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Sure, but i don't think that that is the major reason to be against that stuff. This dynamic has been pretty basic to video games for a long time. Videogames and stuff in video games loses value over time. That is not something that is exceptional with loot boxes. You can get games that you would have paid 60$ for 10 years ago for 2-5$ now. In this regard, it doesn't matter if that thing was something you acquired through a random mechanic or by simply buying it.
The main problem with lootboxes in video games is that they are designed to manipulate you and trying to divorce the "spending money" part from the feeling of reward. You don't spend money directly on loot boxes, you spend it on a bullshit currency, which you can then use to buy loot boxes. So you don't feel like you are spending money when buying lootboxes, and these lootboxes then use all the psychological tricks that gambling uses, too.
I actually think that TCGs and collecting card games are problematic in a similar way. They are gambling which preys on children. And they should probably be looked into, too. But they at least leave the money connected to the thing, so the children notice that they are spending money, and how much they are spending on it. I would bet that most people who buy lootboxes greatly underestimate the amount of money they spend on them, because they are removed from "real" money by so many steps. Money on a credit card doesn't feel as much like money as cash. Using internet money on your phone feels even less like real money. And the bullshit ingame currency is even further removed from the actual money.
But as a gamer, my main reason to dislike lootboxes is pretty simple. They make games less fun. Games with lootboxes in them are no longer designed to be fun to be played, they are designed to make you desire spending money on lootboxes. This means stuff like earning cool cosmetics in game are basically gone. Which was something i found fun, and which doesn't exist anymore, because companies realized that they could just demand money for the things.
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On June 26 2019 23:35 JimmyJRaynor wrote:
The problem with EA Sports game "Card Packs" is that the NHL "Card Packs" I spend money on today become worthless in September when the latest annualized sequel of NHL hockey comes out in September. Namely, NHL '20.
Not only that, but in most of these games, the rewards from loot boxes are account locked, so you can't even trade them if they still are "valuable" and you lose interest in the game. And selling your account is generally against the ToS, and you probably can't separate it from your general gaming account in the first place.
Loot boxes, and in general, microtransactions, are generally designed to pray on addiction and it's past time they get regulated.
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Canada14485 Posts
On June 27 2019 01:21 Acrofales wrote:
Loot boxes, and in general, microtransactions, are generally designed to pray on addiction and it's past time they get regulated.
When the graphics of the "Loot Box Opening Process" mirror the same graphic techniques used by electronic slot machines in giant gambling casinos it starts to tip the balance against the argument that "its just like opening Kinder Eggs so its ok for 6 year olds to play them."
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On June 27 2019 02:22 JimmyJRaynor wrote:Show nested quote +On June 27 2019 01:21 Acrofales wrote:
Loot boxes, and in general, microtransactions, are generally designed to pray on addiction and it's past time they get regulated. When the graphics of the "Loot Box Opening Process" mirror the same graphic techniques used by electronic slot machines in giant gambling casinos it starts to tip the balance against the argument that "its just like opening Kinder Eggs so its ok for 6 year olds to play them."
Same thing with attaining a level up in mmorpgs to keep the grind going. Notice how the screen light up with fireworks and loud noises, giving you a warm fuzzy sense of pride and accomplishment, which is just your brain being jacked on dopamine or serotonin or whatever neurotransmitter that just got released.
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Yeah, but there is a difference between linking that to something you do in a game, and spending money. There is really no big problem if games make playing the game feel rewarding. That is kind of the point. Using cheap tricks to make you feel as if the gameplay is rewarding is maybe not ideal, but there is still a major difference between rewarding gameplay and rewarding giving money to the company.
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On June 27 2019 03:51 Simberto wrote:
Yeah, but there is a difference between linking that to something you do in a game, and spending money. There is really no big problem if games make playing the game feel rewarding. That is kind of the point. Using cheap tricks to make you feel as if the gameplay is rewarding is maybe not ideal, but there is still a major difference between rewarding gameplay and rewarding giving money to the company.
