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3 minutes ago, Sammy Huntsman said:

Can we stop trying to find workarounds, I mean it sounds great on paper. However, when LL catches wind of this and the governments find that this is happening. They are gonna crack down on LL again. I can see it happening. 

Well, since this is a official forum post from LL so i think it will not take to long for them to actually check the comments on a thread they started lol...

Edited by Faly Breen
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1 minute ago, Qie Niangao said:

Right, that blog doesn't actually talk about gacha at all, only about transferable, no-copy objects, some in limited circulation, which they apparently only ever bought by gacha. To the extent there's a real market for those products, they'll be for sale, with or without gacha. To the extent that market is not supportable, that's the extent gacha depended on being a form of gambling for its success (such as it was).

There are plenty of us who learned never to even look at Arcade or Epiphany sales because we just don't want to deal with gacha. If those creators can just quit pining for the good ol' days of gacha and get on with competent marketing, they'll do just fine. If they keep feeling sorry for themselves because change happened, they've been doomed all along.

I don't find people describing the loss of their RL livelihood during a pandemic, in poor countries, as "whining" and "pining".

The big dogs have in some cases left gatchas behind, or retire them, or do them rarely, and put out overpriced sets on no transfer out of the price range for many people. Gatchas enabled people to participate in the mesh revolution; they spread the Linden and fanboy gospel of mesh readily; they enabled people to participate in the economy. As I said, if Patch would like to carry the SL economy on the strength of the middle class living in the "little boxes made of ticky-tacky" in Bellisseria, that's fine, that's actually a plan and a realistic proposition if this "regulatory climate" is as bad as they say. Plenty of gals will go on playing the premium subscription and the $1500 per fancy set released by the big names, and in Belli, you don't have more than 351 prims in one place so they'll be happy enough -- times 5 or 6 or 7 or how ever many alts they have.

But what about the lower class? Where are they going to go? Will they be driven into more sex work? Gatchas provided an escape from hooking for quite a few people, in my observation, through resales, and through creating the opportunity to make a beautiful home for a very low price.

When you crack down on one form of economic activity in this dramatic way, watch for all the other forms to break out of their channels or re-occur. How many people, if asked to mule for the denizens of "The Silk Road", itself attacked by prosecutors, will be happy to do so? Through information, contacts, reports, obviously, not through the literal contraband. SL is a great cutaway.

Copybotting will likely increase. Also theft of accounts through catfishing. It will be hard to watch.

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1 hour ago, Prokofy Neva said:

It's hard to find an analogy to the extension of freedom that occurred with the fall of the Berlin wall that applies to restricting economic activity in SL. It's a crazy analogy. The response to it seems wry and more about pointing out that the Berlin Wall doesn'lt exist any more so it's irrelevant. But there would undoubtedly be less poor people in East Germany if it still existed, that may be his point. Neither situation is one I expect you to have any empathy for.

There'd also be undoubtetdly less free people in East Germany. East Germany wasn't some sort of wonderland where everyone was super happy. Holy *****, people lived in constant fear of their neighbors, or even their own family members outting them to the Stasi, putting them into prison. I rather be free and poor, in that case, thank you.

1 hour ago, Prokofy Neva said:

You're forgetting why gatchas came into existence, at Christmas time, with a memorable Advent calendar from one prominent creator in particular: because of increasing competition, because of the loss of visibility as first the telehubs were killed off, then people went to the MP and dropped inworld stores; and because of the LACK OF SALES.

The drive to create cheap, single copy alternatives came from the LOSS OF SALES by other economic dislocations in SL. At one time, you could buy Aimee Weber's underwear, or Blue's jewelry, or Khamon's trees, or Simone's outfits -- and that was it, there was one in each category, or a few, and the one big one with Linden blessing and help gaining media covering in RL (which I criticized and was banned from the forums for a time for calling out) was the norm. So it was hard for others to break into the market. Anshe created telehub malls that gave them that opportunity. Oldbies retaliated by demanding removal of the hubs "due to lag" (not true of all of them. Lindens put in p2p and  glutted the land market to try to control Anshe. There was the crashing of the old auctions; VAT; the drop in LindEx value and much more. Gatchas arose because of a need to make money somehow in an increasingly competitive and difficult world.

The gatcha take-over led in turn to weekend sales, more and more of them, and then retaliation against their cut of the gatcha revenue with more and larger events with gatcha machines. These are strange phenomena until you realize the market is controlled as it is in China or Russia and people find ways around state controls.

That's nice. I don't see how that makes exploitation okay, tho. Could you elaborate on that?
Lemme be straight with that - I don't give a damn WHY and HOW gachas came into existence. That's a nice little tidbit of information that has no relevance for me other than "Oh, nice to know"
What matters to me is that something with a good goal has been twisted into a mechanism of exploitation.

