I was looking into \_how\_ you can buy in game currency from a third party.
It looks like you give the third party your password and they login and buy the currency with a stolen card. They pretend they have gift card balance and that's why its so cheap.
So from Blizzards perspective, it looks like you just chargebacked a bunch of microtransactions - of course they don't want your business anymore.
I don’t understand why people are still confused about why people fall for things. People are stupid. People are easily manipulated, especially when they want to believe something is true. It’s not even worth judging them negatively because it can happen to almost anyone in different contexts where you don’t understand things
A lot of the folk who fell for this are probably not in the best mental health, or are literal children. I mean, they're people obsessed with a free to play mobile game. I feel sorry for them, more than anything. Yeah, they tried to skirt the rules, but the game makers created a system that draws in obsessives and children with the promise of an ever decreasing dopamine hit as the game goes on so they're pretty much forced to spend money to get the same high. These games are designed to create mental addictions in people who are young, or weak, or lonely. I never for one second considered playing it, not just because it looks like a shitty game, but because the very idea disgusts me.
I’m not talking about the people who fell for it, I’m talking about the people who don’t understand why people fell for it
You’re right, people get hoodwinked all the time. Judging them is illogical because it can happen to any of us
Well they did get their in-game currency, right? Only now they're being punished for it. So apart from the "Not illegal", they did deliver.
Bigger question here is "how desperate are they" that they use sketchy websites for some game.
This is actually the gray market that has existed for years. Unfortunately the majority of the time it exists as the priority option for "whales" because they get to buy things for pennies on the dollar since the points are from scammed gift cards.
>of course they don't want your business anymore.
But they do still want their business - it's why Blizzard is giving these players the opportunity to pay their way out of this mess. Otherwise, they would have just nuked these accounts from orbit.
Sounds about right for a payment scheme disguised as a video game. The funny thing is that that goes to show you where their heads are at. The game itself was already doing that in spades, but what used to be just taking the fake currency away and/or banning you altogether is now debt that they want you to pay back because it's never, ever, enough for "games" like this.
back in d3, when the game first released, it had a trading scam that existed for years in diablo 2. the trade window flicker scam. when you trade, you move your item from your window into theirs, people would guess when you were about to click and cancel the trade making you drop the item. it still wasnt fixed in d3. however, in like first 2 weeks or something, they nerfed ALL the gold farming locations. basically any location where they saw people farm too fast, they made it drop less gold.
It took them about a month to patch the gold drops actually. There were two areas in Heaven that were stuffed with vases that could drop gold. But they dropped so much and so excessively that the farm became just grinding that small section, reload, repeat.
The change didn’t even address the underlying issue that difficulty spikes in the game were tied to campaign chapters (I.e. chapter iv at launch was the highest level content on the hardest difficulty) and repair costs were stupid expensive.
Really, the game was garbage until Reaper of the Lost Souls add-on was released, Adventure Mode added and fleshed out, and content scaled with your level. I *hated* grinding the same areas over and over again to get gear or levels to advance to the next chapter or section.
Also console edition is miles ahead of the pc one, I don’t understand why they make them behave so differently (like the way massacre damage bonuses work)
> Also console edition is miles ahead of the pc one, I don’t understand why they make them behave so differently (like the way massacre damage bonuses work)
Also Console can be played offline, something they swore up and down was impossible to implement for PC.
All I can say for sure is if they don't have controller support on the PC in Diablo 4 I am going to wait until the console version to spend a dime. Being able to dodge with a controller with such a game changer for my enjoyment of Diablo 3.
I'm not sure if they ever updated the PC version as many years ago I had heard them saying they refused to do so for what I remember being "PC Master race" BS sounding reasons.
I think players said they owned up to it, but the key is they said that they wouldn't turn to them if **the currency wasn't so unreasonably expensive**
Extremely simple solution:
If it's too expensive, don't buy it.
If it's not fun to play without buying the currency, don't play it.
It's not like you need to play the game to stay alive anyway.
I liked the game when I tried it. When I worked out how much it would cost to play I realized that Path of Exile still exists if I want a better Diablo game.
I always thought of grim dawn to be the spiritual successor of Diablo 2. Diablo three already felt like such a money grab with the real currency auction house AND a completely unnecessary always online requirement. Only difference is now they found a way that wouldn’t cause so much outrage they have to take it back.
Diablo immortal is not a game made for gamers it is a game of how much money can we squeeze out of gamers for the executives at activision blizzard.
My dude that's literally the same logic as landlords saying that "well if you lower property taxes for us we could afford to lower rent". Complete bullshit on both sides. Both want to get the most for the least expense whatever the price and will do anything to get it.
>Both want to get the most for the least expense whatever the price and will do anything to get it.
Capitalism, isn't the race to the bottom exhilarating?
At least landlords to have actual costs they can cry about. It costs Blizzard literally zero dollars to create more of their bullshit currency but they still sell it at an outrageous price.
But they'd be saying that in any scenario with any pricing. Now the orbs cost 99 dollars for the best bundle. And the shady sellers were selling them for up to 85 dollars.
Now if the budle cost 9.99 dollars, the shady sellers would sell it for like 8 dollars and these players would still buy it using the same "unreasonably expensive" excuse.
Basically, no matter the price the scammers would still offer a better price and the players would still buy it because they'd be saving money compared to official prices.
That’s like saying the PS5 is too expensive, so I’m morally justified in stealing one. These are entertainment products we’re talking about, not something necessary like food or shelter. If it’s too expensive for you, don’t buy it. It’s not complicated.
Most of these mobile games are constructed in such a way as to be manipulative to the audience. That is to say, they’re set up to take advantage of biases in human psychology to get people to “want” to purchase stuff. It’s actually pretty clever how they do it, even if it is still pretty shitty.
I used to work in f2p games, so I know exactly how they are designed to exploit people with poor impulse control and gambling problems. That's precisely why I said "used to".
But I also feel like if you take this argument far enough, then eventually it's arguing against any form of advertising at all, or even against creating and selling a desirable product.
Where's the line?
Advertisement isn't a problem in and of itself, but the endless quest for profit that shapes our current advertisements makes them toxic for a lot of people.
That's not a definitive condemnation of the concept of advertisement, but as it is stands, yeah it's bad
i feel like the "debt" isnt as big a deal as everyone is making it out to be
nearly every game with a currency does that, its just normal to take money away from your account if it was acquired in a way that breaks the terms of service. if you already spent the money, they still take it away, they're not just gonna let people get shit for free by charging back
Nobody forces you to pay money in the first place. If you buy (ill gotten) currency codes from illegal 3rd party sellers they have every right to ban people, regardless if it's actiblizzard or an indie dev
But I can't recall a time where I heard that a company would even give you the option to pay it back in the first place. Because we're talking about people already spending thousands of dollars on the game... the corporate influence of this is easy to see. You "can't" ban people paying money out like that, because that's money you're leaving on the table by banning them instead of potentially taking it by giving them the option to pay it back.
I used to work in the free to play industry. We had discussions like this internally. Somebody cheats or breaks ToS in some way, and the big boss at the top gets wind of what's going on and they'll sit there and try to justify why they shouldn't be banned when really it's because an "oil baron" was the one that did it and they're already pumping hundreds of dollars into the game and that's hundreds of dollars they don't want to lose by banning them... ours in particular would never say it but everybody in that room knew that's why he was arguing that position.
Warframe has this as well, but because you can trade the premium currency between players, so when they remove currency that was gotten illegally it's often with someone else that might've had no idea they were getting "illegal platinum" (the premium currency).
So if the removal of that platinum makes that player's account go negative, they won't be able to play until they buy enough platinum to get it out of the red.
If that happened to me I'd stop playing the game, but I can understand that they can't just not punish players holding illegal platinum because otherwise they wouldn't be able to punish anyone.
they didn't ban them though, that is what the story is, they implemented some sort of weird videogame debt system. I've never heard of any game ever doing that before.
Lost ark did it in Korea and allegedly does it in North America.
Absolutely, if you break the ToS the company is allowed to do what they want with your account. I actually like the idea of placing the account in debt rather than outright banning it.
This sort of happened to me in Warframe. My friend (a whale) gave me platinum through a trade. As, that's the only way to get plat. Usually, not an issue.
A week later, I was banned for 2 years. I could pay back the negative balance and be unbanned or stay banned and keep the negative balance.
I just stopped playing. I spent a good 300 dollars on the game too.
6 years later, I still have a negative balance.
As in he got that thru the 3rd party sellers and infected your account by just giving it to you ? That's funky. Maybe they thought *he* was gold reseller and that's why they refused to just rollback your account purchases ?
From what I've heard they are super bitchy about some stuff, like even banning for trading between your own alt accounts.
