How do I get my friend to stop playing FE:H

[lampsarecooliguess]

Hey, so I have a friend who plays this game non stop, all the time, always on it, and he's spent at least 200 dollars on orbs at this point. He's even said he wants to stop but he just can't. Any ideas?

[Othin]

Has he tried uninstalling it? Or having you uninstall it for him, if that would make it easier.

How long has he been trying to stop?

[lampsarecooliguess]

Well he and I are in different areas, so I can't really uninstall it for him, but it's like an addiction, and even if you uninstall it it's connected to your NNID so you can't really loose anything. He's been trying to quit for like 2 months I think. And he's had the game since launch, and he bought like 5 orbs as a joke, but now he does it all the time and it's p bad.

[redlight]

Convince him on which unit not to  pull on. Find easy to get units for him to invest time in. Tell him he'll be selling his kidney soon just to get those 13 orbs.

Edited March 7, 2018 by silveraura25

[Nanima]

Recommend he sees professional help for it, if that's an option for him. The way you describe it does sound serious. What you yourself can do for him is sadly limited aside from providing support and giving advice. He himself has to stick to the process of getting out of this.

[lampsarecooliguess]

No but like, he's gotten essentially all of the units worth his time, he plays this religiously. I don't think anything that deals with the game will work, because chances are he's already done it.

[lampsarecooliguess]

8 minutes ago, Nanima said:

Recommend he sees professional help for it, if that's an option for him. The way you describe it does sound serious. What you yourself can do for him is sadly limited aside from providing support and giving advice. He himself has to stick to the process of getting out of this.

I think he can get over it, whether it be something else that distracts him that doesn't really require funds, or just something that will help him realize that it's dumb. But if all else fails I'll probably end up doing that. 

[DarkDestr0yer61]

Call 1-800-522-4700
Chat ncpgambling.org/chat
Text 1-800-522-4700

This is information for the National Council on Problem Gambling hotline

[Astellius]

3 hours ago, lampsarecooliguess said:

Well he and I are in different areas, so I can't really uninstall it for him, but it's like an addiction, and even if you uninstall it it's connected to your NNID so you can't really loose anything. He's been trying to quit for like 2 months I think. And he's had the game since launch, and he bought like 5 orbs as a joke, but now he does it all the time and it's p bad.

There is the option to permanently delete data that's linked to a Nintendo account, which is different from simply uninstalling the program. At the bottom of the screen, there's a cog icon next to the Shop titled "Misc." Tap on that, then go to "Account Management," and then "Delete All Data." Select that, and then go through whatever safeguards they have, and then there you go, all the data associated with the account will be deleted and cannot be restored.

Of course, the ultimate decision for whether or not to quit belongs solely to him. It's up to you how much pressure you want to put on him.

Edited March 7, 2018 by Astellius

[Mandokarla]

I had a really bad spat where I spent WAY too much on the fucking game, it was a gambling addiction. I should have known better, such behaviors run in my dads side of the family.

After one particularly expensive (and unrewarded) binge trying to get Sonya on release, I was so mad at myself I uninstalled the game. I reinstalled it a few months ago, and I have been very conscious about it all, and I've been able to not fall back into that bad habit. I only buy orbs with like, throwaway gift cards I got for my birthday. Never money I earned.

Working on building up a Saizo has actually been fun, I get more value out of building high merged common units. 

Tl;Dr he can recover. He just needs time away. 

[Captain Karnage]

Seriously get them some help, call their family, their friends. I myself have a bit a of a gambling problem, what I did was I removed all ways to pay through my Google account.  Honestly my best method was to guilt trip myself by showing myself what I could habe bought with the money I burnt on the game, make them feel bad as that's my best method of guilting myself into quiting

[Rezzy]

When you say $200 on Orbs, do you mean at one time or over the course of the last year?

Dumping $200 in one go can be a problem if you are spending money you can't afford, but if it's been $200 over the course of a year, that's really not that bad.  It averages out to less than $20 a month, which is less than I spend per month on average, and is less than you would pay buying a new game every month.

[Arcanite]

Not gonna lie, I was expecting this to be some meme but it's actually serious...

5 hours ago, lampsarecooliguess said:

Any ideas?

Does him playing it actually get in the way of important things?

If he's actually serious he can just delete all his account info our sell his account / give it to someone else and let them change the password so he can never get it back

[lampsarecooliguess]

16 hours ago, Astellius said:

There is the option to permanently delete data that's linked to a Nintendo account, which is different from simply uninstalling the program. At the bottom of the screen, there's a cog icon next to the Shop titled "Misc." Tap on that, then go to "Account Management," and then "Delete All Data." Select that, and then go through whatever safeguards they have, and then there you go, all the data associated with the account will be deleted and cannot be restored.

