Man spends 6,000$ on microtransactions in a single day

[nomotog_v1legacy]

Well it is possible that this one person had a unlucky roll. It's more likely that the odds were not what they were advertised as. (For one point, a 3% is insanely high for a random drop rate. You more often see drop rates in the .0x% range. Though they might be show as if they were a higher chance. Like you have a wheel with 10 slots so it looks like a one in ten chance, but is really a .05% chance.)

I think we should have a limit of how much money a game can collect form any one person. This whaling aspect bothers me.

 

[RealRT]

So a man trying to get an item that has a drop rate of 3% from a micro-transaction purchase ended up spending 6,000$US in over 2200 attempts to get the item he wanted.

Something to note is how stupendously unlucky this man is. With a drop rate of 3%, at 2200 consecutive failed attempts to get the item, his odds of getting that in a row is 7.9e-30 percent, or 0.0000000000000000000000000000079%. That's half way to being a statistically impossibility.

So, he's a loser AND a fucking idiot?

 

[Ihateregistering1]

Man, this makes me feel a lot better about that one time I played "League of Legends" drunk and bought like $40 worth of Champions.

This sort of reminds me of that story a few years ago where a guy spent $2,600 trying to win a $400 XBox One. If he'd have just kept his money he could have bought 6 of them and had money left over.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/n-h-man-lost-life-savings-playing-carnival-game-article-1.1331161

 

[Orga777]

Why? Why would anyone pay that kind of money for microtransactions. Do you not realise by the time that you have spent 100 dollars that you have a problem and that you need to stop playing this specific game and similar games?

The thing about these type of games is that they are set in a way that you may not even realize what you are doing or how much you are really spending. When it is a couple cents here and there, some people might not even think about it until it is way too late. It is the same with gambling addiction. These sleazy games prey on people that don't know better (usually children) or people that they can exploit because they suffer from certain addictions that they can't really help.

This is why microtransactions are the devil incarnate and should never be anywhere CLOSE to a full price game, and any game that does that should be black-listed by us gamers, no matter how popular it may be just to send a message.

 

[Strazdas]

This shouldnt be happening. as in it should be literally illegal for micro-transactions to have anything but 100% chance.

 

[Elijin]

This shouldnt be happening. as in it should be literally illegal for micro-transactions to have anything but 100% chance.

Well, start knocking on doors to enforce your imaginary viewpoint then. While you're door knocking, dont forget to see to any sort of TCG/CCG, minifig blind packs, mystery packs, lucky dips....have you gotten the point yet?

 

[Strazdas]

This shouldnt be happening. as in it should be literally illegal for micro-transactions to have anything but 100% chance.

Well, start knocking on doors to enforce your imaginary viewpoint then. While you're door knocking, dont forget to see to any sort of TCG/CCG, minifig blind packs, mystery packs, lucky dips....have you gotten the point yet?

Well i do encourage people, including politicians, to listen to my viewpoints, when i can. I wont go all jehovas witness if thats what your asking.

ALso your point was to compare other things that i do not agree with to somehow attempt to sway me into thinking i should agree with gambling? not to mention that those points are not comparable because microtransactions are purchase, as in you are purchasing an item. In coparsin imagine if you bought a game on steam and you only had a 50% chance of it appearing in your library. this is what is happening with this microtransaction.

 

[Silvanus]

[...] imaginary viewpoint [...]

Wait a second. Are you saying Strazdas doesn't actually hold that viewpoint, but only imagines that he does?! That's some metaphysical shit right there.

 

[DoPo]

not to mention that those points are not comparable because microtransactions are purchase, as in you are purchasing an item. In coparsin imagine if you bought a game on steam and you only had a 50% chance of it appearing in your library. this is what is happening with this microtransaction.

That's not actually what happened. The microinstructions were a purchase - you get something akin to a booster pack and when you open it you either get common items/characters/whatever or you have a chance to get a rare, which was the character that dude was after. So after spending $6k he wasn't left with nothing, just left with a bunch of low-valued stuff.

Were your Steam comparison to be true, you'd have to be buying a mystery game but you only have 50% chance for it to be from your wishlist. Or something along those lines. Point being, you still get a game, just maybe not a game you're interested in. Which is more or less the premise of Humble Monthly Bundle [https://www.humblebundle.com/monthly].

 

[Roxas1359]

Some people ruin their lives with alcohol, others with drugs

This guy did it trying to get a waifu (essentially)

At least he can still sell his kidney to pay off his debt

You know what they say, too many waifu will ruin your laifu.
Or at leas that's the logic I'm going by. Just hope this guy is financially off well because that is a lot of money to spend.

 

[Strazdas]

That's not actually what happened. The microinstructions were a purchase - you get something akin to a booster pack and when you open it you either get common items/characters/whatever or you have a chance to get a rare, which was the character that dude was after. So after spending $6k he wasn't left with nothing, just left with a bunch of low-valued stuff.

Were your Steam comparison to be true, you'd have to be buying a mystery game but you only have 50% chance for it to be from your wishlist. Or something along those lines. Point being, you still get a game, just maybe not a game you're interested in. Which is more or less the premise of Humble Monthly Bundle [https://www.humblebundle.com/monthly].

Thats not a purchase. thats a lottery. he "purchased" a lottery ticket with a chance to win certain items. If they want to do lotteries they should at least do what legal lotteries do. And yes, this is precisely why i do not participate in the Monthly bundle. This is, in fact, illegal in many countries. If they want to do it legally theres a lot of extra beaurocracy and taxes when it comes to lotteries. its why they try as hard as they can to avoid that title.

 

[Dragonlayer]

Having suffered the terrible drop rates of Mass Effect 3's multiplayer while trying to unlock my beloved Geth Juggernaut, I completely understand how this could have happened. I even spent real money trying to increase the possibility of getting the reward, though fortunately not even close to this amount. Developers! Do away with random reward systems! Just let us grind away at in-game currency and XP mechanics to get what we want!

 

[Azrael the Cat]

Just a query. Do we actually have any verification that the drop rate is what it's advertised as, or are we trusting the word of the nice people who thought that adopting poker machine mechanics (with real money) was an ethically appropriate business model for a computer game?

 

[Tsun Tzu]

That's about two to four times the trade-in value of my car.

So, naturally, I totally hate this guy for existing and feel no sense of pity or empathy for his "misfortune" in this endeavor.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have some corn flakes and student loan debt to sob uncontrollably into.

 

[Death Carr]

I'm of the opinion that if something in a mobage is available via gacha, it should be available via ordinary play (not counting premium currency you earn in the normal course of play) so instead of a 100 consecutive daily login reward being a bunch of premium currency, just obtaining a special ticket to award you the item you want, regardless of it's rarity within the gatcha

 

[DoPo]

Just a query. Do we actually have any verification that the drop rate is what it's advertised as, or are we trusting the word of the nice people who thought that adopting poker machine mechanics (with real money) was an ethically appropriate business model for a computer game?

We only have the nice word of the slot machine people. So, no - we don't know what the drop rate is.

 

[Lindale FF]

That is precisely why I can only laugh at people who dump hundreds into Star Trek Online and never get a ship. You deserve every bit of not getting that ship. If you take the maths of money to keys, getting a ship costs $200, the same as a Lifetime subscription.

The single best thing you can do is sell the keys on the Exchange. Then use the Energy Credits to buy the ship. That is a 100% guarantee of getting the ship. Better yet, that same maths of money to keys means you only spend $30 to buy a ship.

 

[Bob_McMillan]

Interestingly, Black Ops 3 has a 1% drop rate for some of their DLC weapons.

I don't doubt someone has also blown that much money for BLOPS 3.