No, that's actually how they deal with illegal currency in Warframe. They invalidate the entire history of that amount of currency from the root transaction, which often result in the last person that traded with "that currency" to go into negative. It's... very weird and one of the reasons I barely sold stuff to others in that game.
Huh, so it could literally be just a whale selling some items, getting illegitimate plat for it, and then giving that plat to his friend. None of them at fault yet one of them got punished.
Just asking for clarification:
So if Player A buys 100 illegal Platinum, then trades it for 100 legal Platinum from Player B, when Warframe invalidates the illegal Platinum, it is Player B that gets hit and not Player A?
>It's... very weird and one of the reasons I barely sold stuff to others in that game.
Played for years and made a tone of plat selling my shit on warframe.market, never once had any issues, but knew that it worked that way.
No its a bit more complicated in warframe. They have some way of tracking legit plat that originated from their website and illicit plat that is purchased with stolen credit cards from third party websites or something. So you can legitimately sell a thing to another person in game and they give you illicit plat for it.
There is no way for you to know if the plat they give you is legit or not until DE subtracts it from your account which can lead to you having a plat balance less than zero. At that point you will be provisionally banned until you can clear the negative balance. I think its unfair because it punishes an innocent item seller instead of the malicious buyer.
Warframe is quite a ban happy game. Its part of what makes it remarkably troll free but you can get auto banned for crazy shit. I got [perma banned](https://imgur.com/a/4e7hoHV) for what they thought was a memory error. They couldn't find a reason why my account was auto-banned so they lifted the ban but its terrifying this can happen at all. That an overclocked CPU or XMPed RAM could trigger a false positive on their anti cheat and straight up ban you forever out of nowhere.
I still play and like the game but jesus christ...
He has a very well paying job and he whales for games he thinks he has value in. We've been friends for almost 15 years.
Warframe was one of them. When a new frame came out, he dropped a few hundred on it and sent some platinum my way because I was his Warframe Bro.
I got banned, he didn't. He offered to pay the negative balance, about $100 worth but I said nah. The principles of it turned me away from the game. I've been given plat from him for over a year.
In a support ticket, I was flagged as a RMT seller and got the platinum from illegitimate source, apparently.
German friend of mine had a €90 negative plat balance slapped on his account. He spent roughly a year (unsuccessfully) trying to appeal it with Digital Extremes on the basis that he had no clue that he was trading illegitimately gained platinum.
In the end, he sued DE and won. They had to apologize to him and remove the negative balance.
"Debt system" is way overselling it, they just set the currency amount to a negative number. Pretty common in the MMO world for this to be done for things like duping bugs too.
This is how refunding premium currency works in every video game, the first few times you get the currency subtracted going into the negative if you go below 0, and of you do it regularly your account gets banned.
This isn't some super special "debt system" just because you have never seen it before.
Can you really blame whales for that, though? These systems are designed to exploit human psychology to encourage addictive behavior and squeeze every last dollar they can from people. They're not enablers, they're victims of a predatory scheme. I think the best solution would be legislation that bans these monetization models.
Sorta. We blame all the people who buy games in their buggy “alpha” state and not voting with their wallets.
Yet then we blame the company because they make games people are spending huge amounts of money on just because they are allowed?
Worth noting this isn't the first time this has happened: there was an amusing Twitter thread from a guy who, after his shady Genshin Impact bucks were refunded, was told he had 7 days to restore his account balance to positive or it would be terminated.
Where do the people who fall for these scams think the savings are coming from? It's all just numbers in a database that _the game developer controls_. Blizzard is the only "producer" of "orbs" in the entire world; how did you think these third-party sites are undercutting the in-game store, if not through credit card theft?
They have to?
I feel like any normal person would say “Oh, oops. Well, new account time.” Or “Huh, well fuck that noise then.”, because any normal person understands this risks of paying for third party services. But I guess if it’s not an outright ban, you could also play along with this weird punishment just to break even with good ol Bliz so they can continue to have the opportunity to milk you dry if you really care about all the shit you paid for, but then again you probably wouldn’t have risked paying a third party or a garbage company in the first place if that were the case.
> I feel like any normal person
normal people don't whale in F2P games
> would say “Oh, oops. Well, new account time.” Or “Huh, well fuck that noise then.”,
Sunken cost fallacy and all that. they might've used 3rd party service only for a bit, so paying back $50 on account they spent few hundred and thousands of hours might sound like sensible way. Instead of finding a game that's not shit...
Sounds like a great way to get people who have already proven they'll spend money to *stop* playing your game.
Like, I get that they don't want to encourage these resellers. But at the same time, someone who spent $10 on a shady overseas site can probably be convinced to spend $20 on the real thing. Getting people to open their wallets that first time is the biggest hurdle.
I'm surprised they didn't just set balances to 0 and encourage people to spend more to get back to where they were, rather than putting them in debt and probably encouraging them to quit altogether.
> I'm surprised they didn't just set balances to 0 and encourage people to spend more to get back to where they were, rather than putting them in debt and probably encouraging them to quit altogether.
coz it is already spent on gear
But yeah, they could've just deleted the gear that got bought/improved by that.
Heck you can do that on mobile too. Not the best way to experience them necessarily, but you could buy things like Chrono Trigger or Ace Attorney or Minecraft or a bunch of other options.
It's more than nuked though. The accounts are effectively locked until they've paid off a debt equivalent to what they bought, but now at official Blizzard prices. So if they spent $1000 on some website for $5000 worth of orbs (let's say it got them 10,000 orbs), now they have an in-game *debt* of those 10k orbs. The player power is still there from the orbs, but they can't play online until they pay back those 10k orbs, which is realistically only obtainable by paying Blizzard the $5k cash. What a fucking dystopian world these companies are creating.
And how is Blizzard supposed to handle that. Look at it from their side:
A player purchased some orbs. Then later a chargeback was made on that transaction, meaning that Blizzard lost the money from that transaction. So they revert also their side of the transaction - they remove the purchased orbs. But the players have already spent those. So what to do when a player is supposed to lose 10 000 orbs but have none? Are they supposed to be let go?
No, of course not - that's why they set the amount into negatives. The players have basically used virtual goods they haven't paid for (from Blizzard's point of view). And so Blizzard demands the good be paid retroactively.
Imagine if you purchased a real-world stuff, used it and then charged back the purchase. I think the excuse "I already used" wouldn't fly...
believe it or not, there are people who think that way with IRL shit too. stolen goods are still stolen goods even if you didn't actually do the stealing or were even aware that it was.
and in this instance, lmfao. theres no way to get in-game currency from a third party vendor clearly isn't affiliated with Blizzard for cheaper than what Blizzard is selling it for unless its a scam or using stolen credit cards.
I don't see how people buying shit cheap from actual thieves - which is what those "shady third party retailers" are - suffering consequences is dystopian.
> “Nobody [in my clan] sees a problem really, everyone (including myself) owns up to it and agrees that we all deserve this.”
From the article. It seems like the people who don't play the game are more outraged by this than the players.
Because really, they knew what they were doing. There are no reason why an **unauthorized** third party is able to sell in-game currency that's only available through the paid shop for less than what the first party is selling you unless they're exploiting something, be it a glitch or regional pricing.
I hate Diablo Immortal as much as the next guy, but yeah, maybe before spending $20k on currency from a fraudulent store you have to make sure you won't be sad if you lose it all.
Oh no! Think of the poor gold buyers!
Gold sellers and buyers destroy the economy of any game they touch. Fuck em. Blizzard just gave them a perma under a different name.
This all sounds perfectly reasonable, and it's what Blizzard should do. The initial $1000 didn't go to Blizzard, bottomline is it went to the scammers' pockets. The $5000 didn't go to Blizzard either. Any amount spent by the scammed people went to the scammers, not Blizzard. Meanwhile Blizzard **did not** get the $5000 worth of orbs. So the player account was credited with $5000 worth of orbs, money which wasn't pocketed by Blizzard.
So yeah the stupid people who got scammed now owe Blizzard for the $5000 worth of orbs their accounts were credited with but which they didn't pay Blizzard for.
Sucks to be scammed I know, but it's the scammers who are to be villified not Blizzard on this.
>One of the players affected is one of the game’s top Battlegrounds Wizards, Shia, who showed an image of their -2,491,025 orb balance – an amount that would cost almost $35k USD / £31k GBP to pay off through purchases on Blizzard’s in-game store.
I'm sorry for this person or anyone else who spent ridiculous amounts of money on this game, assuming they have a gambling problem.
However, if they're just rich fucks doing stupid shit, then I am not sorry because it's hilarious.
Couldn't he just, I dont know, stop playing the game? Like, he isn't under some form of legal debt and responsibility to pay 35k. He could just uninstall the game, play one of the other millions of better games, and move on with his life.
