So before I (slobbyknobby) got banned I complained about the crate rushes being impossible to keep up with. I briefly mentioned them making children gamblers. Comments on that post, including from staff, ignored the latter criticism and decided to focus on the former, missed my point, and tried to gaslight me into believing no, the crate rushes actually aren't impossible to keep up with.

I refuted such comments. And in a later (now hidden by staff) post I would refute that idea again, and dive deeper into the subject of child gambling. What about child gambling? Lootboxes are child gambling. Children engaging with loot boxes creates a significantly higher risk of being addicted to real money gambling later in life. I shared proof of this in said post. Since it's gone, I'll share it again here. Hopefully this post doesn't get deleted. It's not breaking any rules as far as I'm concerned so hopefully devs will recognize that. But I'll be copying this post to an external document to be sure I can share it again in case.

Anyways, the proof:

Cross sectional studies (data collected from a single point in time) -

Strong statistical relationship between spending money on lootboxes and showing signs of problem gambling: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0206767

Same thing, strong correlation between loot box spending and problem gambling: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6599795/

Loot box buyers have 4.4x higher odds of problem gambling: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8064953/

Millennials and gen z with highest rates of mobile gaming app usage most likely to use crypto, impulse buy and gamble: https://newsroom.transunion.com/gen-z-millennial-speculators-drove-year-over-year-gambling-growth-in-q2-2025/

Longitudnal studies (participants behavior tracked over time) -

Participants who were engaging in lootbox spending at the start were significantlymore likely to be gambling online by the end of the study https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563223000365

Same study conducted on participants who had not been engaged in online gambling before, also showed that participants engaged in lootbox spending at the start were more likely to be gambling online by the end of the study https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s40359-025-02766-1

This is just a small fraction of the research proving that lootboxes lead to gambling addictions. This game is marketed at children. Given my previous post was deleted though I have a hard time believing plarium don't know what they're doing with lootboxes I don't believe they didn't know before this evidence existed. And the reason. well a certain now dead billionaire, philanthropist, financeer and committer of acts I don't think I can speak of here (IYKYK) discussed with gaming industry executives the idea behind putting lootboxes in games all the way back in 2013. And I don't believe mech arena intends to change as they are still selling crates in countries that restrict lootboxes.

So here's what I've done. This game violates multiple countries laws around lootboxes. I have reported to the appropriate institutions about such violations. Expect mech arena to be banned or for plarium to face legal repurcussions in the following countries:

Belgium, Netherlands, United Kingdom