Home › Game Forums › ArcheAge
Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
Pay King = Game King
This discussion has been closed.
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Comments
Its quite sad how many people have no understanding on what pay to win is and how easy it is thrown around at the moment you can generally say 80% of people on this site that accuse a game of being pay to win have never actually played a game that's pay to win.
For example my understanding is everything you can buy in AA cash shop can be earned in game. This means all you are paying for is convenience you get everything faster than the non paying person but that non paying person over time can still achieve what you have which means you just got it faster. It should be call PFC ( pay for convenience )
Now onto actual pay to win games and I will explain to you the difference so about 4 years ago my mates asked me to try a game with them now I was willing to because there was quite a few of my circle of friends giving It ago and to be honest we had a lot of fun with it to start with until we started meeting people that had dumped money into the cash shop, now in this game you could buy armour and weapons from the cash shop that were unattainable through playing the game these armour and weapons were so superior to anything in game that they basically turned the payer into a one man army I was playing this with 7 people and we in some of the best gear attainable through playing the game could barely scratch him and that was if we got the jump if he did we were all dead in seconds. The cash shop effectively turned you into a type of GOD player over anyone not paying loads into cash shop. Pay 2 win
For me is rather sad to see how many are willingly go though all this acrobatics to convince themselves and others that a game revolving around cash shop with p2w elements is absolutely ok. 10 years ago no one could imagina an MMO where you needed "points" to open loot bags and those "points" being sold in CS. It's like a mobile game where you either wait for a week for the upgrade to finish or buy "gems" to finish it instantly. People willing to open their waller will win. It's just sad that some MMOs are going that way and no semantics can make it any better. "How can you "win" in an MMO?" Lmao
Obvious and blatant examples of P2W don't negate the existence of less obvious P2W models.
There is a whole range from the obvious in your example to the definitely not P2W as is the case where the best gear can only be obtained by playing the game and it can't be sold even in the internal game's auction house (i.e. BOP gear being the best as is the case in WOW.)
If the top gear can be bought -- even if it's just with in-game currency, and even in a game with a sub, anyone can undermine the in-game method for getting such gear by either paying money to the game company (if they are gold sellers... i.e. Apex in the case of AA) or a third party gold seller. The harder it is to get that top-end non-BOP gear through normal game play, the more P2W potential the game has.
There's a whole range of possibilities between those two extremes that make games more P2W or less P2W. It's not black and white, it's all about whether throwing extra money at the game can give you an unfair advantage over those who don't.
Even if the game is old and most players in the game have now geared-up to the top level legitimately, it's still P2W if you can come in and just pay for what it took them months or years to do.
Here's where the phorum philosophers will come in and ask... "What is "win" anyways?" which, after the strict and absolute definition has been dealt with, is the next line of defense
Does that take the sting out a bit of people calling a game you like P2W? It should since just about every other MMO with very few exceptions is too,
This whole AA P2W thing is just a tool that unimaginative haters use to annoy fans of the game.
If they were smarter they would be focusing instead on what happened last Wednesday when a huge chunk of the NA player base was prevented from even having a chance to compete for Auroria land....or Trion's latest spin on the 10% discount bait and switch... you know? Real shit.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
Honestly, I myself at least don't talk about those things because discussing those is about as interesting as saying "Water is wet". (IE, just because something is blatantly true doesn't make it an interesting topic of discussion in the long term)
I was somewhat less than 100% serious
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
This is what DMKano wants you to think. Believe him and get back to paying his emplo... er, those wonderful angels at Trion your money!
(Saying "Anyone can get weapons and armour via crafting and in-game gold" might be fun in theory, but one only has to go around and look strongest players on the server and find out how much they spent on the game, then compare them to the strongest non-spenders you can find to see that there's a reason why several players spent thousands on the game in the first place)
They are both real problems. Just that one is more immediate and has a bigger up front impact while the other is more of a long term issue.
Fact - the meaning of the term "P2W" has and is being watered down in order to accommodate.
Welcome to the "New Age of (ching, ching) Gaming"
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee
I think the term I'd use is obfuscated.
Each time a game comes out, fans have to make sure it can't have the negative label. Since they can't change the game, they change the label. But the lable has been changed so many times we can't even apply it to the most basic of examples anymore.
Let's come up with a new label P2BTSOOPWDP
Pay
To
Beat
The
Shi......errrrr....Stuffing
Out
Of
Players
Who
Don't
Pay (or who pay less)
DMKano do you actually play any games? Your almost 6k posts are a real curiosity to me. I don't know how you have time to play any MMOs let alone AA and have time to post as much as you do on these forums. As to the topic of this thread, anyone that thinks this game isn't pay to win is just a plain fool in my opinion. People who buy credits or Apex can basically exchange their real life currency for in game currency thus giving them the ability to generate gold as they need it. They don't have to actually play the game at all in order to make gold which is required to advance in crafting.
If everything that you can buy in the shop is also available if you play the game, then it ought to be called P2NP, Pay to Not Play, since the only reason to pay money is to not play the game. I could either play the game to get the item, or I could just pay for it and skip playing the game.
Since there is no "winning" in an MMO, the only conceivable reason to pay cash is to skip playing the game.
------------
2025: 48 years on the Net.
You people are delusional.
If you can buy items in the cash shop that help you get ahead, the game is pay 2 win.
That's the ONLY definition of the term.
It does NOT matter if you can obtain the item in-game without spending real money…if you are giving people a choice to pay, it automatically becomes pay2win. Do you know why??? People will always take the easier route, even if they have to spend a few more dollars.
Stop defending this crap and don't share your inane opinion on what is pay 2 win and what is not. If you STILL have trouble with the meaning of this term, GO BACK TO SCHOOL. You clearly have a difficult grasp of the English language.
True enough but P2W is so common in MMOs these days that it can be considered almost a given that some ability to pay to get an advantage will be present.
OTOH, this game has some very unique and specific warts that are much more worthy of individual AA-specific criticism.
For example. Most people don;t even understand that what the "10% bait and switch" is. And this, more than any other single thing they have done has left a very bad taste in my mouth. They have essentially given 10% extra credits (instead of the advertised 10% discount on purchases from the cash shop) to patrons who also bought credits directly. Sounds roughly equivalent at first glance, right?
But what they didn't do was give the same extra 10% credits to anyone who got their credits by buying a bundle that included credits - i.e. patrons who got credits as part of their Silver, Gold or Archeum packs.
The whole P2W argument is a discussion about the integrity or lack thereof, of a game and/or company, their advertising and the deviousness of their monetization. But for the reasons I stated above, almost the whole industry is stained by this.
The 10% discount incident and Trion's unwillingness to correct the screw up last Wednesday with a simple rollback once they became aware that a significant portion of their patrons were being prevented from competing in a very significant, unique and time-limited event due to a bug in their software, are much more specific to this game than the semi-universal P2W discussion.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
Not sure if Scott Hartsman has time to play his games.