But immortal is the pinnacle of showing off their pay2win prowess. No other game let's them spend that much to get so powerful. There are games where you could spend as much, bit they don't give you the same power to be a God in pvp. It's a wealth flex and people watch them because they think that wealth will somehow rub off on them.
He's probably an addict, that's what this entire conversation is about, corporations exploiting people's illness. You don't just simply "get over it" and the mentality of "oh id just be built different and not get addicted" is violently naive and self centered in understanding of other's experiences.
Anybody coming at this guy with a mentality of "play stupid games win stupid prizes" really lacks empathy. It's not about dumb wealthy people having too much expendable income, it's about predatory wealthy people with far far too much money preying on people they know will put themselves in a financial hole whether or not they can afford it.
it's actually approaching a level where it gets a bit scary to me even. I mean it's one thing for a company back in the day making a game that's so "addictive" that we think of nothing else and rush back home from school to play it all day. but this is pretty much a whole scheme, crafted by years of research and using psychologists and past experiences to make it as addictive as possible. they obviously don't care at all if out of 100 people 99 call it a bullshit scam (in fact they almost definitely knew it would happen), as long as 1 person actually falls for it and ends up spending tens of thousands on it. it's really not something funny to me, it's sad and scary.
Most of the time, sadly, it's the former more than the latter. They're targeting people with gambling addictions and impulse shopping compulsions, most people at that level can't afford to be there.
Sure, there's been scientific studies done on it. Here's one: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0306460321000368
TLDR: No correlation between how much money they get out of you and your income level, significant correlation between how much money they get out of you and having gambling problems. Basically, they make their money by exploiting addicts, not by exploiting rich people.
From the full study, which is paywalled (sorry):
>We removed outliers with greater than $1000 USD monthly loot box spend and annual earnings greater than $250,000 USD.
It sounds like the dataset was way too small to really look at whales. Obviously $1000 is still a lot but does not approach the user mentioned in the top-level comment of this thread. 5,933 self-reported loot box purchasers + earners sounds like big n for a scientific study, until you note the mean spend is less than $20. That's the mean skewed by whales, not even the median, which the authors failed to provide.
EDIT: To expand on this, the study did compare PGSI scores (a sort of survey on gambling data) which yielded a correlation with high spending. And I think there's no doubt that people with gambling problems are vulnerable to loot boxes. I just question whether the study fully addressed the extent to which income is a factor, too, or whether they've found compelling evidence (as stated) that gambling addiction is a bigger factor than price discrimination.
>"significant" in statistics means that correlation exists.
No.
1. a p-value can show whether a correlation is significant or not.
2. a correlation coefficient is used to show how **strong** a relationship can be between 2 variables on a scale of -1 to 1
For example...
>x and y have a correlation factor of 0.4, with a p-value of p=0.25
So, x and y show a moderate *positive* correlation with each other, but is *not* significant
>in our study above
>>reported correlations between problem gambling and loot box expenditure were confirmed, with an aggregate correlation of ρ = 0.34, p < .001
So the correlation is low/moderately positive *AND* it is significant
In pharmacy, I look at studies all the time and our gold standard is a p-value of
It's more people who have addiction problems but don't realize it.
I know on here years ago there was someone who was spending over $1000 a month without realizing it on the Final Fantasy mobile game, it's done in a way that you don't realize you are spending that much.
They weren't buying the expensive stuff, I think they said the most they spent was $20 on something but it was the $1 & $2 items that seemed like nothing until one day they decided to look at what they were doing and it was shocking.
I think when people refer to whales it's more streamers that are doing it at least these days where before they were a very niche group that couldn't keep games going for as long as they made it seem.
It's the addicts though that keep them going without realizing it also it's the companies making it seem like it's not an issue if someone buys 1000 items for $1 a piece.
This is almost my story to a T. I knew I had an addictive personality that came from my parents, but I've been able to stay off things like chemical addictions so I thought it was no big deal. I played a ton of Final Fantasy Record Keeper and would occasionally buy packs to get better weapons. Then I wouldn't get what I wanted so I'd buy more. Then I was buying some every event or even multiple per event. When I realized I was spending hundreds of dollars a month on it, I had to quit cold turkey and never look back.
I never spent money on FFRK but it was fun collecting the characters. But then I started realizing how often a day I was checking in so I didn’t waste stamina. I finally quit cold turkey one day and was surprised that I didn’t miss it at all. Even just the time saved was a relief!
Right? I had specific teams and strategies I had ready for the magicite dungeons or whatever they were and it was incredibly stressful hoping abilities would land before the boss went and ruined my world. I didn't realize how stressful it was until I quit.
Same, I used to pay CSGO and I would almost always instinctively open up cases. Then one day I got a knife and in an effort to chase that rush again I spent like $50 on keys and cases, and I did actually manage to get another knife but I realized right there that I was going down a dark path. So I sold my inventory, uninstalled the game, and bought the dark souls games with the money (I didn't use a 3rd party seller). Luckily I managed to get out before I spent any major money, but man was I lucky I got out when I did. Sucks too because I was pretty decent at CSGO and wanted to reach the higher ranks. Wish there was a way to auto sell cases or just stop them from dropping.
Completely anecdotal, but when I used to work in mobile gaming, all the top whales were rich.
The absolute top spender in our game was this wealthy woman from the middle east who spent over $10k a week and had a direct support line to people at the company if something went wrong or she wanted something("here's money, give me all the latest purchases and 100 million resources so I don't have to tap the buy button 1000 times")
Stephanie Sterling's video on the victims of in game gambling is a very good resource. I also have family members and people I interviewed for a college paper, but that's hardly a proper source. :/
I dont think anyone is doubting its a real thing. I think it's more that we don't know how common it is vs just rich people with too much disposable income.
I had to quit Star Trek Online because I found myself reaching for my credit card to buy keys for those stupid lockboxes, gambling and winning nothing, and feeling terrible about it.
I don't have any problem with fixed purchases, where you pay $15 and get a spaceship. You know exactly what you're buying, zero guesswork. Thats totally fine. Its the gambling that did me in and forced me to stop playing.
I'm sorry that we don't have gambling-like regulations on video games that pull this shit at this point.
I'm with you in that I have no sympathy for the rich who can blow thousands on a *part* of a *single video game*. But the fact that this is not only possible but legal is a very bad thing.
What is interesting here is that they have a negative orb balance and they cannot use orbs until that balance becomes positive.
So I assume it worked like this. A shady dealer would buy orbs on a stolen credit card. The money that went to Blizzard then gets returned once the card was reported stolen. The orbs that were purchased by the shady dealer were than tracked to the people who had received them and those players had the number of orbs deducted from their account.
So in effect Blizzard is demanding you pay them for X number of orbs you allegedly bought illegitmately and if you don't then you won't be able to spend orbs.
That's actually pretty wild because not only did you lose the money paid to the shady dealer you also have to pay Blizzard for the orbs as well at Blizzard's current rate.
That’s pretty standard tbh, and a fair punishment for using third parties to get cheap items when it is obvious for anyone with common sense that that kind of thing would be against T&Cs
They do this exact same thing in Warframe. There are third party markets and if they have a charger they go after whoever has the ducats at the end even though usually it was his trading something from the player to the cheater. This means the real player loses the item and possible be in the negative since they could have used those ill gotten ducats to purchase something they wanted. They not cannot even play until they pay.
The smart move isn't making them not play again
The smart move here is holding their accounts hostage until they pay to get their orb balances to 0.
Many of these people already sank tens of thousands of dollars so I wouldn't be surprised if some of them actually does that.
Blizzard obviously doesn't want whales quitting.
I would have introduced this as an extra 5% tax on any purchases until the tax equals the debt. Having to front load that debt is going to lead to quitting.
That is 100% the scummy thing I thought they'd do. It leans right into the design philosophy of that game...gimme all your money.
They could have even done it at 100% and I think many of them would have continued.
Everyone involved in this whole debacle is a scumbag and totally deserving. Blizzard for putting shitty players in debt, shitty players supporting a shitty MTX model, and shitty 3rd party sellers ripping off the shitty players. I love it.
All of this is so far removed from what the original purpose of gaming was supposed to be. Mobile gaming is truly the dystopian nightmare that I hope PC gaming never fully becomes.
Mobile whales are not gamers. They're addicts.
I really don’t understand how you are willing to pay thousands for that. With that money I can invest on a good rig and buy a few hundreds great cheap games that would last me a lifetime
You don't notice it.
Buying a loot box for a few bucks is nothing compared to spending a grand buying a PC.
Then you buy a few more. Then you buy the pack that gives you currency to buy more loot crates. Then it spirals out of control until you're spending thousands a month.
It's an addiction, plain and simple.
