Premium Tabs are pay to win
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I think third party programs present many arguments (mostly how the trade system needs to be overhauled entirely), but the nature of pay to win itself is not one of them. It isn't actually part of the game. If you start considering third party programs as "pay to win" because you have to pay for them, you might also start considering things like RMT (I've seen arguments that suggest all aRPGs are pay to win because of RMT) and bots.[/quote]
I never said that I think 3rd party programms (like procurement) are pay2win. Procurement is free 4 all and is easy accessable. So everyone has the same option to set up a shop, no matter if you have premium tabs or not. So if something is free4all with procurement, how can it be pay2win to have premium stash tabs? " I agree with this, but it doesn't explain why premium stash tabs are pay2win (when using your definition of p2w). " The speed of listing isn't that important to actually sell stuff. I used procurement before the public option for stash tabs was introduced and I had no problem selling my 1alc/1chaos stuff. " Now we could discuss what "significant" means. Lets not forget that many people sold stuff with procurement even before the premium stash tabs where updated and some got rich because of that. I doubt that there would be people with like 50+ exalts without procurement. And it's not really faster to set prices in premium stash tabs compared to procurement. So the only advantage is the listing speed and I dont think there's such a huge difference to go as far and say it is pay2win. There are still tons of people without premium stash tabs and some of them still will make alot currency (compared to me with premium stash tabs). |
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" I didn't say specifically that they were. But there are programs like that. By including third party software in the pay to win model you include paid software. I don't think that paid software is necessarily legitimate, I would have to recheck the ToS. " No, it is actually more the groundwork for the reasoning that premium stash tabs aren't really a problem. I don't see why they would be, at least as long as GGG is trying to keep it reasonably fair. " I think you missed the point. " In that statement I wasn't comparing it to using procurement but the actual forum itself. There is a significant speed advantage in using either third party software OR trade tabs. And yes, I have posted up on the forum manually before, and for a good long while. I stopped because the notations were a real hassle (to setup buyouts and such) and nobody actually checked the thread anyway, they just used the indexer (so having a nicely formatted store page meant nothing). On the speed of listing itself, I'd say that is actually a win/win for GGG/indexers. For players the advantage is the update speed and account verification. The update speed means you're less likely to get people spamming you for the same item. Account verification means that can track your sales and make their own judgment whether or not you're a scammer (it adds credibility). And on GGG/indexers end it's a lot less work than forum scraping. I'm actually almost surprised that GGG just didn't make trade tabs universal and throw out the forum shops. |
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" I'm only talking about legitimate 3rd party programs which are accepted by the developer. Procurement is such a software and it is officially posted here on the forums. And if there is any software that costs money and is accepted by the devs, why shouldn't we consider to include them in the p2w model? The developer clearly allows a paid software that gives clear advantage over players, so it's practically the same thing as a paid ingame mechanic that provides clear advantages. The only difference is, that not the developer but a 3rd party would get the money, but the influence on the game is the same. " Ok, just wanted to clarify if we are on the same page. " And what is the point then? In my view you tried to come up with at least some advantage the prem stash have over procurement or manually doing the forum thread. But lets be honest here: Those things aren't a clear advantage. You will without any problem still sell stuff with procurement and as long as that happens, everyone has a free and a paid way to sell their stuff in probably the same speed. The only thing that happened to me 2 or 3 times is that someone is messanging me for an item which I have sold 10 minutes ok. But since I always set b/o prices, it wouldn't have changed anything for me. I can either ignore those people or tell them the item is sold. So prem stash tabs are more of an advantage for the players who buy stuff, but is it really important to the person who actually paid money for the tabs? And about credibility: Who really looks into that? Not once in my whole poe life I have looked into the people selling me stuff. If I want to buy something, I can just type the item name in poe.xyz and look for the price of other (similiar) items. And there I can just choose the item with the price that I think is right to me. Scamming only happens to people who are to lazy to compare prices and scamming usually only works against players who are REALLY new to the game. For example, yesterday a player asked global how much the "Into the Void" mission is worth (that gives you the super strong void ring). This prophecy goes for 40c. And that guy said "What is this prophecy worth? The current offer is 5 fusing and a Lifespig". So someone tried to scam him but he was intelligent enough to ask global. I guess he didn't know what poe.xyz is, otherwise he could have searched there. Neverthless: As soon as you find out about poe.xyz, scamming shouldn't happen to you anymore and there's no real reason to check for credibility. " Well, I just mentioned manually because it's another way, even without using any 3rd party programm. But then