A broad P2W definition in law would paint premium stash tabs P2W

GGG should just make 1 premium stash tab For Free each league for 12/24 challenges


Soo... people can stop posting P2W BS on forum :)

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Destructodave a écrit :

Anytime you pay for something, be it QoL or advantages of any kind, that doesn't come with the base game, thats P2W. It might not be as egregious as RMT, or gacha games, or other forms of P2W, but buying advantages and quality of life features that other players do not have access to, for a premium, is still a form of P2W.

Almost every fremium game operates on this. Every single mobile game I have ever played, can usually be beat and/or progressed in, for free. Yet, I'm 100% positive every poster in this thread, would say most of those games, if I started listing them off, were P2W. Hell, I'd even agree.

You can do most things in PoE with 4 basic stash tabs, just like I can do most things in say, Summoners War with starter monsters. But, you really want more stash pages to enjoy the game, just like you want more monsters in Summoners War to enjoy it.

Its not a blatant, pure power form, but its P2W nonetheless. Thats just par for the course in F2p games. Its not something I will chastise GGG for, and its not something you should outright deny like a lot of people seem to want to do.

Totally agree with you. Nothing more to say.

While I get what some of you are wanting to say, I still feel it's important to make distinctions and draw a line... somewhere.

Paying additional fees alone does not warrant pay to win.

The main ire of P2W is that a game require you to invest signifcantly beyond an initial purchase purchase price in order to just experience the base game or achieve a basic level of competitiveness.

League of Legends, at least in its earlier state had my favorite and most reasonable f2p dynamic. The only thing locked behind a paywall were the premium skins, which offered nothing more than an aesthetic change.

You could purchase boosts for both experience and IP (earned in-game currency at the time), but the player still had to participate in matches to gain any benefit. Granted, paying to level or get "richer" faster is more of a grey area. But, it also helps that skill has far more sway on a battle's outcome than experience or a larger champion selection alone. You could spend hundreds and its not gonna magically bridge the gap between bronze and challenger.

And that relates to PoE as well - you can buy all the stash space and mtx you want, but none of that dictates whether or not you can beat elder, shaper, uber elder or even vanilla Atziri.

On the other hand, P2W in PoE terms would be paying real world money to third party sites for gearing and leveling services, which violate the ToS.

Paying for convenience is not quite paying "to win". Convenience may make it "easier to win" but it ends up being more about ethics when you get into P2Win territory.

Another example are MMOs that have gone F2P but rely on subs like Swtor. A lot of things are restricted without a paid subscription. Is it pay to win when so much access is restricted? Even earned in game currency is capped and so one could have accrued millions of credits but a sub lapse and access is essentially gone. If an account never subbed, credits earned after hitting the cap simply disappear.

You just can't write off any additional fee and throw it in the P2Win box. Paying for convenience can be quite a huge step away from paying for an unhealthy advantage. In Swtor's case, it was meant to be sub-based but they had to change direction to sustain. Micro transactions saved the game when subs alone were insufficient, and most of it falls under gambling loot boxes.

I lost count of how many times they reskinned the rancor mount alone.

Paying for that subscription allowed me to access many aspects hidden behind the paywall. But just being able to access content didn't mean I could complete it automatically, and despite paying a monthly fee, I still had to put in the time and effort to learn fights and my characters to raid successfully in groups.

Do we say its P2W because you have to pay extra just to potentially access a significant portion of the game? Or do we say it's not because the sub is in the same category as an initial purchase price, just "on-going".

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SeCKSEgai a écrit :

Paying for convenience is not quite paying "to win".

That's actually exactly what it is. Most p2w mobile games also offers only convenience for premium currency. Other games usually have some alternative way to acquiring that premium currency without paying. GGG does not.

Also please stop comparing p2w with the extreme examples. It's only a sad attempt to make something look more attractive by pointing at something uglier. It's p2w and there is no "line" that needs to be crossed like you claim. That line is clearly already crossed when they decided to not sell cosmetics only.

There's no broad term, only what it actually means and premium tabs are not P2W. Stop trying to confuse people with over-analyzing.

You don't need tabs, it's not a major hindrance for anyone except for pretty hardcore players. I played for ages before I decided they deserved a bit of money.

It would be like saying buying gold in GW2 with paid crystals to get gear quicker is p2w, I bet you'd say that and you'd also be wrong because the system in place there has linear gear progression and they have STRONG alternatives with farming/gameplay. You have to factor how the benefit scales in the actual game.

That's what you have to really consider, are the alternatives severely hamstrung? Going back to GW2, they placed enough legitimate farmable ways to get gold so you could fill yourself out in the best gear one-two pieces a day.

Now if there was a constant increase in gear tier in GW2 and it was excruciatingly slow to farm gold and people were buying gold each new tier and leapfrogging ahead by 3-6 months, then yes you are directly buying power and by-passing a massive game-play blockade.

