[quote][b]GameCentral warns of the dangers of loot boxes, and how unless gamers take a stand against them gaming itself will never be the same.[/b] The days of spending £40 or £50 on a new video game, and that being the only time you ever pay for it, are all but over. Over the last several years pre-orders, season passes, and DLC have all slowly added to the price of a game – or at least the price of seeing all that it offers – but now there is a new and even more controversial way for publishers to increase the cost of games without changing the initial price tag. Loot boxes are not a new concept, but the way they’ve evolved in the last few months could spell the end for traditional video games as we know them. Inspired by smartphone free-to-play titles, the concept of loot boxes in traditional video games dates back to at least 2010, with Valve’s Team Fortress 2 on PC. The idea is very simple, in that for a small fee (typically less than £1) you pay for a random collection of three or four minor in-game items. Although specific types of box may indicate the rarity of the items inside you never know exactly what they’ll be until you open them, much like buying a pack of trading cards or stickers. Until this year loot boxes have caused relatively little concern, with last year’s Overwatch being roundly praised for its implementation of the idea. Loot boxes in Overwatch only ever contain cosmetic extras such as new character skins or animations. Lots of people still pay for them, even though they give no in-game advantage, and so Blizzard is able to fund free DLC for everyone in the form of a steady stream of new maps and characters. It’s not just that non-cosmetic extras give an advantage to those that are prepared to pay for it (the so-called ‘pay to win’ complaint) but they have an even more insidious influence on the design of a game. Suddenly it becomes advantageous for companies to design their games so that they’re harder, or at least more frustrating and time-consuming, to play unless you pay extra money. The creators don’t admit this of course, but especially in a single-player game it’s impossible to trust that a game with non-cosmetic loot boxes hasn’t been engineered to make life more difficult for someone that doesn’t pay more. This threatens to destroy the whole concept of balanced gameplay, where it’s being designed, not for maximum entertainment but for maximum monetisation. There’s been a number of high profile games this autumn that are especially worrying. Middle-Earth: Shadow Of War, for example, has a peculiar end game scenario where, even though the story has reached a natural conclusion, the difficultly level suddenly spikes and you need to start recruiting much more powerful orcs. Which seems suspiciously as if it’s been added purely to encourage the use of loot boxes. And while Destiny 2’s microtransactions are less problematic than they first seemed (the extras are mostly cosmetic and the ones that aren’t don’t make much difference) Forza Motorsport 7’s similar system completely changes the customisation system for in-game ‘mods’ so that they have only limited-time uses and are difficult to acquire again unless you pay for them. Star Wars: Battlefront II creates a different conundrum in that EA has been very upfront about the fact that the game features loot boxes with non-cosmetic extras. To compensate for that intrusion though, they’ve promised that all future DLC, in terms of maps and extra characters, will be free. On paper that sounds like a fair exchange, but after the recent beta it’s become clear that it comes at a considerable price in terms of the balance of the gameplay. A rich player will be able to throw money at Battlefront II and within minutes gain advantages that ordinary players cannot match in weeks of playing the game normally. And some of the advantages are extremely significant too, including things like drastically increasing the effectiveness of weapons and decreasing the amount of damage you take. And this is just the start. It’s not hard to imagine how this system can be made more unfair and more addictive. And considering how quickly publishers have latched onto the concept this year it’s almost frightening to think what form it will have morphed into by next Christmas. [b]But there’s no point trying to pin the blame for any of this on publishers. The people in charge of these companies aren’t gamers, they’re business executives whose only concern is to make profits for their shareholders. They don’t care how those profits are made and they don’t care what people say about their games, especially because what people complain about online often bears little relationship to how they spend their money. If people didn’t buy loot boxes the idea would’ve been dropped years ago. But the opposite has happened. Not only are loot boxes the foundation of many popular smartphone games but a recent report revealed that since ‘games as a service’ have become popular the value of the games industry as a whole has tripled.[/b] [/quote] https://i.imgur.com/XcTWhHr.png read more. i omited some http://metro.co.uk/2017/10/12/loot-boxes-are-ruining-gaming-and-only-you-can-stop-them-6994190/ [b][/b] [spoiler]https://www.bungie.net/en/Forums/Post/235303801?sort=0&page=0[/spoiler]