1 year (more?) ago, the devs and/or the publisher have been forced to show the win percentages about chests (chances to get a mythic, a legendary, etc…). By what I understood, it was against the law to not display these win percentages when it comes to gambling involving real money so they added them. Good.
But there are still 2 that are missing:
in the pet rescue event, the percentage chances to receive from a basket gift (if its how its called in english) a pet, a jewel or food are not explained
In the forge, Summoning stones menu, the percentage chances to receive an epic troop, an ultra-rare, …etc… are also not explained
Both are gambling that can involve real money, therefore I would conclude it should be against the law to not also show the win percentage of these 2 categories.
If its not against the law (which would surprise me) then its at best an extremely unethical behaviour from the publisher and/or the devs.
No surprise here because imo F2P games concept can only navigate between these 2 extremities.
A gambling machine disguised into a video game still remain a gambling machine.
Which was right after summoning stones changed to the 8 specific troop per week style, and there were no (announced) changes to summoning stones drop rates (to my knowledge) since. This probably should be explained in game (if it is accurate).
As for the others:
Pet baskets aren’t technically (directly) monetized because they have a gameplay gate between the thing that you buy and your prize, so you are techincally buying the ability to do the thing and not the thing that gives you a (random) prize. If we are counting those, we also don’t have any official rates for specific orbs from chaos orbs (monetized through gem buy ins through events, gems are directly monetized), everything that comes out of a vault key (monetized through selling of vault keys and/or events, through gems), the ratios of the various delve chest drops (monetized through delve events, through gems). Add that on to hidden mechanics, such as drop rate for the current troop in the glory pack being heavily skewed to dropping that troop if that rarity is rolled when using an event key (not explained anywhere in-game). For things that aren’t monetized in any direct way but still might inform player decisions (technically it can be argued that nearly anything in the game can be used as a motivator to get someone to spend to get a tool to be able to get their prize either more quickly, or at all but these would be roundabout at best as opposed to the one-layer of abstraction noted above) traitstone drop rates in both explore and PvP (a few rarities were briefly touched on, on a dev QA stream, one time, with a promise to share them all on the forums, which never happened), token drop rates in explore (we have mostly accepted drop rates found only from digging through game files posted on the forums, no official confirmation), ingot drop rates in PvP, adventure board appearance ratios (both task type and rarity), gnome appearance rate, full gnome drop tables and ratios, full legendary task drop tables, the actual chance to get a given prize when watching an ad, and probably some other stuff I’m forgetting.
Yeah, there is a lot of room for improvement in this department.
Yeah, all these other things needs also to be clearly explained about the win percentages. About the Pet, there is no gameplay before the gems spending on the wednesday guaranteed pet. But Im not english speaker so maybe you meant something else? Otherwise we can say there is a gameplay before the spending for everything…opening a gem chest require the gameplay of pressing a button to open the correct menu(s).
In a more general note (with my struggling englsh), Im just showing that F2P game concept love to confuse and hide infos from players. When a video game company arrive in the F2P world, they at least cant fall lower.
There is no law requiring the disclosure of loot box odds, however 505 is a member of the Entertainment Software Association which requires all games to post them. The pet baskets don’t qualify because you can’t get anything rare from them, and you can also straight up buy copies of the pets with gems.
Good point. Now that I think about it, with the daily offers, there are also cases where you don’t have to do any battles to have a Chaos Orb offered for gems, too… though it is super rare, and requires you to have already spent (to VIP6). I can’t remember if Chaos Orbs were ever directly sold for cash or in flash offers, but thats also possible.
To my knowledge, some countries have laws governing the disclosure of rates for purchasable randomized digital items (some banning them outright, some classifying them as “gambling” to be subject to gambling laws, all with loopholes obviously), and multiple platforms have rules that must be adhered to in order to release on the platform, including the Google Play store, the App Store, and apparently Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft intend to follow suit for games on their respective consoles “by the end of 2020”: Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft to require loot box odds disclosure | GamesIndustry.biz. In addition, the article states that many ESA members plan on independently making purchasable digital item rate disclosure a policy for new games (or games that add loot box mechanics in a patch) in 2020, but only some ESA members agreed ahead of time to make this policy, with one notably absent from this being 505 Games (Gems of War’s publisher).
Maybe the line is monetized resources that can be used on randomized digital items (gems) versus having the option to just buy the access to get the randomized digital items directly or as part of any bundle (keys)? Which would just be a fairly big loophole, but apparently it is enough for them to get on the respective platforms with disclosure rules or countries laws where they release. The rate disclosure we have for chests is very bare-bones as it is, with at least one instance of rounding having the disclosed rate being potentially significantly off the actual (0.01% and 0.014% is a pretty big difference), and no way to tell specifically what is in a given chest (which has been an issue in the past).
And yeah, I’ve been personally saying since always that all drop rates should be disclosed. Whether it is required or not, whether directly purchased or not.
Thanks for this very interesting link. All these actions planned clearly show how big of a problem F2P games with lootbox included are.
Gems of war is the 1st and only F2P game with lootbox included that I ever played and it will also be the last one.
Now I can say I had enough time to make a serious analyzis of all this F2P concept and loot box, and I arrived to the conclusion that this system is not defensible and should be purely and simply forbidden!
The fact that these kind of games can be fun (or not) makes no difference and is irrelevant.
This F2P loot box concept really worry me. I hope it will not become the norm in the video game industry in future. It have nothing to do in it. For me a video game should always have a fixed release price. No F2P concept, no loot box concept and also no micro transaction concept. Nothing wrong with a few DLCs to extend the life of the game though.
Its precisely because of the changes I have see the last years (I play video games since the end of the 70s) that I am extremely worried about the direction that the video game industry is taking.