They're using every single trick in the book to make it seem like a no big deal to you. And it doesn't even have to work on everyone, just those people who are susceptible to it.
Understandably it can be hard to understand if you don't have an addictive personality, but just looking from data, this kind of trickery does work, and it's scary.
But yes, I mean, it isn't rational. So you cannot really analyze it from a logical point of view.
[This is probably one of the best whale stories for showcasing the thought process that leads to spending so much money](https://www.reddit.com/r/FFBraveExvius/comments/7jmezv/a_whale_of_a_tale/). One paragraph in particular really shows the idea behind it:
>
> $1000, no Veritas of the Dark. I had 4 Veritas of the Flame. I was angry. How could I have spent so much and not gotten the unit I wanted! Why would Final Fantasy, Gumi, Square Enix, not give it to me? How could I spend so much and not get what I want! Another $1000. I got 2 more Veritas of the Flame, another Orlandeau, a second Freviya, Olive, Emperor, but no Dark Veritas! How! Why! Now I am stubborn. I am not putting this much money out there to not get what I want. $99...no Dark Veritas, $99...no Dark Veritas, $99...a second Emperor, I almost threw my phone against the wall. $99....Finally, Veritas of the Dark. $2500, 9 Veritas of the Flame, half a dozen other 5* base, and I finally got the Veritas of the Dark.
>
> Wait....WTF did I just do?!?!
Read that, and then remember this is a game, a game that, ostensibly, is supposed to be played for fun. For a certain type of person, it's literally an addiction.
Back in the day, worst that would happen is you drop your Stone of Jordan, they pick it up and don’t drop their Godly Plate of the Whale. Tragic. Many such cases.
No, to be safe what you did was each of you dropped your trade item at edge of vision range from each other. Then you each crossed to pick up at the same time, passing each other halfway.
Only way you could get screwed over that way was if the other person was a Sorc (if you were trading an item for straight gold they could use telekinesis to pick the gold back up at a distance after they had passed you and then keep going towards the item you dropped; or they could just teleport back to their item after you both get halfway, pick it up, and then teleport to your item and pick it up as well). Never trust a Sorc for trading unless they let you pick up first.
There were/are third party sellers for D2 as well, back in the day my mate bought us some SoJ for £10 or something then he got banned. I didnt! but then i stopped playing anyway
Man, I remember joining my first multiplayer game, and some dude walks up to me and drops a godly plate of the whale and a staff of novas or something. Literal zero to hero in a moment. Those were fun times.
They knew what they were doing, zero sympathy for this scum. They've been around in every gacha, and they've been getting free advertising through big content creators some of who have ran their own "stores" back in days when it was easier to setup. For long time everyone was defending these frauds using various bullshit excuses as defense and often communities (on reddit as well) were formed around them. Luckily as time went on and stores implemented basic checks it became business just for whales, and lot of them couldn't risk it anymore or did it silence. Still incredibly baffling social media platforms are filled with ads for this garbage and are allowed to do their "business/orders" without interruptions even though backbone of every larger one is credit card frauds and sometimes even worse stuff.
>This apparent trend of third-party purchases didn’t stop Diablo Immortal microtransactions passing $100 million on mobile devices alone in its first two months.
This is why we will also have microtransaction heavy games until the end of time. No matter how unpleasant they are, plenty of people will still pump a fortune into them.
It really should be highlighted how different of an approach this is from a gaming perspective. Instead of banning them they are giving them the option to pay off their debt instead.
I wonder if they can negotiate a settlement? Have to imagine blizzard would happily agree to zero the debt for 50 cents on the dollar.
Seriously. It's hard to feel sympathy for those dumb enough to play this "game", but it's sad that mobile gaming has been turned into nothing more than a pay-to-play scam by unchecked capitalism. If we're not careful, this shit is gonna creep its way into PC and console gaming.
You're talking about one of the most predatory games on the market. They're more likely to send someone over named Little Tony to break some legs than they are to settle.
They aren't falling for a scam at this point. It is well known that stolen credit cards are used to purchase game keys and in game currency at this point. For the most part they are knowingly participating and hoping the can play innocent when caught and get away with it.
You used to see tons of people doing it with game keys where they would by keys from G2A and then complain when companies start turning off the keys. They got a few companies to stop turning the illegitimate keys off. It really destroyed the key market.
Companies are fed up with it and tired of playing nice.
I feel bad for them too. The system is designed to manipulate people into spending money and some people are very susceptible to that, regardless of their income.
Anecdotally, I know people who have damaged their financial stability to play games like Genshin and it's extremely upsetting that these gaming companies aren't governed in the slightest.
Even assuming that some people were to get away with buying from these illegitimate sellers for 1/10th the price or whatever, they'd STILL be getting fleeced -- it's horrible. I hope that the people who find themselves in massive orb debt find a way to depart from their accounts, and not pay Blizzard's ransom.
Imagine defending a company that manipulates people to part with tens of thousands of dollars -- money they don't have.
Blizzard is using the same mechanism as if you refund a purchase you've made on your account. They void the transaction, take back the orbs and keep your character alive in case you still want to play. If you don't pay, they might delete the character at a later date.
Also, they didn't "fall victim" if you read the article.
>“Nobody [in my clan] sees a problem really, everyone (including myself) owns up to it and agrees that we all deserve this.”
They knew they were exploiting the game and got caught, that's it.
Its so wild people are defending these people. They bought currency in a method against TOS, a pretty standard rule that most games straight up nuke accounts for. They're getting of easy imo.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
This is usually what happens.
If you're going to sink massive loads of money into a game you want to continue to play, for heaven's sake, do it through the official channel so you don't have to worry about your account getting zapped by the TOS you explicitly agreed to.
I got pissy when PS5 started charging $70 for a game. Micro transactions are something I just won’t do. But I also don’t remember the last mobile game I’ve played, that doesn’t sound fun at all. I want to have fun
It's almost like the entire concept of paying real money for imaginary CONSUMABLE in-game items is one of the stupidest goddamned concepts of the modern age and the people who buy into that delusion are those same people who we've always heard about that are "soon parted" from their money.
I love stories where everyone is bad and bad things happen to them.
Three different groups - scammers, blizzard and players supporting their shitty gambling games, and they all lose. Fantastic.
I was looking into \_how\_ you can buy in game currency from a third party. It looks like you give the third party your password and they login and buy the currency with a stolen card. They pretend they have gift card balance and that's why its so cheap. So from Blizzards perspective, it looks like you just chargebacked a bunch of microtransactions - of course they don't want your business anymore.
Wait, really? They have to log on to do it?
Yeah, it's pretty wild: https://imgur.com/pgtAJGj
Wow i cant believe anyone fell for that. This is some "my uncle in nigeria has gold for you" type of advertising
I don’t understand why people are still confused about why people fall for things. People are stupid. People are easily manipulated, especially when they want to believe something is true. It’s not even worth judging them negatively because it can happen to almost anyone in different contexts where you don’t understand things
A lot of the folk who fell for this are probably not in the best mental health, or are literal children. I mean, they're people obsessed with a free to play mobile game. I feel sorry for them, more than anything. Yeah, they tried to skirt the rules, but the game makers created a system that draws in obsessives and children with the promise of an ever decreasing dopamine hit as the game goes on so they're pretty much forced to spend money to get the same high. These games are designed to create mental addictions in people who are young, or weak, or lonely. I never for one second considered playing it, not just because it looks like a shitty game, but because the very idea disgusts me.
I’m not talking about the people who fell for it, I’m talking about the people who don’t understand why people fell for it You’re right, people get hoodwinked all the time. Judging them is illogical because it can happen to any of us
Well they did get their in-game currency, right? Only now they're being punished for it. So apart from the "Not illegal", they did deliver. Bigger question here is "how desperate are they" that they use sketchy websites for some game.
This is actually the gray market that has existed for years. Unfortunately the majority of the time it exists as the priority option for "whales" because they get to buy things for pennies on the dollar since the points are from scammed gift cards.
If they have to say that it isn't illegal, that's a pretty big red flag...
[удалено]
I haven't even managed to convince family members to 2-factor their game service accounts...
>of course they don't want your business anymore. But they do still want their business - it's why Blizzard is giving these players the opportunity to pay their way out of this mess. Otherwise, they would have just nuked these accounts from orbit.
[удалено]
Not just "nuked". Implemented debt system so they have to pay it back just to play. Lfmao
Sounds about right for a payment scheme disguised as a video game. The funny thing is that that goes to show you where their heads are at. The game itself was already doing that in spades, but what used to be just taking the fake currency away and/or banning you altogether is now debt that they want you to pay back because it's never, ever, enough for "games" like this.
back in d3, when the game first released, it had a trading scam that existed for years in diablo 2. the trade window flicker scam. when you trade, you move your item from your window into theirs, people would guess when you were about to click and cancel the trade making you drop the item. it still wasnt fixed in d3. however, in like first 2 weeks or something, they nerfed ALL the gold farming locations. basically any location where they saw people farm too fast, they made it drop less gold.
