Are Stashtabs PAY2WIN?

Firstly, we must know what you call "winning" because there are plenty of playstyles in POE.
If your goal is to become Bill Gates in POE with a ton of currencies.... yes, tabs are really usefull and give you a good advantage. With the same level/knowledge you cannot beat someone with xx tabs (including premium) with you poor 4 tabs. However it doesn't mean that you will not be able to do some good business.

But if you want to win max level races then, play SSF and you will see: the impact of tabs is quite non-existent.
From my own experience, I was top10 pathfinder during flashback event with only 5 tabs... (and without playing a lot). You just need to improve your stash management skill. At the beginning, it's quite hard, especially for maps and currencies but with more experience it will become easier.

Few tips in SSF:
- Don't store a ton of useless unique
- Don't store white map if you are doing red ones (yellow is only if you need for elder or things like that)
- Use your currencies (do you build up fat reserves for the winter or what ?): try to 6 links something etc...
- If you really want to keep some specific items for standard league (even if you will NEVER use them, we all known that), use one or two mules

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Sickness wrote:

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Miathan51 wrote:

It's not P2W imo. Stash tabs are convenience. Huge convenience, but still convenience. You can spend all the money on the world on stash tabs and your character won't gain a single stat point. Its power and the speed at which it levels up (and thus gains power) will stay exactly the same. What I'm saying is, there's no link to the "win" in P2W.

Having a couple of premium tabs allows you to earn currency faster, which allows for faster power gain. That is one link to p2w.

So your telling me when you buy tabs, your currency drop rates magically increase? That's strange i always thought that was iiq :/

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ajo wrote:

Yes, tabs are P2W.

P2W is a term that means:
- Real money = In-game benefits. (Simple as that)

It's not that simple and in my opinion simply not right.

A benefit doesnt automatically mean you win. I try to explain this.

Stashtabs are more like a convinience. They come with certain advantages, that's true, but they also come with certain disadvantages that were often named in the other thread before.

Advantages:
- You can keep items that you normaly needed to throw away. Maybe for another character you will make some day or to sell it
- You can sell stuff more easily thanks to premium
- You will start selling more stuff since it's convinient (compared to a selfmade forum thread)
- You can stack items like currency, maps, essence, fragments etc.
- You can catogorize and color your stashtabs, making browsing through them easier

Disadvantages:
- More stashtabs lead to more micromanagement (especially when using it to sell items)
- You spent more time in your stash
- You start hording things you will probably never need or never sell
- You pick up more items during your runs (for C recipe for example) since you have the room for storing them. Your map clearing gets interrupted more often thanks to that, leaving you with a slower map clear.
- Your Standard SC/HC gets flooded with tons of non-usable tabs you have to sort one day
- You will sell more stuff, also slowing you down since you need to get out of your map, go to your storage, take the item, trade, wishing the guy "ty gl ss" and getting back on the map (including both loading times)
- You also start selling low worth items (like 1c worth), interrupting you very often.

As you can see, stashtabs do not only bring you benefits. They certainly slow down your gameplay, since you start picking up more, spending more time in your storage, hording stuff, setting up prices for items you want to sell and spending the actual time to sell something when you get messaged. And someone who doesnt (ab)use stashtabs spends more time clearing maps. That means he will kill more mobs in a given timeframe, resulting in more drops and higher chance for really good drops (exalteds, high value uniques etc.). There's a good reason why pro players get rich so fast and it's not because they spent alot time hording and selling tons of stuff.

These disadvantages are confirmed automatically if you watch streams from pro-players. They seldom touch their stash at the start of a season and do not sell anything at all. They only use the currency tab here and there, but you certainly dont need that stashtab when you want to progress through the game fast. Stashmicromanagement would slow down those pro-players to much, leaving them behind players who ignore their stash in the first 2-3 days.

And those pro-players should be our prime example. Why? Because they play the game in it's purest form. They are always on top, they dont buy stuff from others at the start (since there is simply no market yet, so it's like ssf) and they know the mechanics to clear high tier content without all the above benefits. They show us that stashtabs are really not needed to breeze through the game.

