Are Stash Tabs Pay To Win ? Science

It is not only a problem of time. That would not be P2W but only pay to do things faster, since you can work with fake accounts for storage.

The problem is that PoE need the interaction with other players in order to make any endgame-build. You can loose a trade because of time, since someone else can 'steal' you a good deal while you are switching account/character. That's why any well-organized shops pays for a store-house (both on earth and in Wraeclast).

Can we discuss an example that's a bit easier to prove?

Let's use the "matching names" recipes. It should go without saying that the more things you can store at a time, the better you will be able to match rare names due to the Pigeonhole Principle.

The two use cases we want to compare are one account with unlimited stash space, and an unlimited number of accounts with 4 stash tabs each. Call these two cases "Stash Tabs" and "Accounts" respectively.

They're equally infinite in terms of the amount of space they contain, thus there are no advantages in the ability to make matches.

In terms of the complexity of the matching operation, both players can set up scripts to scan their inventories from the website (on one account or on many accounts) and produce matches. These scripts run in roughly the same amount of time, and they're done out-of-band/asynchronously, so no advantages in computation requirements, either.

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Now we turn to time efficiency in both storing the items and in executing the vendor recipe, which I hope to show is where they differ.

The player kills monsters and generates rare items and fills up his inventory.
- Stash Tabs can place these items into the first available stash tab, then return to farming.
- Accounts has to have a separate client running the mule account, which p2p trades for the items from the main account, then deposits them into the first available mule account stash tab. If all 4 stash tabs are filled, he must log in a new mule. If he does not have extra mule accounts, he must register a new account.
... There is much more time and effort involved here in the Accounts case.

Later, the player has run his matching script and produced the list of locations of all the matching rare names.
- Stash Tabs follows this list to the letter, grabbing the items and vendoring to Nessa nearby.
- Accounts has to have a separate client running the mule account, which p2p trades the items from the list into the main account who executes the vendor recipe. This may involve logging into every mule account, assuming that the matching rares are evenly distributed through all the mule accounts.
... Again, there is much more time and effort spent in the Accounts case.

The end result is that Accounts (a characterization of purely free play) is at a time and effort disadvantage versus the Stash Tabs (a characterization of paid play). We can quantify this amount of time (in this one example case) and find that it is non-zero. Not large, but not zero.

It's not unlike my previous question of "Is it P2W to sell something that grants 1DPS increase for your character?"

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I also really like HellGauss's example where a trade is time-limited, and if you fiddle around logging in and out of mule accounts, you may lose the trade. That one is much more straightforward to feel intuitively, but it is hard to quantify exactly how much time you lose and how many trades are lost because of that.

Pneuma, we were saying there that there isn't a real actually need for more space ( or not much more at best ) than 4 tabs when not hoarding useless stuff.

Therefore, the question why : is the hoarding of more items than in 4 stash for an optimized actually player worth the time ?


I have couple of tabs for gems, but I know that I will never use most of them, I like to have all of those, kinda like a collection though, but that's basically it, and for many other things that I hoard ( I wound not now, but I'll need to clean it someday ).

I find the "first one to take an item to sell it" argument pretty unlikely and extreme tbh, the things that are really worth a lot ( = worth hoarding ), just hoard them in one or 2 stash tabs and that's it.

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Fruz wrote:

Pneuma, we were saying there that there isn't a real actually need for more space ( or not much more at best ) than 4 tabs when not hoarding useless stuff.

Therefore, the question why : is the hoarding of more items than in 4 stash for an optimized actually player worth the time ?

The "matching names" case is optimized to show the use of hoarding useless rares. It turns alt shards into alch orbs, and the time required to do so can be tuned down to a very low amount of extra time spent. I still feel that it's a small enough advantage to not care about, but it is still an advantage that can only be obtained with money.

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4 tabs is pretty meager from my own experience. One tab gets dedicated purely to currency, and the remaining 3 would need to hold all your hard-to-find twink gear and >L10 skill and support gems. I'm also an altaholic, so that's a larger requirement for twink gear than most (though altaholic status means I forfeit any concerns about topping the ladder and engaging in "competitive PvE").

I could dump a lot of twink gear if I only ever focused on one character, and could probably fit into 4 tabs just barely, but that's without any hyper-efficient things like trying to do the matching names recipe or hoarding gavels/stone hammers for chisels and so on.

