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Pay 2 win becoming legitimate? Have we really lost our way this much?
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Many will spent alot of money not to PVP but to brag about how top geared they are and realy convinced themselfs they achieved something. Making videos and screenshots with there precious bought items showing off how good they are but played 0hours to get it but bragging they kick ass hehe.
No, pay to win is when you can buy items that are otherwise unobtainable to peeople. In other words... the only way to get an item is to pay for it, and the stats/benefits on the item are superior to anything you can get without money. It's not a "shitty justification." It's the definition of the term. Buying items for real money is NOT pay to win unless the items cannot be obtained by any other in-game means.
In D3, you can still get the same items if you go and grind for them.
I'm sorry but you don't get to make up definitions to game concepts to suit your needs.
P2W = I'd still prolly lose o_0
Alas to be poor and only own thumbs.
That, or the cash shop item is "attractively" priced in comparison to the many, many, many months spent farming the materials to craft it the "traditional" way. For example, if the item is designed to take about a year of hardcore farming, but it's available in the cash shop for a mere $2500. (Not an exaggeration or a joke, actual example. I may actually be lowballing the cash price. I'm afraid to look.)
Though, I suppose a year of hardcore farming is "otherwise unobtainable to people"...
However, this is likely irrelevant to the RMAH, as it doesn't seem the game has an elaborate crafting system. BUT it's still very relevant to the average F2P->P2W MMO, which is what it seems the thread started as a rant against, then clumping in RMAH as a poor example of P2W.
To be honest, I actually have little problem with P2W... *IF* the game is designed with that in mind, and no hiding of the fact is made. Go let the people with shiny brand-new Platinum cards rack up their annual salary a few times over on some pixels. Just let me enjoy playing my games of choice without coming over and breaking them!
Where did you get an agreed upon definition of pay to win to your exact stipulations that we can all agree as being a legitmate source? In other words, how is your definition of "paying to win" anymore reasonable than the other?
@mlewin .you are right!most of this discussion is because some are scared ( and rightly so)that this rmah will give idea to the f2p world
i highly doubt player will support thisfor one simple reason the world economy is on the brink of colapse the last thing player will do is spend 50 $ a month on a game when they can barelly pay wow 13 $ a month lol
Great post and the truth as I see it as well. I hear that game Entropy is like that and I have no problem with it just don't play it as it is for people with a much larger wad of disposable cash than I do no harm no foul, I have oodles more time than alot of those people have to grind for the things I want out of my games so chances are I have something they can't achieve as well.
My biggest reason for responding though is to say I agree that this thread is a problem for me simply because it is attempting to lump far too many things together as if we live in a black and white world.
Many sub fee mmo's have been sputtering along for years while players like myself indocrinated into paying sub fees wonders "where is that awesome ever changing world I was told my sub fee's would help provide?"
Now that games have moved to freemium models and such they seem to be able to find ways to achieve those things and for me it hasn't cost me a cent more than I have traditionally paid it's why I can't simply sit here and say the way things have worked to this point are fine and why I'm glad developers are giving it's player base options.
I'd say the answer lies in the name "Pay 2 Win" not "Pay 2 Have an Advantage" not "Pay 2 Look Better" and certainly not "Pay 2 Alternative" but "Pay 2 Win" with winning being the ultimate success state, the phrase hints at an absolute need to pay or success cannot be achieved.
But of course logic like that is an affront to MMORPG.com where anyone can make up a catchphrase and have it mean something different every time it is uttered.
Granted I almost used the term "pay for advantage" for D3's supposed RMAH system but then again we don't really know how it will actually play out just yet. If a player is able to pay real money for the games most powerful items I don't see how it is anything but a pay to win game. What would you classify it as if this were the case?
I think the big problem you have here is a lot of the MMO community is against it but even amongst themselves they cannot agree with is actually Pay 2 Win. Ask people on these very boards to define pay to win & you will not get consensus. I will elaborate.
Theres really 3 types of Microtransaction paths.
1) Cosmetic only: Most players (except maybe Eve players) never seemed to care about cosmetic only modifications being available in F2P games. That said most F2P games makers realise they cannot generate enough money to stay in buiness from cosmetic items alone.