So stashtabs are the OPPOSITE of being P2W. They slow you down to a point, that you could NEVER compete with pro-players if you depend on and use them alot. So they kinda make you actually lose the game. BUT they still provide advantages for those who dont want to win at the first place.

So it's more like this:
P4C = Pay for Convinience

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Sickness wrote:

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Miathan51 wrote:

It's not P2W imo. Stash tabs are convenience. Huge convenience, but still convenience. You can spend all the money on the world on stash tabs and your character won't gain a single stat point. Its power and the speed at which it levels up (and thus gains power) will stay exactly the same. What I'm saying is, there's no link to the "win" in P2W.

Having a couple of premium tabs allows you to earn currency faster, which allows for faster power gain. That is one link to p2w.

Read the above and you may understand. If you want to answer on the above, please also give good arguments why I'm wrong. Thanks.

got about 150 stash tabs. bought most of them before all the special tabs and quad tabs came out, only buying quad tabs now.
Yes, having tabs is a godsend. For example. at the start of the league one can collect random rares, id them in bulk and place them in multiple prem tabs for sale. One doesnt even have to look at the mods - when you put 1000 items for sale for 1-2 chaos, just sit back and watch as flippers help you zero in on that one expensive item that you have among 1000. Put it aside, price it correctly - profit.
Yeah, i dont even look at the mods until someone asks to buy it. Needless to say they dont get the item.

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BigBadWolf1776 wrote:

Yeah, i dont even look at the mods until someone asks to buy it. Needless to say they dont get the item.

You mean ... you are one of the reasons why trading feels tedious and unenjoyable for many ?
Don't you think that it's a very selfish thing to do ? Don't you have any respect for other people's time ?

No

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ajo wrote:

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AceNightfire wrote:

A benefit doesnt automatically mean you win.

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ajo wrote:

P2W is a term that means:
- Real money = In-game benefits. (Simple as that)

Terms are words and compound words or multi-word expressions that in specific contexts are given specific meanings

You don't get it, do you? You simply dont WIN by having them. The definition of win is:

"a successful result in a contest, conflict, bet, or other endeavour; a victory"

In PoE, there is a contest: Who reaches lvl 100 first and who clears the highest tier bosses first. Stashtabs dont let you win this contest, they even SLOW you down if you use them.

Furthermore, you also buy disadvantages on top of the benefits. If you had carefully read what I wrote, then you would have understood that.

Convenience isn't winning. It's not even the same as "mechanical benefit." It's convenience. QoL. That's all stash tabs ever were. They make it easier to organize things for sale. You don't need to sell crap at all if you don't want to.

Stash tabs are only "p2w" if you consider yourself to be in meaningful competition with prominent streamers and other wealthy players. You aren't, and if you're arguing about stash tabs, you never will be, for reasons totally unrelated to stash tabs.

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ajo wrote:

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AceNightfire wrote:

You don't get it, do you? You simply dont WIN by having them. The definition of win is...

Actually you don't get it. You are still arguing if a term carries the meaning or the individual words themselves.

High school is a institute for stoners by your argument.

Get it?

No, High may be commonly used as a word for people who are stoned. But if you take the clear definition of the word high, it means just that: High. We have pre-school (PREpares you for school), elementary school (teaches you elementary stuff you need to know), Middle School (here it's about the elementary stuff, but in more depth) and last bust not least the highest form of school: the high school.

P2W ever and always meant that you can get CLEAR advantages over other players that let you progress through the game much faster or make you clearly stronger compared to other players (and therefore letting you win). So the word "WIN" can be understood literally in this case like in High School, because it meant that you WIN over other players (with no MTX stuff) thanks to the stuff you bought for real money.

They definitely are. People who argue otherwise simply feel the need to defend GGG for some reason when there is nothing to defend. Nothing wrong with P2W as long as the price is reasonable.