Consider the following. (Destiny)

by slycrel , Thursday, March 31, 2016, 16:43 (3253 days ago) @ MacAddictXIV

No worries, I think I read the tone wrong in your first post. It seemed to put me in a box I'd prefer not to be in. =)

Adding real money in there makes it more complex. And also raise the stakes some. micro-transactions can, and I suspect do, take advantage of the addictive/random system they have created.

Gambling is meant to be fun. I have gambled before, it was fun. Games are meant to be fun. Games have gambling aspects in them. Bungie added more with these micro-transactions. I understand that real money makes it more complex and could entice people with addictive/gambling tendencies, but for those people, they really should be playing Destiny if that is the case. That's true with any addiction.

Yes, the player has responsibility not to be stupid. But that doesn't mean that the house running the gambling isn't exploiting the player's basic human nature either.

This is what bugs me. You say that it is wrong for establishments to exploit basic human nature through gambling. I say that it both parties that are doing harm, but ultimately it's the player that is making the final decision. I know we are using casino's as a metaphor to Destiny here, but there is a huge difference. For one, Casino's in my mind are for two purposes, having fun and making money. Simply put, you are having fun by "playing" and the odds are against you to lose money. If you are going to a casino and think that's not true then you are naive. So the odds that you will lose money is your "fun" tax. Then there are people who do it to try and make money, those people should know the risk, of actually making money off of it. If they don't, they are naive as well.

This is the same for Destiny except it's even more forgiving than a casino. I give a raid as an example. There are people who raid just for fun, those people have absolutely no cost to their fun because they are not doing it for the reward. They aren't truely gambling. Then there are people who do raids for the rewards, those people also need to understand that the odds are against them (although less so than a casino).

Now, I know that we all want a better environment that doesn't trigger our "gambling" tendencies. And we have every right to fight for that. But we also can't single mindedly target one aspect of Destiny and say "that's wrong because it makes me want to do things I don't want to do" Destiny is all about risk/reward.

So I guess it changes the entire scope of gambling for me, which is the rub.

I gamble my time away with games all the time. I hope that I have a good time and that it will be worth what I put into it. But it's a pretty closed eco-system. I buy the game and then can do as much or as little as I want with it.

Micro-transactions bring a sort of real life component to gaming that I'd prefer to keep out of. I want something I can sit down and play, not something I have to pay to play with over and over. I really enjoy playing magic: the gathering. But I don't very often because it nearly always is a money game -- to play often you need to be constantly buying cards. I dont want destiny to be that kind of system -- I want to pay an entrance fee and then enjoy it. Not worry about money gates in addition to the time gates that are already in place.