I think it's time for an illustration. I choose (because everyone knows them and the system uses a number of the top tier profiteering methods all at once) Steam cards.
Steam cards are, of course, a collectible. But a particular kind of collectible. Regular collectibles are things people buy because they have an interest in the subject. Manufactured collectibles are the things that have 'collectible' on the box and are designed to take your money and aren't actually collectible at all, and then there's the game collectible. The game collectible is designed to keep people playing a game even after they are done with it. Why? For a variety of reasons, but most of them boil down to advertising. When you load up Steam, you're hit with advertising. Then the landing page (if left unchanged) is inundated with advertising. Many games have splash screens with advertising. A number of games have menu lobbies that contain advertising and DLC storefronts. And finally, there's the in-game advertising. Which all means, the longer the company can trap you in their space, the more money their ads earn them. And that translates to a game design of collectibles, collectibles everywhere. Which, even if it weren't manipulative, is lazy design.
But wait! There's more. So, how does one get Steam cards? They are time-vaulted, so one must play the game for a certain amount of time, whether one wants to play or not. This encourages people to play games they don't want to play in order to score (a drug term) these cards. But people don't get a specific card in a specific order, oh no, they get a random card. Thus causing double-ups. Not only that, one only gets enough cards to complete a half-set, since the rest are vaulted in a money store. And you have to complete three of these sets to get the full collection of related collectibles and social ranks. This encourages you to drop by the helpfully nearby enclosed marketplace. A setup that not only keeps you on Steam longer, screwing around on the marketplace, and thus lets you be inundated with more advertising, it opens your wallet. In sales, getting someone to open their wallet is the hard part. Once it's open, though, the dam bursts, and people spend freely. So, they're already invested in this card set, and completing it is only a couple bucks. Their wallet just opened, and now they're freely buying and selling on the market. Spending money they wouldn't have otherwise done.
What's more, there's the chance of the money drop (the foil card). This combines the collector mentality so common amongst humans with an entry-level gambling process - if you just keep playing this game, you might score the big one! You probably won't, but the hope is there. Tantalizing.
But wait! There's more. Once one completes a set of collector cards, one gets a series of social emotes to be used in Steam chat, backgrounds to be used on their Steam page, and badges to display on those pages. All of which are exclusive social elements, designed to not only foster a Keeping-Up-With-the-Joneses mentality (That emote is cool! Where did you get it? I want one!), but to invest you further and further in the Steam experience. So that you become so invested in the Steam materials you go nowhere else. So that they can inundate you with more advertising.
Even better, there's Steam Level, which is a leveling system thingie that is increased by putting together these card collections. Steam levels require an increasingly larger number of card sets to be completed in order to gain them as one gets higher, and the leveling process is entirely based in social-ranking. The purpose of Level is mostly a notation thing that is always displayed next to your Steam name in the social window, thus fostering a sense of competition amongst the very weak-willed. And more importantly, a few - a very few - Steam Levels have additional social unlocks, such as a different shield shape around the level number or the ability to have more Steam 'friends'. With Steam Friends again being a thing to keep you on Steam. Which all adds up to a treadmill system.
But wait! There's still more. Not only does one get cards by playing the game, once a sucker player has all the drops possible from a game, they become eligible for a card pack drop. Which basically boils down to the possibly of a random drop of a pack of three unknown cards - that is, if you load up Steam at least once a week. So, even if you would have chosen to do something else otherwise, due to the pressure of Steam time-vaulted content, you're back on. Load up Steam, and, boom, advertisements. And once loaded, most people are likely to then play a game. And, boom, more advertisements. And not only that, these pack cards are a random set of three, thus feeding back into the market system due to double-ups, incomplete card sets, and the ever-present hope for a big money drop.
Basically, the entire goal of the collectible cards is to keep you on Steam even when you would rather be somewhere else. It is a method of controlling the environment of the player, so they only see Steam and are always on Steam seeing Steam's advertisements.
For games, such as Battlefield, the trick is implementing all of these things (and EA certainly did) in such a way that most players don't notice (a meh job on that one). And what is the purpose of hemming players in like this? Extracting money from the weak-willed and defenseless. Who are the weak-willed and defenseless? Children, the retarded, the mentally ill, addicts.
Yes, one of the key targets of these tactics is children. This whole experience is all 'children & video games', after all. So basically, those advocating using these tactics are advocating the encouragement of asset-stripping children and corrupting them by introducing them to the classically immoral ways of gambling.
