Developers will probably increase the drop rates for things so that people will continue to buy their crates.
I agree it's still gambling but this is a step.
For Blizzard's Hearthstone, for example, their stated odds of getting their highest category of cards (legendary) is 1:100 and given that that 1% chance is spread across several different cards across multiple sets, getting a specific legendary card is only a fraction of that 1%.
For Nintendo's Fire Emblem Heroes, the chance of getting their highest category of characters (5 stars), is a relatively generous 6%. However, that's split across 2 batches of 3%, one of which is split across 3 specific characters (i.e. 1% specific card) and the other which has about 100 cards (0.03% to get a specific character). As each character is one who appeared in the long-running Fire Emblem series of games, there's significant incentive to try and get specific characters.
And these are games from companies that behave relatively ethically in this space. I can think of Asian games that are much worse.
In contrast, Fire Emblem Heroes has always been upfront about the odds, and you can see the odds whenever you want. (although in my personal experience the 5 star odds are less than 6%, hmrph)
It is possible that Blizzard uses different odds by region but that seems unlikely.
It would not surprise me if odds were indeed different by region. It would be smart to do that, anyways, since player behavior may be different.
“You’d probably have to buy this one thousand times to get what you’re looking for”
People still buy lottery tickets though because “there’s still a chance”.
Not sure how you fix that.
The average person doesn't understand expected outcome, that it means ON AVERAGE it will take this many times to obtain the thing. Lottery tickets are a bad example because the expected outcome is still really high, though most people still understand this.
Like that time I lost my entire squad in X-Com because they all kept missing their 80% to 95% chances to hit. There was much rage that day.
So, you can roll dice over and over, but you actually need a lot of samples for the stats to converge. That's why it is called the law of LARGE numbers. It is still possible to roll two 12s in a row on dice, but we wouldn't expect it to be common. By your clumping together, you need to not only store a lot of data, but now your "random" events are dependent rolls and not independent.
Really it is just a question of what you want to do and how you want fairness perceived. Do you want your game to act like dice? Or do you want a slight advantage? BTW, i2om3r linked the video I was talking about there Meier discusses peoples' perception of fairness. In the end, you have to determine what is best for your game. Maybe stacking the deck makes better gameplay, maybe it doesn't.
Sometimes you just roll snake eyes. Then you deal with it.
Also, it's Sid Meier.
(Also, fixed my post. Thanks)
In the pursuit of making a fun and interesting experience, it's not as bad as it sounds since it leads to a rewarding experience (though getting 2 hours of sleep because Civ is so addictive could be construed as negative). When providing questionable reward to the player and in a money grab via psychological manipulation, well, yeah, seems pretty exploitative and not so honorable.
What's most interesting to me is the wildly different perspectives that gamers on different platforms will tolerate. Zynga/Facebook gamers seemed to never care. Mobile gamers follow suit but some are a bit sensitive to this manipulation. Console gamers are familiar with these tactics since the horse armor days but have a red line (Destiny 2 just crossed). PC gamers have zero tolerance and will go up in arms as soon as their precious games are violated with F2P mechanics (though Ubisoft is doing pretty good here since they're doing it somewhat respectfully).
The same way that a person can have a correct (at least within a few orders of magnitude) understanding of their numerical odds of winning the lottery, yet still go on purchasing tickets. Our intuitive grasp of the idea of one in a million, billion, trillion, etc is such that those odds all "feel" the same. But those differences might make all the difference in whether purchasing a lottery ticket is rational.
What is the EV on those? Some it's something like .5 or less. HORRIBLE odds. If you want to gamble, go play $1000 hands of blackjack or something, you can get something like a .97 EV.
It's not profitable to buy all the tickets, though: that changes the odds enough that it becomes unprofitable.
There have been cases of people buying out all the numbers.. and there are times when it is worth the risk.. but not really relevant to my store. Millions of people buy lotto tickets every day, with an EV of .5.
Making it available in the app is no different; the user would have to be rational and look for it.
A user that would be stopped by this can already go online and find the probability.
The same sort of person that would google it.
I am not assuming people look it up. I'm just pointing out this isn't really changing anything because people who would look at it or care, already could look at it often... but most people won't, so the change of requiring apps to show it in the app matters basically not at all.