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Tales From An MMORPG Whale: The Flaws of Pay-to-Win as a Catch-Up Mechanic | MMORPG.com
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Tales From An MMORPG Whale: The Flaws of Pay-to-Win as a Catch-Up Mechanic | MMORPG.com
Nick is a former MMORPG whale, having spent his time and money in many, many games over the years. Looking back on it all, he's now breaking down how pay-to-win catch up mechanics aren't all what they seem on the surface.
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Pay to convenience is the slope of impacting game play or not. I do not think I have ever played a free to play or similar model game where I did not end up spending money for ease and convenience.
I never chase the high end. Given that up long ago.
Unfortunately most people do not have my iron will. They spend and spend. Well they make enough disposable income to do so or not but I treat it like a foolish endeavour and it is these morons that make it bad for the rest of us.
Even time I refuse if it is inordinate in place of buying my way. I play what I think is enough and if I am unable to enjoy the game I dump it. No sunk cost fallacy is going to trick moi into staying.
There are people who have gone into debt I have read with complete disbelief to fund a game they are playing. How can anyone be this stupid? By right they should be weeded out of society.
The key to surviving in F2P games is one thing: Be content with not winning...Once you can put aside that you dont have to be the best, then you can play and enjoy F2P games at little or no cost.....its the people that HAVE to win that struggle mightily and end up hating things and spending alot of money.
What is their incentive to make grinding difficult and not fun? That would tend to get people to pay so they don't have to play the game as much.
This gets me sometimes and I will pay so that my new alt doesn't have to go through the whole process again. I've already discovered those portals, I might pay a small amount so my alt doesn't have to trek around to all of them again.
I never pay to win or be competitive though.
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2024: 47 years on the Net.
Whales suck, and they contribute to the downfall of gaming and why we're in this situation to begin with. As long as customers prove that it works, this is all we're going to get, and frankly, all we deserve.
1) Pay how much to win?
2) Pay to win what exactly?
3) Just how big of an advantage to players who are paying to win get?
4) How does the presence of whales affect other players?
5) Can you tell the answer to the above questions without spending a lot of time playing the game?
On (1), I see nothing wrong with players who pay $10/month having huge advantages over completely free players. Developers have to get money somehow. If someone who pays $1000/month has huge advantages over someone who "only" pays $100/month, that's a huge problem and the game should probably be avoided.
On (2), if the other players who are paying to "win" buy the ability to crush you in non-consensual PVP, and that ruins your ability to play the game without also spending a ton of money, then that ruins the game entirely. At the other extreme, if they effectively buy access to PVE content a month or two sooner than free players will get to it, then so what?
On (3), suppose that player A spends $1000/month and plays a moderate amount of time, while player B spends nothing but plays twice as much as player A. Who will tend to advance faster? This isn't entirely a binary question, as you can tweak parameters and ask how much faster. If the answer as posed is that player B will tend to advance faster than player A, then that at least avoids some of the worst problems of pay to win. Some games are really just a thin veneer over a contest of whoever pays the most wins, and those games are best avoided entirely.
On (4), there is a large and important difference between items being conjured out of thin air when a whale pays money and the whale buying normal game items from other players. The latter can sometimes make whales beneficial to free players, other than in the sense of keeping the game running, as they make it easier for free players to buy premium items and get much of the benefits of paying to play the game.
On (5), it is a major problem that some games manage to disguise their business model so that you can't tell what it will cost to play the game. This usually isn't because the game is actually a really good deal and they don't want you to know it. Some games manage to botch their business model and look far more pay to win than they actually are. LotRO comes into mind as a glaring example of this.
That old saying that "money can't buy happiness?" it's correct as fuck even if it sounds cliched. I found most of my happiness in spending time with the friends i made that took years to foster and a ton of mistakes made to get to that point- that can't be achieved with any amount of money.
I still want my six grand back from Perfect World Entertainment, even if they did send me a 'thank you basket' thru the mail once.
Fishing on Gilgamesh since 2013
Fishing on Bronzebeard since 2005
Fishing in RL since 1992
Born with a fishing rod in my hand in 1979
they're adults. you can't make financial decisions for them.
I think those kind of people are going to lose or waste all their money no matter what because they have probably have some serious issues with money and control in the first place.
You need restraint. I think a lot of it might be an illness. When you read about the amounts people spend. You cannot really help these people. They will get into trouble in other ways.
Children need protection. Adults need to seek help. Games that promote gambling in children should be tightly regulated. They should be fined and prevented from doing this.
I have always felt that teaching children when they are young to spend money to buy those football cards is the beginning of a cycle that can go out of control.
I be eating colours when my days are grey
Clicking on my profiles just gonna give you music links galore so enjoy
But let us be clear, P2W is not introduced so it can help people "catch up". It is introduced so the studio can generate as much revenue as possible and that is the sole reason. This is proved by the fact that extremely obvious P2W is rarely implemented at launch, that way the game looks far better. P2W then creeps in over the years, it is a golden rule that as the years go by the cash shop will become more dubious.
If this was really about helping people to catch up you would implement the P2W measures no more than a few weeks after launch because by then players would be falling behind others. This is about revenue not "fairness".
Of course, but the PR spin is always "We don't sell power directly, and at best it's a catch up mechanism for those with money but not enough time to keep up."
Personally I enjoy the journey...If the game is good enough, I dont mind running several alts through...It should be enjoyable each time...if it isnt, then maybe the game just isnt that good to begin with....In a game like WoW, I can see where people burn out leveling alts.....It does get old doing quests for ages....To me, that kind of game play isnt really all that fun.
If I can play a FTP game and it's fun for me, then I feel zero obligation to spend more. As with most FTP games then you'll hit the point where you feel you have to spend, for me it's either a disconnect, of I have to decide how much the fun is worth to me.
Some of the posts I see are fairly ridiculous, that it's about the children, and we need laws to regulate them. What is actually called for, is parenting. Parents need to, you know, get involved, they should accept responsibility, and that's something that they teach.
What we don't need is government regulations, and more laws. I understand in the EU, and in places like California more laws are seen as good things. Strange though how passing more laws rarely seems to work, and oftentimes leads to unintended consequences. Especially when the reason for passing them, is to absolve people of personal responsibility.
So short version, hey, if it floats your boat, and your wallet can handle it, more power to you. Just know what you are "buying". If you have a moral, religious, or personal objection, again, more power to you, then don't go down that road. The minute it stops being fun, and starts being a job, then maybe it's time to hit pause, and step away and reconsider.
For me personally, playing competitively is what I find fun, whether that's competitive PvE, PvP, or PvPvE. If I know when I start that I could never compete at the top then I lose interest in a game.
Open-ended laws that give bureaucrats power to arbitrarily meddle in the fine details of a game's business model are surely a bad thing. But clearly-defined regulations that curb the worst abuses without imposing significant compliance costs can be worthwhile. For example, I've seen it asserted that South Korea has a law that if games have gachas, they have to list the corresponding probabilities. Korean games do tend to list those probabilities, even in the foreign versions of their games.
I think that there is space for some worthwhile truth-in-advertising regulations about game business models. Have some specific, detailed promises about a game's business model that a publisher can optionally make, and then make it legally enforceable if they do make such promises. Because it's purely optimal for the publisher to make the promises, you don't get the open-ended problems that mischievous bureaucrats can cause. But if a game is willing to make a legally-binding promise that the game will never have real money gachas and another game is not willing to make that promise, then players can take that into account when deciding which game to play.