again: If manually is just to slow for you, procurement is always an option and since it worked for many years without accident and is/was accepted by the developers, players can trust it. There were also enough people who checked the code itself and tried to find fishy lines within the codes and nothing has been found. So there are free options and I think no one should really be able to complain. But if those options are both not viable to you for whatever reasons, well: Then get the prem stash tabs. Lets not forget that GGG is nice enough to: - implement this option into the prem stash tabs instead of making ANOTHER stahtab upgrade that costs money (so you dont have to buy stash tabs AND trade option for every stash tab) - they offer a cheaper upgrade from regular to prem stash tabs - they offer discount on prem stash tabs regulary (like yesterday) I think GGG is fair in regard to that. They could have made much more money with this, but they decided to make it a premium stash tab feature. So everyone who had bought prem stash tabs to that point got a free upgrade of their stash tabs. GGG could have tried to make even those people pay again. And well: GGG needs to make money somehow. No one has to buy the game and no one has to pay a monthly fee. Furthermore, there are no items with limited time (like double exp or vetter loot for 30 days) and also no things that give you a clear advantage when playing the PvE/PvP content (like buyable stronger weapons, effects that make you stronger, no EXP loss when dying etc.). Last edited by AceNightfire on Jul 3, 2016, 3:31:05 AM
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" Semantics, third party programs are third party programs. " Lets agree to disagree. But the point was you shouldn't (at least in my view) use third party programs as justification for it not being pay to win. " And yet I see on reddit posts almost every day about someone scamming, or complaining that people are trying to buy stuff on poe.trade with premium tabs. Yeah, it might not be a problem for you, but it happens frequently. " And you wouldn't consider speed an advantage? You also run into the problem of potentially having no idea where your loot is (which is something you can find in third party programs). And if you don't use the notations to set buyouts, you'll get a lot less people willing to take a chance on you. " I remember the day they added that functionality, it was right after a stash tab sale. Pissed a lot of people off. Bought all those plain stash tabs to get told they were cheated out of something nice. GGG really dropped the ball on that one. Even more so I think to people that bought hundreds of plain tabs because they didn't think a header on a tab was worth the extra cash (I thought it was, but I like to be really organized). But like I've been saying, I'm okay with the situation. I don't think there is a large reason to bash on GGG for making trade tabs part of premiums. I do find it unusual that they just didn't give them away for free though and scrap the third party programs, and maybe leave the indexer(s) alone. That's what I would have done, transitioned out forum trading. Sure, there wouldn't have been a reason to purchase new things (unless you needed more tabs period), so you could see it as a cash grab, but turning off forum trading theoretically should have reduced the overhead on GGG's servers. Without knowing the numbers though, maybe that isn't a realistic expectation. |
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" GGG's choice to solve this has always felt kind of hypocritical. Having to open your wallet rightly sets off alarm bells for many people too. Instead of solving the issue by giving access to the function to everyone, they gave people a second poison and let them choose between the old one and the new one. Now, don't get me wrong, I don't think that it's an issue that GGG would sell premium tabs or standard tabs. GGG cannot offer infinite storage, and letting players pay to get to whatever amount of storage they feel most comfortable with is a decent solution. However, trading (including selling) is a major part of the game, and requiring players to either choose between paying money and trusting third-party software to access it does seem to me like an attempt to shake players for cash. To me, GGG needs to look for a way to give access to one single trade tab to everyone, even if there needs to be condition to access it, so that players won't be making twenty different accounts to access twenty different premium stash tabs. Making it achievement-based? Requiring to complete a specific task in every league you want to access it? It's not like there aren't many solutions to solve the issue of multi-accounts. TL;DR: It's like offering 500$ bus tickets as an alternative to hitch-hiking or walking all the way. Sure, it's a new solution, and some may opt for it, but that's still not a decent solution. PS: the quote comes from the first trade improvements announcement. |
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" That doesnt change anything at all that it is available to everyone for free. If there were no procurement, I would agree that prem tabs are kinda p2w. I'm just saying that your approach is kinda cherry picking. Since the existence of procurement does weaken your argument that prem stashtabs are p2w, you just say we shouldn't include it in the p2w discussion and I think this is just wrong, especially since procurement existed long before the prem stash tabs and was successfully used for many years without any accident and it was officially accepted by the devs. There's literally no reason at all to exclude procurement from this discussion. But it's quite possible that I have misunderstood you at this point. So maybe you can calirfy things if I have really done so. " I can also place notes on items I want to buy in procurement. But since poe.trade is used to sell stuff, I highly doubt that many people search items that someone else wants to buy. Let