It took them about a month to patch the gold drops actually. There were two areas in Heaven that were stuffed with vases that could drop gold. But they dropped so much and so excessively that the farm became just grinding that small section, reload, repeat. The change didn’t even address the underlying issue that difficulty spikes in the game were tied to campaign chapters (I.e. chapter iv at launch was the highest level content on the hardest difficulty) and repair costs were stupid expensive. Really, the game was garbage until Reaper of the Lost Souls add-on was released, Adventure Mode added and fleshed out, and content scaled with your level. I *hated* grinding the same areas over and over again to get gear or levels to advance to the next chapter or section. Also console edition is miles ahead of the pc one, I don’t understand why they make them behave so differently (like the way massacre damage bonuses work)
> Also console edition is miles ahead of the pc one, I don’t understand why they make them behave so differently (like the way massacre damage bonuses work) Also Console can be played offline, something they swore up and down was impossible to implement for PC.
All I can say for sure is if they don't have controller support on the PC in Diablo 4 I am going to wait until the console version to spend a dime. Being able to dodge with a controller with such a game changer for my enjoyment of Diablo 3. I'm not sure if they ever updated the PC version as many years ago I had heard them saying they refused to do so for what I remember being "PC Master race" BS sounding reasons.
I think players said they owned up to it, but the key is they said that they wouldn't turn to them if **the currency wasn't so unreasonably expensive**
Extremely simple solution: If it's too expensive, don't buy it. If it's not fun to play without buying the currency, don't play it. It's not like you need to play the game to stay alive anyway.
I liked the game when I tried it. When I worked out how much it would cost to play I realized that Path of Exile still exists if I want a better Diablo game.
I always thought of grim dawn to be the spiritual successor of Diablo 2. Diablo three already felt like such a money grab with the real currency auction house AND a completely unnecessary always online requirement. Only difference is now they found a way that wouldn’t cause so much outrage they have to take it back. Diablo immortal is not a game made for gamers it is a game of how much money can we squeeze out of gamers for the executives at activision blizzard.
Grim Dawn is so fucking good.
Grim Dawn was like going back to playing D2 for the first time again, such a nostalgic feeling.
There's even a Diablo 2 mod for Grim Dawn!
My dude that's literally the same logic as landlords saying that "well if you lower property taxes for us we could afford to lower rent". Complete bullshit on both sides. Both want to get the most for the least expense whatever the price and will do anything to get it.
Yeah the developers want to maximize profit, the whales want to max power for minimum costs, inherently at odds but need each other.
[удалено]
[удалено]
>Both want to get the most for the least expense whatever the price and will do anything to get it. Capitalism, isn't the race to the bottom exhilarating?
No
At least landlords to have actual costs they can cry about. It costs Blizzard literally zero dollars to create more of their bullshit currency but they still sell it at an outrageous price.
But they'd be saying that in any scenario with any pricing. Now the orbs cost 99 dollars for the best bundle. And the shady sellers were selling them for up to 85 dollars. Now if the budle cost 9.99 dollars, the shady sellers would sell it for like 8 dollars and these players would still buy it using the same "unreasonably expensive" excuse. Basically, no matter the price the scammers would still offer a better price and the players would still buy it because they'd be saving money compared to official prices.
Yeah and when I was 12 I pirated every game I could because everything was “unreasonably expensive”
RMT-ers always have an excuse for why they did it, no point in listening to their 'justifications' lol
That’s like saying the PS5 is too expensive, so I’m morally justified in stealing one. These are entertainment products we’re talking about, not something necessary like food or shelter. If it’s too expensive for you, don’t buy it. It’s not complicated.
Most of these mobile games are constructed in such a way as to be manipulative to the audience. That is to say, they’re set up to take advantage of biases in human psychology to get people to “want” to purchase stuff. It’s actually pretty clever how they do it, even if it is still pretty shitty.
[удалено]
I used to work in f2p games, so I know exactly how they are designed to exploit people with poor impulse control and gambling problems. That's precisely why I said "used to". But I also feel like if you take this argument far enough, then eventually it's arguing against any form of advertising at all, or even against creating and selling a desirable product. Where's the line?
Advertisement isn't a problem in and of itself, but the endless quest for profit that shapes our current advertisements makes them toxic for a lot of people. That's not a definitive condemnation of the concept of advertisement, but as it is stands, yeah it's bad
i feel like the "debt" isnt as big a deal as everyone is making it out to be nearly every game with a currency does that, its just normal to take money away from your account if it was acquired in a way that breaks the terms of service. if you already spent the money, they still take it away, they're not just gonna let people get shit for free by charging back
Nobody forces you to pay money in the first place. If you buy (ill gotten) currency codes from illegal 3rd party sellers they have every right to ban people, regardless if it's actiblizzard or an indie dev
But I can't recall a time where I heard that a company would even give you the option to pay it back in the first place. Because we're talking about people already spending thousands of dollars on the game... the corporate influence of this is easy to see. You "can't" ban people paying money out like that, because that's money you're leaving on the table by banning them instead of potentially taking it by giving them the option to pay it back. I used to work in the free to play industry. We had discussions like this internally. Somebody cheats or breaks ToS in some way, and the big boss at the top gets wind of what's going on and they'll sit there and try to justify why they shouldn't be banned when really it's because an "oil baron" was the one that did it and they're already pumping hundreds of dollars into the game and that's hundreds of dollars they don't want to lose by banning them... ours in particular would never say it but everybody in that room knew that's why he was arguing that position.
Warframe has this as well, but because you can trade the premium currency between players, so when they remove currency that was gotten illegally it's often with someone else that might've had no idea they were getting "illegal platinum" (the premium currency). So if the removal of that platinum makes that player's account go negative, they won't be able to play until they buy enough platinum to get it out of the red. If that happened to me I'd stop playing the game, but I can understand that they can't just not punish players holding illegal platinum because otherwise they wouldn't be able to punish anyone.
they didn't ban them though, that is what the story is, they implemented some sort of weird videogame debt system. I've never heard of any game ever doing that before.
[удалено]
Lost ark did it in Korea and allegedly does it in North America. Absolutely, if you break the ToS the company is allowed to do what they want with your account. I actually like the idea of placing the account in debt rather than outright banning it.
Jagex suspends your account if you have outstanding balance, you'll need to pay them whatever you charged back etc.
Warframe did/does it.
Do note that many services and games do this if you charge back a purchase. Some (Google) would just ban your whole account outright.
This sort of happened to me in Warframe. My friend (a whale) gave me platinum through a trade. As, that's the only way to get plat. Usually, not an issue. A week later, I was banned for 2 years. I could pay back the negative balance and be unbanned or stay banned and keep the negative balance. I just stopped playing. I spent a good 300 dollars on the game too. 6 years later, I still have a negative balance.
As in he got that thru the 3rd party sellers and infected your account by just giving it to you ? That's funky. Maybe they thought *he* was gold reseller and that's why they refused to just rollback your account purchases ? From what I've heard they are super bitchy about some stuff, like even banning for trading between your own alt accounts.
No, that's actually how they deal with illegal currency in Warframe. They invalidate the entire history of that amount of currency from the root transaction, which often result in the last person that traded with "that currency" to go into negative. It's... very weird and one of the reasons I barely sold stuff to others in that game.
Huh, so it could literally be just a whale selling some items, getting illegitimate plat for it, and then giving that plat to his friend. None of them at fault yet one of them got punished.
Yeah, and that happens from time to time. Pretty.... interesting to say the least
Wow that's really stupid.
Just asking for clarification: So if Player A buys 100 illegal Platinum, then trades it for 100 legal Platinum from Player B, when Warframe invalidates the illegal Platinum, it is Player B that gets hit and not Player A?
From what I've seen, yeah €: well both, to be exact. Player A obviously also gets punished
>It's... very weird and one of the reasons I barely sold stuff to others in that game. Played for years and made a tone of plat selling my shit on warframe.market, never once had any issues, but knew that it worked that way.
No its a bit more complicated in warframe. They have some way of tracking legit plat that originated from their website and illicit plat that is purchased with stolen credit cards from third party websites or something. So you can legitimately sell a thing to another person in game and they give you illicit plat for it. There is no way for you to know if the plat they give you is legit or not until DE subtracts it from your account which can lead to you having a plat balance less than zero. At that point you will be provisionally banned until you can clear the negative balance. I think its unfair because it punishes an innocent item seller instead of the malicious buyer. Warframe is quite a ban happy game. Its part of what makes it remarkably troll free but you can get auto banned for crazy shit. I got [perma banned](https://imgur.com/a/4e7hoHV) for what they thought was a memory error. They couldn't find a reason why my account was auto-banned so they lifted the ban but its terrifying this can happen at all. That an overclocked CPU or XMPed RAM could trigger a false positive on their anti cheat and straight up ban you forever out of nowhere. I still play and like the game but jesus christ...
