this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2024
173 points (96.3% liked)
Games
15812 readers
452 users here now
Video game news oriented community. No NanoUFO is not a bot :)
Posts.
- News oriented content (general reviews, previews or retrospectives allowed).
- Broad discussion posts (preferably not only about a specific game).
- No humor/memes etc..
- No affiliate links
- No advertising.
- No clickbait, editorialized, sensational titles. State the game in question in the title. No all caps.
- No self promotion.
- No duplicate posts, newer post will be deleted unless there is more discussion in one of the posts.
- No politics.
Comments.
- No personal attacks.
- Obey instance rules.
- No low effort comments(one or two words, emoji etc..)
- Please use spoiler tags for spoilers.
My goal is just to have a community where people can go and see what new game news is out for the day and comment on it.
Other communities:
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Fomo is a form of coercion, and im pretty sure that's a crime in this case. The industry uses underhanded and shady practices to get people to spend money on things that have no intrinsic value.
I can see from your comment that its possible you haven't looked into this very much because you sound like me a few yesrs ago when i didnt see the harm as im not particularly susceptible to the ways they pedal microtransactions/in game purchases.
lol it very obviously is not a crime. It's not even a civil action.
I don't support the whale business model for video games, but the idea that it's somehow a crime is a laughable lack of understanding of the law.
Not coercion in regards to shady business practices. But in 2015 in the uk coercian was made a criminal offence. Since im from the uk you can understand where im coming from when i say its a crime.
It does not even loosely resemble the broad, non-legal definition of coercion in any way. There are zero similarities. Let alone the statutory definition, which is not near as broad.
It also is not and does not resemble FOMO, which is also not illegal anywhere and is practiced by every business on the planet.
No, fomo is not a form of coercion whatsoever. Here's the legal definition in the federal legal code:
So it requires the threat or implied threat of serious harm or abuse of the law against a person.
And no, not looking cool or being at the top of a game isn't "serious harm," you'd be laughed out of the courtroom and perhaps fined for wasting everyone's time if you tried to make that legal argument.
Im not making a legal argument... im making a philosophical one.
The original context of this chain is a legal one:
Yes, you didn't say that, but you responded in that context. I asked "what is illegal about it?" and you directly replied with the note about coercion. To me, that clearly implies you think this is a form of legal coercion, and now you're backpedaling because I showed that's explicitly not true. You're moving the goalposts.
Google tells me "fomo" is probably an acronym for "fear of missing out" (it'd probably help make your points clearer if you didn't obfuscate them behind acronyms the people you're talking might not be familiar with, by the way).
Supposing that's the case... what is there to miss out on in Star Citizen..? Any package above the base ones (which get you the games for about $40) give you absolutely nothing that you can't get in-game (with the arguable exception of a few limited edition ships, which in any case shouldn't offer any in-game advantages and can probably be considered cosmetic)... you're not missing out by not buying them...
I guess it's a good thing you used such a common word as obfuscate when making a point about clarity then....
Fomo or fear of misaing out iant exclusive to items or skins etc that can only be gained via purchase.
I could go deep into this, but i want to try to be concise here to save on massive paragraphs
Fomo applies to any situation where someone could miss out on the player experience that other people get. So, being behind other people or everyone else in a game increases the likelihood that you will make a purchase to catch up.
A good example is the battle pass in overwatch 2, which gives you instant access to the newest character. If you dont owm the battle pass, you have to grind for weeks to get a character that everyone else seems to have, and you have to play against that character whilst you sit there feeling left out.
So if you want the character now, you have to buy the battle pass. This creates alot of pressure to make the purchase in people who are susceptible to fomo or peer pressure.
Did you know that in schools, kids thst play fortnite get bullied for being a "default" because they only have the basic default skin which adds pressure on.
It's not only kids who experience this. Adults do aswell and the evidence is quite clear when a game company can price a pack at 48k because of a precedent set by whales and krakens (players thst spend obscene amounts of money on in game purchases) that legitimises that price point.
