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4 minutes ago, Vince777 said:

That's a prize to be won as far as shitty analogies go.

Once you require the orbs like you do calories to survive, perhaps it'll be of some value to compare them. 

Luxury restaurants. Can you not read, or are you just in willful ignorance?

There is zero caloric requirement to spend huge amounts of money at luxury restaurants over buying food from the grocery store and cooking it yourself. Assuming both provide the required nutrition, the difference in money between the two spent for the transient atmosphere and experience is no different than spending money on pretty pixels that you can't keep forever. Both bring momentary happiness that is most certainly not required for living.

If you want an analogy that might be easier for you to wrap your head around, you can use a Caribbean cruise as the example instead. That's definitely not required for survival and usually costs even more.

Giving people a means of spending large amounts of money for momentary happiness is not unethical. Making it addictive is.

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I did read and also noticed someone else understood your comment similarly and also felt like pointing it out. Surprise, perhaps people that aren't in your head might interpret things differently and there's at least two people here that did.

I could see people getting addicted to luxury and developping unhealthy spending habits. In fact, I'm pretty sure that's fairly common. Someone else mentionned clothes and fashion before in this thread, to parallel your luxury restaurant argument. If they feel compelled to spend for luxury for a reason or another, it is a problem, it is an addiction, and gacha games can make you feel that. It has mechanisms that make it so that you must keep spending to retain status. 

Heroes's business model has you spend to remain relevant. There's a power creep, that you've also constantly denied or sought to minimize through your posts and with each shiny new things, each new more powerful things, the game makes it's players feel like they need to keep on spending to remain on top. Or at least to stand a better chance to. That's also an aspect of it that I consider unethical. 

Then there's the loot boxes gambling aspect of it that you've mentionned yourself. 

You say the amount doesn't matter but I believe the massive amount of money that's invested in such a video game by some of it's players amounts to addiction one way or another. Whether it is getting the whole collection of collectable units, or getting extra merges for the team, it can amount to several thousands, which is just several orders of magnitude higher than what most video games sell for or expect you to spend on them. It's insane. Promotions aside, the best orb for buck deal right now is 143 orbs for 105 bucks, which is essentially on average probably 2 or 3 5* units, half of them only being the focus unit you desired. Gunning for several +10 merge projects is a huge investment for anyone, including those with deeper pockets. It is such irrational spending when compared to what's asked of you by the rest of the vgame industry that it can only be done through addiction and the entire model depends of finding ways to get it's players addicted before hitting you with things like barriers to progress, particularly in PvP, where you compete against opponents in higher tiers that are mostly all big spenders. 

Even PvE content can hardly be beat my f2p players. You argued before that it can be and pointed towards guides online, but these are produced by exceptional players that have invested several hours into finding solutions. For the greater majority, some of the game modes will be unbeatable unless they replicate the strategy, which is not really playing the game at all, or do what the game wants you to do: pay to win.

How much have you spent? Getting close to 100k? Despite the limits you've imposed on yourself, despite the budget you have for it, despite that you're an adult and despite who the fuck am I to tell you how to spend your money and what makes you happy, that's irrational spending and that's gotta be rooted in addiction.
 

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1 hour ago, Vince777 said:

I could see people getting addicted to luxury and developping unhealthy spending habits. In fact, I'm pretty sure that's fairly common. Someone else mentionned clothes and fashion before in this thread, to parallel your luxury restaurant argument. If they feel compelled to spend for luxury for a reason or another, it is a problem, it is an addiction, and gacha games can make you feel that. It has mechanisms that make it so that you must keep spending to retain status. 

To me, blaming addiction on companies is basically copping out on personal responsibility. The difference between gachas and fashion is that fashion is forced upon you; you have to spend on fashion even if you do not want to; you have no obligation to spend on gachas and it is entirely of your own free will if you choose to. If you want to blame capitalism and fight corporate greed, fight the fashion industry and demonize them instead.

52 minutes ago, Vince777 said:

that's irrational spending and that's gotta be rooted in addiction.

As a person's income gets higher, the amount that they can reasonably spend also gets higher. What you think is unreasonable for your income level is not unreasonable for a person of another income level. And income is just one factor. Sometimes it is just down to personal quirks.