There's competition in SL, all right. And I understand it's hard. Mesh takes a lot of work, and you cannot compete with people who steal stuff from 3d asset sides or games, who have steamlined processes, or just have more ressources at hand to allow for cheaper prices. And no, I do not have a solution for that. But exploitation should not be one either.

Edit: Also, no, why would I know of anybodies life on here.

Edited by Sukubia Scarmon
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2 minutes ago, MissPhortune said:

Posted probability rate showing the likelihood of getting each tier…. Common, rare, ultra rare… Apple actually came up with the idea and implemented it in the past…

Here's an exhaustive chart showing the odds of various throws when playing craps - does that make it not gambling?

https://www.vegasslotsonline.com/table-games/craps/odds/

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Just now, Sukubia Scarmon said:

There'd also be undoubtetdly less free people in East Germany. East Germany wasn't some sort of wonderland where everyone was super happy. Holy *****, people lived in constant fear of their neighbors, or even their own family members outting them to the Gestapo, putting them into prison. I rather be free and poor, in that case, thank you.

That's nice. I don't see how that makes exploitation okay, tho. Could you elaborate on that?
Lemme be straight with that - I don't give a damn WHY and HOW gachas came into existence. That's a nice little tidbit of information that has no relevance for me other than "Oh, nice to know"
What matters to me is that something with a good goal has been twisted into a mechanism of exploitation.

There's competition in SL, all right. And I understand it's hard. Mesh takes a lot of work, and you cannot compete with people who steal stuff from 3d asset sides or games, who have steamlined processes, or just have more ressources at hand to allow for cheaper prices. And no, I do not have a solution for that. But exploitation should not be one either.

Yes, I know. My children's father spent 9 years in the GULAG; his grandfather and brother died there. I'm a big opponent of communism and you have no idea of my life apparently. But I am also capable of pointing out that the poverty that followed the collapse of communism and the distortion of capitalism without the rule of law are factors that made many yearn with "ostalgie" and could prompt the comment above. Understanding a comment doesn't mean endorsing them. These are facts, and there's no need to preach to me.

I don't see gatchas as exploitation. In fact, I was drafting a post about how a lot of the great gatcha makers had stopped making great story gatchas; quality was less; and backdrops and sets were starting to fill in more where gatchas used to bed. I don't see that the people losing their income now were "exploiting" people who are adults and can decide how to spend their money. I do think gatcha addiction is a reality, even if the amounts are small. But I don't blame the creators for that.

 

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3 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

Stating the obvious doesn't answer the question as to why LL, a little company, would be timid after a big company faced down irate parents and won (the parents could keep their kids off games without supervision, for one). If anything, LL's business model, which involves 10% cuts and not 30% cuts, and a huge latitude for granting users the right to "jailbreak their phones" (make 3rd party viewers and otherwise adapt SL in various ways) should have been the one to defend users more.

Something is driving this. We have not yet heard what it is. The Twitter Helpful Hannahs, Hamlet, and other knowier-than-thou bloggers are not doing investigative reporting but are doing court reporting when they show no curiosity about this matter and hypothesize that "China" or "Belgium" or "California" prompted LL to do this. How? Why? In what form? By whom?

Loot boxes and gatchas already fall within the ambit of the gambling regulators in several jurisdictions where LL do business, and this will be true of several more (including my own, the UK) by the end of next year.

Whatever the merits of the California case under discussion (I'm not familiar with it), that has little to do with how the governments of Australia, the UK and other countries may decide to regulate loot boxes in future -- we don't yet know -- and it seems to me not at all unreasonable for LL's new owners to decide from the outset that keeping themselves in compliance with an increasing number of different regulatory and reporting regimes in different jurisdictions just isn't something the company needs to be bothered about, since they presumably don't view gatchas as being so important to their business model as Apple do to theirs.   

Rightly or wrongly, LL presumably don't see gatchas as being worth the long-term hassle of keeping up with with the differing requirements of multiple regulators, and are bailing now rather than later.   

The "something" that's driving this seems to me to be no more than LL's assessment of what's in the company's best business interests.    Presumably it's been under consideration for some time, and  the people who make such decisions at LL have read too many articles like this

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/04/uk-report-recommends-regulating-all-loot-boxes-as-gambling/

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/loot-boxes-new-gambling

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-53253195

and have decided they want to divest themselves of all possible regulatory risk by banning gatchas altogether.   

It seems a perfectly rational decision, whether you agree with it or not, and I don't see why there needs to be anything else behind it.

 

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This thread is now paused.  

Heed this warning, if I continue to see nasty fighting between any of you beyond what should be considered healthy debate, it's going to stay locked.

This thread will be unlocked again at 7am SLT.

