Comment by crankylinuxuser | Hacker News Reader

Comment by crankylinuxuser | Hacker News Reader

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crankylinuxuser

My guess is lot of us adults don't really see much of it, cause it's not targeted at us.

I see the regular "come to hopping awesome great casino" ads on tv/radio/internet. My thoughts - thats where people go to lose money.

But these loot boxes, I had to research what this was referring to. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loot_box

And after reading how they're used, yeah, thats like years ago when I played and bought Magic The Gathering. Sure, a pack was $2.95, but it was a complete gamble on what rare you got. You didn't buy packs for commons and lands - you bought them for a chance at the chase rare (now ubers).

Maybe its just my age. But I think lowly of "buying" some digital construct in a game that I don't own is completely ridiculous. I get spending time and running up levels, but spending actual hard cash (past a per month cost) is just.. bad.

you're absolutely right you can trace the roots of this back to Magic and if you want to go further back Baseball cards. It was fairly innocent back then, with the advent of gaming technology and research into dopamine-releasing mechanics/skinner boxes it's reached insidious levels.

Tell me about it :/

I remember the older days of MTG, around revised and 4th ed. There were ante cards - it was set up so games could be gambling between players. They finally removed all the ante cards (like ante another card, and gain life back to 20 and a full hand of cards). But in the end, there were good and bad cards - but the game was fun.

MTG started doing the "YuGiOh" scam, of foil cards. Then uber-rares. And then also using the chase-rares to loot-boxify the game.

But now, I've seen a few games that try to incentivize purchasing coin to play more. There was some car game I remember that did that - if you were to buy every upgrade it would be over $12,000 . Hill Climb Racing 2, I think its name was.

And here I was, thinking that a $50 game was expensive. Yeouch. I feel bad for people who got suckered into that scam.

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