Comment by riotnrrd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by riotnrrd | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I used to work at Valve -- on the CS:GO team, no less -- although I left nearly a decade ago. I don't know what prompted this change but I have some suspicions. Even when I was there and the loot box system was new to CS:GO, there were concerns that a lot of trading was happening outside of the marketplace. The trading happened elsewhere because you can't have more than $300 in your Steam wallet (more than this would trigger some banking regulations that Valve wanted to avoid), so anything more valuable than that had to happen on 3rd party sites.

We didn't want this for three reasons: we'd lose out on the marketplace cut (10% of all sales I think?); we didn't want people grinding the game to earn money from rare drops; and finally because 3rd party trading ended up creating a lot of scams and therefore angry players.

At the time, we didn't see any way around it: we couldn't prevent people "gifting" items to each other, and despite omniscience and omnipotence in the game and Marketplace, we weren't confident that we could rejigger the drop rates and rarities to lower the maximum perceived value of the fanciest knife to be under the $300 limit.

I suspect that the CS:GO team finally decided to do something about it and chose this. If the team is anything like I left it, they probably modeled this extensively (we had data on nearly every game ever played in CS:GO and complete Marketplace data), and discussed the change with the TF2 and DOTA teams, who also have to deal with this, and decided that the short-term fury of a small fraction of the playerbase was worth it. I wonder if TF2 and DOTA are having similar problems and, if so, whether this change will be rolled out for those games, too.

Thank you for sharing your experience and perspective.

> we'd lose out on the marketplace cut (10% of all sales I think?); we didn't want people grinding the game to earn money from rare drops;

My naive understanding is that by having skins be worth tangible and significant value; this was the primary motivator for players to purchase keys to unbox cases, which was the dominant direct revenue generator for CS.

I would guess that the revenue generated from keys (and cases, from the market cut) eclipses the potential market cut revenue from limiting the value of items to the marketplace limit (now $2k I believe), as the consequence of that is significantly less demand in keys and skins as a whole.

Without the prospect of extremely expensive chase items, the $2.50 + ${case} slot machine pull loses its jackpot. With a knife being dropped once every 400~ unboxes, the EV of a knife would be $1000 + 400*${case}. Obviously the actual EV would be lower in practice, but the point I'm trying to understand is how the monetization model works if skins are any less expensive than they were.

> My naive understanding is that by having skins be worth tangible and significant value; this was the primary motivator for players to purchase keys to unbox cases, which was the dominant direct revenue generator for CS.

Yes. The Valve philosophy on the cosmetics marketplace (we called it "the economy") is that you distribute random rewards to players and they can trade and sell and discover the value of those goods for themselves. Obviously, this was done to make money for Valve but, in theory, it's also good for the players. It allows people who have things they don't want to sell them to people who want them. And all this buying and selling happens between Steam wallets (and there is no off-ramp) so at the end of the day, it's all just profit for Valve.

But above all we wanted people to play CS:GO because it was a fun game. We didn't want to turn it into some kind of grim pachinko parlor, with players grinding out matches just to get random loot box drops. So you have to balance the potentially real dollar random rewards so that they're a fun surprise but not economically attractive enough to become a job.

> players grinding out matches just to get random loot box drops

I mean... what you have is people operating rooms full of computers running automated bots to farm drops (and presumably accounts to sell later) [0].

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3yS6_WDb6w

Right, but they didn’t want that to happen.

It’s just a weird side effect that’s surprisingly difficult to prevent - online games have had gold farmers for pretty much as long as there have been online games with gold.

Coffeezilla makes an interesting series of videos about casinos in the csgo community and also makes a video against Valve themselves.

Worth a watch imo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13eiDhuvM6Y

You can not want something to happen but still do so knowing the inevitable result.

I’ve run into idle bot accounts several times while playing and it’s infuriating. Mainly in the arms race mode. Players can leave and join that mode at any time. So the bots will constantly be joining and leaving. if the bots manage to become 50% of the game they will vote kick all the remaining players. I’ve had several in progress matches interrupted because a few of the actual players bailed and the bots managed to take over the lobby.

