My Pay2Win Equation model (work in progress)

BigBadWolfe

Disclaimer:  No, this model is not finished, there's still a lot of factors about GW2 that we don't know about yet to complete it.  However I think this is a very good starting point, and I've put a lot of work into this, and so I wanted to share it with the community, get some feedback.  If you don't want to read the whole thing, just skip to the Conclusion.

The Big question is when does the P2P model become P2Win?  We all have a general idea from experience, but nothing concrete.  Until now.  I personally hate P2Win, or just gimmicky sub models in general.  I will be more than happy to just pay a flat rate for a quality MMO, but when you toss in Cash shop, then things get tricky.  I know a lot of players like myself are on the fence if GW2 is going to turn into a cash grab, or the rest of you think ArenaNet can do no wrong.  For the people like me that don't want to end up paying a GW2 pseudo-sub to play, along with a real game sub, please look at this model, as it will be the one that I will be using to gauge my interest in GW2.  You guys can use this model or not, that's fine.

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Player Types:

For this model, Casual vs Hardcore is not really definitive enough, so I an using weekly playtime as a measurment.  I would assume to say that a person that invests 40+hrs a week in GW2 will have different mentaliity then a person willing to invest 20+hrs, which will be different from a person that invest only 10+hrs.

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What type of content does the cash shop effect?  x = does not effect, + = effects ++ = huge effect

GW2  PvE = Leveling Alts (+),  Farming (+), Dungeons (+)

GW2 PvP = World PvP (++), Structured PvP (x)

miscellaneous= Crafting (+), Achievements (x), Story/lore Collection (x), Twinking (+)

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Hypothesis:   P2Win is defined as when a player that plays for free will have less access to content then a person that P2P.  Guild Wars 2 claims that it is not P2Win because all content is technically accessible to both free and P2P customers.  However there is a time difference between when a F2P and P2P person will be able to complete said content.  It's assumed that the content will require some form of gold investment to complete it. Whether for gear, consumables, travel, etc.  P2P becomes P2Win when it takes a player more time/work/effort to manually farm up the gold necessary to complete the content then it would to just manually buy it using real world money.

Ex. a person playing GW2 20+hrs a week and works at a job making about $7.25 an hour.  Hitting level 80 will take him about 4 weeks or 80game hours to complete normally.  If he can just buy $58 worth of gems to purchase enough buffs/consumables to cut his requirement by half (-40hrs), then the game has become P2Win. $58 is only 8 hours of  RL work to save 40hrs of game time, a 1:5 ratio.  Now $58 is a lot of money, but it's money you can get back, you can't get 2 weeks of your life back.  Most people will most likely make this trade, but even more sensible people would probably just quit a game like this altogether and save their money, and time.

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P2Win model:  The problem is that you can use gems to buy in-game gold and the price of gold fluxuates, while the price of gems stays the same.  For $5 USD (or 42mins of RL work) you can get 400gems. If the price of gold fluxuates so that buying enough gold through gems to save you about 3hrs 27mins worth of gametime, then it becomes P2Win.  There's a lot of math behind this, but I'll have to post it later, but let's use me another example instead.

I play about 20+hrs per week and work full time.  I'm not very good at farming at all, unless I get the gold through quest itself, mob killing or reward, I'm not going to make much money.  At the same time I also love to use consumables to reduce the amount of grind as much as possible.  I dont make a lot of in-game money but I do spend it, and I'm probably not going to craft and play the AH much.  Let's say I can make a net total of 5,000g per hour through playing, and I make about $7.25 minimum wage.  if I can spend $25 ($7.25 x 3.45 hours) and make a good 25kg selling gems (5,000g * 5) then the game is completely P2Win for me and I'll either have to decide to pay up to continue to play or just quit.

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Conclusion:  P2Win is relative.  It depends entirely on how much gold you make per hour playing vs. how much money you make in real life.  It's safe to assume that if you have a good paying job that you probably don't have much time to play in-game which means that you are that much more likely to spend money in the cash shop. It looks like GW2's cash is designed to give people that spend money the potential to make even MORE money then their F2P counterparts.  Not only that it seems that bonuses from the cash shop stack (i.e. if you spend $60 in the cash shop you get more bonuses then $30, which is better than $15, etc). Last but not least ArenaNet is not dumb, if people are not using the cash shop, they are going adjust the shop or the game itself so that more people will use it.  The balance of power will start out small, but over time (probably months from now) there will be a significant gap between players that activately use the cash shop to players that don't, which will provide more incentive to those players to use the cash shop to close the gap or just spend more time in the game, or just quit.

Considering the way I play MMOs, I'm planning to just cough up the $60 for cash shop bonuses now to see how far I can get in PvE.  If I find out that I haven't progressed fast enough where I feel I have to keep using the cash shop to stay competitive, I'm either going to just regulate myself to Structured PvP or just quit the game entirely.