New Gacha Policy Discussion

[Mollymews]

3 minutes ago, Hana Nova said:

I am highly considering poisoning the well by making a dirty, cheating, conveyor script that pulls all the nasty tricks to look random. Then releasing that script publicly for free and open source to make sure that everyone knows that the conveyor they choose to play could be using that script as its engine without any way for the vendors to prove that their script is "fair".

I feel that with proper marketing of this script this could torpedo the credibility of the scheme before it gets off the ground.

am pretty sure that the only people this will hurt is amateur shopkeepers. It won't do anything to hurt the professional shopkeepers or the professional resellers of no-copy transfer items

 

[Da5id Weatherwax]

5 minutes ago, Hana Nova said:

I am highly considering poisoning the well by making a dirty, cheating, conveyor script that pulls all the nasty tricks to look random. Then releasing that script publicly for free and open source to make sure that everyone knows that the conveyor they choose to play could be using that script as its engine without any way for the vendors to prove that their script is "fair".

I feel that with proper marketing of this script this could torpedo the credibility of the scheme before it gets off the ground.

That would, in my opinion, (and yes, I know it's JUST my opinion) be a step too far. It gains nothing in terms of "exposing a vulnerability" that the basic math does not also encompass and short of providing a "how-to template" for the unscrupulous it does not contribute materially to the awareness, on LL's part or on resident's, of the problems existence or severity.By the discussion in this thread LL are aware and they are the ones that must take any action required to eliminate it. The limits of "responsible and ethical disclosure" have been reached.

To use an analogy, you and I know - as presumably moderately-capable coders - how it would be done to rip assets from the game without that being either detectable or preventable by LL. We do not do it and do not give those details on here. I fear publishing a script as you describe would be stepping into the same ethical grounds as publishing a ripper patch to the source code of a popular viewer.

[Frankie Antonioni]

15 minutes ago, Silent Mistwalker said:

Do you have evidence to back up that claim?

There has been no communication to LL, from any country about gacha prize machines. One of the owners used to be Deputy Director of the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB)

He was also a protege of Elizabeth Warren. So he feels that people that play gacha prize machines are being cheated. Some people feel the same way about gambling, or payday loan stores. But in each case, people make their own choice. Nobody hold a gun to their head, and say play the gacha machine, or slot machine, or borrow from a payday loan store. They are all choices. Some might be bad choices.  I say to each their own.

[Sammy Huntsman]

9 minutes ago, Frankie Antonioni said:

There has been no communication to LL, from any country about gacha prize machines. One of the owners used to be Deputy Director of the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB)

He was also a protege of Elizabeth Warren. So he feels that people that play gacha prize machines are being cheated. Some people feel the same way about gambling, or payday loan stores. But in each case, people make their own choice. Nobody hold a gun to their head, and say play the gacha machine, or slot machine, or borrow from a payday loan store. They are all choices. Some might be bad choices.  I say to each their own.

She means actual evidence, so cite your sources, give us links to show what you mean. 

[Mollymews]

34 minutes ago, Da5id Weatherwax said:

That would, in my opinion, (and yes, I know it's JUST my opinion) be a step too far. It gains nothing in terms of "exposing a vulnerability" that the basic math does not also encompass and short of providing a "how-to template" for the unscrupulous it does not contribute materially to the awareness, on LL's part or on resident's, of the problems existence or severity.

yes agree

the objective is to raise awareness amongst the resident body about how these machines can be constructed, what to look for when playing them and making them. That the construction of ToS-compliant methods shouldn't be a secret knowable only to scripters and mathematicians

the more information people have then the decisions they do make for themselves are at least better informed. Better informed shopkeepers and customers is a good thing

Edited August 12, 2021 by Mollymews
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[Coffee Pancake]

7 minutes ago, Mollymews said:

yes agree

the objective is to raise awareness amongst the resident body about how these machines can be constructed, what to look for when playing them and making them. That the construction of ToS-compliant methods shouldn't be a secret knowable only to scripters and mathematicians

the more information people have then the decisions they do make for themselves are at least better informed. Better informed shopkeepers and customers is a good thing

There needs to be some open source scripts, this doesn't guarantee anything in world, but it would be a step in the right direction.

[Arielle Popstar]

54 minutes ago, Hana Nova said:

I am highly considering poisoning the well by making a dirty, cheating, conveyor script that pulls all the nasty tricks to look random. Then releasing that script publicly for free and open source to make sure that everyone knows that the conveyor they choose to play could be using that script as its engine without any way for the vendors to prove that their script is "fair".

