Can we stop pretending that Path of Exile is free to play?

In every new league, when i start a new character, a GGG employee come to my home, puts a gun to my head and forces me to purchase a supporter pack.



Does anyone really needs 30 tabs? NO.

Does 30 tabs gives you a nice QoL game play? YES.


I fail to see how can this can still be debated after some 7 years of existence.

You wanna play for free? Feel free to enjoy the game. You wanna spit up some cash on it? Feel free to do so.

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Katastruff wrote:

In every new league, when i start a new character, a GGG employee come to my home, puts a gun to my head and forces me to purchase a supporter pack.



Does anyone really needs 30 tabs? NO.

Does 30 tabs gives you a nice QoL game play? YES.


I fail to see how can this can still be debated after some 7 years of existence.

You wanna play for free? Feel free to enjoy the game. You wanna spit up some cash on it? Feel free to do so.

There is no real end game to this.

GGG can't put a pricetag on it anymore, that ship has sailed. They should have at the start to avoid the semantics of pay what you want for the game versus pay nothing; but here we are.

The people that are whining won't get what they want, which is actually kind of hard to tell what they actually want.

It's pointless but this is General Discussion.... Where pointless things come to be debated ad nauseam.

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Phrazz wrote:

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Turtledove wrote:

PoE is absolutely Free to Try Out.

PoE is Free to Play if you're extremely poor or extremely cheap or extremely casual.

PoE is much better if you pay at least a little bit, 500 mtx points or so. GGG deserves at least a little something for making a game you enjoy.

And that goes for most, if not all "F2P" titles.

Sure, you have some games that are STRICTLY cosmetics only. But those are few and far in between. Especially if we're looking at games that are pushing tons of content out each three months.

I understand people calling PoE "P2W". I disagree, but I do understand it. It just boils down to how we define "F2P" and "P2W". Some people refuse to use the "F2P" term as long as a game doesn't give a non-paying costumer the same experience as a paying costumer. Others fail to understand the difference between "free" and "F2P".

Anyhow, I don't really care. PoE is - and will always be FAR better than some REAL "P2W" titles out there, so I don't really see the problem. Is PoE "F2P" enough to market themselves that way? Yes, I think so.

I agree completely, well said.

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Katastruff wrote:

In every new league, when i start a new character, a GGG employee come to my home, puts a gun to my head and forces me to purchase a supporter pack.



Does anyone really needs 30 tabs? NO.

Does 30 tabs gives you a nice QoL game play? YES.


I fail to see how can this can still be debated after some 7 years of existence.

You wanna play for free? Feel free to enjoy the game. You wanna spit up some cash on it? Feel free to do so.

I think the debate falls on one thing really.

When they added specialty tabs that MASSIVELY condensed resources (It would probably take 100 regular tabs to fit 5000 of each currency normally)...that's when the lines were blurred for me.

Don't get me wrong, it's great quality of life. However, it IS paid quality of life.

Just being able to buy more places to store your junk is one thing, but being able to condense dozens to hundreds of tabs into one that you can't get unless you pay is the real "grey area".

No one is saying you NEED 30 tabs. But the idea of the game being a miserable experience without at least a currency, map, and shard tab...that's the real question.

**EDIT** Because I've seen this a few times. Yes, they need to make money. But why does everyone think if they didn't charge for tabs, the money would stop flowing in? I would rather see every new player start with one of each specialty tab, and a premium tab.

That way, when they want to put money into it, they can buy MTX or something cosmetic for fun. That's a far more pleasant paid model than basically telling people, "After you spend $60 on the QoL stuff, THEN you can pay us more to look cool."

Man, they are still going in this completly pointless thread. People who thinks this game should offer LITERALLY EVERYTHING to them FOR FREE will bitch about it no matter what. People who enjoy this game and are ready to spend couple bucks to make their experience better wont change their opinion about this game either.
All those 11 pages can be pretty much summed up by "My opinion is more important than yours and I dont give a shit about your arguments!"