I've never noticed "obfuscate" being an uncommon word, but English is my third language, so what do I know. At least you can find it in a dictionary, I suppose, which won't be the case with some obscure acronym. 🤷♂️
As for this fear of missing out you're obsessively trying to shoehorn onto Star Citizen... we're not talking about a race here, there's no getting behind, there's no winning other than having fun and achieving whatever objectives you set for yourself (talking about the Star Citizen MMO specifically here, not Squadron 42, but the ships they're selling now won't be playable on the single player game, so it's mostly irrelevant to this discussion, other than as yet another way to weaken the missing out argument, since it very evidently doesn't apply to that game).
This isn't some microtransaction ridden malware like Fortnite or Overwatch (and I'd say any comparison to that crap is ill informed or disingenuous), this is a fucking space sim... There's no microtransactions, there's no pay to win, there are no season passes, there's no such thing as a better ship... it's a rock paper scissors situation, some ships will be better for some things, some better for others, and no matter how many you own you won't be piloting more than one at once (and the larger ones you probably won't be able to pilot or defend alone, so they'll be worthless to you if you don't have a group of friends to help man them).
If all you care about is fighting other players (personally I have no interest in that, but to each their own), sure, maybe having a better combat ship (which you'll easily be able to obtain in-game anyway) will make a difference... but not as much as your piloting skill (same if you want to be a racer), and much less than being part of some player organisation.
But there's so much more to do... you might want to explore (in which case the main "missing out" factor will probably be how early you get into the game... which, since all beta progress will be reset before release, you can't buy into no matter how much you pay), you might want to be a trader or smuggler, or miner, or whatever.
Is CIG preying on people with too much money and too little sense..? Possibly (though if I'm not mistaken they asked for this particular everything package, and they seem to be enjoying their ship collecting, so if that's what they want to waste their money in, let them, I say)... but that won't give them any significant advantage over players who just bought the basic game, and they're well aware of that.
If there's any pressure here it's from the whales to CIG, asking for more new shiny ships for their collections, not the other way around.
Obfuscate is not a commonly used word. English is my 1st language. So im pretty confident about that. And the point isn't that the word isn't common. It's that you were trying to say i used an uncommon word and described it using an obscure word. Which is really ironic.
Fomo isn't obscure just because you haven't heard of it. It also isn't nonsense just because you aren't affected by it. I'm not affected either, i dont buy things with real money in games. But i can see that it's real.
The shortest way to counter you here is to simply say: it's clear from your reply that you accept fomo exists. Its also clear that you agree that CIG are employing predatory tactics to squeeze money out of gullible people. But mainly its clear that you missed the part where i mentioned that skins in fortnite are a massive money maker in the fomo market. They dont affect your gameplay (basically your entire countrr argument) but they are a huge money maker for epic games because its all about peer pressure.
You can pretend that people other than youself arent affected by fomo in star citizen but it won't make you right. Cosmetic items are one of the biggest factors in fomo and making it work. Most games dont offer advantages that you can pay for.
I am happy to accept that i dont know much at all about SC as i dont play it. But what im "shoehorning" is not fake just becauee you dont see it and it doesn't affect you.
Im not even trying to prove a point here. Fomo and game companies use of it is a fact. And it applies here.
Really? I'm a native speaker and I use it a lot. Maybe not in casual conversations with friends, but I use it a ton in a workplace setting and when discussing current events in a more than passing manner. Looks like it's gotten steadily more popular in texts since the 50s.
And yeah, fomo isn't obscure, but it is an acronym that's relatively recently become popular (Google trends says the last 10-ish years).
Regardless, arguing about whether words are uncommon is silly, English usage varies by region, and people who speak English as a second language can have a really odd set of vocabulary.
Doesn't the graph showing the use of the word obfuscate show that it's 0.20 per million people that use it today? Is that a percentage? So i would need 5 million people before i find 1 person that says it? And has it only risen in use since the 50s? That's fairly recent in the grand scheme of things, considering it's such a small rise in use.
Anyway, your use of the word is anecdotal, and after 35 years on this planet, i find it amazing that its maybe the first time I've ever seen the word used outside of a book. So if we compare your anecdotal evidence to mine, we arrive back at zero.
You even said you dont use it casually, only in a professional setting.
I happily accept that non native speakers do end up with an odd vocabulary. But that doesnt change that the word isn't very common.
What the everloving fuck?
What?