I feel that with proper marketing of this script this could torpedo the credibility of the scheme before it gets off the ground.

Maybe so but your post also gives credibility to the rumours of S/L creators and developers being quite cutthroat among each other when the opportunity presents itself. This thread has been eye opening in that regard with the long line of business types arguing to bury Gacha's and anything else that looks like it. And of course if one is willing to do that others trying to make a few dollars in S/L, can such be trusted to do good to their customers?

[Mollymews]

26 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

There needs to be some open source scripts, this doesn't guarantee anything in world, but it would be a step in the right direction.

i think so yes. A opensource script implementation of a standard binomial distribution algorithm would do more to help the resident body than anything else

most shopkeepers and their customers would be quite happy with this, and when players encounter machines that deviate from the standard distribution then is up to them to stop sticking money into the deviates

to be fair to the great number of the old gacha shopkeepers most of them did use a standard binomial distribution algorithm that they got from somebody (if not themselves) who knows what this means and how to write it. Even when the shopkeepers didn't necessarily understand how the algorithm does what it does.  They just stuck the probability table in, and their machine produced what they expected

Edited August 12, 2021 by Mollymews
()

[missyrideout]

1 hour ago, Frankie Antonioni said:

I say to each their own.

Nailed it. In this case each = Linden Lab and their own = banning gacha.

[Kyrah Abattoir]

8 hours ago, Hana Nova said:

I am highly considering poisoning the well by making a dirty, cheating, conveyor script that pulls all the nasty tricks to look random. Then releasing that script publicly for free and open source to make sure that everyone knows that the conveyor they choose to play could be using that script as its engine without any way for the vendors to prove that their script is "fair".

I feel that with proper marketing of this script this could torpedo the credibility of the scheme before it gets off the ground.

That was one of my plans for gachas at some point, but I'm slower than Linden Lab

[So Whimsy]

8 hours ago, Silent Mistwalker said:

Do you have evidence to back up that claim?

Of course not! Did you even have to ask?

[Prokofy Neva]

On 8/10/2021 at 8:14 AM, Qie Niangao said:

There are quality items in gachas, and once in a great while a talented creator's best work is reserved for gacha "rares" as lure to get people to buy all the junk they'd never give away, lest it besmirch their brand. That's the thing, though: some real garbage gets loaded a commons, stuff nobody would buy on resale, stuff the merchant includes as tongue-in-cheek booby prizes. Which would be fine if gacha were still allowed (or if it moved to "skill gaming" regions), because it's a free market and folks can take a joke.

I suppose now, at stores that are running the last weeks of gacha as a fire sale, there may be some bargains, but in general claiming that gacha is a way to get high quality at low cost? Nobody can truly believe that without also worshipping their charmed personal "good luck."

Speaking of taking a joke, the creator of the "Meipon" contraption is original and quite talented, and also has a quirky sense of humor that emerges often, across their builds. I have a lot of their non-gacha stuff (some of the early work is not LOD-friendly, but they're not alone there), and at first I thought Meipon was intended as a joke. Apparently not. Nonetheless, it does push the conveyorpon concept pretty far in one direction: hard to imagine that having yet more slots in the visible sequence could be an improvement.

I'm interested in what further mutations could make even more obvious that conveyorpon should be subject to the same regulations LL fears for gacha. (We must recognize, though, that the lawyers may well be right about that it won't be subject to those regulations, or that it's worth trying. Consider the hugely chance-driven "games" on the "skilled gaming" regions that are nonetheless apparently exempt from gambling restrictions in enough jurisdictions to make a loophole-exploiting policy worthwhile.)

So what's the conveyorpon loophole? Presumably it's that the buyer knowns in advance exactly what they'll get for their money on each individual purchase.

As @Mollymews nicely outlined above, there may be a bunch of junk ("commons") to buy en route to an already showing prize ("rare"), but that's not a problem; it would be almost identical to a randomly preselected "obese pack" full of junk and a prize. In fact, that could be offered by a stock vendor, give or take the "randomly preselected" part which doesn't seem to add to the appeal.

