Oh, I think that criticism was plenty simple to begin with.
There's a whole lot of "but this game does this" which doesn't really compare to this. You just brought up a slot machine system in Destiny 2. How does that relate to ARX? It doesn't, it's just a thing you said, two completely different things; a lootbox system and a system where you know exactly what you're getting operate in completely different manners, their mechanics are different, their outputs are different, their inputs are different.
The only thing they have in common is somebody might spend money on them. So you may as well compare ARX to a hot dog cart for all the relevance your example had.
Thanks for picking one line and not reading all the text around it, good job.
Also, as an aside, Destiny's slot machine was one of those popular ones where you KNEW what you were getting, that was the very point of how it psychologically manipulated people. You could buy up to 7 additional spins every week, and each time would get one of the 8 listed items that you had not received before, the manipulation was precisely in the fact of KNOWING that if you just spent the money you'd eventually get the items you wanted from it. Thus it created the sense of investment with the first payout, in that now you KNEW you had better odds on the next spin. Thankfully it was the FIRST thing Bungie removed upon splitting with Activision.
For the people who actually read the full text of my post,
(I'm going to generously assume you're just not good at reading full context, not deliberately disingenuous) the point was clearly that the entire point of businesses giving away "free" stuff has, for roughly the last 5000 years, been to tempt people to spend their actual money. There's a calculation in there. Frontier's financial team have done the maths. You give away a certain amount with the expectation of a specific minimum amount of profit which will be generated by people developing a sense of investment and wishing to pay a bit more to get the rest of what they couldn't get with the single freebie. Because there's a well known psychological effect.
When you add this on top of a shift from a system where the purchasable currency had a 1:1 exchange ratio to a real world currency where you could easily track the values of stuff, and in which the purchasable items' costs tracked easily to whole fractions of that - to one where the exchange rate is arbitrary, this raises legitimate concerns, based on what it usually entails in all other cases ever observed of publishers doing this. Not to mention for PC users, shifting from actual real money transactions to selling a virtual currency is a technique used to inflate a company's balance, because players pay up front for virtual currency, which they then do not necessarily spend right away, but instead that money is sitting earning interest in Frontier's accounts, not theirs.
The "Free" Arx, at their most generous interpretation, exist to provide a buffer of sorts to this scummy practice of arbitrary fake-currency values. If something you want would require purchasing two Arx bundles to get the extra 1000 or so Arx you'd need to afford it, this can offset that. This is a good thing
for players who were already willing to spend more money on the game than simply the cost of the core game and expansions. I count myself among these, but I recognise that there are other types of people.
But Frontier is first and foremost a BUSINESS. So they'd not choose to implement something which potentially reduces their sales of the bundles without doing the calculations beforehand, and predicting that overall, this would increase sales of those bundles, by pushing people who have bought stuff with the free ones, or are saving them to be able to afford something, to then spend money they might not have otherwise chosen to, because of how long it'd take to save up for the next thing they'd like, as now they have a sense of having an amount saved up towards it. And
there is the "nudge".
At the end of the day it's all about understanding the psychology of purchasing, and using it to optimise profits. It always is. And
that is why this kind of thing is
always rightfully under scrutiny. No matter how it happens to be implemented in any individual case. No matter what the track record of the business is. No matter how much people trust the one telling them all about it. It always has to be.