Of course, the ultimate decision for whether or not to quit belongs solely to him. It's up to you how much pressure you want to put on him.

Oh hek, I didn't know that and that's p useful, so I might try to do that or something among those lines. I don't want to delete something he's spent 200 dolars on though, I just want him to realize that he should like not, that's like breaking someones 3ds that they religiously play.

 

15 hours ago, Mandokarla said:

I had a really bad spat where I spent WAY too much on the fucking game, it was a gambling addiction. I should have known better, such behaviors run in my dads side of the family.

After one particularly expensive (and unrewarded) binge trying to get Sonya on release, I was so mad at myself I uninstalled the game. I reinstalled it a few months ago, and I have been very conscious about it all, and I've been able to not fall back into that bad habit. I only buy orbs with like, throwaway gift cards I got for my birthday. Never money I earned.

Working on building up a Saizo has actually been fun, I get more value out of building high merged common units. 

Tl;Dr he can recover. He just needs time away. 

I know he's going to recover, but it's just the sooner he realizes that what he's doing is really dumb then he'll get over it, but thank you thoughh.

15 hours ago, Captain Karnage said:

Seriously get them some help, call their family, their friends. I myself have a bit a of a gambling problem, what I did was I removed all ways to pay through my Google account.  Honestly my best method was to guilt trip myself by showing myself what I could have bought with the money I burnt on the game, make them feel bad as that's my best method of guilting myself into quitting

And I really like this Idea as well, but it isn't as effective as to how he doesn't really care because I've told him that he could have bought a switch already but he doesn't really care about anything else really and ultimately ends up spending it on orbs.

 

14 hours ago, Rezzy said:

When you say $200 on Orbs, do you mean at one time or over the course of the last year?

Dumping $200 in one go can be a problem if you are spending money you can't afford, but if it's been $200 over the course of a year, that's really not that bad.  It averages out to less than $20 a month, which is less than I spend per month on average, and is less than you would pay buying a new game every month.

He's spent 200 since release, and spent like 50 on it yesterday cuz he just got a new job, but it's a little worrisome that all of the money he earns that his parents don't make him put into savings goes into this game. 

14 hours ago, Arcanite said:

Not gonna lie, I was expecting this to be some meme but it's actually serious...

Does him playing it actually get in the way of important things?

If he's actually serious he can just delete all his account info our sell his account / give it to someone else and let them change the password so he can never get it back

Yea man, I thought it was a meme as well, but then he started to take it to heart. It gets in the way of his school work a little bit because like any addiction you'd kinda just not wanna stop, but I do really like the idea of selling his account, I didn't think about that.

 

Ultimately, I think I'm gonna end up getting someone to help and get this sorted out, but thanks for all the ideas none the less, I really appreciate it.

[Raven]

You can't do much if you're not there in person. You need to let his other friends who are close to him - and maybe even his family - know what's going on and let them help in some way.

Also tell him horror stories of other people going off the rails and spending literally everything they have on microtransactions, gachas and lootboxes. There are too many out there and they are all the result of falling into the very real trap of "just one more, for sure I'll get what I want."

Playing the game is fine. But spending more money than what you can reasonably afford is not fine. He seems young, inexperienced with money management, and doesn't know where to draw the line. Letting his parents know what's going will be a big step towards finding a solution.

[eclipse]

Whether he seeks professional help is up to him.  I understand that you're worried, but I think it's out of the hands of random strangers on the Internet.  If he really decides to give up Heroes for good, get his NNID and password from him.  Then, change the password on the NNID, and don't tell him what you changed it to.

Someone posted some helpful links earlier in the topic.  Please make use of those.

[TimDiamond]

If he has been playing since release, it's impressive that he has recognized a limit of where X amount of money is too much. We've all heard of stories of folks with too much expendable income already shelling out thousands of dollars and not thinking any of it.

If he's not willing to quit cold turkey, you can ask him if he's interested in being a born again F2Player, or flat out make a new account and make a point to be prideful in keeping his wallet away from the game. Or you could ask him to only roll 200 orbs a month, during the last week of the month, and aim to save 500 orbs by June.

[Vince777]

Despite my love for Heroes, and that's just because I love Fire Emblem and it's characters, the gacha business model is so predatory, would call it borderline evil, and some people have so little self-restraint that I wonder if something should not be done about it as far as legislation goes.

Quite frankly, there's a lot that's unethical and difficult to respect about the sort of money that's being made from Heroes and similar games. I also personally feel insulted at the price they sell orbs and would never buy any, on principle.

Then again, I benefit from the model as a f2p player (minus the BK pack deal, the one deal I bought into) as it insures more content (which, essentially, others pay for me to have).

