Letting people get burned by the hot pan is a great philosophy, until you let it go too far and destroy society.
Think of it as a drug addiction. Yeah, letting morons kill themselves over drug abuse sounds like a good idea, sounds like natural selection taking it's paces. But then if you let people abuse drugs as they please you'll probably turn your country into Rapture.
People already pretty much abuse drugs as they please. Drug control doesn't work for the same reason gun control isn't gonna work.
Manipulation and abuse is an issue, these people are manipulating consumers into spending all their money on a valueless enterprise.
Unless they are misleading (either outright or through innuendo) they aren't really manipulating, though, are they? They're just offering a stupid product to weak-willed people.
You can let morons gamble away everything they own and watch them suffer for their stupidity, but it stops being fun once you realize you've harbored an entire generation of desperate people who have no talent and will probably resort to petty criminal acts in order to get their next emotional high. Yeah, this is a logical extreme, but it's still a possible outcome to this kind of behavior and it's up to powers that be to prevent it from happening.
We already let morons gamble away everything. And I highly doubt video game loot crates are going to be the fall of western society. Hell, I'm saying this nanny, mommy, "feminine instincts" behavior is what is harming society. You're treating people like children, right here--and what we've done is harbor a generation of exactly that
through this type of coddling. People need to learn a lesson through the consequences of their actions. If they cannot, then coddling is just going to drain the system on low-class morons. And, now, before you say they'll be a drain on welfare and stuff, I have a simple solution that--don't give them any welfare.
It's disruptive to society and to the market. Unfortunately, consumers really do have to be protected from their own stupidity.
No, they really don't. We really don't need a society that caters to the lowest common denominator. It's what we have now. Some people seem to think the problem is is that we don't have enough babysitting and coddling to make sure things go right. It'll just get worse and worse, you're trying to douse the fire with gasoline.
Society is a screeching autistic child that sometimes needs to be wrapped in pads to prevent it from hitting itself in the head.
And if you don't let kids run around on the playground and skin their knee they'll never learn where the boundaries are. This is why the conservative use the term "nanny state," literally everyone should be treated like a child and have a mommy there to protect them. If someone is really that stupid and unable to learn a lesson then they're a waste of resources anyway.
And if you believe that, then who is going to play Mommy and Daddy to this screeching autist called society? Society itself, or do you have someone outside the screeching autist system, some ubermensch or divine entity in mind?
That's why we have the FDA and FCC, among other entities, to prevent corporations from, I dunno, putting asbestos into foods as an artificial filler. Because you know they'll do stupid shit like that if they were allowed to.
That's a different argument and can of worms and I'm not getting into that here. Suffice to say, I am not promoting companies being misleading or falsely advertising. But loot crates, in and of themselves, are not inherently misleading, unless they mislead on loot percentages. They're offering people a choice, and letting them to decide what to do with that. And where's the limit anyway? Is the Humble Monthly Bundle gambling, too? Should Taco Bell be punished for subsidizing Boogie2988's obesity?
It's a delicate balance and requires a lot of forethought (a lot more forethought than the government puts into things, but still), running society is a lot like a game of Jenga.
From the top-down, liberal vision of society as run by a dynamic government body led by "experts," sure, understand that opinion. It's certainly the dominant view of what government should be today. However, it is not my view; where we differ is that I am a completely bottom-up guy. It's clear from how we approach these issues that you are more liberal and I am more "conservative." You view society as dynamically being tinkered with for some greater good for the "general population", while I believe freedom is having all the choices laid out for you and you free to take them and suffer for it if you make the wrong one.
ea pushed it too far and as usual is ruining things for everyone else by having game mechanics and player upgrades locked behind random chance crates that don't have the odds visible, you cannot (from what i know) trade them for the upgrades/mechanics you do want, and aren't weighted to guarantee you fuck all that you want
i don't doubt this will fuck over a lot of products with crates in them but some of them have had it coming for a long time with how little transparency they have with your actual chances and how little freedom some of them give you to remove some of the randomness
So don't play the game. I don't really get why this is a big deal. It's really easy not to play these games since they're not fun. EA is garbage and is largely associated with games that are the cultural equivalent to Marvel superhero movies. I agree that the odds are not visible is concerning, but it should be a red flag to the person not to play in the first place. As I argue above, people should be left to their own reasoning faculties, however poor, and experience whatever the outcome is, win or lose.