My dad chooses to fly first class even though business class will do just fine in terms of comfort, and he hates travelling. His hobby is making radio controlled airplanes but he absolutely refuses to spend much money on the hobby and insists on buying the cheapest parts possible. Why he chooses to spend so much when he travels while penny pinching his hobby is beyond me and seems pretty irrational, but to him it makes perfect sense.

50 minutes ago, Vince777 said:

Even PvE content can hardly be beat my f2p players. You argued before that it can be and pointed towards guides online, but these are produced by exceptional players that have invested several hours into finding solutions. For the greater majority, some of the game modes will be unbeatable unless they replicate the strategy, which is not really playing the game at all, or do what the game wants you to do: pay to win.

Beating Infernal is trivial. Literally any nuke with 3 Dancers/Singers can solve them.

Beating Abyssal is difficult, but it does not reward the player with anything outside of cosmetics and bragging rights.

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I think the problem with gacha is it is akin to gambling.  Spend money to roll the dice and maybe get what you want or not.  It is like pulling a slot machine, except instead of putting in money to win more money you are putting it in to get something from a game.  

The comparison to food, vacations, cars whatever else.  Those you spend money for a known product, this is again like a slot machine or lotto ticket. 

Well is gambling bad?  Not necessarily, but here in the US have to be over 21 to do so.  Gacha games have no age restriction so it preys on children, which renders the personal responsibility argument mute.

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12 minutes ago, Lewyn said:

Well is gambling bad?  Not necessarily, but here in the US have to be over 21 to do so.  Gacha games have no age restriction so it preys on children, which renders the personal responsibility argument mute.

Spending on gacha games requires a credit card or debit card. Children should not have easy, unrestricted access to their parent's wallets. Blaming lack of parental oversight on businesses is stupid in my opinion and it is just a way of deflecting responsibility instead of owning up to personal mistakes.

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2 hours ago, Vince777 said:

How much have you spent? Getting close to 100k? Despite the limits you've imposed on yourself, despite the budget you have for it, despite that you're an adult and despite who the fuck am I to tell you how to spend your money and what makes you happy, that's irrational spending and that's gotta be rooted in addiction.
 

If Ice Dragon is willing to spend that much money and is aware it’s transient, it’s not really irrational. He just values anime jpegs differently to you or I.

For example, an idea I had to fix Heroes would be to remove the option to buy orbs in favour of buying heroes outright. With a set price, people who are willing to pay that price do, and people who aren’t, don’t. That’s how most businesses work, including those part of the fashion industry.

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2 hours ago, Lewyn said:

The comparison to food, vacations, cars whatever else.  Those you spend money for a known product, this is again like a slot machine or lotto ticket. 

That's not entirely true (on either comparison).

I think it's a common misconception for people who are not familiar with the mathematics of statistics to believe that randomness is completely unpredictable at any scale. While it is certainly unpredictable on a roll-by-roll basis, it is certainly not unpredictable in aggregate over a large number of rolls.

Take a coin flip, for example. While each individual flip cannot be predicted, over a large number of flips, you'd expect the number of heads to be very close to the number of tails. After 1000 flips, there's about a 70% chance that you'll have between 484 and 516 heads and a 95% chance that you'll have between 468 and 532 heads.

With the roll of a D6, you have the same effect, though it'll take more rolls to get that close to the average. Same with a D20. Same with a gacha game.

Sniping for a focus character on a Legendary Hero banner gives you about a 2.1% success rate per pull, accounting for sessions without the given color and the pity rate. That's approximately the same as rolling a D47 for one specific result. After 500 pulls (about 1200 USD), there's a 70% chance you'll get 7-13 copies of the character you want and a 95% chance you'll get 4-16 copies of the character you want. With more pulls, that range becomes narrower and narrower (relative to the size of the average number).

So for players that are spending whale amounts of money, pulling on a gacha is actually pretty close to buying a known product, as long as you're willing to accept some variation.

 

Slot machines and lottery tickets, on the other hand, are just a complete scam. Their average payout is always less than the amount of money spent on them (slot machines pay out between 75% and 98% of the money put into them depending on location), meaning getting what you want out of them is actually complete dumb luck.

The aggregate over a large number of plays is negative (a slot machine with 98% payout means that over a very large number of plays, every $1 spent will return you only $0.98 for a $0.02 loss). This means that "winning" at slots or the lottery is equivalent to getting a single win that pays out sufficiently more than you've so far lost, which is tied directly to the roll-to-roll probabilities and not to how many of each reward you've accumulated.

