Would U Like A Supply Box Option In WoT?

Dorander, on 08 January 2019 - 10:59 PM, said: I'm not voting one way or the other because my answer would probably be "Depending on what you mean I might not care". I'm taking a page from a response written by Jigabachi that I noticed earlier in another skill-based MM thread, paraphrased here: before any discussion is possible you should clearly state what you mean, because there are multiple ways of doing this.     I am not necessarily opposed to random rewards.... "but". And the "but" part is fairly big (insert yo-mamma joke here).   As it currently stands, I think it's very improbable when you buy the Christmas lootboxes that you don't get at least your gold worth out of the purchase. I can draw one hard line here: we currently have established money-to-gold conversion ratios, because there are established values in the Premium store. If random lootboxes of any sort were to appear, they should at the very least give you your money's worth, even if it's just at a low conversion ratio of gold. That is to say if your purchased box contains 250 gold plus maybe assorted randoms, it should cost the price of 250 gold, no more, so that the gambling factor is *extra* on top of your purchase. You might get nothing, but you'll always get what you paid for.   However I've also been doing some interesting reading lately which suggests to me that this notion is a problem. The problem is that this notion just described relies on the fact that we KNOW that the gold you get has the monetary value of the amount of money you paid. However, anything that comes in that box additionally, even if it's only a potential chance, by necessity has a greater economic value than zero, because we don't get it for free. We get it conditionally. Therefor if in both situations we pay the exact same amount of money, it is logically therefor true that if such a box comes with more than just the gold you paid for, the gold you paid for is therefor worth LESS than the amount of money you pay for. There's no magic trick to this if you wonder what's going on here; what's going on here is simply how consumers determine whether or not a product is worth its money.   I was alerted to this phenomenom through a pretty well-known book called "Thinking, fast and slow" by Daniel Kahneman. He described two situations, which he'd actually tested in experiments, that are relevant to this notion. The first situation he described was selling packaged rare baseball cards. He found that if you packaged rare baseball cards together and nothing else, they sold better than if you packaged these same rare baseball cards together in addition to some cheap, common extra cards. The addition of the cheap cards apparently caused potential buyers to assume that the rare baseball cards were worth LESS in that total package, even though the price of both packages was identical. The reason was that even though the common cards had nearly no value, their value was deemed non-zero, and if the packages were otherwise identically priced, any price minus any non-zero value is always lower than the original price.   He further demonstrated this effect by an experiment in which he advertised two sets of tableware. Both sets consisted of some plats, cups, etc., but the second set had some additional broken pieces added to it. Test subjects were supposed to estimate the rough value of each set, however one group of subjects was only presented the set of intact pieces to judge, the other group were asked to judge the value of the sets comparatively. As it turned out, adding broken pieces to the set impacted people's value judgement so that they rated the set with broken pieces of less value than the set with pieces intact, and the test subjects who weren't presented with an alternative set with broken pieces rated the overall value a little higher. In other words, adding broken pieces to a set devalued the set in the eyes of potential buyers, even though both options gave you the exact same amount of intact plates and cups.   Keeping that effect then in mind, there's genuine cause for concern here. I wouldn't trust people to make a judgement about these things objectively, in fact, I wouldn't even trust myself with it even knowing what I know about the effect I just described. Even if I consider my initially mentioned hard line, for most people this is still going to look like gambling and people would have to have the fact that they're getting at least they're money's worth pointed out to them. It doesn't help that Wargaming's gold sale values aren't linear, the more you buy the less you relatively spend per gold. So it's quite arguable that getting your gold value doesn't even fly as an argument.   Quite frankly the more I think about it writing this, the more I see the potential dungstorm. I'm just going to press "No" at this stage, and you've just read why. This game has enough customer complaints (valid ones as well as invalid ones) for it to open another can of worms.