New Gacha Policy Discussion

[SysyJewell]

Good riddance. 

[VergilISparda]

2 hours ago, Deathly Fright said:

I know and I've seen them get worse and worse tbh

the ultra rares and the hidden rares are amazingly bad

Good thing it was stopped before the "Ultimate ultra super rare" would come out 😁

Edited August 2, 2021 by VergilISparda

[Alice Aurelia]

30 minutes ago, Annie Nova said:

Да, конечно, давайте, поместите их в игровой РЕГИОН, который позволяет людям из определенных штатов получить доступ. Я не играю в гачи, но вижу протест людей, которым запрещен в РЕГИОНЕ, как это правильно и честно? 

The best solution is to create a special region with access control!

[mori OwO]

Just now, Deathly Fright said:

I know and I've seen them get worse and worse tbh

the ultra rares and the hidden rares are amazingly bad

hidden rares i think are the worst of the worst. why would i want to drop like 2kL to get something i can't see ? happened to me a couple months ago, felt *****ing horrible and now i'm stuck with 2 items that i don't want but can't resell because they were skin vouchers 💔

[SlyDog4]

5 hours ago, Bridge McMahon said:

What would have prompted this ruling and seems there will be a lot less revenue for Linden's from the sales, resales and events so it must be a good one. 

Hope everybody likes paying more fees lol

[Faly Breen]

2 minutes ago, LittleMe Jewell said:

Try to spin it any way you want, but the buying of the food is not in any way a gamble on anything.

 

No becourse i linked you ONE breedable which needs the food NOT to stay alive BUT to BREED and to BREED only. If you dont feed them they will be "sick" and not able to breed and since they get old they can only breed a "limited time" of their ageing - like i said, i guess it was just the first 50 days of their lifetime.

 

So if you only go for the breedables YOU KNOW (which i dont know you are talking about, maybe some i dont know) than ok, YOUR THING but SL is BIG and as seen in this thread, a lot people dont see the problems this gacha rule will create since some people just doesnt know what will count as gacha or what not - like said breedables, 7seas fishing game (as one other sample) or simple collecting cards.

[Deathly Fright]

1 minute ago, mori OwO said:

hidden rares i think are the worst of the worst. why would i want to drop like 2kL to get something i can't see ? happened to me a couple months ago, felt *****ing horrible and now i'm stuck with 2 items that i don't want but can't resell because they were skin vouchers 💔

rare gatchas for vouchers are so bad. i'm so sorry

[Ananessa Pancake]

Was really looking forward to gacha guild's stuff later this year. ;~;

[Misery Babii]

so what about the gaming places those are more gambling then gachas....you get something from gachas you dont get anything from no devil unless you by chance win....doesnt make sence to me but sure

[Lucia Nightfire]

@Patch Linden

It's been brought up several times without a official response, but what about token based purchases of randomized received content where L$ buys tokens/store credits/store points and those are later used to make purchases instead?

[Butch Daddy]

3 minutes ago, Dima Plessis said:

Do you have any idea how much time it will take for creators to go through all their gachas and change permissions, update ads, test, repackage, update vendors and MP, etc.? Even simple updated can be weeks of work when you have hundreds of items in your store. I am willing to bet a lot of gacha items will simply be pulled from the shelves because it's too time consuming to update thousands of individual items and potentially a few hundred packs of gachas like some stores have. Not to mention the impact on gacha events which have been running for years. The least LL could do is give creators and event organizers more time to make changes to comply with the new policy in time.

It shouldn't take weeks. The items themselves do not have to be changed, in any way.  The creators of the gacha items will need to change out the vendor machines.  Instead of a machine that sells a random item from a set of items, the machine will need to sell a specific item so that the buyer gets the specific item they want to purchase instead of a random item from the set. 

The creators don't even need to change the "Gacha Key" texture that they have already created for the set since the buyers will still get the same item from the same set itself, but instead of only having a chance at getting the item they want, they can directly buy the item they want. 