people try it, but I wonder how successful they will be with that approach. And about scamming: I can also scam people with procurement. But that doesn't change that I highly doubt that anyone will check the credibility of a player. If I dont like a price, I go on and look for something better priced. Just because a minority posts things on reddit doesn't mean it's a big issue. I mean: Are we talking about 10 reports per day? per week? I don't see any forum threads here complaining about scams and trust me, this community is very fast when it comes to complaining about the tiniest issue. So it's not a big deal. " Like I said: If the manual setup is to much for you, you have to use procurement or just get over it and buy prem tabs. In the end, you have 2 fast options, one is for free and one costs money. And if you dont have the money and you dont trust proocurement, then it's your own decission, but you have to live with the consequences and set up your shop manually or dont have a shop at all. " And then again: You can upgrade your normal stash tabs. A normal stah tab costs you 30 points. An upgrade to premium costs you 15 points. A premium stash tab costs you 40 points. That's a difference of 5 points, which is 50 cent. Ok, but this is the price for ONE tab! Now lets compare bundles. A stash tab bundle in discount costs 110 points and the prem stash tab bundle costs 200 points. Now if you want to upgrade those 6 normal ones, it costs you 90 points, which is a total of exactly 200 points! That means if you upgrade your normal bundle stash tabs it costs the same as buying the prem stash tab bundle! It's simple math and I dont think people would have saved much more when they had bought a discounted premium stash tab bundle. So those peoples were pissed off pretty much for nothing or only a very small amount of money (maybe 2-3 dollars). And lets not forget that you don't have to upgrade all your stashtabs. Even if you have 100 normal ones, you can just upgrade 5 or 10 of them for selling stuff and leave the rest normal. " Well, GGG is not just a developer. They are a company with the ultimative goal to make money and have enough to make a (good) living. So finding new ways to make money is ok. That being said, I respect GGG that they stick to the f2p rule without going heavy p2w, because that's not the easiest approach to create a (financial) successful game. You have no guarenteed income with that approach and always need to hope that people constantly buy supporter packs, cosmetics and account features. Like GGG said, stash tabs are their best going product (naturally) and to motivate people to buy more of them, they implemented the trade option. This motivates people to buy prem tabs right from the start and also motivates those who have normal ones to upgrade them. It's easy money without breaking the game. And I think they stay with procurement and indexers, because it works and people have adapted to that. Like they say: Never change a winning team. It's also a good sign in my opinion that GGG is working together with the community. I mean, they depend on poe.trade, because this indexer makes trade possible at all. And most developers would try to bring those down, but GGG accepts that the community wants to be involved in the developing process and that's why 3rd party programms get accepted by them. Otherwise they would have done something long long ago. Last edited by AceNightfire on Jul 3, 2016, 9:09:24 AM
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" LeL Now isn't this a valuable gem. IF there were no 3rd party programs, premium stash tabs are "kinda" p2w. IF there were no people who slave their asses off for free, premium stash tabs are kinda p2w. so GGG/you explains away the Premium stash tab sales by offering the work of other people for free? If you cant see a problem with this there is no argument that will persuade you. Totally fine to have some crazy ass .exe file run on my pc from a random guy on the planet with no accountability. Sure mate sure,ill use this session ID, let me see whats in your stash, you can trust me. Offering programs made by fans to excuse charging for programs made officially. Flawless logic right there. Brought to you by : "PoE is all about trade and its never p2w". "Oh, wanna trade easily and securely through our systems? $$$$" Cheers.. btw, lab sucks | |
"Can you tell me what I have in my public stash tabs? No using any 3rd party tools though. I bet you can't name 1 thing in my "p2w" tabs. Guild Leader The Amazon Basin <BASIN>
Play Nice and Show Some Class www.theamazonbasin.com | |
" Your did not comprehend what i wrote. | |
" I included all in game and GGG provided solutions in my argument -- well, okay I didn't talk about trade chat in that last post, but I have in this thread (but trade chat is just spam). Discarding all third party programs wouldn't be cherry picking in my view. Especially since I considered them in my argument that premium tabs aren't a big deal. Cherry picking is ignoring things that aren't in your arguments favor, not considering and weighting them. " Any reports on the official forums about scams are suppressed by GGG as naming and shaming. GGG does not endorse this practice so you won't find it here, at least very much. " I think you misunderstood. If you reduce overhead on your server costs, then that is money in the bank. Does it make money? No, but unless you make more money than you save, it is a less effective solution. But without knowing the exact math I can't say whether or not my position is valid. I don't know the numbers. It just is the way I would have gone. " Actually I think it's a bad thing that GGG relies on third party developers. Having a community that helps the game is good, interacting with the community is good, depending on them is not. Ultimately the goal should be transitioning away from community led initiatives (not just trampling on them because that only demoralizes the community). |
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