And in this sense loot boxes even take away from the gameplay (not for all, but still). Sure, you can have everything without buying the loot boxes, but to do so you need to pretty much abandon everything else apart from this one game and the grind doesn't feel fun. Also, usually by the time you get everything you want there's an update with new content and the grind starts over. Most people simply don't want to deal with this bullshit so they'll spend money. It's a win-win-win for the company because you get all you want from gamers: a) whales that buy everything and spend a lot of money, b) pretty big population of players that spend some money and c) small population of hardcore f2p grinders that boost your game's activity and engagement numbers.
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Very. Long. Jason Schreier does it again, the industry desperately needs to unionize.
One Friday afternoon a few weeks ago, the developers at Treyarch held a happy hour event to welcome the summer interns. There was pizza, beer, and jubilation for everyone at the studio behind Call of Duty: Black Ops 4—except the quality assurance testers, who had to leave shortly after they got there.
“QA was told we were only allowed down at the party for a max of 20 minutes, and we ‘really shouldn’t drink anything’ because we still had to work,” said one tester. “It sucks, but honestly we’re pretty used to getting these sort of ‘rules’ when they do any parties here.”
It was a small affront, but it felt indicative of a bigger problem: At Treyarch, many contract employees, especially the testers, say they feel like second-class citizens. Testers work on the second floor of the office, while most of the other developers are on the first. Some testers say they’re told not to speak to developers in other departments, and one told me they’ll only do so surreptitiously, out of fear of getting fired. When they get to work, testers have to park their cars in a different parking lot than other employees, one that’s further away from the office. When lunch is catered, testers are told that the food downstairs is for the development team, not for them. Sometimes, they’re allowed to scrounge for leftovers an hour later, once the non-testing staff have gotten to eat.
Put another way: When I asked a non-tester at Treyarch about the party, they responded, “Surprised they were invited at all.”
Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, released last October, is the latest entry in Activision’s massively popular first-person shooter series. It made more than $500 million in its first three days on sale, helping ensure that Activision’s 2018 financial results were what chief executive Bobby Kotick called “the best in our history.” It was also a turbulent production, marked by a drastic reboot, the last-minute addition of a battle royale mode, and what one developer described as “perpetual crunch” that perhaps hit the QA team hardest. Many of Treyarch’s employees are not full-time staff but contractors, which means that, among other things, they don’t qualify for the bonuses that full-timers might get from all those Black Ops 4 sales.
According to Glassdoor aggregates and testimonials from employees to Kotaku, Treyarch’s QA testers are paid a base wage of around $13 an hour. For the past year or so, some say they’ve been working around 70 hours a week. So it was a gut punch to at least a few of them when, in January of this year, news broke that the video game publisher Activision had given a cash and stock bonus worth up to $15 million to its new chief financial officer, Dennis Durkin. They didn’t even qualify for a $15 bonus.
“That broke a lot of people,” said a tester who left shortly afterwards. “We’re getting paid these very minimal amounts working these ridiculous hours, yet these people are getting paid absurd amounts of money. It’s just a culture of not being cared about.”
This account of Treyarch’s studio culture, and of the development of Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, is based on interviews with 11 current and former staff members, all of whom spoke anonymously in order to protect their careers. They described a company in which contractors, and particularly testers, feel like they’re perceived and treated as inferior. Throughout Black Ops 4’s rocky development, testers said they worked under unfair conditions—a theme that’s common in the video game industry, but one that remains worth scrutinizing. Those who spoke to us for this story said they did so because they hope that public pressure will lead the studio to change.
Source
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I'm all for unionizing. Also, I think it's very stupid of a company to treat their QA team like that. Testers are super important.
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On June 27 2019 22:03 Manit0u wrote:
I'm all for unionizing. Also, I think it's very stupid of a company to treat their QA team ANY EMPLOYEE like that. Testers are super important.
Fixed that for you
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United States11894 Posts
That article reminded me a lot of when I was a tester at EA, and later Namco in the early-mid 2000s. At EA, console QA had half a floor in one of the buildings and were told not to wander around too much. Shortly after I started, at one of the all-hands it was announced that all temp employees would be given green access badges, replacing the blue access badges that looked the same as everyone else's. They already had different access levels per department, but now you could decide at a glance if a person was worth talking to based on whether they had a green badge. After all, if you had a green badge, you were only going to be around a few months, so no point in developing any kind of professional relationship.
