This week at Bungie, we’re planning a raid date night.
Happy Solstice, everyone! The bonfire is lit, there is grass in the Tower, and Guardians are donning their new armor with the stats and glows to go with it. We hope you are enjoying your time in the EAZ this year. We have been tracking your feedback on what you are liking about the event, changes that aren’t feeling good, as well as any improvements you would like to see added. Thanks for sharing your feedback and keep it coming.
We’ve got a busy TWAB planned for you today. As promised, we will be going over the launch date of the next raid and then also talking over some matchmaking changes rolling out in Season 18 and Season 19.
Let’s get into it.
Raid the Date
Coming up in Season 18 will be our second go at bringing a raid out of the Destiny Content Vault and this time it’s going to be… [REDACTED]. Sorry, we’re saving the reveal of which raid is coming to Destiny 2 for our Destiny 2 Showcase on August, 23. But we wanted to make sure you had time to make any arrangements necessary to be ready on day-one. So, request off work, hire a babysitter, but don’t skip school please, your education is important.
[REDACTED] raid goes live at 10 AM Pacific on August 26, 2022.
Because this will be a raid that many of you are already somewhat familiar with, we will be changing up the World First race a bit similar to how we did with Vault of Glass. Here is what to expect:
The raid will launch with Contest Mode enabled for 24 hours.
You will need to be at 1560 Power to be at the cap for all of the encounters.
Clearing the raid with Contest Mode active is the first step to access the new Challenge Mode in the Director and the special Triumph for completing all of the challenge Triumphs for each encounter.
Completing the secret Triumph, a curated list of challenges in this newly unlocked Challenge Mode, will be how a fireteam crosses the World First finish line and claims their prize.
To enforce the Triumph requirements in the Challenge Mode, your team will wipe if you fail the success conditions during any encounter.
Challenge Mode and the secret Triumph will only be available for the first 24 hours, so make haste if completing it is on your bucket list. The first fireteam to do so will be declared the World First winners—pending a review from our team. If everything checks out, the final six members of the winning fireteam in the activity will be awarded the coveted raid belts as a monument to their achievement.
Good luck!
Making Matches
Starting in Season 18, we will be introducing some changes in how we play matchmaker in the Crucible. This will be the first iteration that is part of a larger plan going through Season 19. Our World Systems teams are leading the charge on this transition and are here with a big info dump on what to expect.
Let’s Talk About Skill and Connection
We know this has been discussed with a lot of passion and goodwill in many places in the community (and inside Bungie), so we are going to give you a clear tl;dr before we get deeper into the how and why:
We’re striving towards a goal that all players—including New Lights!—can enter the Crucible and regularly get matches where they can feel competitive and have a reasonable chance of winning/competing.
Making fair matches using Skill-Based Matchmaking (SBMM) is going to be important to help meet that goal.
We are starting by implementing loose SBMM to the Control playlist at the start of Season 18.
Loose SBMM has a wider starting skill-similarity than Survival and should result in matching with a wider variety of players, while also eliminating some of the frustrations we see in our current system.
Expect loose SBMM to expand to other playlists in future Seasons as we tune what we consider a “high-quality match” by gathering real data and feedback from you.
We are not planning to add it to every matchmade Crucible playlist.
We will continue tuning until we are in a good place.
We will report tuning updates regularly.
We will be implementing a form of fireteam-size-preferred matchmaking in Season 19.
A lot of what follows is pretty in-depth, feel free to skip to the Tuning section below if you aren’t interested in the details and just want a high-level view of what you will be experiencing!
Goals of Creating High-Quality Matches
We developed some goals which we will be working on over the next few Seasons:
All players (including New Lights!) can enter the Crucible and regularly get matches where they can feel competitive.
All players, whether solo or with a fireteam, can find a place in the Crucible where they can play a variety of matches and have a reasonable chance of winning/competing.
We are defining reasonable as “expected win rate between 40 and 60% for most matches.”
Players are rewarded based on their skill, and proud of their skill.
Reserve a place for players who do not want to engage in the skill system.
Generally speaking, any matchmaking in a competitive multiplayer game tries to put together high-quality matches. We consider three things when assembling a high-quality match:
Connection quality:
There are two types of connections that are important:
Connection to the game server.
Connection to all other players in the match.
Generally, bad connections to other players have a larger effect in Crucible than connection to the game servers, so when we talk about connection quality in Crucible, we are talking about that—connection from player-to-player.
