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Brazil's president has signed a ban on selling loot boxes to minors as part of a larger online child safety law (www.pcgamer.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/pcgaming@lemmy.ca
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/49748743

The loot box ban will go into effect in March.

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[–] 2 points 1 year ago (5 children)

(Im in Canada many other countries are the same) When a chance of game becomes electronic probability rules still apply. Those screen based jackpot machines in casinos have to follow actual mechanical jackpot game probability payouts.

So a six sided dice role in a game that involves a monetary system to purchase still has to have a 1:6 payout, or it is illegal because you are fooling the person.

I have played several games where they have say 3 loot boxes and you pay to open one. There is a known prize and generic stuff. The payout odds do not match over a large number of tries, meaning the back end probably has been coded to only payout 1% or something super low, or maybe not at all. In many countries this type of gambling (even for adults ) is illegal because it simulates a chance game but is fundamentally not as presented.

I was responding to the loot boxes and the gambling comment.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (4 children)

    Sure, but this isn't a digital version of a casino game. It's a digital version of a blind box. And there is no rule to say that trading cards or collectible card games need to have equal possibilities of yielding a specific card. That is very much the opposite of how that works. Physical blind box offerings absolutely use different probabilities and different content rarities.

    So yeah, if you make up the categorizations, the rules and the mechanics we can be talking about whatever you want, but in the real world that's not even close to how this works in either physical or digital form, which I guess explains the confusion.

    For the record, multiple games offer a readout of the possibilities of getting a particular type of thing. I, you may be surprised to know, haven't checked the probabilities being accurate in all of them, but I'm gonna need some specific proof of someone fudging them, because that's a problem of false advertising at that point, forget gambling rules that don't even apply.

    Also, 1% is a HUGE drop rate for rare items in loot boxes, both physical and digital. 1% is, as it turns out, 1 in 100. Lots of games, collectibles and other types of blind boxes feature way more than 100 tries at opening a loot box, even for fully unmonetized ones. If anything there's a bit of a cognitive bias there, where people are very bad at instinctively understanding how percentages work, which makes disclosing loot box percentages a bit of a challenge.

    Look, I'm not sure what games you play or your understanding of how any of this works but, respectfully, you're misunderstanding it pretty deeply.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    I think you mis understood what I mewnt. And maybe we are crosstalking. The 1% I meant it was a game where one of the loot boxes on screen was the prize, then "shuffled" with to others. So one of the three selections should yield the prize. Based on probabilities, you should get a payout on the 4th refreshed try at this since you are now pushing the odds in your favour, but it was not like that you could go 100 times.

    Same with spin the wheel games to get the loot box. If every other spin section has a loot box, you should on average land on it 50% of the time. But they weren't like that. Might be 10%.

    This is why its become a worldwide scrutinized thing in games because the chances are misrepresented. There are guidelines for those tginking about adding paid game mechanisms so as to not run afould of state/province gambling laws.

    Here's what's been happening about it in some places https://liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/glr2.2024.0006

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    But you're not describing a loot box. That's not how loot boxes work.

    I mean, for one thing, 1 in 4 doesn't mean you should get a payout in the fourth try. You could buy a hundred things with a 1 in 4 chances and never win. Random means random.

    But precisely for that reason loot boxes sometimes implement "mercy rules" that increase the odds on repeated tries to prevent people being frustrated because squishy human brains are bad at understanding probability intuitively.

    But the way look boxes work is by having a loot table, which associates a list of possible outcomes to a weight and runs a random check against that table each time. It's how it worked on pen and paper Dungeons and Dragons in the 70s and it's how it works in monetized loot boxes today. Different implementations can have different odds, each game can offer different box types with different probabilities, but if we're talking about loot boxes we're talking about that.

    I don't know what game you were playing. I suppose a loot table with 75% of nothing and 25% of a single hardcoded item is still a valid loot table, but it's overly simplistic and now how it'd typically be implemented. If you're playing some game that gives you an on-screen representation of a paid item under those rules and you can show that they are misrepresenting the odds you can and should go flag them in front of whatever body regulates advertising in your country, as well as to whatever platform is offering the game. It's very likely that it'd be breaking multiple regulations entirely unrelated to gambling, both public and private. I'm not saying it doesn't happen (mobile games in particular are full of really gross design people aren't following up on enough), but that isn't a typical implementation and not the base complaint people have.

    And again, can't stress this enough, it's probably already illegal regardless of whether loot boxes run on gambling rules or not.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    We are probsbly talking the same thing and just misundersranding, I took a university probability course. And I didnt mean 1-4 gives you a payout forth try, i was refering to 3, and by fourth you should start seeing a payout. To simplfy, If you have a coin its 50-50 chance. On the third flip you should start to see it hit the side you called if first two missed, but yes random. So Sometimes not. But the longer the flip you will eventually get a distribution of 50-50, even if you had ten tails in a row at the beginning, over time the randomness succumbs to probability.

    So the games I mentioned weren't following that. And I did report it.

    Personally I never pay into that stuff, I receive free tokens as a lure. But knowing enough about chance over time I started to make note of the odd behaviour.

    As that article mentioned loot boxes term now encompasses both a single blind chance box, and those that represent odds.

    So probably we are thinking different types of loot box scenarios.

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