Sashanan posted...
I tend to feel the odds are against you, but little enough to keep up the illusion
You don't need much to keep up the illusion of the odds being good enough to be worth continuing. The Gambler's Fallacy does half of that work for you, and if you're dealing with something like VLTs it's easy to manipulate most losses into near misses to capitalize on that fallacy as well. Throw in audiovisual cues that make you feel like lots of people are winning all the time, and you've got a recipe for people believing they can come out on top despite the odds of that being extremely slim.
agesboy posted...
for video slot machines they take like $10 of every $100 tho (and they can just adjust the odds at will, so who knows what you're getting). dont do that.
I don't remember the exact numbers because this was many years ago, but I remember reading a study that found that with more traditional gambling machines, for every $100 a problem gambler thought they'd spent, they'd actually spent like $3-400. For VLTs, though, for every $100 they'd thought they'd spent, they'd actually spent $1700, which is a pretty terrifying discrepancy.
joemodda posted...
That's why gambling is so regulated, and its also why governments are gearing towards regulating loot boxes and other gacha mechanics
Indeed. The debate of whether or not lootboxes count as gambling rages eternally, but at the end of the day, the addictive behaviours lootboxes prey on are exactly the same ones gambling exploits. Therefore, the reasoning behind regulating gambling applies equally to regulating lootboxes.