Compendium of refutations to arguments on the topic of - "Pay to win in Path of Exile"

Introduction

Hello brothers and sisters,

Summer 2020 I was extremely bored for a day so I took up an interesting task to challenge most of the popular arguments against the idea of P2W in Path of Exile.
I posted it previously in the Steam forums but I thought that it would be fun to see the responses that the official forum produces as well.

If you wish to reply, please read the thread at least superficially.

Have fun!

Why is there a strong opposition against the idea of the existence of P2W in any game?

Having P2W elements in a game delegitimizes the efforts of the paid users and gives the game, with it's developers a bad reputation of being unfair to it's users.
Killed the hardest boss in game? Who cares, it's a P2W game anyways - just like that, all of your efforts were marginalized.

If you really care for your game, you don't want your game nor it's studio being perceived as unethical, unfair or have any of the terrible qualities which they could have.

My position

I personally have taken the stance that PoE is P2W which I have no problems with and before accusing biased responses, I believe making arguments solely from middle-ground is unproductive, if not impossible.
The arguments and refutations provided by me are written to ground an axiom that P2W does exist in Path of Exile.

A game being either indirectly P2W or directly P2W is irrelevant as the end result is still the same for both pathways.

Pay to win in PoE is about premium stash tabs and the ownership relation of them with players who do not own premium stash tabs - I'm not discussing SSF, cosmetics or lootboxes in this thread.

Does any of this matter? Not really, it's for fun.

1. You cannot "Pay to Win" because there is nothing to win

This is the most common argument in the discussion.

The problem of this argument is appealing to a narrow, malleable, personal and subjective definition of the word "win" which can be only combated by giving it a clear definition for it's dynamic in it's environment.

Pay to win in this context means having an advantage over your co-players within the environment(s) which you both share.

If you do not agree with that definition, write your own definition of P2W in the replies and let's start from there.

If GGG introduced paid level-ups, skips, boosts, items & orbs in their point store; the game still would not have defined prizes or a winner but a reasonable person would claim that the game is P2W.

If we used the literal meaning of winning strictly through paying only, we would not be able to label even the worst P2W games as pay to win because if you can beat an equally skilled but a paying player in a 1 in a 1,000,000 chance, you've beat a paying player, hence it's not forced to pay to win.

2. How do you win in Path of Exile?

If we go by the definition of "winning" being an "advantage" over other players, then we can say that premium stash tabs provide a psychological, sociological, economical, time-saving, visual and competitive advantage on a very serious magnitude.

If you do not buy at least 1 stash tab, you will be spending in multitudes more time creating a trade offer than a player who does have a stash tab.
Since PoE has a free market based economy which is heavily reliant on stash tabs, an equivalent scenario would be using dove mail instead of a computer to buy stocks.

If you have a premium stash tab, you will be spending ludicrously less time than someone who doesn't have at least one which will translate into you having more time to acquire currency / gear / items.

3. For someone to win, someone has to lose

In Path of Exile that is absolutely true. As soon as you list an item, you're in a battle with everyone else who wants to buy or sell the item. If everyone has more space to store items and can sell items faster than you, then you will always be lagging behind players of equal skill and knowledge to you due to the lack of premium stash tabs.

There is no "You lose" screen, but you potentially might not be getting that Headhunter which you desire, you might not be able to join a group of players, you might not have enough space for items to level fast enough, you might not get to socialize with as many people through trading if you don't have premium stash tabs.

The more there are people who make use of premium stash tabs, the lower your odds of reaching your goal with the use of just 4 normal stash tabs in Path of Exile's economy is.

4. This game is not a competition

We have defined prizes like challenge rewards, physical rewards, private & public race event rewards which are impossible for some to achieve without the extra help of stash tabs.
Within the past year there have been races and events with real monetary rewards in tens of thousands of dollars. A reasonable estimate for physical and digital rewards for playing Path of Exile effectively should be in hundreds of thousands of dollars.

5. You can clear all of the content without premium tabs

You can clear the content with or without an advantage - neither proves or disproves the P2W presence.

Technically and theoretically you can clear the whole game without them but the same story applies for almost every other pay to win game as well.
The magnitude of discomfort avoided and improved QoL by premium tabs to the player makes it unreasonable on a practical level to not invest in them.

Players who have limited amount of time, might not be able to clear all content or reach their item goals without premium tabs.

6. Path of Exile is a singleplayer game

Path of Exile is a singleplayer game with a free marketplace economy. From the "Trade Manifesto" - "The ability to trade any item is a fundamental part of why people enjoy playing Path of Exile".

7. Buying more premium tabs cannot make you win more therefore it's not P2W

As long as you don't have at least one premium stash tab, the binary state of you being able to make transactions as fast as a premium tab owner is disabled, putting you at a disadvantage.