Edited March 26, 2018 by Vince777

[Ice Dragon]

1 hour ago, Vince777 said:

I wonder if something should not be done about it as far as legislation goes.

So on what basis should gacha games be legislated against that should allow collectable card games to go scot-free?

[Raven]

31 minutes ago, Ice Dragon said:

So on what basis should gacha games be legislated against that should allow collectable card games to go scot-free?

Physical items are cheaper and worth more than digital, in general. Physical have resell value and last for as long as the owner takes care of them. Gacha games die/go offline. Some gachas last more than others, but will die eventually.

So that £1,000+ a year hobby collecting digital images attached to a ball of skills and stats just stops existing, and nobody will have anything to show for such an expensive hobby aside from some memories, videos and screenshots.

This is personally why I stopped spending on this game.

---

Probably didn't answer the question directly, but I think this is valid reasoning towards not putting physical collectible cards in the same basket as digital goods such as gacha games. It's not like we can spend £200 on Heroes and get exactly what we want, unlike what we can do for collectible cards.

Edited March 26, 2018 by Raven

[Ice Dragon]

26 minutes ago, Raven said:

Physical items are cheaper and worth more than digital, in general.

That's not intrinsic to the medium, though.

Additionally, it's not exactly easy to argue exactly how many Magic: The Gathering or Pokémon TCG cards are equivalent in value to how many characters or items in Fire Emblem: Heroes, Puzzles & Dragons, Fate/Grand Order, etc. in order to determine if the cost to the player is comparable.

 

31 minutes ago, Raven said:

Physical have resell value and last for as long as the owner takes care of them.

But are not guaranteed to have non-trivial value for as long as the owner takes care of them.

I'm pretty sure my collection of Pokémon cards would sell for a fraction of the cost of the booster packs they were obtained from. Yes, the costs are partially recoverable, but that's no different from getting a very delayed rebate on an item from a store or just saying that the actual cost of the booster pack is less than the written value.

 

34 minutes ago, Raven said:

It's not like we can spend £200 on Heroes and get exactly what we want, unlike what we can do for collectible cards.

Let's say video games with a loot box mechanic are mandated to allow trading of items obtained from them between accounts, which makes them exactly comparable to collectable cards. Then what?

[Humanoid]

I don't have a horse in this race but I'd observe that there's also no permanence to you get in FEH, the moment Nintendo shuts down the servers, it's all gone. That said, it's the same with any long-running MMO with microtransactions that has eventually shut down. Best case, the community manages to run unofficial servers without being cease-and-desisted by the IP holder.

Personally I'd like it if any such game stopped being officially supported, the back-end should be open sourced so the community can keep it going without the threat of any legal issues. Unfortunately there's undoubtedly an unholy tangle of various rights-holders behind it and there's no way most companies would do this voluntarily. As with a lot of other issues regarding consumer rights, it might be left up to a body like the EU to fly the flag for this kind of thing.

[Raven]

31 minutes ago, Ice Dragon said:

Let's say video games with a loot box mechanic are mandated to allow trading of items obtained from them between accounts, which makes them exactly comparable to collectable cards. Then what?

 

Such a trade mechanic will never be implemented if it means the publishers can't continue to abuse your desire to obtain specific rewards from these lootboxes/gacha pulls, milking you dry in the process.

Maybe they could implement a large in-game currency charge for both players to trade items/characters, etc., but that's probably discussion for a different topic.

Edit: Didn't notice you said "mandated" - but yeah, that would piss off many gacha/lootbox devs for the above reason. They will no doubt implement the feature either behind a paywall of sorts, increase the cost of in-game currency, or both - or some other completely different method/s.

Edited March 26, 2018 by Raven

[Ice Dragon]

15 minutes ago, Raven said:

Such a trade mechanic will never be implemented if it means the publishers can't continue to abuse your desire to obtain specific rewards from these lootboxes/gacha pulls, milking you dry in the process.

39 minutes ago, Ice Dragon said:

Let's say video games with a loot box mechanic are mandated to allow trading of items obtained from them between accounts, which makes them exactly comparable to collectable cards.

In our hypothetical (but entirely possible) world, it will be implemented. So all you've done is avoid the question.

 

15 minutes ago, Raven said:

Maybe they could implement a large in-game currency charge for both players to trade items/characters, etc., but that's probably discussion for a different topic.

I hate suggesting videos, but I highly suggest these two recent (from last month) videos from Extra Credits:

• The Loot Box Question - Designing Ethical Lootboxes: I
• The Legality of Loot Boxes - Designing Ethical Lootboxes: II

Edited March 26, 2018 by Ice Dragon

[Baldrick]

If I own a Marth cipher card, I can do anything I want with it, including trading it for my friend's Sigurd card. I don't need any legislation to mandate IS allows me to make such a trade.