What does add to the appeal, and makes conveyorpon potentially problematic, is the random new item revealed upon purchase of one item. In fact, the appeal of that non-deterministic part (what I earlier termed the "Enchantment of Chance" to skirt "gambling" defensiveness) is changed by a long queue of commons before something valuable might appear. The simple gacha chance appeal would be more closely approximated with no queue at all, revealing upon purchase only the very next item available. It's an interesting cognitive psych question, how extending that queue changes the addictive learning effect: it's delayed reinforcement in addition to partial reinforcement, so how effective is that at making the conditioned response immune to extinction?

The folks who make RL gaming machines would have good suggestions how to optimize a next-gen gacha-loophole device. At first I assumed long-queue conveyorpon couldn't be optimal at exploiting vulnerability to gambling addiction, but now I'm not so sure.

One thing I explain in my gatcha tutorial is that sometimes commons becomes rares, I call it the "rarified common," in addition to actual rares that have a lower percentage change of coming to you. Why? Because the law of chance is not the law of averages. The first few dozen people playing a gatcha under the law of chance may indeed happen to get a bunch of rares in a row, even, many have had that experience. And maybe that lamp that seemed so attractive just never came. So as they are mainly re-sellers if they bother to follow shopping feeds avidly and keep entry hammer scripts in use to get on the same, then they set the low price for those rares that actually repeated, and then decide that one of the lamps in fact really is a rare because they never got it, and then set that price high. Early price setters with the volume of activity and cash to wait for the MP to die down past the event know that they *might* sell at those higher prices. And they do.

There's also the law of taste, if you will. Certain rares in fact aren't all that to people and another common in the set suddenly appeals more. And hence de-fact becomes rare as more of it sells on the MP. Most people studying gatcha machines and their effect on the consumer and the inworld economy seem to bracket out the Marketplace, like some sort of unrelated appendage. But they are symbiotic, the machines at events and the MP -- one needs the other and they operate in tandem to set prices and tastes.

How will this phenomena of the law of chances in real action with re-sellers and the "law of taste" play out in a world where everyone has to stand around equally, but those with time and hammer scripts will win? I think we will see the same outcomes, as availability of discretionary time is what you need to be a good gatcha re-seller, even more than a large buying budget -- time to watch, time to keep refreshing the MP to see how prices are doing. No one has made an MP bot that alerts you to a fall in price as they have made land bots that do that -- have they? I'm not sure that scripts work on the MP as they do on land but I suppose in theory they could?

I think practically, we will see the same thing -- rarified commons and cheap rares. Here's the difference, however. In events, the merchants are bound by contracts with the organizers, such as they are, and they feel bound by things like "don't sell this gatcha outside a gatcha". There's also a widespread "law" that if something is in a gatcha set, you don't add or subtract from it, you leave it as is. You have to, or consumers will howl. They will have much more flexibility with conveyors. They may begin to adapt a system where they put what they want in these machines, as long as they advertise a key and the item next to be sold. So if something isn't doing well, they will replace both the key and the next visible item. And why not? Their ability to do this will affect how well they can do with these new scripts./

[Aoi Ichibara]

I can't read all the comments, so I apologize if this has already been said.

If a system similar to Gacha in some form is going to be allowed in the future, I think it would be a good idea to at least make some rules regarding the emission rate of rare items. 
As long as the machines that set too bad emission rates are not eliminated, they will remain gambling.

I don't have a good or bad image of Gacha, so I will follow the new policy, but I do feel that a minimum arrangement is necessary.

[Alwin Alcott]

21 minutes ago, Aoi Ichibara said:

I can't read all the comments, ..

why not? 

only the first pages are really relevant, all others are just resident-resident thoughts ( many you can skip without missing important thoughts... and no Linden will likely come back other than to lock the thread.

[Pandora Nova]

10 hours ago, Arielle Popstar said:

Maybe so but your post also gives credibility to the rumours of S/L creators and developers being quite cutthroat among each other when the opportunity presents itself. This thread has been eye opening in that regard with the long line of business types arguing to bury Gacha's and anything else that looks like it. And of course if one is willing to do that others trying to make a few dollars in S/L, can such be trusted to do good to their customers?

I have never sold or supported gacha. The sole purpose of this open source script would be to poison the well.

All of my own products that I take pride in are either open source (source code of all scripts included in a notecard) for my older products or source available on request for any of my newer products. I also have a history of releasing free products that others charge ludicrous amounts for (my mesh shadow for example because I do not feel that literally 5 minutes in blender plus a L$10 upload fee warrants a 100+ L$ price tag.)