At Namco (on the console side), QA was on a different floor from the developers, sequestered in a sealed lab. Eventually the company moved into a new building where the entire company would be on a single floor. The QA manager had concerns about the open-office floor plan and stated in no uncertain terms that there were invisible "off limit" lines beyond the QA area where testers would immediately be terminated without discussion if they crossed. "Don't cross over into the Marketing corner, don't wander off into the development area past these restrooms. If you do, you will be immediately terminated, no questions asked." One time, a producer from a development team came over into QA and picked some of us to kleenex-test their game ahead of an E3 demo. It was an RTS game, so I gave my feedback as an experienced Starcraft player in great detail and had a productive discussion with the team. I told them I would write down additional feedback that came to me after I went back to my desk and they said they would be thrilled to get it. I jotted down some notes and told the manager I needed to go back to the other side of the office to give them to the devs, and he apprehensively said: "Okay, but... just don't draw attention to yourself, and act like you belong there."
I don't know how EA works currently or if anything has changed, but at least some changes happened at Namco to improve things and make collaboration between QA and the other departments easier.
I'm also of two minds regarding the "skill of labor" and testing. I guess I would liken it to the difference between being an amateur artist and being a professional artist. There are plenty of people out there who can draw or model well. However, when doing that is your job, you suddenly have a bunch of additional factors to consider: working under a tight schedule, fulfilling someone else's vision for a character or environment, adhering to special formatting restrictions... all of that is very different from just making a 20-hour polished piece of art for fun in Photoshop. Testers who are mass-hired are brought on board with minimal screening, by and large. When this happens, they are expected to simply function as a warm body, execute a test plan, and report results. The reason for hiring these contractors is to simply invest a certain amount of "testing man-hours" before a game is considered complete. Most of those testers will just grind out the hours and go home. Some of the more valuable testers will become invested in their assigned game, offering up suggestions for improvement, identifying inconsistencies, and finding exploits. None of those are things that the test plan specifically calls for, but people with a desire to ship a quality product will voluntarily deliver this information due to passion and high work ethic.
To go even further beyond is to be a tester who crafts a test strategy together with the developers. Under that old waterfall model that I experienced at EA and Namco, QA never gets this opportunity because they are just given builds and told to test new things or verify that bugs are fixed. If you are lucky enough to work alongside developers, you can discuss all of the potential pitfalls in the abstract and help guide development by teaching engineers what to avoid ("what happens if the player chooses to do these levels out of order?"). Another benefit is getting the earliest possible notification while an engineer is coding, like "I can't build this the way I want to, so I have to touch this other part of the code and it could affect this other portion of the game, so let's make sure we look at that closely when we have a new build ready." You also get to teach the rest of your dev team how to test effectively, and how to evaluate risk. This is the point where QA truly becomes skilled labor, because these are skills that no ordinary person off the street would have.
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On June 28 2019 04:48 Excalibur_Z wrote:The QA manager had concerns about the open-office floor plan and stated in no uncertain terms that there were invisible "off limit" lines beyond the QA area where testers would immediately be terminated without discussion if they crossed. "Don't cross over into the Marketing corner, don't wander off into the development area past these restrooms. If you do, you will be immediately terminated, no questions asked." American labour laws are so fucking weird.
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Yeah, pretty much the only situation where i can imagine "walking into the wrong area" being reason for immediate termination is if that area happens to be the other sex bathroom.
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Lets not forget that it is also incredibly inefficient and risky. In our company, testers are one of the most important positions in a team, because it allows you to fail faster when you do R&D, which creates rapid prototyping and good reputation among customers when a product is launched. I am stunned that testers are treated this way in certain companies in US.