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Would be great if LL will run gacha events into the skill games regions, and about the creators they could have the chance to open their own gacha shops into other skill games regions,  like this will be fine for everybody , so if LL wants can fix all!!!! I mean the zyngo gambling machines still run in SL with the conditions to stay in skill games regions,  why don t do the same with gachas??? @Patch Linden

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@Patch Linden Thank you Patch for opening the thread again.  I think we would very much benefit from LL giving a view on Breedables in light of this development.  While it affects breedables content to varying degrees depending on product there ARE similarities in some areas (like the randomness of traits when buying starter packs).  I do not think knowing all traits up front is reasonable, even Nature throws out genetic variants.  Can Linden Labs please update us on what will and won't be allowed regarding breedables in future.  The silence given the amount of discussion here is starting to worry me.

Edited by VanessaJane66
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All of these links to UK and EU bans on Lootboxes keep talking about children. How its children "between the ages of 11-16 who are buying the majority of lootboxes and becoming addicted to them." Just make gachas only available on Adult land.. Kids cant go to adult land unless they lie about their age and break the ToS, at which time LL can bann them. 

When does personal responsibility come into play? Who gave these "children" access to credit cards in the first place? As has been mentioned before, you can easily equate lootboxes to buying packs of cards for various games. Completely random as to what cards you will get and they are usually $15-$20 a pack. No one says anything when a kid blows hundreds on them. 

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1 hour ago, Cinos Field said:

Non-gacha creators have been doing it for... well, since SL first launched really. They set a realistic but profitable price for an item, and people pay it. In fact, did you know that real life works like that, too? People do pay for things if they know what they'll receive!

Some creators set the price too high and don't sell anything. Some set it too low to make much profit. It's up to each to find the sweet spot. That's just how life goes!

100% this. I always stress this with selling products that you need to find a sweet spot of not putting 48+ hours of work up for 50L but also not making it so prohibitively expensive that nobody can afford it. Make it cheap enough that a lot of people won't think twice about buying it but expensive enough that when their friends see the cool new toy they got you'll make some money. You do also always make money off a product as long as it sells, extra copies don't cost you money so you always have a trickle income at worst.

Freebies also help with this, I'm a huge advocate for making good decent/high quality freebies as a means of letting people sample your work. Lots of people make freebies these crappy things (which is why freebies have that stigma) when really it should be a way to show what you can do for potential customers. It has the added effect of also bolstering the community you make them for by letting new or poor players get into it without the risk of spending money. If your freebies show off your superb quality products you can generally sell them at a bit higher price. 

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10 minutes ago, Aria Fae said:

i love how we have all these keyboard lawyers trying to second guess LL.... guess what... your opinion means less than the waste products that the breedables produce ..... if you don't like the policies that their putting in place, then here's the door, go start your own virtual world

Success in business depends on listening to your customer (with a discerning eye of course).

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18 minutes ago, VanessaJane66 said:

@Patch Linden Thank you Patch for opening the thread again.  I think we would very much benefit from LL giving a view on Breedables in light of this development.  While it affects breedables content to varying degrees depending on product there ARE similarities in some areas (like the randomness of traits when buying starter packs).  I do not think knowing all traits up front is reasonable, even Nature throws out genetic variants.  Can Linden Labs please update us on what will and won't be allowed regarding breedables in future.  The silence given the amount of discussion here is starting to worry me.

We are working on getting more information, clarity and perhaps something like an FAQ set-up, hopefully we can get that published later today.

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Just now, Patch Linden said:

We are working on getting more information, clarity and perhaps something like an FAQ set-up, hopefully we can get that published later today.

Thank you. please make sure to cover breedables and gatchas that tell you what the item is currently

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8 minutes ago, Drake1 Nightfire said:

All of these links to UK and EU bans on Lootboxes keep talking about children. How its children "between the ages of 11-16 who are buying the majority of lootboxes and becoming addicted to them." Just make gachas only available on Adult land.. Kids cant go to adult land unless they lie about their age and break the ToS, at which time LL can bann them. 

When does personal responsibility come into play? Who gave these "children" access to credit cards in the first place? As has been mentioned before, you can easily equate lootboxes to buying packs of cards for various games. Completely random as to what cards you will get and they are usually $15-$20 a pack. No one says anything when a kid blows hundreds on them. 

Exactly...i don t  understand  why they don t run the gacha events into skill game regions and as well give the chance to open gacha's shops into this regions too....it's easy....there is no difference by the law from a zyngo and gachas!!!! So they have to apply the same rules....means open gacha's event and rent gacha's shops into skill game regions 

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Hello, I got  a question about Gacha and the SL Marketplace. It is possible to sell a random Item at the marketplace, will this also stop working  on 1. September? What about selling a random KittyCat Box on the SL Marketplace? Is this forbidden also?

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