8. Everyone has different arbitrary goals in PoE, therefore there cannot be a winner

Everyone has different arbitrary goals in an array of shared possibilities intersectional to each other. Most of the goals which PoE players have are related to getting good or unique items and killing the strongest bosses / tiers possible.

As long as the players goals intertwine, there will be competition in the market for gear & items, making some win and some lose in their small battles in the marketplace.

9. You need to spend only $1 to get a stash tab, everyone can afford it

Even if it was 1 cent, it wouldn't matter because the discussion is about the binary state of Path of Exile being either a game where you can pay for an advantage or not.

10. Most people don't think that Path of Exile is P2W

Frameworks of logic don't need a population's majority support.

11. Path of Exile's developers need to make money somehow

Real life private entity's wishes are irrelevant to how in-game dynamics work.

12. Hoarding more items won't make you have an advantage

If one person gets to list thousands of items in a selling tab and another person only 10, then the one who has more space will have more business opportunities and will most likely gain more currency, even if both simply hoard items.

In terms of practicality, four stash tabs is not enough nowadays anymore due to the extreme variety of expensive loot dropped. It's guaranteed that you will be making sacrifices on what to store or not and have to use far more cognitive power to resolve stash managements problems if you don't have premium stash tabs once you've reached maps.

13. Path of Exile doesn't lock content out for not paying

You can still have an advantage over other players even with all content unlocked.
If you can never acquire enough currency and trade items / maps because you're too slow to trade with normal stash tabs, you won't get to the content which is technically available.
This practice is almost universally true for mobile P2W games - you're not literally locked out, just have to wait or grind excruciatingly and unreasonably long where it becomes unenjoyable and impractical to not pay.

14. Path of Exile is free to play both practically and by definition

Being free to play doesn't exempt it from being possible to pay for an advantage.

15. Premium stash tabs aren't essential - they're a luxury

Premium stash tabs allow us to have an advantage over other players, even if it's just a luxury and a non-essential - the advantage is still there.

16. Stash tabs are just QOL and buying them alone won't make you progress faster

They are quality of life feature for a problem made by GGG which stops you progressing at a faster possible pace if you haven't bought them. Although you don't jump levels by buying stash tabs, you are buying additional tools which greatly increase your ability to compete in the marketplace and progress faster through that.

17. Other games are way more P2W and PoE is nothing compared to them

Stating that there are worse P2W game out there and for the game to be P2W, it needs to be as bad or worse than the other game, is a dishonest move which allows anyone to drag the goalpost to where-ever they wants as long as it's not the worst offender.

As an example - Black Desert Online is worse than Archeage, therefore Archeage is not P2W. If there's a revelation that Archage is actually worse than Black Desert Online, the goalpost can very comfortably moved to Clash of Clans - rinse and repeat!

Other games being more pay to win does not change the fact that there's an in-game advantage to be gained in Path of Exile by paying money.

18. Video games are made to waste time and entertain you, it makes no sense to buy stash tabs for it

This doesn't actually have anything to do with PoE being P2W but on how video games should work as a mere psychophilosophical model and nothing else.

On a psychological level it doesn't hold water either as we play games to waste time meaningfully - if we feel that we're literally just and only wasting time, we get frustrated and angry about it, as we all hold values, dreams and goals which we want to reach.
If video games were just a hamster wheel with no progress at all, we would not play them.

19. What other players do does not affect you as a player

The prices of items in the market depend on how fast they're dropped, sold and used - as long as the supply and demand is orchestrated by the other players alongside with you, the other players will affect your progress as a player.

20. Aila wins level 100 races in SSF with 4 normal tabs

If there were two Ailas on exactly the same similar skill level then the one who has more tabs will by definition have an advantage over the one who doesn't have them. The Aila with more tabs will have a lot higher chance of winning. This effect would be even greater in multitudes in trade leagues.

21. Aila level 100 proves that players don't need premium tabs to reach level 100

It proves that there is one narrow and unpopular goal which can be achieved without stash tabs, while not taking into account any other level of analysis or emotion.
You can have a goal of creating a character as well, doesn't refute that the other goals which involve stash tabs are disadvantaged by the non-payers.

22. The game is already easy enough to not need more stash tabs

This doesn't refute the fact that two equally skilled players will have drastically different results and journeys if one of them has premium stash tabs and the other does not.

23. Trading is just a small part of Path of Exile

Trading is not just one small part of the game but one extremely essential and ginormous core part of the game - the whole game revolves and is balanced around heavy trading.

Most items & gear is acquired through trading.
Around 40% of the time spent in this game on average is spent in hideouts, it's reasonable to assume that a large part of it goes under trading.

Being able to fulfill tasks in up to double digits of multitudes faster is not just a convenience but a very real and measurable advantage over competitors in the market which influences everyone's gameplay.
Pretending that the game is not Pay to Win is simply dishonest.