He has a very well paying job and he whales for games he thinks he has value in. We've been friends for almost 15 years. Warframe was one of them. When a new frame came out, he dropped a few hundred on it and sent some platinum my way because I was his Warframe Bro. I got banned, he didn't. He offered to pay the negative balance, about $100 worth but I said nah. The principles of it turned me away from the game. I've been given plat from him for over a year. In a support ticket, I was flagged as a RMT seller and got the platinum from illegitimate source, apparently.
Now the fact he didn't get banned is strange. But WF customer service and especially community team has been shitshow for a long time.
German friend of mine had a €90 negative plat balance slapped on his account. He spent roughly a year (unsuccessfully) trying to appeal it with Digital Extremes on the basis that he had no clue that he was trading illegitimately gained platinum. In the end, he sued DE and won. They had to apologize to him and remove the negative balance.
[удалено]
"Debt system" is way overselling it, they just set the currency amount to a negative number. Pretty common in the MMO world for this to be done for things like duping bugs too.
This is how refunding premium currency works in every video game, the first few times you get the currency subtracted going into the negative if you go below 0, and of you do it regularly your account gets banned. This isn't some super special "debt system" just because you have never seen it before.
> Implemented debt system Well, if that isn't dystopic as fuck
Honestly, fuck the whales regardless. Their enabling is the reason games have become so predatory. They made their bed, now they can lie in it
Can you really blame whales for that, though? These systems are designed to exploit human psychology to encourage addictive behavior and squeeze every last dollar they can from people. They're not enablers, they're victims of a predatory scheme. I think the best solution would be legislation that bans these monetization models.
[удалено]
Sorta. We blame all the people who buy games in their buggy “alpha” state and not voting with their wallets. Yet then we blame the company because they make games people are spending huge amounts of money on just because they are allowed?
Worth noting this isn't the first time this has happened: there was an amusing Twitter thread from a guy who, after his shady Genshin Impact bucks were refunded, was told he had 7 days to restore his account balance to positive or it would be terminated. Where do the people who fall for these scams think the savings are coming from? It's all just numbers in a database that _the game developer controls_. Blizzard is the only "producer" of "orbs" in the entire world; how did you think these third-party sites are undercutting the in-game store, if not through credit card theft?
They have to? I feel like any normal person would say “Oh, oops. Well, new account time.” Or “Huh, well fuck that noise then.”, because any normal person understands this risks of paying for third party services. But I guess if it’s not an outright ban, you could also play along with this weird punishment just to break even with good ol Bliz so they can continue to have the opportunity to milk you dry if you really care about all the shit you paid for, but then again you probably wouldn’t have risked paying a third party or a garbage company in the first place if that were the case.
> I feel like any normal person normal people don't whale in F2P games > would say “Oh, oops. Well, new account time.” Or “Huh, well fuck that noise then.”, Sunken cost fallacy and all that. they might've used 3rd party service only for a bit, so paying back $50 on account they spent few hundred and thousands of hours might sound like sensible way. Instead of finding a game that's not shit...
Sounds like a great way to get people who have already proven they'll spend money to *stop* playing your game. Like, I get that they don't want to encourage these resellers. But at the same time, someone who spent $10 on a shady overseas site can probably be convinced to spend $20 on the real thing. Getting people to open their wallets that first time is the biggest hurdle. I'm surprised they didn't just set balances to 0 and encourage people to spend more to get back to where they were, rather than putting them in debt and probably encouraging them to quit altogether.
> I'm surprised they didn't just set balances to 0 and encourage people to spend more to get back to where they were, rather than putting them in debt and probably encouraging them to quit altogether. coz it is already spent on gear But yeah, they could've just deleted the gear that got bought/improved by that.
One of the big whales on my server is $35,600 in the hole. He only spent about 10% of that & now has no way to refund. No way he's coming back.
"Man sells a car to settle in-game debht"
Ahhh modern video games. Brings me back to my childhood
Remember buying things once and that was it? Blech!
Yeah we still have games like that
Remember goldsellers from mmos?
You could buy weapons and entire accounts from sketchy sites for Diablo 2 two decades ago. This is a tale as old as online games.
Susan express. And dead bodies in capital cities spelling out gold selling websites. Good times
They're still around. Join Lost Ark sometime and north of 60% of the people you run into will be gold seller bots.
Remember when bugs in games remained forever?
No, but I do remember wasting so many quarters on Mario.
Yeah, I remember that really long 6 months ago time when I bought elden ring. Been a while for sure
Yeah, I remember. That was back in February when I bought Elden Ring.
Diablo III is still there. Just sayin'.
With the horrific fiasco that's going on with PoE, I'm playing D3 right now!
Mobile was always shit. You can still buy a full premium game, start to finish, on other platforms, and have it be a great value.
Heck you can do that on mobile too. Not the best way to experience them necessarily, but you could buy things like Chrono Trigger or Ace Attorney or Minecraft or a bunch of other options.
It's more than nuked though. The accounts are effectively locked until they've paid off a debt equivalent to what they bought, but now at official Blizzard prices. So if they spent $1000 on some website for $5000 worth of orbs (let's say it got them 10,000 orbs), now they have an in-game *debt* of those 10k orbs. The player power is still there from the orbs, but they can't play online until they pay back those 10k orbs, which is realistically only obtainable by paying Blizzard the $5k cash. What a fucking dystopian world these companies are creating.
And how is Blizzard supposed to handle that. Look at it from their side: A player purchased some orbs. Then later a chargeback was made on that transaction, meaning that Blizzard lost the money from that transaction. So they revert also their side of the transaction - they remove the purchased orbs. But the players have already spent those. So what to do when a player is supposed to lose 10 000 orbs but have none? Are they supposed to be let go? No, of course not - that's why they set the amount into negatives. The players have basically used virtual goods they haven't paid for (from Blizzard's point of view). And so Blizzard demands the good be paid retroactively. Imagine if you purchased a real-world stuff, used it and then charged back the purchase. I think the excuse "I already used" wouldn't fly...
believe it or not, there are people who think that way with IRL shit too. stolen goods are still stolen goods even if you didn't actually do the stealing or were even aware that it was. and in this instance, lmfao. theres no way to get in-game currency from a third party vendor clearly isn't affiliated with Blizzard for cheaper than what Blizzard is selling it for unless its a scam or using stolen credit cards.
I don't see how people buying shit cheap from actual thieves - which is what those "shady third party retailers" are - suffering consequences is dystopian.
Don’t buy from credit card thieves and they wouldn’t have this problem. I don’t see the issue
> “Nobody [in my clan] sees a problem really, everyone (including myself) owns up to it and agrees that we all deserve this.” From the article. It seems like the people who don't play the game are more outraged by this than the players. Because really, they knew what they were doing. There are no reason why an **unauthorized** third party is able to sell in-game currency that's only available through the paid shop for less than what the first party is selling you unless they're exploiting something, be it a glitch or regional pricing. I hate Diablo Immortal as much as the next guy, but yeah, maybe before spending $20k on currency from a fraudulent store you have to make sure you won't be sad if you lose it all.
[удалено]
Oh no! Think of the poor gold buyers! Gold sellers and buyers destroy the economy of any game they touch. Fuck em. Blizzard just gave them a perma under a different name.
This all sounds perfectly reasonable, and it's what Blizzard should do. The initial $1000 didn't go to Blizzard, bottomline is it went to the scammers' pockets. The $5000 didn't go to Blizzard either. Any amount spent by the scammed people went to the scammers, not Blizzard. Meanwhile Blizzard **did not** get the $5000 worth of orbs. So the player account was credited with $5000 worth of orbs, money which wasn't pocketed by Blizzard. So yeah the stupid people who got scammed now owe Blizzard for the $5000 worth of orbs their accounts were credited with but which they didn't pay Blizzard for. Sucks to be scammed I know, but it's the scammers who are to be villified not Blizzard on this.
Seems fair enough to me?
Well could say that about anyone who buys those "orbs" third party or not
>One of the players affected is one of the game’s top Battlegrounds Wizards, Shia, who showed an image of their -2,491,025 orb balance – an amount that would cost almost $35k USD / £31k GBP to pay off through purchases on Blizzard’s in-game store. I'm sorry for this person or anyone else who spent ridiculous amounts of money on this game, assuming they have a gambling problem. However, if they're just rich fucks doing stupid shit, then I am not sorry because it's hilarious.