Separately, the guild stash has been the biggest improvement on stash tabs, since it's the perfect place to do shared storage of twink gear (since not everyone is rerolling at the same time, but everyone wants to use the twink gear eventually).

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Overall, the question that keeps bugging me is... why 4? Why not 10? Why not 100? Why not an infinite amount (i.e. press a button, receive a new tab on demand)? How important are stash tabs to GGG's bottom-line? It's a scary thought that the entire project may have floated on this awkward UI decision and that they have to balance vendor recipes so precariously so as not to give a strong advantage to people with more stash tabs.

As an example of the latter, GGG cannot in good faith add a vendor recipe that is "vendor 4 full tabs (regardless of contents), receive an exalt orb", since that does give a huge advantage to filling space with useless junk. Not that I'm saying they would add such a recipe, but it adds a constraint where there logically shouldn't be.

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pneuma wrote:

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Fruz wrote:

Pneuma, we were saying there that there isn't a real actually need for more space ( or not much more at best ) than 4 tabs when not hoarding useless stuff.

Therefore, the question why : is the hoarding of more items than in 4 stash for an optimized actually player worth the time ?

The "matching names" case is optimized to show the use of hoarding useless rares. It turns alt shards into alch orbs, and the time required to do so can be tuned down to a very low amount of extra time spent. I still feel that it's a small enough advantage to not care about, but it is still an advantage that can only be obtained with money.

Is there no opportunity lost when not being selective in what rares you take to town? You are assuming that those rares would have been taken to town anyway. But there is a "cost" associated with taking more trips to town. If there are no more trips to town, then you are taking rares to stash while missing the opportunity for easier currency like chromatic orbs and alchemy shards. By taking only items with the right mods to give you alchemy shards, you will get orbs of alchemy faster than waiting for matching names to appear in your stash. I know that example illustrates a purpose for having more stash tabs, but that is the most inefficient archaic recipe there is and I would be extremely surprised if you can find any top players (ie, the winners) using it.

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pneuma wrote:

4 tabs is pretty meager from my own experience. One tab gets dedicated purely to currency, and the remaining 3 would need to hold all your hard-to-find twink gear and >L10 skill and support gems. I'm also an altaholic, so that's a larger requirement for twink gear than most (though altaholic status means I forfeit any concerns about topping the ladder and engaging in "competitive PvE").

I could dump a lot of twink gear if I only ever focused on one character, and could probably fit into 4 tabs just barely, but that's without any hyper-efficient things like trying to do the matching names recipe or hoarding gavels/stone hammers for chisels and so on.

Well, in my honest opinion, we can only discuss about something being pay to win if it gives a direct advantage from a competitive perspective, which here means = the ladder, and that means of course a single char for efficiency ( maybe a second one for an extra support gem ? does not need stash space anyway ).

So I think that the question is the thing that can be up to debate.

I don't think that it's worth it, and there's ( to me, at least ) the line that separate people thinking about those tabs as p2w, and those who do not, basically.



I could not comfortably use only 4 tabs personally, but I'm not playing the ladder, I like to keep stuff, and more than ~70% of what I hoard, I'm pretty sure that I will never sell it/use it ( and since I'm an altaholic also, there's a lot I use already :] ).
It's a bit like a collection to me ( for gems, it kinda is at least ), I find something and I think "hey, that's a nice one ... let's keep it for now", but the more I play, the more I realize that I should just vendor most of those ones lol, my stash is highly un-optimized, it's just more convenient for my play style, and my purpose is definitely not to "win", in PoE.

4 stash tabs are NOT enough, say what you want, Path of Exile is a pay to win game, sad but true. Now take my money GGG i need more tabs.

I have always thought it was a little pay to win and no I do not care either.

I discovered a flaw in the OP's logic

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There once was a man named Joe, who saw a game called POE and decided he'd try it. He got FOUR stash tabs. Wow, that's a lot of stash tabs right class?

Actually, he got 4 stash tabs, plus the inventory space of all his possible character slots combined - which totals ... idk, more than 4 stash tabs

Having noted this issue with the premise that I'm certain nobody ever discovered before, until just now, you may continue with this debate.

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Qjaum wrote:

4 stash tabs are NOT enough, say what you want, Path of Exile is a pay to win game, sad but true. Now take my money GGG i need more tabs.

You can always mule, it's not p2w at all.