Lower quality matches result in jerky movement by other players, missed shots, or getting unexpectedly damaged or killed.
When fireteams are spread across the globe, we pick a single player’s latency to speed up finding matches.
Match fairness:
Ideally, all players in a match have a reasonable chance to win that match (i.e., have similar skill).
Matchmaking speed:
We always consider matchmaking speed as a key element—no one wants to wait 10 minutes between matches, no matter how perfect they end up being.
When matchmaking, we must balance these three elements. If we want to lower matchmaking speed, we are either going to need matches that are less fair or matches with a lower connection quality.
We’ll continue tuning to find the best balance possible.
Skill
Throughout this TWAB we will be using the term “skill.” In Destiny, that term refers to how we rate all players who participate in PvP on a scale of 2000. Player skill is reflected in a graph that looks like this:
Internally, skill is a combination of stats made up of your performance (kills, deaths, captures, round wins, revives, dunks, etc.) that ranks you against all the other players in a match. Each player’s skill is compared against the skill of the other players in a match, and we make skill adjustments for all players at the end of a match where the two rankings differ. There is also a confidence rating—the more games the system has seen you in recently, the more confident the skill adjustment is.
In addition to the stats mentioned above, skill encompasses all sorts of things: your reaction times/agility, how you approach fights, how well you know the map/mode, how well you know your character, how you build your character, the weapons, armor, and mods you use, and how you blend all of those into performance with other players.
You won’t ever actually see a skill value in-game, and while we are currently only using it to try to get fairer matches in Survival and Elimination, we still track it for all modes (including Gambit!). This gives us a reasonable starting spot in new game types like Rift or Zone Control.
Now, how do these skill numbers actually play out in-game? Here’s a good shorthand we use internally:
If someone is 200 skill above you, you can definitely tell they are better than you, and they will win ~75% of engagements against you. The opposite is true if someone is 200 or more below you.
By the time you get to a difference of 400, the better players are going to win ~90% of engagements and lower-skilled players need to get extremely lucky to pull off a win.
Once you get to a difference of 600 there is basically zero chance for the lower-skilled player to ever win a 1v1 conflict.
Engagements should get fairer the closer you get to the same skill. This is our goal.
The Problem Space
As we started looking at the competitive landscape in Destiny, we noted a few things:
Outside of Survival and Elimination, the ability to influence whether your team wins or loses is usually out of your personal control if you are average skill or below (half the population!). This can feel bad, as the match outcome feels essentially random, and you don’t feel motivated to try to win. This has contributed to us de-emphasizing winning as a requirement to gain rewards in the Crucible.
The current landscape also allows brand new players to match up with some of the highest skill veterans and are expected to compete. On the flip side, if you are highly skilled, you are often put on a team where it feels like you are carrying them and must constantly perform if you want to stand a chance at winning. This doesn’t feel good for anyone.
In Control, the skill disparities on a team can be stark—over 50% of matches have a skill disparity of 900 or more between best and worst player, which is so significant that the outcome is already known before a single shot is fired. On the other hand, in Freelance Survival, 60% of matches have a 250-skill difference or less. This is much more reasonable.
These wide variances in skill also lead to more mercy games than you would expect. For example, Control:
Wide disparities in skill also exacerbate other problematic elements:
With wide disparities in skill, trapping a single team in a spawn is significantly easier.
With wide disparities in skill, it’s more likely that most of one team is dead at the same time, freeing the other side up to roam around and look for new targets without having to worry about danger.
Because of these extreme factors, no matter what your skill, it becomes hard to tell if you are improving or not. “Was that a great play, or are they just a worse player than me?” You may, quite reasonably, look for other stats to demonstrate how good you are—kills, assists, and deaths (KDA) are great, but it’s still unclear how good your opponents are. Given that matchmaking is dependent on lots of factors, a KDA in a low population situation can mean a very different thing (skill-wise) than a KDA in a normal or high population scenario.
If you can’t tell if you are improving, it’s hard to be motivated to try to improve!
We know we have to do something to solve these problems (and more) to get Crucible into a better place. We know we won’t be able to address everything in one fell swoop in Season 18, but this will be the start of an ongoing process to improve PvP over time.