Try play some Korean MMOs and you might understand what P2W is. Basically you'll be only 1/10th of equal players if you don't constantly buy benefits/skips/currency etc. And going back to what I said about realistic alternative, in those games there are none.

The worst part of real P2W is that it's CONSTANT, you are paying more than a sub to be at least just among average players.

I'll humor you with POE, let's say it is p2w, well at least you only have to pay $15-20 ONCE and that's it. Even then, that's a pretty good deal.

f2p btw

stashes are totally cosmetic btw

"we don't want qol changes for free add this for microtransactions GGG!"

Like the OP stated, "artificial difficulty placed upon progression" can certainly apply to stash tabs from a broad point of view. Anything that could potentially slow your progression, like taking longer to trade or taking longer to sort inventory/stash, can be viewed as "artificial difficulty."

To those saying so, nobody ever said that you NEEDED stash tabs to "win" the game. Then again, what exactly is "winning" in a game like PoE? A game where you basically set your own goals. IMO, I'd say efficiency is pretty dang important in a game where accruing wealth and godly items is among many people's definitions of "winning".

*I personally don't care about loot boxes and such being banned, I don't care about most MTX. What I do care about is whether games are being designed with inconvenience built into them so that you feel more compelled to purchase QoL items. With PoE, I'd say that engineered inconvenience seems more plausible with each league.

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WhaleBusiness a écrit :

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SeCKSEgai a écrit :

Paying for convenience is not quite paying "to win".

That's actually exactly what it is. Most p2w mobile games also offers only convenience for premium currency. Other games usually have some alternative way to acquiring that premium currency without paying. GGG does not.

Also please stop comparing p2w with the extreme examples. It's only a sad attempt to make something look more attractive by pointing at something uglier. It's p2w and there is no "line" that needs to be crossed like you claim. That line is clearly already crossed when they decided to not sell cosmetics only.

See, if you truly felt the anger that comes with pay to win games, you would be so disgusted with PoE as to not waste your time posting at all.

Actual games are hardly "extreme", but merely practical examples as they are applied in the real world. Monthly subscription fees are largely in the past, and micro-transactions are now the bread and butter of many games today simply out of necessity.

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Madix a écrit :

*I personally don't care about loot boxes and such being banned, I don't care about most MTX. What I do care about is whether games are being designed with inconvenience built into them so that you feel more compelled to purchase QoL items. With PoE, I'd say that engineered inconvenience seems more plausible with each league.

THIS is where the discussion should be focused. Lockboxes typically become predatory when the items within can only be acquired through gambling on said boxes. If the desired items within can be purchased separately at a premium, eliminating that rng, that gamble, then it's now just an opportunity for the player to gamble on a potential deal.

Inconvenience is understandable to a point. In a loot-focused game of this dynamic, players need to have reason to decide whether something is worth picking up, let alone keeping. But then we get to things like fossils and resonators and this strange notion to now rearrange the atlas with each new league.

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SeCKSEgai a écrit :

Actual games are hardly "extreme", but merely practical examples as they are applied in the real world. Monthly subscription fees are largely in the past, and micro-transactions are now the bread and butter of many games today simply out of necessity.

That doesn't justify your claims that convenience is not p2w. Convinience is actually the most common p2w mechanic used today. Some games (like poe) also takes that one step further and designs the game mechanics to punish you for not paying. Needless to say, that's a horrible way of exploiting the model even when compared to the extremes.

I have decided by some random-unknown thought that I want to sort of list why not having stashes makes the game straight pay to win garbage:

Not having stashes:

- You have limited choices on what to pick.
- Constantly deal with the awful experience that's trading because you can't keep your currency and you must trade it constantly rather than trying your own things.
- You can't pick maps neither save them for later, because once you start to complete your altas and you're over 101% chances you're getting more than 1 map from every red map and onwards you do in the game.
- Paying for "trade" or download a 3rd party program which can risk your account, again the qol change locked on wallet time.
- You can't pick cards either, constantly selling the good others by spaming trade or just keep them in your stash rotting forever because dealing with trade is already exhausting enough in this game.
- You can't pick uniques, bases nor try to start your own craft without sacrificing alot of your space.
- Fossils and other things, you can imagine already.. sell instantly or don't bother picking.

tl;dr: absolute dogshit pay to be more effective feature in a game where you have such complex systems but as new player you have to stop yourself and decide constantly what to do, what to pick, what to sell.

So yeah the game might be "fReE tO pLaI" but it's more like free to download, any ARPG can't have a critical thing such as space locked into a monetary microtransaction and call it a day for your selfish purposes while you're already making enough by selling cosmetics.
Synthesis has proved me how a company can be very greedy and people will still give them money regardless, absurd amount of spaces if you want to try craft something or even try for bases later..

edit: ever since I started to play the game and understood how things work, I havent ever trade something that I got myself to other player or sell something, either sacrificed it to destroy it or sell it.. that's PoE new player experience in a nutshell.