
Chinese law will force game makers to reveal loot box drop rates - bojo
http://www.pcgamer.com/chinese-law-will-force-game-makers-to-reveal-loot-box-drop-rates/
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Terr_
I'm surprisingly okay with this, although I feel it should really only apply
when the "box" contains any rewards that can be traded/resold.

It's not perfect, but it's an 80/20 thing that would give a clear exemption to
a lot of innocent loot scenarios while still covering most of the
problematic/scummy ones.

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xiaoma
Diablo 2 would have been no fun if it were like this. One of my favorite
things about playing was discovering newer and more powerful items. This
basically forces every publisher to publish spoilers. It's not the end of the
world but it kinda sucks.

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norea-armozel
I think for China it's a bit more complicated since you didn't pay Blizzard
for keys to open lockboxes which decides what drops. In Diablo 2 you farmed
like everyone and that pursuit was fun in itself. Whereas these companies and
their games are basically digital slot machines where you farm for the
lockboxes and then spend extra to just open them in the hopes you get any
return. I remember reading about one woman in China who literally spent
thousands of US equivalent dollars on this. It's really sad and it should be
treated like gambling where you are told your odds.

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xiaoma
I played Diablo 2 in China.

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belovedeagle
Can anyone explain what problem is being solved by this law?

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flashman
Without odds, players can't make informed decisions about their spending. They
have no idea whether a rare drop is 10%, 5% or 0.002% of the time. So this
regulation will help them calculate the probable cost of acquiring the item.

Example: If it costs $0.99 to open a box, and the desired item drops from 4%
of boxes, then it will cost you $9.90 for a 33% chance of getting it. But if
the drop rate is 0.5%, $9.90 only gives you a 5% chance of getting the item.
At some point you might just decide to buy the item on the secondary market
(and indeed, these odds will influence secondary market prices).

(I personally think that these loot crates are effectively gambling. Even if
the developers claim the items have no monetary value - because they have to,
otherwise they're clearly offering you odds of a return on investment - the
same developers often operate secondary markets which assume the items have a
value, e.g. Valve and its Steam trading service.)

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belovedeagle
In games where there's no way to 'export' real cash (at least not without
breaking the TOS), does it matter? I can see the usefulness of the rule in
that case (although I still don't think it should be a law), but here it's the
difference between making one set of pixels appear on your screen vs another.
Could an unbalanced/unfair/opaque game be less fun? Yes, for some players. But
I have difficulty grasping why even an authoritarian regime feels it needs to
regulate _how fun a game is to play_.

