Hacker News Reader

Comment by usrusr | Hacker News Reader

But card packs are random at least. The very rarest card will be equally rare for every buyer, any time. Loot boxes can be much worse than gambling on a random number generator: game servers know the inventory of a player and can tailor box contents to always keep the inventory close to one of the many thresholds that are usually designed into game rules. Maybe some operators are voluntarily staying away from these dark patterns, maybe using them could theoretically get you into legal trouble, but it would be very difficult to prove anything.

Basically my point is this: it can be perfectly reasonable to allow one form of gambling-like transactions where it is easy to ensure that the house is playing fair while outlawing a superficially similar one were making sure that the house is not cheating would require enormous regulations and oversight efforts.

View on HN

Couldn't you prove operators were doing it by running a large number of accounts, checking the distribution of inventory and figuring out what the likelihood of distributions?

How many non-free transactions would you be willing to pay for?

Ps: Also, a manipulative pretend-random drop function could easily be made to adhere to defined overall droprates without sacrificing any individual manipulation. Detecting "bad luck" that only strikes when the system detects willingness to keep rolling the dice until some local goal is achieved would not be easy even with a complete dataset.

I agree the non-free transactions thing is a problem, however some organizations might be willing to do it as part of an investigation?

However for the second point, given what I know about programming as a discipline, I'm not sure that the probable bad actors have gone through a lot of effort to hide their gaming of the system, or that if they have made the effort to make said function that it actually works as envisioned and does not leave its own telltale traces.

I am not aware of any loot boxes that aren't random? Are you just saying this is possible, or do you know of an instance of this?

How would we know that they are truly random?

I have vague memories of reading about this kind of dark pattern when I first heard about loot boxes, but I failed to google any references now so maybe my memories are diluted with imagination.

But why wouldn't it happen? How would the public find out? Tipping the scales just a little bit, at the right times, for the right victims, could be very effective at "increasing engagement". The whole thing would even be a/b-testable, so any internal arguments against would be futile. (You'd want to keep the "a" implementation around anyways, in case you need to present source to someone who should not see how the sausage is made)

How do we know casinos and such are truly random?

At least for jurisdictions like Nevada, heavy regulation and verification.

I'd expect that's part of the point of regulating something that appears to be gambling as gambling, to ensure that it is, at least, fair (for some definition of that word).

Massive regulation and outright bans, and yet we still don't truly know.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com