If the banning of gacha, or public knowledge on the evil nature of any of its replacements, hurt any creator big or small I will not shed a tear. They brought it upon themselves by exploiting toxic and predatory mechanics rather than making products and selling them for a fair price that the market will support without any tricks needed.

[Yingzi Xue]

I would point to Blender as one example of a great open source project (there are countless others). 

Most Linux distributions have thriving communities and you can find all the support you could ever want.  The beauty of open source is that you can modify it to your liking, to get the functionality you want.  Open source, by its very nature, keeps the software clean, because the source code can be downloaded, perused, compiled and used by anyone.

LSL is an easy language to learn.  There are plenty of examples available to get you started.  There is a support forum where people are willing to help.  There is a Wanted forum where scripters are willing to help make your project a reality.

If you don't agree with the ideology of a developer or their software license, don't use their software.  If enough people disagree with their way of doing things, it will cease to exist.

It's okay to disagree with another person's opinion, with an ideology, with their way of doing things.

Edited August 12, 2021 by Yingzi Xue

[Qie Niangao]

3 hours ago, Hana Nova said:

I have never sold or supported gacha. The sole purpose of this open source script would be to poison the well.

All of my own products that I take pride in are either open source (source code of all scripts included in a notecard) for my older products or source available on request for any of my newer products. I also have a history of releasing free products that others charge ludicrous amounts for (my mesh shadow for example because I do not feel that literally 5 minutes in blender plus a L$10 upload fee warrants a 100+ L$ price tag.)

If the banning of gacha, or public knowledge on the evil nature of any of its replacements, hurt any creator big or small I will not shed a tear. They brought it upon themselves by exploiting toxic and predatory mechanics rather than making products and selling them for a fair price that the market will support without any tricks needed.

I don't think such a script would actually hurt anybody because it would only illustrate what everybody who has paid attention has known about gacha since forever (they're often rigged, sometimes egregiously, and there's simply no way to know), and that's had little effect on their popularity. And that means such a script also wouldn't help anybody either: Those of a mind to learn from it, already know.

Just to restate a point I tried to make earlier, it's not only that the gacha (and now conveyor) merchants exploit customers—really, if the customers want* to pay for the thrill of the hunt for a less valuable catch, well, let 'em. A bigger problem is that those merchants' game-of-chance marketing technique steals honest business from more talented, less cynical creators.

______________
*Where "want" is euphemistic. This thread is ample evidence of buyers in deep denial about what truly motivates them to press that gacha lever.

[Kimmi Zehetbauer]

1 hour ago, Qie Niangao said:

I don't think such a script would actually hurt anybody because it would only illustrate what everybody who has paid attention has known about gacha since forever (they're often rigged, sometimes egregiously, and there's simply no way to know), and that's had little effect on their popularity. And that means such a script also wouldn't help anybody either: Those of a mind to learn from it, already know.

Just to restate a point I tried to make earlier, it's not only that the gacha (and now conveyor) merchants exploit customers—really, if the customers want* to pay for the thrill of the hunt for a less valuable catch, well, let 'em. A bigger problem is that those merchants' game-of-chance marketing technique steals honest business from more talented, less cynical creators.

______________
*Where "want" is euphemistic. This thread is ample evidence of buyers in deep denial about what truly motivates them to press that gacha lever.

And in world there some merchants said on a couple groups that they will only use a device of chance such as the gacha or rip-off-veyor to give out their products

[Qie Niangao]

11 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

I've noticed over the last year, with the pandemic especially, more and more pressure for me to furnish homes, which I generally don't do as it is a lot of work, and people often then want it removed. Why? Shrinking purchasing power from ordinary people. 

Maybe they spent too much chasing the gacha dragon and need a place to crash until it's time for their next fix.

[Innula Zenovka]

19 hours ago, Mollymews said:

picking up on this. A consideration for shopkeepers

the fatpack price should be the sum of the single pull probabilities of the items in the machine

for example with the 22 item set:

18 * 5 = 90
 1 * 4 =  4
 1 * 3 =  3
 1 * 2 =  2
 1 * 1 =  1
        ---
        100
 
pull price L$20. 100 * 20 = L$2,000

when the fatpack price is greater than this then is not a good deal. Better off to play the machine

when the machine approaches infinity (as it is designed to do) then the expectation is that the return will be 90,4,3,2,1 for every 100 pulls. 100 * 20 = L$2,000

the consideration for the shopkeeper is that players will take the fatpack price as the indicator of the probability table in the machine (in the absence of any other information)

for example:  Pull price L$20. Fatpack price: $3,000. 3000 / 20 = 150. This indicates that the machine is expected to pay out the 1 rare every 150  pulls. When this is not the case in the example table above

How do I go about calculating the likely range of pulls it's going to take to collect a full set?   