2) Skip the grind: This revolves around allowing more casual players to skip the grind or long progression paths in many games by allowing them to purchase things like double XP gain potions, double gold gain potions as well as mounts, spells, weapons & armour that are also available for ingame funds (grinding funds) or by ingame grinding of instances/mobs/quests or via player to player trade such as A/H. None of the weapons or armour that can be bougth for real world money are generally better (sometimes they have cosmetic modifications too) than what can be found or bought in the game. Purchasing them with real cash is just a way for casual or time poor players to progress or play catchup to other players who dont mind the grind.
3) Better than the rest: This revolves around people being able to access exclusive items that are better than what can be found in the game. This includes (but is not limited to) weapons, armour, mounts, potions, modifier crystals, special gems & extra slots etc. In this instance the spending of real cash gives an actual advantage over other players usually revolving around a PvP environment.
I am aware there are grey areas between these 3 but I dont feel like writing a 10 page essay. So lets look at the community opinion on the 3.
On Cosmetic only: there is much disdain for people who buy these modifcation for som reason, and while it obviously doesnt get them labelled as pay 2 win some players do have a bad attitude towards it.
On Skip the grind: This is where the community clearly divides. There are hardliners who say that allowing people to skip the grind is pay to win, even though when you disect the concept it really is not. It just allows them to pay $10 to skip grinding 100 hours of the one dungeon to get the winged helm of flight, some peopel feel slighted that they spent 100 hours to grind something someone else just rocked up and paid $10 for. Thats fine but at the end of the day it was your choice to grind 100 hours to get that helmet instead of paying $10 for it and supporting the game. To me right now there are too many people arguing that this system is pay 2 win when it is clearly not and this has muddied the waters on the whole pay 2 win debate and needs to be laid to rest as not pay 2 win so we can concentrate on tackiling the real pay 2 win problems.
On Better than the rest: this to me is purely what pay 2 win is and I think most people identify this as pay 2 win since it is so in your face obvious. A player who is not paying for items cannot hope to match their F2P items against someone who has spent some money. This is an unfair advantage and IMHO something F2P titles should avoid if they want to enjoy longterm success. Remember there is a reason the game is F2P right ? usually because it couldnt sustain enough subscriptions to stay afloat. So if you drive off all your F2P players away by allowing true pay 2 win then the pay2win players have no one left to play with and ultimately your game will die a slow death as people leave due to boredom.
Lastly there are more subversive versions of "Better than the rest" but I did not want to cover that here and to me it still fits into that category anyway.
So lets all unite with a common understand if what really is Pay 2 win (IMHO: Better than the rest) so we might have a chance of identifying games that use that mechanic and encourage people to avoid them until such time as they change their ways.
[quote]
Originally posted by Thekandy
The irony is that in most cases, "Pay2Win" means "Pay to hit end-game, with uber gear and no game content". That often leads to boredom fairly quickly. Why isn't it called "Pay2Lose", as that's closer to the actual end result?
Most MMO's don't have a "Thank you for saving me, Mario!" screen; the Princess is always in another castle. It's their very nature, even if the castle doesn't yet exist or is not yet available to the playerbase. Rushing to the very end of what you can do in an MMO makes you lose out on the RP of MMORPG. Hell, why bother playing the G when you've lost the P, eh? (Perhaps that's why "MMO" is the popular abbreviation?)
thecrow2k ,a lot of those for it work for the gaming industry ,not many gamer would be for it if it was doable to do a poll of just gamer since we all know a lot of the gaming industry come here in the forum it looks like the gamer are mixed whe4n in fact it is just game maker vs gamer
yes there are a limited few for it (gold seller zam etc)those that do the gold selling thing for a living but regular folk
the majority of gamer that make it possible for blizzard to pay their bill?nope they arent for rmah!
Simply put, RMT or RMAH if you prefer specifics.
Just the very fact you aren't gauranteed a shot at buying the most powerful items and that somebody must have attained the items the old-fashioned way places it in a different category than most games with a cash-shop, we're treading new ground here. (Sorta, it's the first game of its type to have a RMT system of its type)
Besides, the most powerful items will come with a level requirement, that alone dictates that some effort must be put in to even be eleglible for the item.
I must say, i like the way you think.