 

In short, the comparison between slot machines or lottery tickets with gacha pulls is only applicable for players that are seeking a single copy (or any other very specific relatively small number) of the gacha pull they are going for. This therefore really only applies for minnows and dolphins. However, since we're talking about large amounts of money comparable to luxury items like fancy restaurants, vacations, and cruises, whale territory is firmly in the range where the results of individual pulls no longer matter as much as the accumulated total and a purchase of a specific amount does reliably get the player a result close to what would be expected.

(And to be fair, cruises and the like are also not guaranteed to be what one expects and can be better or worse depending on many factors.)

 

tl;dr: Spending money to get a single copy of something from a loot box is comparable to a slot machine. Spending a ton of money to get many copies of something from a loot box is nothing like a slot machine and is more similar to buying a "known" product. Your comparisons are not really accurate in the current context of whale levels of spending, but would be accurate when in the context of small budgets. Scale is very important when you're actually crossing over breakpoints where intent changes.

 

1 hour ago, Baldrick said:

For example, an idea I had to fix Heroes would be to remove the option to buy orbs in favour of buying heroes outright. With a set price, people who are willing to pay that price do, and people who aren’t, don’t. That’s how most businesses work, including those part of the fashion industry.

It would be better for the world if it were to be that way, but alas, that business model makes nowhere near as much money and might not even be profitable at all for the cost of the content that gacha games provide.

I honestly want to know how much it actually costs to make this type of content and at what price point they would break even.

It's kind of unfortunate that the spotlight is currently on the loot boxes of certain AAA game companies where the content obviously didn't cost all that much to develop (red dot, anyone?) so it doesn't seem likely that any government will inquire in the near future upon the cost and revenue balance of gacha games where this information would actually be interesting.

Edited by Ice Dragon
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I used my all-Reinhardt team plus dancing Ishtar to beat Leif's infernal. That's as high as I'm going to go. That was certainly interesting.

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4 hours ago, XRay said:

Spending on gacha games requires a credit card or debit card. Children should not have easy, unrestricted access to their parent's wallets. Blaming lack of parental oversight on businesses is stupid in my opinion and it is just a way of deflecting responsibility instead of owning up to personal mistakes.

Don't know how it works in the Apple world, but you can buy orbs with Google Play gift cards (widely available in stores).

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3 hours ago, mampfoid said:

Don't know how it works in the Apple world, but you can buy orbs with Google Play gift cards (widely available in stores).

That also requires children to have access to money in the first place. Can children empty their piggy bank and spend it all on gacha? Definitely. But parents can also open up a bank account for their children and deposit money there for more security and earn a tiny interest. Having a bank account allows parents to have a huge amount of control over their children's spending via limits on their debit cards, or you can simply not allow them to spend that money by simply not giving them the debit card.

Edited by XRay
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6 minutes ago, XRay said:

That also requires children to have access to money in the first place. Can children empty their piggy bank and spend it all on gacha? Definitely. But parents can also open up a bank account for their children and deposit money there for more security and earn a tiny interest. Having a bank account allows parents to have a huge amount of control over their children's spending via limits on their debit cards, or you can simply not allow them to spend that money by simply not giving them the debit card.

Parents have responsibility for their children. Gambling is dangerous for them, no matter if it's easy or not to spend a lot of money for it. 

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3 minutes ago, mampfoid said:

Parents have responsibility for their children. Gambling is dangerous for them, no matter if it's easy or not to spend a lot of money for it. 

Children can also go on porn sites quite easily. It is up to parents to manage their children, not businesses. If parents are not even able to trust their children or control their children's spending, then do not give them an allowance in the first place.

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3 minutes ago, XRay said:

Children can also go on porn sites quite easily. It is up to parents to manage their children, not businesses. If parents are not even able to trust their children or control their children's spending, then do not give them an allowance in the first place.

Well, like you wrote, it's their responsibility. No harm in helping them to give their children more freedom by making dangerous things less accessible for them. 

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4 hours ago, XRay said:

Children can also go on porn sites quite easily. It is up to parents to manage their children, not businesses. If parents are not even able to trust their children or control their children's spending, then do not give them an allowance in the first place.

