• @[email protected]
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    175 days ago

    Honestly it’s both valve’s fault and the legal system. They’ve tried to combat these sites with the trade window system back in like 2015 2016 I think, but their csgo and tf2 trading economy struggles when you have to wait a week to do stuff.

    It also doesn’t help when a lot of these sites dodge being legally a casino, and get away with it.

    • @JayDee
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      95 days ago

      I mean, we can point at the legal system, but as you said, casinos just find new loopholes to circumvent the law. Ultimately, Valve is the group with the power to remove any gambling-adjacent mechanics from their games, but they have been pretty flaccid regarding changes because they know that they will lose money from it.

      Crackdowns won’t stop the gambling on CS, legislation and enforcement won’t change it, but making items non-tradeable, or damaging item value or appeal through any method, can stop the gambling - but at the cost of CS’s financial success and overall appeal.

      • @[email protected]
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        94 days ago

        Is there a proposal to do this that doesn’t gut other legitimate parts of their trading system?

        • @[email protected]
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          44 days ago

          No, there we’ll always a way to work around the trading system to have gambling. The current proposal I have seen is doing an ID check before trades but that would hamper legitimate trades since people don’t want to hand out their ID info like that.

      • @UnderpantsWeevil
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        4 days ago

        casinos just find new loopholes to circumvent the law

        They don’t “find new loopholes”, they explicitly lobby/capture the agencies/courts that write/interpret the rules and carve out loopholes.

        Might as well say “You can’t keep money in a bank, the robbers will just find a way in” while a guy in a ski-mask walks through the front door, hands the teller a $20, and is lead directly into the vault with a complementary tot bag.

        Crackdowns won’t stop the gambling on CS, legislation and enforcement won’t change it, but making items non-tradeable, or damaging item value or appeal through any method, can stop the gambling

        There are countries that impose limits on what tech companies are allowed to advertise, distribute, and collect revenues on outside of the US. These countries don’t have President-elects who are joined at the hip with their country’s most wealth individuals, bending over backwards to make the billionaires happy.

    • @x00z
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      14 days ago

      Lootboxes, such as the CounterStrikes lootboxes, have simply been banned in Belgium.

      It’s not too hard to do it legally.

    • Cethin
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      04 days ago

      No, they wanted to pretend like they were combating them while leaving them fully intact. There are pretty easy ways to combat it, but that also requires they destroy the market they profit so much off of. The trade window system (purposefully) did very little to stop this. It’s was purely PR, which some gullible people actually believed.

      People like Valve, so they believe everything they do is honest and good. It isn’t. It may be better than some other companies, but it doesn’t make them good. You can recognize when they do the right thing while also recognizing when they’re doing the wrong things, and enabling gambling (underage or not) is bad. At a minimum, they control CS esports, so they could ban advertising from gambling sites if they don’t want to block it in its entirety.