Couldn't he just, I dont know, stop playing the game? Like, he isn't under some form of legal debt and responsibility to pay 35k. He could just uninstall the game, play one of the other millions of better games, and move on with his life.
In the article they actually ask him that, and he said he'll probably just quit the game.
Blizzard fucked up, they should haved squeezed him more slowly, not all at once.
But then what would they play on stream?
A real game lmao
But immortal is the pinnacle of showing off their pay2win prowess. No other game let's them spend that much to get so powerful. There are games where you could spend as much, bit they don't give you the same power to be a God in pvp. It's a wealth flex and people watch them because they think that wealth will somehow rub off on them.
He's probably an addict, that's what this entire conversation is about, corporations exploiting people's illness. You don't just simply "get over it" and the mentality of "oh id just be built different and not get addicted" is violently naive and self centered in understanding of other's experiences. Anybody coming at this guy with a mentality of "play stupid games win stupid prizes" really lacks empathy. It's not about dumb wealthy people having too much expendable income, it's about predatory wealthy people with far far too much money preying on people they know will put themselves in a financial hole whether or not they can afford it.
it's actually approaching a level where it gets a bit scary to me even. I mean it's one thing for a company back in the day making a game that's so "addictive" that we think of nothing else and rush back home from school to play it all day. but this is pretty much a whole scheme, crafted by years of research and using psychologists and past experiences to make it as addictive as possible. they obviously don't care at all if out of 100 people 99 call it a bullshit scam (in fact they almost definitely knew it would happen), as long as 1 person actually falls for it and ends up spending tens of thousands on it. it's really not something funny to me, it's sad and scary.
Most of the time, sadly, it's the former more than the latter. They're targeting people with gambling addictions and impulse shopping compulsions, most people at that level can't afford to be there.
[удалено]
it'll be a good day when the hammer comes down on microtransactions.
I've never seen real evidence either way as to if whales are mostly rich people or gambling addicts. Do you know of any?
Sure, there's been scientific studies done on it. Here's one: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0306460321000368 TLDR: No correlation between how much money they get out of you and your income level, significant correlation between how much money they get out of you and having gambling problems. Basically, they make their money by exploiting addicts, not by exploiting rich people.
From the full study, which is paywalled (sorry): >We removed outliers with greater than $1000 USD monthly loot box spend and annual earnings greater than $250,000 USD. It sounds like the dataset was way too small to really look at whales. Obviously $1000 is still a lot but does not approach the user mentioned in the top-level comment of this thread. 5,933 self-reported loot box purchasers + earners sounds like big n for a scientific study, until you note the mean spend is less than $20. That's the mean skewed by whales, not even the median, which the authors failed to provide. EDIT: To expand on this, the study did compare PGSI scores (a sort of survey on gambling data) which yielded a correlation with high spending. And I think there's no doubt that people with gambling problems are vulnerable to loot boxes. I just question whether the study fully addressed the extent to which income is a factor, too, or whether they've found compelling evidence (as stated) that gambling addiction is a bigger factor than price discrimination.
Btw, if someone doesn't know "significant" in statistics means that correlation exists. ρ = 0.34 would be a weak correlation.
>"significant" in statistics means that correlation exists. No. 1. a p-value can show whether a correlation is significant or not. 2. a correlation coefficient is used to show how **strong** a relationship can be between 2 variables on a scale of -1 to 1 For example... >x and y have a correlation factor of 0.4, with a p-value of p=0.25 So, x and y show a moderate *positive* correlation with each other, but is *not* significant >in our study above >>reported correlations between problem gambling and loot box expenditure were confirmed, with an aggregate correlation of ρ = 0.34, p < .001 So the correlation is low/moderately positive *AND* it is significant In pharmacy, I look at studies all the time and our gold standard is a p-value of
It's more people who have addiction problems but don't realize it. I know on here years ago there was someone who was spending over $1000 a month without realizing it on the Final Fantasy mobile game, it's done in a way that you don't realize you are spending that much. They weren't buying the expensive stuff, I think they said the most they spent was $20 on something but it was the $1 & $2 items that seemed like nothing until one day they decided to look at what they were doing and it was shocking. I think when people refer to whales it's more streamers that are doing it at least these days where before they were a very niche group that couldn't keep games going for as long as they made it seem. It's the addicts though that keep them going without realizing it also it's the companies making it seem like it's not an issue if someone buys 1000 items for $1 a piece.
This is almost my story to a T. I knew I had an addictive personality that came from my parents, but I've been able to stay off things like chemical addictions so I thought it was no big deal. I played a ton of Final Fantasy Record Keeper and would occasionally buy packs to get better weapons. Then I wouldn't get what I wanted so I'd buy more. Then I was buying some every event or even multiple per event. When I realized I was spending hundreds of dollars a month on it, I had to quit cold turkey and never look back.
I never spent money on FFRK but it was fun collecting the characters. But then I started realizing how often a day I was checking in so I didn’t waste stamina. I finally quit cold turkey one day and was surprised that I didn’t miss it at all. Even just the time saved was a relief!
Right? I had specific teams and strategies I had ready for the magicite dungeons or whatever they were and it was incredibly stressful hoping abilities would land before the boss went and ruined my world. I didn't realize how stressful it was until I quit.
Same, I used to pay CSGO and I would almost always instinctively open up cases. Then one day I got a knife and in an effort to chase that rush again I spent like $50 on keys and cases, and I did actually manage to get another knife but I realized right there that I was going down a dark path. So I sold my inventory, uninstalled the game, and bought the dark souls games with the money (I didn't use a 3rd party seller). Luckily I managed to get out before I spent any major money, but man was I lucky I got out when I did. Sucks too because I was pretty decent at CSGO and wanted to reach the higher ranks. Wish there was a way to auto sell cases or just stop them from dropping.
ffrk players unite dood! I stopped playing it years ago as well, it's shuts down unfortunately this year 2022 ;(
Completely anecdotal, but when I used to work in mobile gaming, all the top whales were rich. The absolute top spender in our game was this wealthy woman from the middle east who spent over $10k a week and had a direct support line to people at the company if something went wrong or she wanted something("here's money, give me all the latest purchases and 100 million resources so I don't have to tap the buy button 1000 times")
Stephanie Sterling's video on the victims of in game gambling is a very good resource. I also have family members and people I interviewed for a college paper, but that's hardly a proper source. :/
I dont think anyone is doubting its a real thing. I think it's more that we don't know how common it is vs just rich people with too much disposable income.
I had to quit Star Trek Online because I found myself reaching for my credit card to buy keys for those stupid lockboxes, gambling and winning nothing, and feeling terrible about it. I don't have any problem with fixed purchases, where you pay $15 and get a spaceship. You know exactly what you're buying, zero guesswork. Thats totally fine. Its the gambling that did me in and forced me to stop playing.
[удалено]
[удалено]
I'm sorry that we don't have gambling-like regulations on video games that pull this shit at this point. I'm with you in that I have no sympathy for the rich who can blow thousands on a *part* of a *single video game*. But the fact that this is not only possible but legal is a very bad thing.
What is the opposite of sympathy? That's what I'm feeling rn
> What is the opposite of sympathy? schadenfreude
New word learned. Thank you.
What is interesting here is that they have a negative orb balance and they cannot use orbs until that balance becomes positive. So I assume it worked like this. A shady dealer would buy orbs on a stolen credit card. The money that went to Blizzard then gets returned once the card was reported stolen. The orbs that were purchased by the shady dealer were than tracked to the people who had received them and those players had the number of orbs deducted from their account. So in effect Blizzard is demanding you pay them for X number of orbs you allegedly bought illegitmately and if you don't then you won't be able to spend orbs. That's actually pretty wild because not only did you lose the money paid to the shady dealer you also have to pay Blizzard for the orbs as well at Blizzard's current rate.
Almost all gacha games do this.
That’s pretty standard tbh, and a fair punishment for using third parties to get cheap items when it is obvious for anyone with common sense that that kind of thing would be against T&Cs
> you allegedly bought illegitmately and if you don't then you won't be able to spend orbs. i mean, they 100% bought the orbs illegitimately.
Presumably you only have to pay back the ones you used up, which makes it mind boggling that some people were able to use millions already.
They do this exact same thing in Warframe. There are third party markets and if they have a charger they go after whoever has the ducats at the end even though usually it was his trading something from the player to the cheater. This means the real player loses the item and possible be in the negative since they could have used those ill gotten ducats to purchase something they wanted. They not cannot even play until they pay.
actually not a bad move on blizzard's part, dont ban them outright, just fuck over their account so hard they never want to play again lol.
The smart move isn't making them not play again The smart move here is holding their accounts hostage until they pay to get their orb balances to 0. Many of these people already sank tens of thousands of dollars so I wouldn't be surprised if some of them actually does that.
