Harte Straaf

Ever since the discussions (back in late 2017 early 2018) about the loot boxes in the game StarWars Battlefront II and not only the big backlash from the gaming community but also the legal issues around the microtransactions for loot boxes, resulting in EA completely overhauling the game, I wondered when gachas in SL would also be affected. With time the whole gacha thing also got somewhat out of hand. For example just look at the older early gachas from stores like Madpea and compare them to the later newer ones. There are a couple of older gachas with vehicles like golf carts. Those older gacha machines only have golf carts inside them (or whatever other vehicle they're selling) and alll of these vehicles are more or less nice, and even though you don't know which one you'll get, the differences aren't so big, you always more or less get what you pay for in return. But now these days they make gachas like for example the one with pontoon racers, where the machine predominantly shows all those vehicles along with a few buoys or helmets and things like that on the picture. But when you play the gacha machine you usually just end up "winning" one worthless item after another. These newer gacha machines are deliberately packed full with tons of useless junk, while at the same time deceivingly pretending to be a gacha that's (just) full of vehicles, and they don't define most of those "rare to win" vehicles as "rare" items they're "common", just as "common" as the tons of different worthless junk buoys. When you now take a closer look at the prices some of the rare gacha iterms are generally being offered on the Marketplace for, and how much useless and worthless junk so many gacha machines pass out to people who are trying to win those rare items, then I must say I really do perfectly see how this is de-facto nothing other than pure "gambling". Some machines make you have to play dozens of times to win something reasonably valuable while you're collecting utterly worthless junk. And with the option of being able to sell a highly valuable rare gacha for L$ in MP and then in a next step being able to exchang these L$ into real world currencies such as the US $, there is de-facto no more difference left between those types of gacha machines and slot machines in a RL bar, where people often times can't even cash in their wins, but only get store credit for meals and drinks. Some (mostly early types) of gacha machines may indeed be very much like gumball machines, yes. But with tieme it has all more and more mutated to a point, where it's become more and more like gambling, with little to no principal differences compared to RL lotteries where people play and pay for a rare chance to win a fancy house or a new car.