Porn is free, and educational! I'd never shame a 12 year old for looking at porn, that's where I began (willfully) learning. But spending their parents money on virtual nothings is where I'd speak up, personally. Growing up I felt immense guilt when asking parents to buy me stuff. I quit the school band at 12 when I needed to replace my instrument, for instance. I weighed the cost of that against the enjoyment I got from the band experience which wasn't much at the time. I got my first job soon after since my family needed the money. And as a player since launch day, I know the value per dollar of orbs in Heroes and it's incredibly small - and it gets smaller the more characters you get. Even a completely new player logging in today would get more out of grails and feathers and they'd be earning about as much as I do week by week.

I recognize this is an empty platitude to say this online, but if I were friends with somebody spending finite, hard earned money at the level of $100+ per month, I'd be encouraging them to stop spending money on this game and games like it. No question. I'm an adult who wastes money on things all the time, but it's never been a sizeable fraction of my income. And most people I meet have significant difficulty managing their money and spending habits, we're only human. It's not just gambling/gachas. I've been talked out of spending my next 50 dollars at the blackjack table and I didn't feel ashamed. I felt smart when I realized that money could go to something cooler than the personal satisfaction of winning back my previous 50 that I was okay with losing anyway. Instead that next 50 went to ziplining over the Vegas Strip with family whom also never done something like that before. We still laugh about that experience on the Slotzilla-zilla-zilla. Having friends who ask those questions does get people to look inward at their habits and evaluate where their money goes - and where it could go instead. But you guys are definitely not my friends so I don't get on this soapbox for some online randos. I do hope you've got friends/family though. Sorry for getting so personal with my examples, but I feel strongly about this subject.

Edited by Glennstavos
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...so anyways, think we'll get the next Update preview tonight with new weapons and refines?
Now that Lute has a refine to her weapon, that means the other Farfetched Heroes are on the table, meaning Mia and Joshua (Dorcas... might get cheated out of one for having a DC weapon...)

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45 minutes ago, Xenomata said:

...so anyways, think we'll get the next Update preview tonight with new weapons and refines?
Now that Lute has a refine to her weapon, that means the other Farfetched Heroes are on the table, meaning Mia and Joshua (Dorcas... might get cheated out of one for having a DC weapon...)

Yeah it would be a perfect time, we're already like a Week from the Update.

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Poor Valentine Roy. He has Bow Valor so he's helping train up Legendary Leif, but little does he know that he's training the unit that completely outclasses him and is about to replace him as my Brave Bow cavalry of choice. Brave Bow cavs are often useful in Arena Assault though, so luckily for him he'll probably get to see some action whenever Leif is not in season.

I got put on Est's team again for the last round of Grand Conquests of course. Oh well, didn't get to support Catria at all, but it's not like it matters. I like all the Whitewings, it's just that Est definitely ranks the lowest of the three. My actual score when on Palla's team last round was really good though, I think we controlled 15 areas at the end.

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I got Palla three times in a row. I think. Probably.

Ether way, I'm just hoping I can get to tier 25 this time around in grand conquest. I missed like an entire day because I was sleeping in and stuff ;/

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1 hour ago, Sunwoo said:

I got Palla three times in a row. I think. Probably.

Ether way, I'm just hoping I can get to tier 25 this time around in grand conquest. I missed like an entire day because I was sleeping in and stuff ;/

I almost always get to tier 25, and sometimes i don't even get extra runs in during the first few days (of course i compensate by doing crazy runs on the last one). basically on last day, i blow the natural lances, and then just start using two lances per match (I do lunatic 1).  I never use the featured taem (just my best units) and i usually end up okay. 

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I always play on lunatic because infernal gives me a headache. This round has been relatively kind to me, but sometimes I don't get perfect runs.

Also, sometimes I have to let my lances go to waste if I don't use them right before I go to work XD

Edited by Sunwoo
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21 hours ago, Ice Dragon said:

That's not entirely true (on either comparison).

I think it's a common misconception for people who are not familiar with the mathematics of statistics to believe that randomness is completely unpredictable at any scale. While it is certainly unpredictable on a roll-by-roll basis, it is certainly not unpredictable in aggregate over a large number of rolls.