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United States11894 Posts
On June 28 2019 07:44 Dangermousecatdog wrote:Show nested quote +On June 28 2019 04:48 Excalibur_Z wrote:The QA manager had concerns about the open-office floor plan and stated in no uncertain terms that there were invisible "off limit" lines beyond the QA area where testers would immediately be terminated without discussion if they crossed. "Don't cross over into the Marketing corner, don't wander off into the development area past these restrooms. If you do, you will be immediately terminated, no questions asked." Wow. American labour laws are so fucking weird.
Contract testers are hired under so-called "at will" employment which stipulates that they can leave or be terminated from their job for any or no reason. For the record, nobody was ever fired for going into an "off-limits" area, it was merely a scare tactic. What's more, nobody outside of QA was even aware of that rule, and found it puzzling why such a rule would even exist. It was probably intended to minimize leaks by intimidating QA into thinking that anyone outside the department would report them for straying from their invisible cage.
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On June 28 2019 00:06 Harris1st wrote:Show nested quote +On June 27 2019 22:03 Manit0u wrote:
I'm all for unionizing. Also, I think it's very stupid of a company to treat their QA team ANY EMPLOYEE like that. Testers are super important. Fixed that for you
Thanks. Now I know I'm a horrible person deep down inside 
But I agree completely with your fix and my thanks are genuine (it will help me become a better person in the future).
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Reading that article pisses me off so much. If game development wasn't seen and treated as such a passion project maybe filthy corporate fucks would have some more respect for the people that make their overinflated wallets bulge.
Aside from ranting, I'd kill to see the entertainment industry more unionized, I don't think that'll be easy without some pretty massive support from a huge chunk of the really high class developers because aside from the company abusing the sense that people are doing what they love a lot of developers that haven't gotten their years in often feel like they're just lucky to be doing what they're doing where they're doing it.
EDIT: that corporate email that went out is also definitely full of shit, especially considering so many people are contractors, they’d probably go to Treyarchs HR and get told to go fuck off to Volt, who presumably gives no shits.
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Canada14485 Posts
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On June 28 2019 07:57 Excalibur_Z wrote:Show nested quote +On June 28 2019 07:44 Dangermousecatdog wrote:On June 28 2019 04:48 Excalibur_Z wrote:The QA manager had concerns about the open-office floor plan and stated in no uncertain terms that there were invisible "off limit" lines beyond the QA area where testers would immediately be terminated without discussion if they crossed. "Don't cross over into the Marketing corner, don't wander off into the development area past these restrooms. If you do, you will be immediately terminated, no questions asked." Wow. American labour laws are so fucking weird. Contract testers are hired under so-called "at will" employment which stipulates that they can leave or be terminated from their job for any or no reason. For the record, nobody was ever fired for going into an "off-limits" area, it was merely a scare tactic. What's more, nobody outside of QA was even aware of that rule, and found it puzzling why such a rule would even exist. It was probably intended to minimize leaks by intimidating QA into thinking that anyone outside the department would report them for straying from their invisible cage.
Ok, American work culture and their labour laws are so fucking weird.
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On June 29 2019 05:32 Dangermousecatdog wrote:Show nested quote +On June 28 2019 07:57 Excalibur_Z wrote:On June 28 2019 07:44 Dangermousecatdog wrote:On June 28 2019 04:48 Excalibur_Z wrote:The QA manager had concerns about the open-office floor plan and stated in no uncertain terms that there were invisible "off limit" lines beyond the QA area where testers would immediately be terminated without discussion if they crossed. "Don't cross over into the Marketing corner, don't wander off into the development area past these restrooms. If you do, you will be immediately terminated, no questions asked." Wow. American labour laws are so fucking weird. Contract testers are hired under so-called "at will" employment which stipulates that they can leave or be terminated from their job for any or no reason. For the record, nobody was ever fired for going into an "off-limits" area, it was merely a scare tactic. What's more, nobody outside of QA was even aware of that rule, and found it puzzling why such a rule would even exist. It was probably intended to minimize leaks by intimidating QA into thinking that anyone outside the department would report them for straying from their invisible cage. Ok, American work culture and their labour laws are so fucking weird.
And inefficent.
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EPT
