from the US, but there were mysteriously no records of the mislabeled boxes anywhere so nobody could prove they authorized them.
#America 8-)
You have to open box after box to get anything cool, don't think I was ever disappointed by the contents of a Kinder Egg
Games like Fortnite specifically target and market to children
Also governments have been regulating and supervising gambling for hundreds of years
Fuck THAT. It is their responsibility to worry about your TEN YEAR OLD brother with a gambling addiction that they enabled.
I don't know how much I have to even explain why this is so. I'm all for drug legalization, but not for someone selling my kids (even otherwise legal) drugs.
I saw the actual answer in a news wrap up video and it is just as creepy in real life. I think this should start around the 3 minute mark, but if it doesn't just skip there for the excerpt, her answer runs about 2 minutes.
Law and Order ≠ Justice
ACNH Island Isla Cero: DA-3082-2045-4142
Captain of the SES Comptroller of the State
And the gambling thing is a bit of a farce. People who get sucked into these things aren't addicted to gambling. They have a really poor judgement of value. They're the kind of people who feel like having something simply because it's "rare" gives it value. They also falsely believe having these "rare" items somehow is going to bring actual joy, pride, and a sense of being special in their online games.
I knew a guy who apparently spent between $1k and $2k in Star Wars because he needed to have some sort of special light saber color that only dropped from loot boxes, as if that would fulfill some sort of missing space in his life. It didn't. And when he finally got that super rare, super special cosmetic, he was hot shit for all of 2 minutes. And then no one gave a fuck. Everyone went back to enjoying their own game. It wasn't until then that the realization of the emptiness of it all (including his wallet), hit him like a blast from the 2nd Death Star.
The reason I bring this up is that we can put all sorts of rules and regulations on this. Regulate it like it's gambling. Make gaming illegal for minors. Force EA games to be behind glass in Wal-Mart. Do whatever. But it won't do a single thing to change the industry, because it's not actually getting to the root of the problem. Sure, some regulation to make sure game companies aren't literally cheating customers (by releasing the odds to the public, and making sure the algorithms and code behind the boxes are available to regulators). But you're not actually going to stop people from cashing in on loot boxes.
People with what you might call a mental disability are still going to fall full on sucker for these types of things. Classifying it as gambling does nothing to deter the person who doesn't see themselves as gamblers. The best we can hope for is that these poor bastards who are throwing millions of dollars away, chasing fantasies, are at least NOT getting illegally ripped off.
"If you go to your version of a Target and you go to the Toy Section"
Let me stop you *right there*
I know damn well what toy I'm buying when I go to a Toy Store. I don't hand the Cashier ten bucks and say "Surprise me" XD
Then he repeats the question of whether they're *Ethical Or Not* and she tries to subtly assert he's mischaracterizing what she said
Cracker Jack toys, or toys in cereal for that matter, aren't "embedded" in the food/candy, i.e. completely or partially enveloped by it.
https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/cms_ia/importalert_107.html
A "non-nutritive object of practical functional value" would be something like a lolipop stick. This video explains the reasoning of the ban a bit.
To be fair, the British seem to have issue with crunchy frogs and metal springs in their candy:
Looking at PUBG, you buy a key for $2.50 and then you might get a $200 item out of it (which you can sell and then the money goes into your Steam wallet and you can buy games for it)
Most of the time, you're only getting something where the resale value is only a few cents
It should be easy to see why this system has similarities to gambling
http://www.toyboxphilosopher.com/2016/08/sunday-surprise-cabbage-patch-kids.html
Now, there's a difference in that, putting personal preference aside, these "surprise" toys are always giving you a toy of equivalent value, just different cosmetics. There's isn't one box with a cheap, tiny plastic thing, and the next box has a game console in it. Also, I believe all the varieties are produced in equal quantities, meaning you have an even chance of finding any one particular model.
So, yes there are toys that "surprise" you a bit with what, specifically, you'll get. However, I don't think any of these are equivalent to loot boxes.
Now I'm just imagining the kid opening up their Surprise Newborn Twins package and all it contains is a tiny pair of brown pants.
Here's a 19 year old describing how his loot box addiction started at 14:
https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWarsBattlefront/comments/7dfoqg/an_open_letter_to_dice_ea_and_other_devs_i_am_19/
A particularly relevant quote:
But comparing it to gambling is sleight of hand. The issue they're papering over is that even gambling isn't about chasing the payout. It's chasing the high of winning. And that's as applicable to a kid playing fortnite as it is to the gambler living in debt.
That's what they're monetizing. The chase. They're banking that the disappointment of "white t-shirt" stacks up long enough that when you get "blue t-shirt", you'll feel so good you won't really think twice about the fact that you spent real money to do so.
Just to be a nitpick, but Fortnite doesn't have loot boxes, you know exactly which cosmetics you're buying or working toward. Agree with all the rest.
And there are ways to transfer those funds into real money, though you end up with less of course
Despite all the white t-shirts there was a time you could almost break even from what you got out of PUBG loot boxes (in terms of Steam wallet funds) - what you "lost" was essentially like a house edge
It did operate psychologically like a casino in that you always got some of those Steam funds/chips back to keep you playing
And a little card with the link to the website where he/she can buy a doll to go with those pants.
Funny side note: Before today I had never even heard of these Kinder eggs. Then after work today I was at the campus bookstore at my community college and there were Kinder Joy eggs on the counter. lol
-Tycho Brahe
https://www.today.com/food/kinder-joy-chocolate-eggs-are-coming-us-t118667
The Kinder Surprise eggs are still banned in the US. Interestingly, the Kinder Joy eggs created years ago to be sold in warmer climates, where the Kinder Surprise eggs had a tendency for the chocolate shell to melt, making it a sticky mess to get to the toy. Separating the toy and chocolate into distinct halves of the egg packaging solved this problem, and Ferraro eventually figured out they could sell this variation in the US as well.
Now that you're aware of them, you'll see them everywhere. There's even one in your mouth right now.
I'm choking!
-Tycho Brahe
It's not choking, it's "surprise erotic asphyxiation"!
Very fun and ethical.
Did any of us have any idea how bad things could get, back then?
Some would say it was the first wedge in opening this door, but it actually was paying to unlock levels in shareware.
So Commander Keen is truly the Alpha and Omega of gaming.
I personally don't distinguish much between pay to win and cosmetics. I play games for the gameplay, story, appearance... really the whole experience with different priorities depending on the game. So things looking right are just as much "winning" to me as actually winning. I mean, it doesn't affect me much because I don't play multiplayer with strangers very much anymore. But when I did, I almost wished they offered a way to pay to not have everyone else in ridiculous costumes--pay to have things actually look the way the designers intended instead of filled with a bunch of memes the studio made them add.
Loot boxes are like a combination of microtransactions with in-game random prizes. Random prizes awarded in game for certain achievements is fine, it's when they add the ability to use real money to buy turns in the random prize games that it turns into gambling.