Match Balancing
Once we match a group of players into a lobby, assuming we don’t have any full fireteams, we try to split them up into balanced teams. If the player skills are somewhat random, the system has a tough time—we’ve tried several different algorithms here, to mixed results. For the time being, we are hoping that reducing the skill variability in any given lobby will make this easier.
SBMM in Control
At the start of Season 18, we are going to start turning match fairness back up in Control (and only Control) in the Crucible. We want to start slowly to limit the number of playlists we consider when tuning matchmaking with hundreds of thousands of people. We can do some testing, but nothing can fully simulate how the full population will be affected by these changes before we ship. We are going to be live-tuning the matchmaking parameters over the first few weeks until we land on something that provides a better balance between fairness, quality, and speed.
We will not be touching any other Crucible playlists during Season 18. Trials has no planned changes to its matchmaking, Elimination and Glory will still use the same SBMM they have been using, and everything else will still use the connection-based matchmaking they have been using for years. We are currently planning to make further adjustments in Season 19 (based around the goals listed above), but rest assured, any major changes will be communicated in either a TWAB or a blog post, as well as patch notes.
Connection-Based Matchmaking
Connection-based matchmaking (CBMM) is what most of the Crucible playlists utilizes to find matches that have the best possible connection quality.
First, we identify a pool of available players with a good connection to you.
Within that pool, we choose players with the very best connections.
If we can’t find players within that pool, we widen the variance in connection.
We repeat until we find enough players, then we break them out into equally skilled teams.
A key point about matchmaking in a fireteam:
The latency we measure to find a good match does not take into account a fireteam with disparate connection speeds. We only measure latency for one of the players in a fireteam. So, if you are in Tokyo, and you are in a fireteam with someone in New York and someone else in Johannesburg, you are in for some LAGGY Crucible matches no matter what lobby you join!
Skill-Based Matchmaking
Better known as SBMM, skill-based matching uses a similar model to connection-based matchmaking. In addition to latency, SBMM uses skill similarity when asking to join a lobby. Like latency, the acceptable skill similarities expand over time:
First, we identify a pool of available players with a good connection to you.
Within that pool, we choose players closely matched to your personal skill rating.
If we can’t find players within that pool, we widen the variance in skill.
If THAT doesn’t work, we expand the search again with more variance in connection quality.
Once enough players are selected, we break them out into equally skilled teams.
Our current Glory matchmaking settings prioritizes connection quality and matchmaking speed while still trying to find a fair match. The goal statement for our standard SBMM is: “We would rather sacrifice some match fairness in order to maintain connection quality and matchmaking speed.”
Loose SBMM
Our initial version of loose SBMM for the Control playlist is going to work a little differently. It starts with wider acceptable skill variance, and then expands very slowly on both acceptable skill and connection quality at the same time.
The goal statement for this new loose SBMM is, “Start with a broad definition of match fairness and compromise on matchmaking speed in order to keep match fairness and connection quality high.” We expect overall matchmaking times to go up—moreso if you and your fireteam are on the eitherend of the skill curve—depending on the current population in your region. However, we are hoping the tradeoff for matches that aren’t super sweaty or lopsided blowouts will be worth it.
We have analytics set up to review overall matchmaking data each hour (especially critical over the opening few weeks of the Season) and will be monitoring and adjusting timings and thresholds above while we try to home in on good settings. Control is generally a nice high-population playlist, so it will be a good testbed for tuning like this.
What are we going to be looking at as we tune?
Amongst other things, we’re looking at:
Matchmaking time
Minimize players who cannot find a match in 10 minutes with a goal to keep the average under 2 minutes, and under 4 minutes for 95% of players.
Mercy games
Right now, mercy rates vary based on the map (as low as 5%, and as high as 25%).
We believe the number of mercy games should be under 5% on all maps but not actually hit zero.
Final score differential
In general, games should be closer in score.
Right now, 65% of matches end with one team hitting the score target, (15% going to time, and 15% ending with a mercy). Our goal is that >80% of matches end with one team reaching the score target, and most of the rest ending with a time limit. We are looking for most matches to have under 10-point difference between the two teams.
Less variance between the top player and bottom player
Right now, 5-10% of matches have the best player scoring 30-39 more kills than the worst player in the match, and 50% of matches have the best player getting 20-29 more kills.
We believe that 90% matches should have less than 20-kill difference between the best and worst players, and 50% should have no more than a 10-kill difference.
