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US Senator Introduces Bill to Ban Loot Boxes & P2W Microtransactions - MMORPG.com News
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
US Senator Introduces Bill to Ban Loot Boxes & P2W Microtransactions - MMORPG.com News
US Senator Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) will soon introduce a bill called "The Protecting Children from Abusive Games Act" to the US Senate. It aims to ban the sale of loot boxes and other pay-to-win microtransactions in "games played by minors", specifically for children under 18 "whose developers knowingly allow minor players to engage in microtransactions".
Comments
The worse game of all time is Black Dessert Online.
I would like to take another minute to comment about that game that took my friend's wife plus another 12 000$ US. He played for 9000 hours...
Trust me these guys know how to hook you up. It could become quickly your nightmare.
I'm all for government placing regulation on how items must be sold, and ensuring that buyers will always know in advance what they get to support making reasonable decisions. But if someone sells virtual health potions, it's not the government's place to disallow that.
It wasn't the game's fault, it was the guy's fault. But yeah, 9000 hours and his wife left him basically for a video game addiction. No different than many other addictions.
You can see my sci-fi/WW2 book recommendations.
Parenting for the win.
I want a mmorpg where people have gone through misery, have gone through school stuff and actually have had sex even. -sagil
I'm not sure what legal precedent can be used to ban "pay to win." Maybe bribery, since you are paying for preferential treatment? I don't know; that's a stretch at best.
More likely than not the organized gambling interests in Branson are already paying him to launch this assault on an activity which threatens theirs, but of course it's being done for the "good of the children"
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Huh? I'm not looking at it in terms of protecting kids. I just want a better game-play experience. The removal of loot boxes will be a superb change for adults, too.
In the early days of ArcheAge, there was this donkey mount that gave a major advantage to crafters/traders. The only way to get this mount was by getting lucky with a loot box.
A lot of people spent hundreds and hundreds of dollars via loot crates with hopes of getting this donkey. It's dumb on them, but also dumb on the developers. Trion, a once respected entity, will now forever be known as a pile of vomit due to their greedy sass.
I'd rather deal with pay 2 win vs pay for chance to win.
Well that's nothing new really, as legal lobbying is nothing new in the US, it's just more obvious that big business runs things now.
Even if this bill were to pass, the industry can just adjust how it does things to gain the same general effect. For instance they could continue to push the whole pay to progress "option" where they make playing to progress so insanely slow, and tedious, that your only way to move forward past the mid game portion, is to completely no-life the game, pay, or both, which you'd need to keep doing, as more content is added. They could make player markets, run off of the cash shop currency, rather than an in-game one. The cash shop currency could be overpriced, unless you get it at a discount, with discounts being unreliable to get, especially the higher ones. They could have a trade channel, rather than a proper market place UI, so players have no market info available to them, making scamming, and overpricing easier.
In short, they can just follow the Warframe example, which despite all logic, many people claim is one of the fairest profit models around, even though it most certainly is not. Problem is that people can be so easily duped if you just change how something is presented. Take rested XP for example, when Blizzard first introduced it, it was presented as a penalty, where you start out getting more XP, but depending on how long you were offline, you'd eventually be hit with a penalty, so gain less. All they did is present it as a bonus, so being offline gives you additional XP for a while, which when the bonus runs out, you now get base XP, then everyone thought it was great, even though it worked out to be the same thing.
The long, and short of it is that the free to play model really is the worst one, while pay to play, and buy to play, with no cash shops are much fairer to the consumer. With pay to play, and buy to play, where you just pay for access to content in one way, or another, not stuff used while playing, there's no pay to win, no profiting from gambling addictions, and so forth, leaving the devs to just focus on making good games, not how to wedge in monetization options. The only obvious downside is that the potential profits are lower.
You have to go into details. This sounds interesting. 12k? How? What was he buying? Took his wife? Meaning she got def up and left him?
Details, Matt Damon!
Aloha Mr Hand !
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
Except it isn't the government's responsibility to make sure you have a "better game-play experience". Government regulation of hobbies is a step WAY too far.
I want a mmorpg where people have gone through misery, have gone through school stuff and actually have had sex even. -sagil
¯\_(ツ)_/¯