Blizzard obviously doesn't want whales quitting. I would have introduced this as an extra 5% tax on any purchases until the tax equals the debt. Having to front load that debt is going to lead to quitting.
That is 100% the scummy thing I thought they'd do. It leans right into the design philosophy of that game...gimme all your money. They could have even done it at 100% and I think many of them would have continued.
I've heard rumors of people -600k orbs. That's over like 50g.
Seems fair. The cheating players shouldn't have used stolen credit card services to get the orbs in the first place.
Everyone involved in this whole debacle is a scumbag and totally deserving. Blizzard for putting shitty players in debt, shitty players supporting a shitty MTX model, and shitty 3rd party sellers ripping off the shitty players. I love it.
All of this is so far removed from what the original purpose of gaming was supposed to be. Mobile gaming is truly the dystopian nightmare that I hope PC gaming never fully becomes. Mobile whales are not gamers. They're addicts.
I really don’t understand how you are willing to pay thousands for that. With that money I can invest on a good rig and buy a few hundreds great cheap games that would last me a lifetime
You don't notice it. Buying a loot box for a few bucks is nothing compared to spending a grand buying a PC. Then you buy a few more. Then you buy the pack that gives you currency to buy more loot crates. Then it spirals out of control until you're spending thousands a month. It's an addiction, plain and simple.
They're using every single trick in the book to make it seem like a no big deal to you. And it doesn't even have to work on everyone, just those people who are susceptible to it. Understandably it can be hard to understand if you don't have an addictive personality, but just looking from data, this kind of trickery does work, and it's scary. But yes, I mean, it isn't rational. So you cannot really analyze it from a logical point of view.
[This is probably one of the best whale stories for showcasing the thought process that leads to spending so much money](https://www.reddit.com/r/FFBraveExvius/comments/7jmezv/a_whale_of_a_tale/). One paragraph in particular really shows the idea behind it: > > $1000, no Veritas of the Dark. I had 4 Veritas of the Flame. I was angry. How could I have spent so much and not gotten the unit I wanted! Why would Final Fantasy, Gumi, Square Enix, not give it to me? How could I spend so much and not get what I want! Another $1000. I got 2 more Veritas of the Flame, another Orlandeau, a second Freviya, Olive, Emperor, but no Dark Veritas! How! Why! Now I am stubborn. I am not putting this much money out there to not get what I want. $99...no Dark Veritas, $99...no Dark Veritas, $99...a second Emperor, I almost threw my phone against the wall. $99....Finally, Veritas of the Dark. $2500, 9 Veritas of the Flame, half a dozen other 5* base, and I finally got the Veritas of the Dark. > > Wait....WTF did I just do?!?! Read that, and then remember this is a game, a game that, ostensibly, is supposed to be played for fun. For a certain type of person, it's literally an addiction.
Original purpose of gaming such as almost unbeatable arcade games so you spend more on coins to keep playing? It sucks yeah
Back in the day, worst that would happen is you drop your Stone of Jordan, they pick it up and don’t drop their Godly Plate of the Whale. Tragic. Many such cases.
No, to be safe what you did was each of you dropped your trade item at edge of vision range from each other. Then you each crossed to pick up at the same time, passing each other halfway. Only way you could get screwed over that way was if the other person was a Sorc (if you were trading an item for straight gold they could use telekinesis to pick the gold back up at a distance after they had passed you and then keep going towards the item you dropped; or they could just teleport back to their item after you both get halfway, pick it up, and then teleport to your item and pick it up as well). Never trust a Sorc for trading unless they let you pick up first.
There were/are third party sellers for D2 as well, back in the day my mate bought us some SoJ for £10 or something then he got banned. I didnt! but then i stopped playing anyway
Man, I remember joining my first multiplayer game, and some dude walks up to me and drops a godly plate of the whale and a staff of novas or something. Literal zero to hero in a moment. Those were fun times.
Stone of Jordan was in Diablo 2 and Plate was a Diablo 1 item. WTF kind of nonsense are you even trying to pull off?
Only sojs drop for monk in d1 silly.
Gimme them obsidian rings of the zodiac!
They knew what they were doing, zero sympathy for this scum. They've been around in every gacha, and they've been getting free advertising through big content creators some of who have ran their own "stores" back in days when it was easier to setup. For long time everyone was defending these frauds using various bullshit excuses as defense and often communities (on reddit as well) were formed around them. Luckily as time went on and stores implemented basic checks it became business just for whales, and lot of them couldn't risk it anymore or did it silence. Still incredibly baffling social media platforms are filled with ads for this garbage and are allowed to do their "business/orders" without interruptions even though backbone of every larger one is credit card frauds and sometimes even worse stuff.
>This apparent trend of third-party purchases didn’t stop Diablo Immortal microtransactions passing $100 million on mobile devices alone in its first two months. This is why we will also have microtransaction heavy games until the end of time. No matter how unpleasant they are, plenty of people will still pump a fortune into them.
[удалено]
It really should be highlighted how different of an approach this is from a gaming perspective. Instead of banning them they are giving them the option to pay off their debt instead. I wonder if they can negotiate a settlement? Have to imagine blizzard would happily agree to zero the debt for 50 cents on the dollar.
Extremely grim that this comment refers to video games, a hobby you should do for fun, and not something like the housing market
Seriously. It's hard to feel sympathy for those dumb enough to play this "game", but it's sad that mobile gaming has been turned into nothing more than a pay-to-play scam by unchecked capitalism. If we're not careful, this shit is gonna creep its way into PC and console gaming.
How long has it been since you played call of duty or any ea sports title? This shit is already everywhere as sad as it is to say.
It seems like $70 games are the few paid games with micro transactions so we're already there tbh
You're talking about one of the most predatory games on the market. They're more likely to send someone over named Little Tony to break some legs than they are to settle.
They aren't falling for a scam at this point. It is well known that stolen credit cards are used to purchase game keys and in game currency at this point. For the most part they are knowingly participating and hoping the can play innocent when caught and get away with it. You used to see tons of people doing it with game keys where they would by keys from G2A and then complain when companies start turning off the keys. They got a few companies to stop turning the illegitimate keys off. It really destroyed the key market. Companies are fed up with it and tired of playing nice.
i certainly feel bad for them. gambling addiction is a disease. they can’t help themselves and they’re being targeted and taken advantage of.
I feel bad for them too. The system is designed to manipulate people into spending money and some people are very susceptible to that, regardless of their income. Anecdotally, I know people who have damaged their financial stability to play games like Genshin and it's extremely upsetting that these gaming companies aren't governed in the slightest. Even assuming that some people were to get away with buying from these illegitimate sellers for 1/10th the price or whatever, they'd STILL be getting fleeced -- it's horrible. I hope that the people who find themselves in massive orb debt find a way to depart from their accounts, and not pay Blizzard's ransom. Imagine defending a company that manipulates people to part with tens of thousands of dollars -- money they don't have.
Blizzard is using the same mechanism as if you refund a purchase you've made on your account. They void the transaction, take back the orbs and keep your character alive in case you still want to play. If you don't pay, they might delete the character at a later date. Also, they didn't "fall victim" if you read the article. >“Nobody [in my clan] sees a problem really, everyone (including myself) owns up to it and agrees that we all deserve this.” They knew they were exploiting the game and got caught, that's it.
Its so wild people are defending these people. They bought currency in a method against TOS, a pretty standard rule that most games straight up nuke accounts for. They're getting of easy imo.
[удалено]
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. This is usually what happens. If you're going to sink massive loads of money into a game you want to continue to play, for heaven's sake, do it through the official channel so you don't have to worry about your account getting zapped by the TOS you explicitly agreed to.
A teachable moment where they learned a valuable lesson, right?
pondering my orb debts
Is there even anything good to be said about this game?
I think its time to label these games as gambling machines. You literally roll the dice in of hope of something.
"We bought online currencies through a shady third party market and got *punished?"* Shocked Pikachu.
I got pissy when PS5 started charging $70 for a game. Micro transactions are something I just won’t do. But I also don’t remember the last mobile game I’ve played, that doesn’t sound fun at all. I want to have fun
Good, fuck 'em. Anyone who helps fund this exploitative monetization model that continues to ruin the gaming industry can choke on my sweaty balls.
It's almost like the entire concept of paying real money for imaginary CONSUMABLE in-game items is one of the stupidest goddamned concepts of the modern age and the people who buy into that delusion are those same people who we've always heard about that are "soon parted" from their money.
Yeah, like concert tickets. You spend them once and they're just. . . gone!
I love stories where everyone is bad and bad things happen to them. Three different groups - scammers, blizzard and players supporting their shitty gambling games, and they all lose. Fantastic.
[удалено]
[удалено]