If I'm incredibly lucky, and get item different one each pull, it's going to take me 22 pulls.  But to achieve that I have to pull a different item each time, which is very unlikely to happen.     There's a probability curve there somewhere, but I don't know how to calculate that.   

Can anyone assist me?   What's the sort of median spend if I try to collect a full set?  

 

[Niri Nebula]

I made a gacha once. Very early on. I really enjoyed the continuous dinging of small amounts of L$ being deposited into my account. It was addictive. Every day it was out, I'd sit there and wait for a whale to come by and just drop 5k on it. It rocked.

That was also when I decided to never again make a gacha. The second one user shoved 10K L$ into my machine within 20 minutes. It was 50L$ a play, to clarify. That was not something I could accept, morally. I gave them 5k back and handed them the rare.

As a customer, I've seen gachas of all kinds come and go and some are very worth it and very unique. But most gachas? They're cashgrabs with very little to no value if you only get one of the items, they are only worth it if you play the thing to get a set or if you get the rare. Consumers are dumb, as a whole, not individually, and need to be protected from themselves. Hence governmental control on gambling. And that includes me, I'm a sucker for a good gacha, or anything addictive really. Some people aren't and I am so happy for them. But their joy shouldn't supercede my protections.

As a creator, defending this predatory behavior has and will continue to sicken me. These are your customers. Treat them with care and respect, you wouldn't be here without them. Instead of trying to leech them dry still.
 

And all these points have been made. And I add nothing new. But at least I'm on topic, right?

[Niri Nebula]

Oh, and conveyors are a dumb propagation of the existing gacha system intended to skirt the rules as lightly as possible to keep a failing economy of false scarcity intact.

Shame on yall who think it's the solution.

[Arielle Popstar]

11 minutes ago, Logan Skytower said:

As a customer, I've seen gachas of all kinds come and go and some are very worth it and very unique. But most gachas? They're cashgrabs with very little to no value if you only get one of the items, they are only worth it if you play the thing to get a set or if you get the rare. Consumers are dumb, as a whole, not individually, and need to be protected from themselves. Hence governmental control on gambling.

Not much different from a pile of regular content that is deceptively marketed and not worth the price paid for it but we not seeing anyone looking to get those cleaned up and banned. I just got burnt for 399 on an accessory that was like that. Only thing I can do with it is trash it and the outfit it was for. 800L$ down the drain. That is just an example from the past week.  And yeah, I just was pulling on one gacha at a place that gave me 5 duplicates in a row but being it was only 10L per pull, it was only a 50L loss and I could even maybe sell a few if I was so inclined, unlike the 399L item that is No Transfer.

From that perspective, Gacha's are no worse then regular content and it is buyer beware.

[Niri Nebula]

1 minute ago, Arielle Popstar said:

Not much different from a pile of regular content that is deceptively marketed and not worth the price paid for it but we not seeing anyone looking to get those cleaned up and banned. I just got burnt for 399 on an accessory that was like that. Only thing I can do with it is trash it and the outfit it was for. 800L$ down the drain. That is just an example from the past week.  And yeah, I just was pulling on one gacha at a place that gave me 5 duplicates in a row but being it was only 10L per pull, it was only a 50L loss and I could even maybe sell a few if I was so inclined, unlike the 399L item that is No Transfer.

From that perspective, Gacha's are no worse then regular content and it is buyer beware.

Just because you can't discern quality from an ad and misbuy does not mean that seller is using predatory behavior. Also, whataboutism. 

[Mairi Fairelander]

I had a gacha out once. Some of my older designs newly redone in mesh. I made it as fair as I could, upping the odds of rare pulls from what was recommend in the script I used. I just quickly realised I didn't have the time to commit to creating for gachas if I wanted to maintain the level of quality that goes into the stuff I make. That's no knock on those who DO (or, I guess, did) create for gachas, whether exclusively or in addition to regular releases - I know many designers whose work in gachas is just as good as anything they make; which, to me, suggests they have either the time and/or skill level to make quality things rather quickly and consistently. I truly hope those creators continue to make stuff, because I will continue to buy from them either in world or via the Marketplace.