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Aynix wrote:

Man, they are still going in this completly pointless thread. People who thinks this game should offer LITERALLY EVERYTHING to them FOR FREE will bitch about it no matter what. People who enjoy this game and are ready to spend couple bucks to make their experience better wont change their opinion about this game either.
All those 11 pages can be pretty much summed up by "My opinion is more important than yours and I dont give a shit about your arguments!"

As the one that created the thread, I'll openly say that I disagree. I bought plenty of supporter packs and bought the tabs. At the time (3.0 era) it didn't feel that bad, but the specialty stashes didn't exist yet. If I'd started now, I'd feel much more pressured to buy the specialty tabs, instead of supporting by buying cosmetics (which are useless really, but more "fun").

Long story short - I enjoy this game, but if I were a new player now, I'd be more ready and willing to spend a couple bucks on a flashy outfit than a bunch of quality of life stash tabs that really felt necessary to enjoy myself.

**EDIT** I should say, I'm still pretty salty that I've had to buy multiple map tabs because of the horrible way they've treated atlas changes every other league or so. I know I could technically have played without them, but once I bought one, I shouldn't have to buy more to have the same experience. If ANYTHING, the map tabs debacle over the last couple years has been the closest thing to P2W that this game has had (constantly paying more over time to get the same experience).

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Redthorne82 wrote:

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Aynix wrote:

Man, they are still going in this completly pointless thread. People who thinks this game should offer LITERALLY EVERYTHING to them FOR FREE will bitch about it no matter what. People who enjoy this game and are ready to spend couple bucks to make their experience better wont change their opinion about this game either.
All those 11 pages can be pretty much summed up by "My opinion is more important than yours and I dont give a shit about your arguments!"

As the one that created the thread, I'll openly say that I disagree. I bought plenty of supporter packs and bought the tabs. At the time (3.0 era) it didn't feel that bad, but the specialty stashes didn't exist yet. If I'd started now, I'd feel much more pressured to buy the specialty tabs, instead of supporting by buying cosmetics (which are useless really, but more "fun").

Long story short - I enjoy this game, but if I were a new player now, I'd be more ready and willing to spend a couple bucks on a flashy outfit than a bunch of quality of life stash tabs that really felt necessary to enjoy myself.

**EDIT** I should say, I'm still pretty salty that I've had to buy multiple map tabs because of the horrible way they've treated atlas changes every other league or so. I know I could technically have played without them, but once I bought one, I shouldn't have to buy more to have the same experience. If ANYTHING, the map tabs debacle over the last couple years has been the closest thing to P2W that this game has had (constantly paying more over time to get the same experience).

The fact that you still donr understand basic difference between p2p and p2w is amazing.

This is how i explain the game to new players.

Path of exile is a free to play demo of a game.
You can access all content , but doing so without spending any money on the specialized tabs will lead to a miserable time.

Saying the game is outright free is wrong these days. GGG does everything in their power to make inventory space feel more and more limited.

I would rather POE be a $30 game and give out more freebies for events.

Overall i am taking a break from POE right now as the game developers are stretching themselves too thin , resulting in very poor mechanics being released and not flushed out. They are too concerened about releasing any content these days over releasing good content that can be enjoyed without no lifeing the game.

It is a shame because the game could be amazing if they simply abandoned the 3 month cycle and delivered larger fully tested , non meta shifted seasons.

I am spending my time in last epoch - and it is much more enjoyable to play.
Slower pace , and much better crafting system that everyone can do and not just for the 0.00001% of players.

I think the solution to pay to play or too higher quality of life is to have many more special loots appearing in the next few leagues.

These loots are special in the way that they take up four slots in stash, they cannot be stacked up, then, finally the margin between the free to play players and pay to players will become much more smaller. (Crafting my evil thoughts in my basement.)

What makes a pay to win game pay to win? When someone else have more advantage than you.

face the reality, NO thing is FREE in this world

even when we were death, still need to pay for the coffin

ask yourself if you are one of the POE creator, will you doing thing for free

BUT

there is only ONE confirmed is FREE to everyone, have FAITH in Jesus Christ will get salvation. Amen!