All of this is great, but there are some things it does not address that we will be looking toward in future Seasons:
Skill Distribution
As we discussed in the Skill section, player skill in Destiny (and most games) tends to follow a bell curve, centered around skill 100. That means half of the players are clustered between -100 and 300 skill, and just 1% above 800 or lower than –550.
When you do skill-based matchmaking with skill windows, what ends up happening is players at either end of the bell curve have fewer potential players to match against, and thus potentially take longer to find a match with a good connection. This is one of the reasons we will start with a wider skill threshold and expand more slowly (to make sure we go through all available players). Like we’ve said, we expect this to cause longer matchmaking times initially, but it’s important to note that we are going to be looking at outlier skill thresholds and tuning the experience for them.
In a future Season, we are hoping to introduce some technology that allows us to search with a wider skill variance based on your position in the skill curve and keep matchmaking times more consistent (with the downside of loosening some match fairness).
Fireteam Size Mismatches
It’s no mystery that full fireteams often stomp six solo players who matched against them. Fireteams that are used to playing together may also be in voice chat with each other, allowing them to communicate more effectively than those who are not. Oddly enough, if we look at the average skill for solo players, it fits the bell curve from above clearly. If we look at the average skill for full fireteams in Control, we can see the bell curve centers around 400-500. So, not only do the fireteams have a communication advantage, but they also have a decisive skill advantage. The big question is, “Are high-skill players more inclined to play in fireteams? Or do regular fireteams make your skill go up?”
Either way, we will be implementing a form of fireteam-size preferred matching in Season 19. We will be sharing details about how it works closer to release. Our goal is for it to be utilized like skill—sometimes as a strict requirement, sometimes as a loose one, (or sometimes not used at all!). Further, it will allow us to eventually replicate the benefits of playing in a Freelance playlist without having to split the population.
That is our current plan going forward. We will keep you updated as we tune settings in Season 18 and beyond.
Votes Are In
Last week, we revealed that three maps would be voted on by the community to determine this week’s Trials of Osiris map. Eternity, Widow’s Court, and Rusted Lands were all on the ballot. But there could only be one winner:
Eternity is the community picked map for the Trials weekend of July 25.
This one was close with Widow’s Court and Rusted Lands coming in within 1% of each other, but Eternity pulled away to win with 39% of the vote.
Results:
Eternity – 39%
Widow’s Court – 31%
Rusted Lands – 30%
What wasn’t close was our challenge to the community to tally up 77,000 votes in the first 48 hours. You all completely decimated that goal and have unlocked the special new emblem for everyone through Bungie Rewards. Players can pick up this emblem starting next week after reset on August 2.
Primed and Ready
What is better than free rewards? That question is rhetorical so I’m not going to answer it for you but am going to tell you how you can get some awesome rewards in Destiny 2 just by having Amazon Prime. Here is how it works: sign up for Prime Gaming, link to your Bungie.net account, and get the sweet cosmetics listed below. Lined up for this month, we have the Flip Out Exotic emote, the Takanome Wings Exotic ship, the Constricting Exotic Ghost Shell, and the Spaded Knife Legendary Sparrow. Check them out!
Player Support Report
A bonfire a day keeps the Darkness away
Now we introduce our Player Support Team. They are our live-game experts, getting you the info you need on any issues or upcoming maintenance and fixes.
This is their report.
SEASHORE PACK UPDATE
Last week we identified an issue causing players who purchased the Seashore Pack from Eververse to not receive the included items when opening the bundle.
This issue has since been resolved for future purchases of the Seashore Pack, and affected individuals who previously purchased the set should now have the individual items unlocked to acquire from Rahool in the Tower.
EVENT CARD EXPIRATION
Players should ensure that they complete and claim all Event Challenges and event rewards from their Solstice Event Card prior to its expiration at the weekly reset on August 9.
After the weekly reset, players won’t be able to acquire any unclaimed rewards from their Event Card.
KNOWN ISSUES
While we continue investigating various known issues, here is a list of the latest issues that were reported to us in our #Help forum:
The Hyperborean Pinion Sparrow does not appear in Collections.
The Photodraulic Actuators Exotic ornament for Synthoceps appears owned for all players when inspecting armor cosmetics for the armor piece.
Tracked Seasonal Challenges may not disappear from nav mode view once completed.
Nightmare Containment does not award progress for the Solstice Jubilee Event Challenge.
The Arc, Solar, and Void Solstice glows appear less bright than prior to Hotfix 4.1.5.1.