>we couldn't prevent people "gifting" items to each other

Why not remove trade and use an auction system with a limit? Or not allowing trades under market price?

Runescape tried this back in 2007 along with completely disabling PvP; it was a very unpopular change for the vast majority of players who were not buying items.

I stopped playing the game around that time, so I have to thank Jagex for getting my school grades up.

The grand exchange (auction house) and the trade restrictions that landed at the same time pretty much killed the game for me.

Prior to the G.E., RuneScape had a thriving, complex economy. Players made money transporting goods from harvesting areas, either on behalf of someone or by paying independents for their goods so the independents could avoid going back to town. Players made money buying and selling goods - geographic arbitrage was very much a thing, as well as across time, and also across servers. People made money turning cheaply available goods into more expensive goods.

When the G.E. landed, it basically killed most of the economy. Harvesting stuff could still be profitable, and players could still make money transporting goods from harvesting areas to the nearest bank so people grinding levels wouldn't have to leave, but basically everything else became irrelevant. There's no point in selling anything anywhere yourself when you could take it to the G.E. and get a sale with no effort.

Less of an issue but still sad, the trading restrictions also killed the generosity of veteran players. 'drop parties', where a rich player leads a group around town dropping valuable items, died off as valuable items would no longer appear in the ground for others. Gifting people stuff was no longer possible if it exceeded (fairly low) thresholds. Very sad.

"geographic arbitrage was very much a thing"

You must like a albion online, its also like that

Eve online also comes to mind

Or just skipping the predatory gambling crap entirely and selling the skins directly like every other live service PvP shooter these days

Because people literally want to give gifts to each other sometimes. A friend I met playing CS get each other a skin every year for Christmas.

Gambling for kids so we can gift skins?

You're almost purposefully missing the point.

A better analogy would be to say kids are banned from bringing cash to school because that makes bullies take their money and kids gamble and bet.

How is that any different? It would be fine if schools banned children from bringing cash to school. If there were a multibillion dollar bullying and gambling market going on at the school, I'd demand it.

My issue with that is that the kids are losing something because someone else is doing something. Very similar to one kid being disorderly in class and everyone losing the recess.

Imagine being a kid in that room and being annoyed by the kid being disorderly, because you want to learn. Now you lost your rights because of that kid. You never did what he was doing, you never contributed to the disorder he caused, if anything you were also victimized by it. And then the power figure in this equation goes and chops away your rights along with his. First lesson in unfairness where the wet grass is burnt alongside the dry grass, because to the powers that be, the rights and allowances you had are mere acceptable collateral damage. Suppressing dissent was more important than protecting what is yours.

Are these schools in Stalin's soviet union? One kid causes disorder so all kids must be purged to make sure there won't be another naughty child in the future?

Believe it or not, teachers (your sao-called "power figures" here) are generally not a bunch of untrained dumbshits unable to think of kids with more granularity than as the entire collective group making up a class. They have the skills and training to identify the sources of disruptions along with ample resources available for correcting them without calling forth damnation and hellfire on everything in a 5 mile radius. Hammers are awesome, but it's not all that hard to grab a scalpel when a situation calls for a scalpel.

I had some great teachers, and some not so great ones. It didn't even take being in Stalin's Soviet Union to experience the whole spectrum.

Even the good ones at times resorted to those kind of measures. But it seems we agree that collective punishment is unfair.

With trading. Market price is not only price. With skins there are lot of preferences. Starting for weapons they apply, not all people use same guns as much. And they might prefer one style of skin over an other skin.

If you are not in to extract most possible value, you might trade a more expensive skin for weapon you do not use in style you do not use for less expensive one for weapon you use more in style you really like.

This sounded odd to me as well. Most lootbox games today has no trading at all - you can pay to unlock items for your own account, and that's it. I suspect the more accurate way to explain it is Valve successfully prevented authority interventions than this being more consumer friendly.

I was wondering if you had any thoughts on the CS2 rollout (2 years and counting) and the number of bugs, poor performance, and issues?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com