Why bother reading the article when a headline will do?
Victim shaming is all the rage now.
Takes many forms and I find extremely sad, as it takes a devastating lack of empathy to come to this kind of response.
This.
I came on the thread expecting a woe-is-me tale full of bullshit, but it all seems perfectly plausible and the company (and the parent) could prove that a series of transactions were made within seconds of each other.
Victim shaming is all the rage now.
Takes many forms and I find extremely sad, as it takes a devastating lack of empathy to come to this kind of response.
It was clearly deliberate on the part of the kid, which means it was both a failure of parenting and a failure of the kid knowing right from wrong.
Also in a situation like this, Google and the game company have detailed records of how much the game was played, when it was played, when purchases were made, how many were made, etc.
Not to mention your bank sends you an email and/or an SMS whenever there's a transaction. And they send you a bill at the end of the month. How can someone just forget everything about their credit card and then expect to be taken seriously when they complain that they didn't know it was happening?
People need to realize, a lot of these parents aren't tech savvy, let alone game savv.
The bleeding hearts in this thread irritate the hell out of me. In this case, the parents deserve what they get. If you hand an 11 year old a credit card, you've got nobody to blame but yourself.
If ya wana read the article, it says he never saw confirmation so he just kept clicking. He meant to make one purchase each time. That's the error.
I had to comment on this. While I check my personal accounts frequently; I get no alerts outside of transactions exceeding the thousands. Although a thousand $10 purchases would probably slip by and be doable if someone stole my card with this bloody paypass system.
My statements are every 3 months. The traditional "Credit card" isn't the only way of paying by credit card; and based on the new article I would assume it is actually a debit card since they seem to have been hit by an overdrawn type fee.
Finally, I frequently use my credit card without ever physically touch it. I've committed all the details to memory so it would be quite easy for someone to swipe my card; get the details and put it back into my wallet and go on an online shopping spree.
Just one of the many reasons I prefer Paypal.
Also a good point. Even if you think the kid did this intentionally; the article suggests the kid has also had been fairly responsible and sought permission for purchases up until this point.
I wonder what the reaction would have been (or if there would even have been a news story) if this happened to a 30 year old; or a 70 year old.
11 year old with access to crédit card seems like a good idea.
Right, and I also think we are missing the bigger point. Why are we just "ok" with these games, that are basically predatory to children to extract as much money out of them as they possibly can. These games are literally slot machines with no pay outs. We should be looking at if children or anybody for the matter should be playing these games without an explicit warning about what they are.
As it stands, these devs are going to continue looking for whales at the expense of the industry as a whole.
Shitty parenting aside it's pretty fucking criminal of Google and all the other companies that let this happen basically say "whoops you gave us 3k by mistake, see ya".
Giving it back is obviously not the solution, preventing it from happening is, but nobody is doing anything to do that and they won't, unless shit like that gets regulated.
I think poorly of those games myself but I realize that they actually offer genuine gameplay as opposed to filling bars. They're the lesser evil here.Do you hold the same view of Hearthstone, Magic the Gathering, Team Fortress 2 and Path of Exile? Because they are fundamentally the same in terms of their business models, consumer protections, and the ability for the same sort of incident as the OP to occur.
I think poorly of those games myself but I realize that they actually offer genuine gameplay as opposed to filling bars. They're the lesser evil here.
I don't find any of them to be even remotely appealing. PC or mobile.My point is I think some people can be quick to label "mobile F2P" quintessentially bad and "PC F2P" anything else. They are the same, both offering the same variety of great and terrible implementations and practises depending on what you look at, and both having millions of hardcore fans and players*.
* fun side fact, hardcore console/PC gamers are the ones who spend the most on mobile games.
Selfishly, I dislike them as they are slowly preventing games I want to play from being made.
Jachaos said:It was a technical error and there should be a refund.
In fact Nick had simply been trying – and seemingly failing – to buy credits to play football management game Top Eleven 2015 and strategy game Clash of Clans among others.
I personally think that the kid was not telling the entire truth and the mother was not being careful enough letting her kind handles her CC.
Child aimed gambling? Let's not get carried away here. There are controls in place that allow parents the ability to limit/restrict spending, pretty much "no questions asked" refunds policies which exist on both Google Play and iTunes.
Even if it was the case that a particular F2P developer was being maliciously exploitative, they wouldn't be targeting children as they typically have no money or unrestricted access to credit cards.
Would you say Hearthstone, Team Fortress 2, and Path of Exile were "child aimed gambling" if the kid had spent that much money on those titles? Because he could have just as easily.
Do you hold the same view of Hearthstone, Magic the Gathering, Team Fortress 2 and Path of Exile? Because they are fundamentally the same in terms of their business models, consumer protections, and the ability for the same sort of incident as the OP to occur.