Take a coin flip, for example. While each individual flip cannot be predicted, over a large number of flips, you'd expect the number of heads to be very close to the number of tails. After 1000 flips, there's about a 70% chance that you'll have between 484 and 516 heads and a 95% chance that you'll have between 468 and 532 heads.

With the roll of a D6, you have the same effect, though it'll take more rolls to get that close to the average. Same with a D20. Same with a gacha game.

Sniping for a focus character on a Legendary Hero banner gives you about a 2.1% success rate per pull, accounting for sessions without the given color and the pity rate. That's approximately the same as rolling a D47 for one specific result. After 500 pulls (about 1200 USD), there's a 70% chance you'll get 7-13 copies of the character you want and a 95% chance you'll get 4-16 copies of the character you want. With more pulls, that range becomes narrower and narrower (relative to the size of the average number).

So for players that are spending whale amounts of money, pulling on a gacha is actually pretty close to buying a known product, as long as you're willing to accept some variation.

 

Slot machines and lottery tickets, on the other hand, are just a complete scam. Their average payout is always less than the amount of money spent on them (slot machines pay out between 75% and 98% of the money put into them depending on location), meaning getting what you want out of them is actually complete dumb luck.

The aggregate over a large number of plays is negative (a slot machine with 98% payout means that over a very large number of plays, every $1 spent will return you only $0.98 for a $0.02 loss). This means that "winning" at slots or the lottery is equivalent to getting a single win that pays out sufficiently more than you've so far lost, which is tied directly to the roll-to-roll probabilities and not to how many of each reward you've accumulated.

 

In short, the comparison between slot machines or lottery tickets with gacha pulls is only applicable for players that are seeking a single copy (or any other very specific relatively small number) of the gacha pull they are going for. This therefore really only applies for minnows and dolphins. However, since we're talking about large amounts of money comparable to luxury items like fancy restaurants, vacations, and cruises, whale territory is firmly in the range where the results of individual pulls no longer matter as much as the accumulated total and a purchase of a specific amount does reliably get the player a result close to what would be expected.

(And to be fair, cruises and the like are also not guaranteed to be what one expects and can be better or worse depending on many factors.)

 

tl;dr: Spending money to get a single copy of something from a loot box is comparable to a slot machine. Spending a ton of money to get many copies of something from a loot box is nothing like a slot machine and is more similar to buying a "known" product. Your comparisons are not really accurate in the current context of whale levels of spending, but would be accurate when in the context of small budgets. Scale is very important when you're actually crossing over breakpoints where intent changes.

 

It would be better for the world if it were to be that way, but alas, that business model makes nowhere near as much money and might not even be profitable at all for the cost of the content that gacha games provide.

I honestly want to know how much it actually costs to make this type of content and at what price point they would break even.

It's kind of unfortunate that the spotlight is currently on the loot boxes of certain AAA game companies where the content obviously didn't cost all that much to develop (red dot, anyone?) so it doesn't seem likely that any government will inquire in the near future upon the cost and revenue balance of gacha games where this information would actually be interesting.

 

@Baldrick Theres also comes issues of how its executed as well. A gacha game i followed back then made a sequel that does exactly that, no gacha, units are bought. But apparently the pricing is so restrictive, that its kinda unreasonable. I read some dudes saying "i rather have gacha" which i will never get the logic behind why since god i hate the concept but it is what it is

 

TCG is in an interesting spot where due to what it is, it is in the middle between gachas and buyable directly stuff, but of course you have shit like Konami short printing desirable cards with low reprint schedule resulting in situation reminiscent to CYL Heroes(read: blatantly overpowered desriable product thats more common) costing like say 20 USD to Halloween Mia 80 USD. I personally hate TCG model as well but eh

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7 hours ago, Sunwoo said:

I always play on lunatic because infernal gives me a headache. This round has been relatively kind to me, but sometimes I don't get perfect runs.

Also, sometimes I have to let my lances go to waste if I don't use them right before I go to work XD

 

lol yeah i hear you. i kinda bounce (it depends if i reallly need the perfect score (then i'll go lunatic) but if i need it i do infernal.this round the maps are kinda poopy so i can't get the last fort, but i manage to hold my own. i spent the natural lances (minus 1) + a full lance so i am on tier 18 now. i do get to go home early tonight so i can really try to get it done. (i need mah coins)

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