Some players are only receiving one Silver Ash on secondary characters when completing a Bonfire Bash.
For a full list of emergent issues in Destiny 2, players can review our Known Issues article. Players who observe other issues should report them to our #Help forum.
Invasions and Sweeper bots
Ivan: Since Bruno is enjoying his well-deserved vacation, today I’m the one to select #MOTW. Enjoy:
Movie of the Week: Born to Rule
I love Gambit. It’s like comfort food for me—always soothing. This #MOTW will inspire you to jump through that portal. Go and make Drifter proud, Guardian!
Movie of the Week: LANDFALL: A Destiny 2 Story (Ep. 5)
Sweeper bots are not useless. It’s always a pleasure to meet one in the Tower—at least someone is doing something while you are pointlessly jumping around and showing off emotes. Apparently sometimes sweeper bots can help Guardians too. I bet you will be waiting for the next episode. Well done, OVERHEAL.
It “Wimdy” But We Knittin’ Through It
Hippy: It’s no secret that a lot of us are lowkey in love (don’t judge) with Caiatl and her promise of breaking “small men” in half. (Seriously, how cool was that line?!) But what if our favorite behemoth was bite-sized? As a massive collector myself, this Caiatl action figure was too good to pass up, and many of you in the community agreed! Pocket Caiatl… it does have a certain ring to it.
Art of the Week: Pocket Caiatl
Sam: I know that I should probably not pick “yarny” things all the time, but also, why shouldn’t I?! Can you just imagine what is going through their heads?
Zavala: “Oh this is lovely. I cannot wait to cast on my next project!”
That makes me laugh. Oh, can we also talk about how she gave him the big chair? Because ohmygosh that’s too precious. Okay, enough from me now, stay crafty, Guardians.
Art of the Week: Knitting Besties
Hippy: I would say we’re sorry for this bonus art, but we’re not. We’re really, really not.
Bonus Art of the Week: It “Wimdy.”
Alright, we covered a lot today, so I am going to keep this outro short. You have another date to mark on your calendar with the [REDACTED] raid going live on August 26. If you haven’t already, make sure you also have August 23 on there as well for the Destiny 2 Showcase. Can’t wait for you to see what we’ve been cooking up!
Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Getty
A team of researchers from Newcastle University and Loughborough University in the United Kingdom had pressing questions about a feature of many popular video games. More and more, digital games seemed to be incorporating something called “loot boxes”—a surprise bag of random in-game goodies players could acquire in exchange for real-world money. Take the popular “FIFA” video game franchise, for instance, which has introduced loot boxes in the form of player packs. Gamers can purchase packs and collect famous soccer stars to play on their team. In addition to an aesthetic benefit, packs have a small chance of containing “rare” or “legendary” players who can strengthen one’s team in-game. Loot boxes don’t meet the legal definition of gambling, but they often take pages out of the same book.
Selling loot boxes in popular video games, the U.K. researchers wrote in a 2022 report, is “problematic,” in no small part because these games are regularly played by children and young people. Gambling, meanwhile, is restricted to adults above 18. In their study of 42 English families with children between the ages of 5 and 17, the researchers investigated how young people engaged with these paid reward systems—and their findings were striking and concerning.
One young person they interviewed routinely spent up to seven hours each day playing a popular mobile card game. He watched YouTubers who played the game and aspired to compete with them—but to do that, he needed better cards. The game sold him loot boxes in the form of packs of random cards that he purchased with real money. Since buying a pack didn’t guarantee that he’d get the rare cards he wanted, he kept purchasing packs, again and again. Over the course of a month, he had spent nearly $550 on the game.
“As soon as I was getting better players, I wanted to get better and better and better and better, like, I couldn’t stop,” the anonymous young person told the researchers.
“In my head I was like ‘stop,’” another young person told the researchers. “My guts were saying ‘stop’. Everything was saying ‘stop’, but my brain wasn’t. My brain was like ‘keep opening [loot boxes]’. It was hard. It was like when you’re addicted to something.”
Loot boxes have existed in video games for years. A Chinese game called Zhengtu Online, released in 2007 for PC, has been cited as the first modern online version of this element. The simplest explanation for their growing prevalence—by some estimates, they are now present in amajority of popular digital games— is that they make loads of money for gaming companies by encouraging players to make continuous microtransactions. These small payments to buy loot boxes add up: Market research firm Juniper Research estimates that loot boxes will generate video games over $20 billion in revenue by 2025.