Yes I do. Hearthstone especially has pay2win tactics baked in, and I play that game daily. I'm saying we need to have a industry wide look at what these games do not only to children, but to adults as well. If these games effect our minds in any way detrimentally in the long run. No one can or cam not say because their aren't any active studies or much real current data to go on.
I say all F2P is gambling. With exception that actual gambling you have a chance to actually win something back. And like gambling, it should be illegal for kids to even touch this shit.
So you knowingly play a game ever day you consider exploitative and detrimental to your well being, that is (presumably) not fulfilling, and that you consider harmful to the industry?
If you consider it an addiction, why haven't you reached out for help? Or have you?
I personally think that the kid was not telling the entire truth and the mother was not being careful enough letting her kind handles her CC.
But damn people; some of you are acting as if the F2P mechanics in mobile gaming (not all, but many of them) are not structured specifically to allow/exploit stuff like this--or at least exploit the psychology of children... and adults alike, I guess--for easy bucks.
The bleeding hearts in this thread irritate the hell out of me. In this case, the parents deserve what they get. If you hand an 11 year old a credit card, you've got nobody to blame but yourself.
They avoid doing this for kids because it's a pain in the ass for the refund process and chargebacks. It's just not worth it.
Kids spend a few bucks accidentally.
Adults are the ones that know how much to budget and have the spare income.
The issue here is that the kid hasn't got what he paid for, or at least claims thus. He "didn't realise" he was spending the money because he wasn't getting what he was supposedly paying for and so assumed he wasn't being charged.
If that's the legit truth, I don't see any issue with the parenting. Anyone would click again if they thought a transaction hadn't gone through, child or not.
But what are the long term of effects (psychological, biological) that these types of games may have on us? Many of the mobile games are just slot machines masquerading as games. Many of the design choices are made to extract money out of the player and entertainment isn't the biggest concern, taking your money is.
I didn't say it was addiction. I said I don't know. Like my previous post, their isn't any data to prove if it effects us or not.
It also seems you don't exactly understand the terminology of what "addiction" means. Hearthstone it self isn't addictive. It's the fact it has certain things in it that exploit certain types of people. To make an analogy, we may drink alcohol occasionally and we know that can be addictive for some people. We also know it's not necessarily good for you. Yet in moderation alcohol (or wine) is ok.
We aren't talking about people who drink in moderation or game in moderation though. We are talking about a select type of people who are open to being taken advantage of through exploratory practices OR they are biologically susceptible to addictive behaviour.
Imo that's a very good point and it emphasizes that the problem is not that a 11y old wasted some funds on a f2p game, all kids (and adults) spend some funds on unnecessary stuff, the problem here us that the mother gave him access to basically unlimited funds.Would you also be in favour of banning trading cards, sticker albums and blind bag collectable toys? It's the same basic principle.
The fact is that kids can play these games perfectly fine. They can either grind or they can buy Play credit with their allowance. And I don't judge them for wasting their money because I've got Monsters In My Pocket, Pogs, Panini and Merlin sticker albums all boxed up in my mum's attic that prove how much money I wasted on crap like this.
But what you don't do is give them your credit card and then get upset when it goes wrong.
I'm just trying to understand why you play a game every day that you think is harming individuals and the industry.
I'm all for controls that avoid exploitation. But the challenge is finding the balance between allowing ready access and consumption to the wider population for something while restricting it for others.
If you want to call it a potentially dangerous vice, then there are many industries that face similar challenges such as movies and TV, car ownership/licensing, gun ownership, and AAA games themselves as well as more demonstrably "bad for you" things such as alcohol and cigarettes.
I'd argue there are already a lot of processes in place that dissuade the OP situation from happening in the first place. And again, they still got their refund anyway. Not opposed to their being more.
On iTunes it is even easier and heavily in favour of the consumer with various levels of IAP lock, IAP "warnings", and a very lenient refund policy. Somebody got a 99c refund last month on a game we took down from store over 2 years ago.
Do you hold the same view of Hearthstone, Magic the Gathering, Team Fortress 2 and Path of Exile? Because they are fundamentally the same in terms of their business models, consumer protections, and the ability for the same sort of incident as the OP to occur.
I agree. Granted, education is key. I also think we need to go beyond just setting up passwords though. We need to actually deal with some of these practices that these developers are employing in the marketplace in a consumer advocate level. Some of these games border on basically gambling.
People should learn to readThe purchases where going through, but he wasn't getting the in game credits, so he kept clicking them thinking the purchase didn't go through. Anybody of any age would have thought "huh, where is the thing I bought? It isn't here, so I guess it didn't work." What would have "parenting" have changed?
Is it confirmed that you can indeed just click multiple times on a buy button and each time it registers a buy..? If so that's not exactly good, probably almost intentionally done to prey on people's mistakes.. there has to be a confirmation process on each transaction, everything else should be illegal.
Everyone looks bad in this story..