Heck, if I created and sold Gacha items, I would offer each piece of the set for sale, along with the Rare item  then offer a discount or partial refund on the rare item to anyone who has already bought all of the other parts of the set so that they didn't have to just buy the rare version from the vendor machine. 

If the set has 10 items + a Rare item, then set up a vendor machine with all 11 items in it, the buyer would scroll through the machine to the item they want then buy that 1 item.  If they buy all 10 items, then they could contact me with the proof of purchase of the 10 items, and I would offer them something like a 10 or 20 percent discount on the rare item. 

If the buyer only wanted the rare item, then they could pay the extra for it. 

Ya'll acting like Linden Labs told everyone that 3rd party viewers were being outlawed or something. 

Yeah, it is extra work for the Gacha creators, it is ZERO extra work for the Gacha Resellers,  but it is not this OMG the sky is falling, gonna take MONTHS to change, panic that some people have worked themselves into. 

 

[Rowan Amore]

4 minutes ago, VergilISparda said:

Good thing it was stopped before the "Ultimate ultra super rare" would come out 😁

Otherwise known as, The When Hell Freezes Over Rare

[Yuki Suki]

7 minutes ago, Marie Sims said:

What about gaming cards to play? Buy them with Ls and play the machine without Ls ?

Going around technicality, interesting.
I suppose this is up for discussion and interpretation within LL and the regulations on loot boxes.

[LittleMe Jewell]

1 minute ago, Faly Breen said:

No becourse i linked you ONE breedable which needs the food NOT to stay alive BUT to BREED and to BREED only. If you dont feed them they will be "sick" and not able to breed and since they get old they can only breed a "limited time" of their ageing - like i said, i guess it was just the first 50 days of their lifetime.

Your link takes me to a page with lots of listings, so no clue what specific item you meant to link to. 

If feeding is truly tied directly to breeding and not to just stay alive, then there might be an issue - since the outcome of the breeding will be random.  I apologize for making an invalid assumption about the feeding. I did say in multiple posts that my comments applied directly to KittyCats as I have no specific knowledge of other breedables. 

 

[Kyle Beckett]

6 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

Well that makes no sense.  They'd make more sales just selling it outright without a machine.  In effect, not a gatcha but a lucky chair.

Kind of except you pay to receive the current item and change the next item for sale. There is no guarantee the next item you want will be next, but you can keep playing in hopes it changes to the item you want.

It's the same as gacha, but now you can see the item you will get for your pull, but there is still a chance what the next item for sale will be. Will it be the rare?  Who knows!?

So the gacha spirit is still alive and well!

[Mistary Sandalwood]

Would people who want to run GACHA machines be allowed to get a gambling 'license' like the sims that run the gaming sims?

[Silent Mistwalker]

1 hour ago, Lucia Nightfire said:

Commons -> Arm

Rares -> Leg

Ultra Rare -> First Born Head

*coughs*

[Faly Breen]

4 minutes ago, LittleMe Jewell said:

our link takes me to a page with lots of listings, so no clue what specific item you meant to link to. 

If feeding is truly tied directly to breeding and not to just stay alive, then there might be an issue - since the outcome of the breeding will be random.  I apologize for making an invalid assumption about the feeding. I did say in multiple posts that my comments applied directly to KittyCats as I have no specific knowledge of other breedables. 

and thats what i tried to say, SL is just to big to know "all things". My breedables i know were the "Fennux" which...

- can life without food endlessly

- WILL be sick if you dont feed them (and way less active)

- CANT BREED if they are sick

- Can ONLY BREED in the first view days of their lifecycle IF they are NOT SICK

- can be turned into pets if you dont wanna breed/feed them for an extra price

Again try to check them out, they are called "Fennux". were kinda fun as they were new tbh (and kinda cute).

Edited August 2, 2021 by Faly Breen

[Skye Fairywren]

Although I understand that the EU and powers that be consider selling gachas as "gambling", I don't doubt for a minute that this will drive up the price of many creators' products and customers will no longer be able to afford many of them.

Well, I guess we'll see...

[Rowan Amore]

2 minutes ago, Kyle Beckett said:

Kind of except you pay to receive the current item and change the next item for sale. There is no guarantee the next item you want will be next, but you can keep playing in hopes it changes to the item you want.