But there may be a disturbing underbelly to this trend. High levels of loot box purchasing have been linked to signs of problem gambling, with new research suggesting the former might predict the latter in young players. Meanwhile, a new study finds that industry self-regulation (the main form of regulation in the U.S. and Europe) is significantly lacking. Taken together, experts interviewed by The Daily Beast say there’s cause for concern that parents may not be fully aware of the risks of loot boxes on their children and teens.
Your (Kid’s) Brain on Loot Boxes
Luke Clark, the director of the Centre for Gambling Research at The University of British Columbia, had been studying gambling for over a decade when his graduate students brought a new topic to his attention. They had been keeping tabs on “Star Wars: Battlefront II,” a much-anticipated 2017 video game that stirred up controversy in beta testing because of purchasable loot boxes that gave players an advantage through items, crafting parts, and in-game currency. Loot boxes only had a small chance of giving players the strongest items and parts, though, leading many to spend upwards of $100 to open the boxes again and again, leading players and officials alike to compare the game mechanic to gambling. “This game is a Star-Wars-themed online casino, designed to lure kids into spending money. It’s a trap,” Hawaiian Democratic State Rep. Chris Lee said at the time.
The apparent similarities between loot box purchasing and traditional gambling led Clark and graduate student Gabriel Brooks to conduct one of the first studies linking loot box usage to problem gambling. Since then, the association between the two has been pretty easy to establish in other games as well, Clark told The Daily Beast.
But there’s still an important distinction between determining an association between the two behaviors and figuring out if loot box engagement causes a person to develop problem gambling behaviors. Correlation, Clark emphasized, does not equal causation. A 2022 report from the U.K.’s Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport underscored this point between loot boxes and gambling harms, concluding there was evidence for an association but not a cause-and-effect relationship.
Currently, this leaves room for two theories, Clark said. The first is “migration”—that underage and adult video gamers exposed to gambling-like loot boxes might be more likely to move onto conventional gambling. The other theory is that the association is due to a case of reverse causality—experienced gamblers are attracted to video games with loot boxes.
Recent research is beginning to offer answers to these quandaries. Clark and Brooks published a study in the April issue of Computers in Human Behavior that tracked young gamblers’ and non-gamblers’ engagement with loot boxes and conventional gambling over the course of six months. They found that the more a non-gambler spent on loot boxes, the higher their odds of becoming a gambler after six months—providing evidence for the migration hypothesis.
Crucially, however, the participants in the study were not minors—they were on average 22 years old, since they were asked to report gambling behaviors that would not have been legal for minors in the regions studied (the U.S., U.K., and Canada). Future studies should try to replicate this finding in a younger age group to cement a migration pathway, Clark added.
Still, the results highlight why, from a brain development perspective, there are reasons to be concerned about young people in particular. Adolescent brains lack a fully developed logic center to regulate decisions about risk-taking. In other words, the gas pedal develops before the brakes. Gambling in minors can lead to immediate financial and familial problems and are associated with other risky behaviors including drug use and truancy.
Video game publishers have defended the use of loot boxes using a variety of arguments. “Battlefront II” publisher Electronic Arts justified the game’s loot boxes in a Reddit comment as a way to provide players with “a sense of pride and accomplishment for unlocking different heroes.” Redditors clearly felt otherwise, as that post holds the record for the single-most downvoted comment on the platform.
Another defense of loot boxes likens them to trading cards and Kinder Eggs, not conventional gambling. But Natalie Coyle, an independent psychology and video games researcher based in the U.K., told The Daily Beast that the research doesn’t support these comparisons.
Studies have found that the process of purchasing trading cards and novelty eggs contain several key differences from that of buying loot boxes—most importantly, a built-in waiting period. Buying a real-world product requires you to drive to the store or wait for a delivery to arrive. Compare that to the immediate dopamine hit felt from purchasing a loot box in a game, Coyle said—“It’s really not the same thing.” And in fact, one 2021 study found that spending money on collectible trading cards was not linked to problem gambling in the same way that loot box spending was.
On the other hand, techniques programmed into the opening of some loot box, like portraying “near misses” and using sounds to simulate “wins,” are more akin to gambling, the 2022 U.K. report authors wrote.
