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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 (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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