The Shrine

Saw an article about sales of grab bag items, i.e. for $1 you buy something that has some chance of getting some really awesome stuff but most likely it'll be junk. It's essentially a lottery, which I don't have a problem with, but I'm really surprised a lot of MMORPGs apparently offer these services without telling you the chance of getting the prized item at all.

To be, that looks like an outright scam especially if it's done by a lesser known MMORPG where you can't really trust the brand. If the Uber Sword of Awesomeness has a value of $1000 and drops 1 in 1 million bags that cost $1 each then you'd be a lot better off just buy it outright from someone who has it. It's not an issue about being good at math or whatever. Plenty of people with solid mathematical understanding buys Magic the Gathering booster packs hoping they'd get lucky, or participate in the lottery. But you've to at least have some reasonable guaranteed that the whole thing isn't a scam. For example we know you get 1 rare per booster pack of MTG, and presumably all rare are equally rare. We know the pool of numbers you draw the lottery from and we're pretty sure the process is truly random. They might not be a good idea from a mathematic point of view but you know what you're getting into when you participate.

It seems like there has to be some kind of law to force publishers to disclose the odds. It seems no different than say run an online casino and then just outright lie about the results to make more money. Then again, that has already happened too.

Yeah, that's just what I want in my MMOs, to PAY for the torture of more RNG screwing me over even more then it already does.

Eric wrote:Yeah, that's just what I want in my MMOs, to PAY for the torture of more RNG screwing me over even more then it already does.

People who post that are usually the same guys complaining why they didn't get their uber loot from the said bags!

Don wrote: It seems like there has to be some kind of law to force publishers to disclose the odds. It seems no different than say run an online casino and then just outright lie about the results to make more money. Then again, that has already happened too.

The law hasn't caught up to the technology. I love how MMO's, in particular the microtransaction ones, cling to the premise that items or game currency have no real life equivilent. Yes they do...you are selling these things for a real world value, spelled out plainly.

I suppose you need some players to sue these game companies to really force the law to adapt.

I think one of these days someone will sue a company, the company will go to their 'nothing in this game has any value!' argument and someone will point to EBay or anything that deals with RMT and that'd be the end of that debate. I realize companies don't want to get into a situation where if a bomb blew up their server and they can't recover it and get sued them for $10 million for the lost virtual property, but if you've no problem selling a million virtual ponies for $ then yeah you better be prepared to pay up if you somehow lost all that stuff. I mean there are talks about how virtual currencies are ideal for money laundering since it's reliably convertible to cash and it's hard to track, but apparently all this stuff has no value whatsoever.