Although calls for the regulation of loot boxes often come from concerns about protecting children, Coyle stressed that people of all ages and walks of life play video games. Children and adolescents may be particularly vulnerable to risks associated with loot boxes and gambling, but legal adults can be susceptible, too.
“When people go to college and get their own finances, there are horror stories of it being spent on video games,” she said. “While the psychology of [buying loot boxes] might not change, sometimes the difference between being 18 and up is having access to money.”
Researchers, parents, and regulators agree that the status quo of loot boxes in video games needs to change. And save for a few examples of federal regulation, most governments have relied on industry self-regulation from the same agencies that provide age-rating recommendations, Leon Xiao, a loot box regulation researcher at the IT University of Copenhagen, told The Daily Beast.
Infamous examples of industry self-regulation gone wrong—alcohol, tobacco, and fossil fuel, to name a few—should tell us that a laissez-faire approach to the video game industry is unlikely to succeed, though it seems few regulators have learned those lessons, Xiao said.
Xiao is the author of a study published on March 29 in Royal Society Open Science finding that, unfortunately, self-regulation isn’t going very well. In the U.S., the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) is the self-regulatory agency in charge of rating video games and alerting parents to games that contain loot boxes; in Europe, it’s Pan-European Game Information (PEGI). ESRB and PEGI labels for games containing loot boxes both read “In-Game Purchases (Includes Random Items).” But when Xiao looked at 66 games rated by both ESRB and PEGI, he found that more than 60 percent of them had been labeled by one agency but not the other—even though each agency was meant to alert consumers to the exact same thing.
When Xiao shared his findings with each board, they provided various explanations: ESRB did not retroactively label games that had been released prior to the launch of the loot box label, while some PEGI-labeled games did not contain loot boxes in Europe only. Still, the two agencies corrected several of their labels for mislabeled games.
Xiao also took a look at 100 popular games found on the Google Play Store that were known to contain loot boxes. When publishers upload a game to this store, they must fill out a questionnaire meant to help assign an age rating and loot box disclosure. Based on these games’ questionnaires, though, only 29 percent were labeled as containing loot boxes.
These games have since been properly labeled since Xiao shared his data, but he stressed that his findings are only the tip of the iceberg.
“The problem is, of course, that I only looked at about 100 games,” he said. “We got them labeled, but I will say there are tens of thousands of games containing loot boxes that are still not labeled on the Google Play Store.”
Even with proper disclosure, there’s some question of how well parents understand loot box warnings. A February study from researchers in Australia and New Zealand presented results from three experiments that found that “consumers do not appear to understand the ESRB/PEGI loot box warning.”
In the absence of better or more intuitive labeling, researchers like Xiao have called for “ethical loot box design” that would take more than industry self-regulation. In a 2019 paper, he and his co-author wrote that neither allowing industries to continue to self-regulate nor passing draconian bans would result in positive outcomes. Rather, they argued, “regulatory nudging” by offering video game companies tax and grant incentives could encourage them to lay off loot boxes or implement them more responsibly.
Many of the proposed changes in ethical loot box design are simple and intuitive, Coyle said: limiting low-value, “junk” items in loot boxes, capping purchases at a daily or monthly ceiling, and doing away with “pity” loot boxes that reward gamers who spend aggressively are all common-sense proposals that would enhance gameplay and start to mitigate the negative outcomes of loot box engagement.
If nothing else, this field of research should cause gamers and their families to take a skeptical look at loot boxes. More often than not, Coyle said, it’s not a fair shake for the consumer.
“The house always wins, and that’s especially true when it comes to video game publishers,” she said.
On almost every single April Fool’s Day, Mojang creates a fun and bizarre version of Minecraft for players to download. This particular version of the game will obviously not have any major features that will be featured in the future. Rather, it contains several new ones that will simply be there for fun and pranks. The developer recently posted a YouTube video and an article showcasing The Vote Update snapshot
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In this April Fool’s Day snapshot, players will be able to choose from a set of bizarre options that will be implemented in the game.
Mojang releases April Fool’s snapshot called ‘The Vote Update’ for Minecraft
What is The Vote Update?
In the video published by Mojang, they explained how they came up with the mob and biome voting system, allowing fans to choose one of the features coming to the next update; however, on April Fool’s Day, they wanted the player base to choose from a whole set of new bizarre and hilarious features inside the game itself.
