Jewel's Book of Shadows

My blessing & explanation of my favourite Wiccan sabbat.

“Sunwise to clockwise”

#bees

sun-storm:

spiroandthelacktones:

rad-roach:

queen-of-arcordia:

rad-roach:

I don’t wanna be That Bitch™ but if we’re gonna (rightfully) classify loot boxes as gambling then we need to have a similar discussion about how roughly 60% of the current toy market is blindbox gimmicks. Not only is this shit usually aimed at even younger kids than lootboxes, but the prices have seriously been creeping up over time. $3-$5 is one thing, $10-$15 begins to seriously raise eyebrows, but shit like the full sized Hatchimals where you’re dropping $50+ on a maybe? At the very least, “surprise” toys should be required to print accurate odds somewhere on the box.

I thought they did print odds on the box? Most of the one’s I’ve seen say “this common is 1:24 but the gold version is 2:352” or whatever

The only blindbox I’ve seen recently that prints odds is the Funko Mystery Minis (And bc of the way the casepacks are set up, they’re inaccurate odds.). LOL dolls and the small Hatchimals, two of the most popular “surprise” toys right now, don’t have any indication of how hard it is to pull a rare. Hell, some toys now don’t even tell you which figures are rare until after you’ve bought one and pulled out the collector’s list inside.

You’re absolutely right op

Heeeeavily disagree. Blind boxes and loot boxes aren’t the same. The fundamental difference between physical blindboxes and digital lootboxes is the freedom of choice.

Blind boxes have been a concept in Japan for years, with “trading figures”, they’ve only popped up stateside in the past few years but the concept has been around for a while.

When you buy a lootbox from, like, Overwatch, you take your chances getting something you want, and a bunch of stuff you don’t want. You can save up the coins to buy the item you want but it might take several lootboxes to get there. You can play games and level up to get lootboxes without spending money, but when you hit a certain point your XP gain slows dramatically, and they keep pushing new content so high level players are pretty much forced to spend money on lootboxes. You also cannot trade loot you don’t want for loot you want.

If I want a specific blindbox figure, I can go online, and boom, there it is. There are dealers that sell the figures individually, or the whole set. In fact, most collectors opt for doing it this way.

“But kids aren’t collectors, they don’t know you can buy those toys online and don’t have the means!” I watched my friend’s 8yo son open a bunch of blindbox stuff for Christmas, and you know what? He loved it! He loved the mystery of not knowing what he was going to get. Kids don’t care about rarity, they care about getting new toys and the surprise factor. As someone who grew up through Crazy Bones and the initial surge of Pokemon, the wonderful thing about blind box figures is that they force kids to socialize and trade. I was a massive outcast when I was a kid, yet I was actually able to bond with people over these things. 

And if we’re going down this route, why not TCG boosters? Why not Gatcha machines? You can’t paint everything with the same brush; there’s a nuance.

The price thing can be said for all toys, and that should be its own critique of the toy industry since it ultimately isn’t specifically linked to blind boxes.

Loot boxes are gambling because they’re deliberately designed to force you to spend money in order to get what you want or collect the whole set. Blind boxes offer you the option of being surprised, or just going online to buy the figures, and the mystery is something that from my own observations is enjoyed by kids and encourages socialization.

((Don’t forget Happy Meals, cereal boxes, Kinder Surprise’s, Cracker Jack’s, and Christmas crackers. People used to collect cereal box tops & send them in to get marketing gimmicks. No purchase is necessary to play contests from restaurants & coffee franchises but we still buy the Big Mac meal supersized so we can get as many tokens to play McDonald’s Monopoly.

The sad thing is before the form script was written for the internet, there were contests that wanted our contact information and we gave our private info freely not knowing companies were using it for or if it was kept safely out of con artists’ and identity thieves’ hands. Nothing is free. - Myri.))

#DeadPeople #Communication #Mythology

“The Dreamer’s Book of the Dead” / Robert Moss, Kairomancer & Dream Shaman