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This is the worst thread… ever.
Quite the opposite. Things have finally set into motion, and currently, a bill with bi-partisan support is proposed to strictly regulate what is now viewed as predatory business practices aimed at minors who are less capable to resist exploiting psychological impulses related to gambling - namely lootboxes. There are scientific studies that lootboxes are really capable of tricking people (and ESPECIALLY minors) into spending unreasonable amounts of money, that the number of adolescent gamblers quadrupled in the UK due to similar schemes used by mobile games, and thus, as a form of gambling, it should be both heavily taxed and regulated, i.e. inaccessible to minors.
According to Beligan law, lootboxes are already illegal predatory business practice.
All in all, it seems that the children's card game will soon become and adult only card game.
Basically this.
We can mock and joke about it all we want but I'm pretty sure a lot of us have been looking at how the video game industry has been using microtransactions lately. The Star Wars BF2 issue was meant to be a wake up call: find a way to manage your excess or have the whole thing shut down.
And all they've done is get even worse with it. Now you get games that go without any shops on release then introduce them later, games that flat out gut the experience post-release to make it more appealing to buy from the shop than play the game as is, and so on. And honestly, you are lucky to have dodged even nastier stuff like gacha sets (which only stopped because they were outlawed in certain key countries).
Harping about personal responsibility makes sense but just because you were fool enough to leave a car door open with the keys inside doesn't give me a pass to go take your car. Neither is it ok to run a ponzi scheme just because people are being warned about them.
More so because a lot of the folks who get into microtransactions are new players just becoming heavy gamers. That's WHY these games stay popular despite the constant flood of "I'll never play a game like that again." posts. For every person who's realized how nasty they get a new youngin who only knows of the game through their friends gets into Black Ops 4 and Clash Royale and thinks nothing of it.
It would be awesome if the industry could regulate themselves similar to what they did with the ESRB. But they are addicted to it as well to the point where they can't make a game without microtransactions for fear of investors tearing them apart. Honestly there's technically still time. The industry can still offer an alternative to calm congress, again like they did with game age ratings.
If they literally can't even go that far then so be it. I like hearthstone and epic seven but I won't accept the path gaming is going just to keep them around.
One does not simply walk into Mordor,
unless they want to be the best they can be.
It's a radical and silly idea, I know, but how about you try the game yourself and see whether or not is ok for your child to play it?
In death, I exact my revenge!
It is gambling +it attracts you to buy more (fancy voice-lines, closed cardbacks who'll light up if you hover over them.) But you'll also buy value (atleast 40 dust). I've heard that you can't buy packs in China, only dust just because of this.
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ModeratorI appreciate the thought on this, but having worked on this very issue with a large MMORPG game, the definition of actual gambling has nuances that this game manages to skirt around.
For it to be considered actual gambling for the sake of legality, there has to be certain guidelines that are met / adhered to. Otherwise you could easily say that any game with a randomised element in it could be considered a form of gambling. So it revolves around the use of real money and how that ties into the game.
In terms of Hearthstone, there is no actual gamble for your money. You can purchase card packs for the guarantee of at least 4 common cards and 1 rare card. Anything above that is considered a free upgrade (in terms of gambling) - which is something entirely different.
Gambling (in the serious sense) requires there to be the possible outcome of you finding yourself in a lesser position than you were when you started. So either losing your money, or ending up with something that is valued at less than the money you put in.
For example, paying £50 for a Mystery Box with the chance of there being a Playstation 4 or a Can of Coke inside.
In Hearthstone, the 5 bottom line cards that are pulled from a pack are valued at the price of the pack, so the worst outcome you can recieve is the exact value for money you put in.
So TL;DR - no, Hearthstone can't be considered actual gambling in the true sense of the word (though there are misinterpretations of the word that Hearthstone could fall under). Otherwise there would have been a legal issue surrounding this a long time ago.
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ModeratorWhat you've said there is true and correct, but it does, however, miss a vital point when comparing to a game like Hearthstone.
In addition to what I said in my previous post, there is a reason Lootboxes are under scrutiny and that is because of the real-world monetary value that has been put on the items by the community itself.