The thing is, in Diablo 3, in order for people to pay to win for the best items...someone has to farm that particular item and then go "meh, I don't need the best sword in the game, I'm just a measly Barbarian!" Maybe they'll sell it when they get it a SECOND time, but how long would that take?
Also, pay to win has always existed in every game in some form. Anyone with a credit card that wants to get better items, level faster, or have more gold, can find at least ONE person out there willing to trade that particular thing for real money. All Blizzard has done with Diablo 3, is take away the opportunity of the RMT companies to have the entire market cornered, and handed the opportunity to EVERY person who plays Diablo 3. The fact that people get pissed about this is laughable. Which is worse? Having a reputable, client based, AMERICAN, proper English speaking company allowing each player to sell items, while the company takes an amount off the top. Or have the market 99% owned by suspicious, frowned upon, disgraceful, probably NOT from your country, English butchering companies selling everything, and mashing prices down so far it isn't worth the time to the average player? Personally, I'd go with the former.
Do I think RMT is a great thing? No, and neither does Blizzard, I would think. But it's the far lesser of the two evils, and allows for a larger player base of people to play the game, and still enjoy it even if they aren't "hardcore" enough to monotonously farm the same 3-5 bosses for 8 hours a day to get the best items. There won't be any "Hi, thes iz herp, derp, and I'm totally from America and wunt to sall you some itams at w w w . d i a b l o i t e m s c h i n a . c o m...use the code "Communist" to get a dicount!" either...just the usual banter we all know and love from WoW trade chat of actual players actually letting people know that they have an item for sale. Though I will admit they sometimes rival the annoyance of chinese farmers in WoW.
There always has, and always will be, a way for people to shell out cash to get things done/attained faster. At least now we'll have an intermediary that will eliminate the possibility of fraud/scamming, will likely make the market stabalize quickly, and fairly, and best of all...give each player the ability to eventually have sold enough items to have, at the very least, payed for their copy of Diablo 3, which I feel would be a very beneficial goal to set for yourself.
The problem is that many games have introduced things that stack on top of that 2x experience. The game I keep mentioning and not naming has a 12x experience item that stacks on the 2x. Combine that with exploitable game glitches that already give tens to hundreds of times the normal experience.
Perhaps you can see how it can be considered Pay2Win if you can just drop a few hundred dollars on these items for a few days and sit there at the glitch, ending up at a higher level than players who have been doing it "the hard way" for 2 or 3 years.
I suppose it is our choice to actually play the game's content rather than spending a few hundred dollars, yes. I suppose it is also our choice to avoid exploiting bannable glitches, even if there are now enough people exploiting them as to make it almost unenforceable.
However, we also choose to play a game, not to sit there showing off how much money we can spend how quickly. These are Role-Playing Games, not Popularity Contests. (There may be overlap, but that's tangential to my point.)
As I said in my example before, yes, the uber-gear you can cash shop for some thousands of dollars is available in game to farm. It's actually uber enough that it's hard to argue that it was ever intended to be available any other way. Farming THAT much is one hell of an achievement, and you should be rewarded accordingly.
The funny thing is that you said that the P2W people pay to avoid hundreds of hours of grinding in one dungeon. My experience has repeatedly been that all they know how to run by the time they finish paying to powerlevel is the one dungeon that they got leveled in...
Surely you can't say that's actually good for the game? All it ever creates is high level players who don't know how to play, then they all post to the forum saying "This game isn't that hard, I don't know why you guys are acting like it is"... If it weren't a losing battle, I'd personally drag these P2Wers into the difficult places in their game. *sigh*
These observations are from a number of F2P->P2W MMO's. That's the main reason I'm not naming the one I'm using for examples. I don't want to get the conversation focused on how "fail" a particular game is; the problem is epidemic.
There's a huge canyon between "selling an advantage in the cash shop" and P2W. Hopefully this post is a useful datapoint in finding the edges of the canyon without having to fall in yourself.
Someone probably will put in quite a large amount of effort to obtain the top end items for D3's upcoming RMAH, the fact that someone has a high chance of living in an asian prison somewhere, well that's just part of the game now too =D! I guess it makes it a little better that someone has had to give away a portion of their life for the item instead of it just being conjured into being by the magic that is cash.
Oh tbe lizzard A/H Idea I hate, its just a money grab plain and simple.
