It is a very grey area. We start getting in to questions like "What about Magic: The Gathering Cards" or other popular CCGs. It seems silly to many of us, but these are pretty good questions to ask. With games, both tabletop and electronic, becoming away for young folk to live the dream - it does reward them to pay out cash money if they can get an advantage.
There needs to be strong regulations on things like E-Sports. Maybe less in friendly matches.
I would have to respectfully disagree with you here. TCGs (like Magic the Gathering and Hex Shards of Fate) and CCGs (such as Hearthstone) are inherently different in the way that they are run. Whilst lootboxes for games like Battlefront II make no sense at all (you pay to enter the game), for card games you do not pay to enter, you pay to own cards for yourself.
Trading Card games need to consider their secondary market as well and for that matter the TCG owners cannot give out cards for free or at a value, distribution needs to be random based on the cards rarity. Without this market, a huge amount of TCG players would drop out. A lot of them 'play' as an investment that future values of the cards increase.
With all that, the random pack openings (basically lootboxes) seem to be the only way to go forward to keep that special player base happy.
I agree. But I know some are using cards as a talking point. I still think esports need tight monitoring. Any game with random p2w should be as well.
That's a good point. A Pokémon card pack doesn't