For example, when you pay £1.50 for a loot box key and get a weapon skin for CS:GO (etc). You then go on to sell that on the Marketplace and find that because of the supply and demand for tat weapon, it's only worth 7 pence now. So you lost a chunk of money on the Gamble. This is considered real gamblin gin the eyes of the law, because you are left in a worse position financially (albeit through value of items you own), when there was the chance of getting a weapon that was worth hundreds of pounds like a flashy knife, etc.
Hearthstone doesn't have this problem (and likely never will) because of the fact that it cleverly has never allowed trading of cards, meaning that they will never reduce in real-world monetary value.
For that reason, there's not likely to ever be a concern that it will be put into the same position as lootbox games that provide actual tradable commodities. This is also why Hearthstone (contrary to what a previous poster scoffed about) does in fact follow the same pattern as buying physical packs of cards in a shop. Although HS is actually in a better position, because paper cards ARE tradable.
I mean in terms of gambling there's worse. World of tanks blitz players had to spam the playstore page so they release loot odds on chests..
Turns out there's often less than 10% chance to get the tanks plastered all over them chests. At least in Hs I knew the odds from day 1: you're guaranteed a legendary every 40 packs.
Winning!? Nah dawg *Meme-ing!*!! (but also winning)
The best thing about this thread is that it outed another troll for me to ignore.
"Why, you never expected justice from a company, did you? They have neither a soul to lose nor a body to kick." -- Lady Saba Holland
First of all, the poll choices are weird. I don't know in what context you judge whether a company is "better", and somehow I doubt it's the same context as mine.
Second of all, for anyone who is interested, the loot box practices are definitively NOT gambling under U.S. law UNLESS the items received from the loot boxes are transferable to other players AND have some expected value in real money.
In other words, if you could sell cards to other players, it would be gambling. If not, then not. If anyone is interested, I base this statement on the state law of Nevada and New Jersey, the two states in the US which most prominently feature legalized gambling. Yes, there are other states that have casinos, but almost all of them are on Native American land, and subject to weird offshoots of federal law that I don't know much about, and in any case wouldn't apply here.
Now, as to the question of whether there should be an age limit, the answer is it functionally doesn't matter. The vast majority of minors do not have their own income, ergo an adult, presumably a parent, is going to be supplying the money for such endeavors. We know that no gaming company is going to require a credit card as verification of age to play the game, as no one in their right mind would share credit card info as a means to gain access to an f2p platform. So, the age verification would only come into play when the minor wants to make a microtransaction.
If there is no age verification, the minor does the transaction with or without parent's permission. If it was with permission, then the parent would have acted as a proxy for the age verification anyway. If it was without permission, the same would be true, although whether or not the age verification was a thing would not effect that remedy for the parent. The parent could call the credit card company and dispute the charges, or just eat the cost rather than turn in their child for identity theft.
The only way this question could matter is if the company requires more age verification than "check here to signify you are over 18" at the start of the game. Since there's no federal driver's license database accessible to private companies (at least in the US), you'd have to ask for a credit card, which puts us right back at the question: In this day and age of massive and pervasive identity theft, who the hell would give that information out in order to play Hearthstone? The answer is "far fewer than play the game now", which means it's probably a bad idea for Blizzard to do.
Helpful Clarification on Forbidden Topics for Hearthstone Forums:
Enjoying Americans winning in the Olympics is forbidden because it is political. A 14 plus page discussion of state-sponsored lawsuits against a multi-national corporation based on harassment, discrimination, and wrongful death allegations is apparently not political enough to raise an issue.
You could say gw2 has gambling in it with well that u toss weapons in to it to get a chance to get legendary weapon pre but. It’s also on u to have brains to say no more
Age restriction because of gambling themes.
Age restriction because of suggestion of violence.
Age restriction because of sexually suggestive images.
Yes, gtfo my lawn you kids.
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Did pokemon or magic cards have a restriction?
I think it should be around 18-20 years old. I mean we already all work at that time and we have a better idea how hard it is to earn money
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ModeratorPlease do not resurrect old and dead threads in this way.
Locked.