Patch notes for the April Fool’s snapshot
Mojang not only created a hilarious snapshot for players to explore and have fun in; they even made the patch notes of the snapshot humorous. They did not even leave the name of the snapshot version itself. Here are the patch notes for Minecraft snapshot 23w13a_or_b:
FEATURES
Introduces Voting: a way to change everything!*
Realistic voting action – no need to wait for next Minecraft Live to get angry about other people’s choices!
Revolutionary Meta-voting Technology for Metaverse!
Includes multiple new features too good to be included in mainstream releases – up to now!
Minimal chances of vote result destroying your world!
Exciting countdowns!
BLOCKS
Yes for blocks.
We couldn’t quite decide whether to make a ‘b’ snapshot this week, but he had a bunch of ideas so I guess you can choose for yourselves if you want it. Minecraft Snapshot 23w13a_or_b is now available in the Launcher! minecraft.net/article/vote-u…
We couldn’t quite decide whether to make a ‘b’ snapshot this week, but he had a bunch of ideas so I guess you can choose for yourselves if you want it. Minecraft Snapshot 23w13a_or_b is now available in the Launcher! minecraft.net/article/vote-u…
ITEMS
Items for a better future!
TECHNICAL CHANGES
Very exciting!
BUGS
Added multiple new bugs (unless you hold a vote to decide they are features)
How to download the April Fool’s Day Minecraft snapshot
<img class=”lazy-img” width=”1920″ height=”1080″ data-img=”https://staticc.sportskeeda.com/editor/2023/04/19110-16803470916656-1920.jpg” sizes=”(max-width: 360px) 720w,(max-width: 420px) 840w,(max-width: 600px) 1200w, 1920w” alt=”Players can find the April Fool’s Day Minecraft snapshot in the official launcher (Image via Sportskeeda)” data-img-low=”https://staticc.sportskeeda.com/editor/2023/04/19110-16803470916656-1920.jpg” src=”data:image/svg+xml,” srcset=”https://staticc.sportskeeda.com/editor/2023/04/19110-16803470916656-1920.jpg?w=720 720w, https://staticc.sportskeeda.com/editor/2023/04/19110-16803470916656-1920.jpg?w=840 840w, https://staticc.sportskeeda.com/editor/2023/04/19110-16803470916656-1920.jpg?w=1200 1200w, https://staticc.sportskeeda.com/editor/2023/04/19110-16803470916656-1920.jpg 1920w”>Players can find the April Fool’s Day Minecraft snapshot in the official launcher (Image via Sportskeeda)
Right after Mojang released the YouTube video explaining the April Fool’s Day snapshot, they released it on the official launcher as well. Players can simply open the launcher and search for the ‘Latest Snapshot’ version in the version list as well. Users will also notice a fascinating and funny April Fool’s Day easter egg in the launcher as well.
Many car makers tout smartphone connectivity as a selling point, but GM won’t in the future. In a Reutersinterview, GM digital chief Edward Kummer and executive cockpit director Mike Himche say GM will phase out Apple CarPlay and Android Auto with upcoming electric cars, beginning with the 2024 Chevy Blazer EV. Instead, you’ll have to rely on Android Automotive and its apps.
Users will get eight years of free Google Assistant and Google Maps use at no extra charge, GM says. The company doesn’t mention what you’ll pay if you still need those functions afterward. We’ve asked GM for comment. It will still offer CarPlay and Android Auto in combustion engine models, and you won’t lose access on existing EVs. GM plans an all-electric passenger vehicle line by 2035.
The company argues that Android Automotive provides more control over the experience. There are upcoming driver assistance technologies that are “more tightly coupled” with navigation features, Himche says, and GM doesn’t want them to require a smartphone. Kummer also acknowledged that there are “subscription revenue opportunities.” Don’t be surprised if you’re paying a recurring fee for certain features like you already do with some brands.
Android Automotive has a growing footprint. On top of GM, companies like BMW, Honda, Polestar, Stellantis, Volvo and VW are adopting it with or without Google apps. However, the platform doesn’t preclude support for CarPlay or Android Auto. GM is deliberately dropping those features. While this could lead to some innovative driver aids, it could also force you to mount your phone if there’s an app or function the EV’s infotainment system doesn’t support.
The decision is a blow to Apple. Its services may not have native support in GM EVs. The iPhone maker is also developing a next-gen CarPlay experience that can take over the entire dashboard — GM just ruled itself out as a potential customer. If Apple is going to have more control over your drive, it will have to turn to other marques.