It's the same as gacha, but now you can see the item you will get for your pull, but there is still a chance what the next item for sale will be. Will it be the rare?  Who knows!?

So the gacha spirit is still alive and well!

Which is in effect a lucky chair you pay for.  Stand around and wait for your item to come up and hope someone there doesn't beat you to it.  

[LittleMe Jewell]

3 minutes ago, Mistary Sandalwood said:

Would people who want to run GACHA machines be allowed to get a gambling 'license' like the sims that run the gaming sims?

Technically, the current gaming regions are not 'gambling' but are instead SKILL Gaming - because gambling is not allowed.  I can't see any way of turning a Gacha into a SKILL game.

Edited August 2, 2021 by LittleMe Jewell

[Innula Zenovka]

58 minutes ago, Drakkhis said:

But I still don't know where LL is saying changes in  legislation. What  legislation? I don't know of any new rules for prize machines.

Gatchas and loot boxes are already unlawful under certain circumstances in Belgium and The Netherlands under existing gambling law, at least in the opinion of the local gambling regulators.      Revisions to Australian gambling law are already before the Australian senate to bring gatchas and loot boxes within their ambit, and several other major jurisdictions, including the UK, will be introducing similar legislation this year or next.

There's a short and very accessible report summarising all this at

https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-8498/

SL isn't a gaming platform and LL don't want to deal with the myriad of regulatory authorities they'd have to satisfy in order to become one, not least -- I would imagine -- because they'd have to submit all the source code for the gatchas (which they didn't write) for approval by dozens  of different national gaming boards.

LL have plugged the plug sooner rather than later, but the decision was inevitable, and has been for some time.    Legislation is being drafted with companies other than LL in mind, and platforms other than SL, but it will be equally applicable to SL as to anything else, and no other decision would have been possible, to my mind.

Edited August 2, 2021 by Innula Zenovka

[Coffee Pancake]

1 minute ago, LittleMe Jewell said:

Technically, the current gaming regions are not 'gambling' but are instead SKILL Gaming - because gambling is not allowed.  I can't see any way of turning a Gacha into a SKILL game.

Oh damn .. can you imagine misery of playing no-devil for a random hair color you don't want.

[Anitya Leclerc]

1 hour ago, Prokofy Neva said:

Collecting VAT is something they do as merchants, as a business.

They are not prosecutors, however, with international standing, and cannot prosecute another country's laws on their behalf.

What they can do is make a policy about anything they like, for any reason or no reason, as a private company. So they have. Most likely because Elizabeth Warren's protégé among the new owners of LL cast his eye on this, for a variety of political and cultural reasons.

Many people have ideas about how laws are executed internationally that are utterly ignorant of how such things work. Laws are not electronic machines that self-execute. You need a prosecutor, a judge, a court with standing, etc.

Example: as we see Canada passed an anti-gatcha law in *2010*. Canadians went on pulling levers in SL for 11 years afterward. Nothing changed in Canada. There isn't some judge eyeing SL as far as we know. Possibly Japanese regulators did? But I'm willing to bet there was no actual RL prosecutor contacting SL, it was just produce on their part. They have not cited their legal thinking on this, merely alluding vaguely to a "regulatory climate" which in fact does not yet exist in the SL, absent a law *and its application*. Remember, the US is common law, i.e. law is interpreted by a judge and past rulings form the basis for future prosecution.

www.ca.gov is the URL for the government of the state of California. I'm not saying you're wrong about international law (first of all, I am not a lawyer; second, to the extent I know anything about law, you're right).

But please stop being disingenuous about the existence of an actual law in California because you haven't checked the URL or the PDF that was linked.

[Yuki Suki]

49 minutes ago, Faly Breen said:

ah ah ah

but you dont know what you will get when you breed them. see.

When you buy a horse, your get the horse - it is not random.

The random stats are generated AFTER you bought the horse. You did not (need to) pay to generate the random stats.

But I can understand why you look at it from that PoV though.

Edited August 2, 2021 by Hanjo Harvey