I wasnt taking my experience solely from the boards here either, theres a real community split in every F2P game when ti comes to microtransactions that falls into the.
1) I just dont care players.
2) Players who think anyone who spends any money on the game are Pay 2 winers.
3) Players who can differentiate between items that are pay 2 win Vs Items that are Pay 2 skip grind.
4) Players who buy Pay 2 win items then argue that they do not give an unfair advantage.
Still the majority of these communities are made up of players in category 2 & 3. the problem is they do not agree on what is actually Pay 2 win and end up getting nowhere beyond arguing with each other....
It's that or make licence plates. Or dig holes. Gamer prisoners got it easy compared to regular prisoners.
Many chinese/korean workers do in fact consider themselves lucky if they can get to work at a dumping ground for harmful by-products from recycled plastics, sans protection gear.
The ones who get to grind must feel like they got a cushy desk-job in comparison.
You are muddying the waters even further. Glitching is cheating.
That said 2 x XP potion or 12 x XP potion whats the difference ? it is still only pay 2 skip grind not pay 2 win. You mention it is unfair that people get ot skip the grind so I guess that puts you in the group that seems confused about what is really pay to win. I dont see the point in getting upset over someone who pays real money to get to level cap in a week when it took me 2 months of grinding to do the same. because ultimately we are the same level with access to the same skills etc so everything is on a level playing field except I am likely better at playing my character due to more hours of experence doing so.
Whereas if the best longsword you can grind ingame is say the Vorpal longsword of +20 armor penetration and +50 damage but the cash shop has an exclusive Diamond Vorpal longsword of +60 armor penetration and +150 damage. Then that is obviously pay to win.
its people complaining that fast progression is unfair instead of identifying true pay to win who are giving developers & pay 2 win advocates more ammunition with which to actually shout those against pay 2 win down.
I never said Pay2winners actually pay to skip the grind, so please do not try to put words in my mouth.
Pay to skip grind is its own thing, pay 2 win = pay to gain a permenant unfair advatage over others. Paying to level faster is not a permenant advantage since I can eventually grind my way to be on par with them. What I cannot do is grind my way to uber powerfull gear exclusive to the cash shop.
You would figure what with all the noise about China reving up and trading in their bicycles and scooters for cars they'd need more license plate making prisoners, however, apparently the guards get paid better enslaving the prisoners into the gold/item farming so there's the pickle. Someone needs to come up with more lucrative chinese prisoner slave labor oppourtunities and fast or else those guards families will continue to subsist on what meager revenue can be generated by the power hungry appetites of the neo -western gaming culture.
You seem to miss the subtext: Many of the P2W crowd do cheat by exploiting. That's the only reliable way to reach end-game in < 1% of the normal amount of time: Combine exploits with cash shop experience items that otherwise only feel like a very bad idea to have available. (And, again, it quickly becomes so rampant that banning people becomes hard without hiring more GMs and maybe even data analysts if it's extremely out of hand.)
And paying to skip levels 2-99 so you can be level 100 (easy round numbers; just like your fictional Vorpal Blade) in a week, alongside everyone who spent a couple years, not months, (real numbers, unlike the level just preceding) to get there seems awful "Pay2Win" unless "Pay2Skip" doesn't care that you're skipping everything other than "I started!" and "I won!" :P
And you ignore the fact that in the case I'm mentioning, they're skipping all those levels so they can wear the uber-gear that they should have been farming for the 2+ years they were playing (and probably still would not have obtained), only obtainable by MUCH massive farming or entering your card number onto the charge page.
So, please tell me how (pretty literally) skipping all the levels in the game to cut a couple years of play time out, and then going and buying the most epic gear in the game in the cash shop isn't P2W?
How is the online auction house going to make D3 a 'pay to win' ... what are you winning? I guess if they open up PvP in D3 then it would be an issue... but a 4 man Co-op is what I thought the game was about. You're not really paying to win a 4 man co-op. It's not an MMO so what's the big deal really. If you don't like it, don't participate in the practice of the AH and then Blizzard will call it a bust and re-evaluate the need for it.
I would rather have something monitored and made fair between players than have gold farmers and ebay greasers getting cash for pixels. The person buying items that someone else has placed up there is paying for better gear than they have in order to enjoy their game, but how does that hurt YOU personally when it's not an MMO?
No bitchers.