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That's it folks!
Feel free to criticize anything (:

ok so you touched on it a bit, but basically you need to boil things down to if you're being literal or what.

to the actual meaning of "pay to win" literally, PoE is absolutely not P2W. but when you consider things to be P2W when it gives distinct advantage or convenience or quality of life, then PoE is absolutely P2W.

just depends how you want to define it. i can see it both ways and i think of it both ways too.

if someone were to directly ask me if i thought PoE was P2W i'd response: yes and no.

"

xMustard wrote:

ok so you touched on it a bit, but basically you need to boil things down to if you're being literal or what.

to the actual meaning of "pay to win" literally, PoE is absolutely not P2W. but when you consider things to be P2W when it gives distinct advantage or convenience or quality of life, then PoE is absolutely P2W.

just depends how you want to define it. i can see it both ways and i think of it both ways too.

I'm being very literal (:

You can give me your definition, reading the first post might help you construct it.

I think we need to stray away from using the words "pay to win". In my opinion the term we should be using is "pay for advantage".

I think people get hung up on the word "win" and because of that it allows for easy dismissal of systems that give clear advantage for paying players. You touched on this with the example of two equally skilled players reaching level 100. The ones with premium tabs and now the auto sort tabs will get to 100 faster without question.

The question to me now is, what level of advantage do we find acceptable before we stop playing? I think Destiny is in a similar state with the release of stasis paywalled behind a $40 expansion. Stasis isnt an insta win button (in the broader sense over a course of a game) but any high level pvp player or trials players knows the stasis subclasses are inherently better than the light subclasses for pvp.

Its an interesting time with this for sure and I hope we can evolve our definitions of "pay to win".

"

1. You cannot "Pay to Win" because there is nothing to win

This is the most common argument in the discussion.

The problem of this argument is appealing to a narrow, malleable, personal and subjective definition of the word "win"

That is precisely what you are doing in the following bullet points though.

With no other knowledge or context, a broad, unmalleable, impersonal, and objective definition of winning in an un-scored single player RPG would be beating the final boss. That is the traditional 'win' of any RPG and if you make it anything different or obscure, that is narrowing the definition to suit an argument.

I think anyone that trades is probably cheating. How I know y'all didny buy them from one of dozens of RMT sites out there? Not to mention it's literally an item editor. you type in what you want FFS!

Instead of add remove and hoping u hit T1 in harvest, it's just add!

Poetrade is like

90+ life
explody
Frenzy
cumulative res 120%

Have a nice day

"

gladiatorpie wrote:

I think we need to stray away from using the words "pay to win". In my opinion the term we should be using is "pay for advantage".

I think people get hung up on the word "win" and because of that it allows for easy dismissal of systems that give clear advantage for paying players. You touched on this with the example of two equally skilled players reaching level 100. The ones with premium tabs and now the auto sort tabs will get to 100 faster without question.

Is there even a game where you can clearly "win" with money in a manner where it doesn't qualify as an "advantage"?

"

gladiatorpie wrote:

The question to me now is, what level of advantage do we find acceptable before we stop playing? I think Destiny is in a similar state with the release of stasis paywalled behind a $40 expansion. Stasis isnt an insta win button (in the broader sense over a course of a game) but any high level pvp player or trials players knows the stasis subclasses are inherently better than the light subclasses for pvp.

Its an interesting time with this for sure and I hope we can evolve our definitions of "pay to win".

I think the idea of P2W is so banalized in PoE that unless it's overly expensive and directly, constantly being shoved down your throat; it won't get much traction as a topic of discussion.

I think Runescape and Oldschool Runescape are both good examples of the same phenomena.
Oldschool Runescape has a direct P2W element of bonds with which you can buy anything except XP in half the skills but the game is not considered or discussed as a P2W game.
Runescape 3 where you have quite similar levels of P2W except you can buy XP to skills; with it being constantly, every day advertised to you is labelled as extreme P2W.

It's hard to compete in the PoE market already if you've paid less than $40.

"

innervation wrote:

"

1. You cannot "Pay to Win" because there is nothing to win

This is the most common argument in the discussion.

The problem of this argument is appealing to a narrow, malleable, personal and subjective definition of the word "win"

That is precisely what you are doing in the following bullet points though.

You deleted the second part of the sentence where I explain that a definition giving and narrowing has to be done in order to have a discussion only to tell me that I've given a definition and narrowed it.

Yes, I am precisely doing the thing that I said that I will do.

"

Kiss_Me_Quick wrote:

The problem of this argument is appealing to a narrow, malleable, personal and subjective definition of the word "win" which can be only combated by giving it a clear definition for it's dynamic in it's environment.

Doesn't bother me a bit if you call it P2W. It's not. Calling it that and supplying a page full of stuff is only making you look bad.

Having a premium tab isn't "winning'. Trading isn't "winning". Just because someone can do something that someone else can't isn't "unfair".

"

Kiss_Me_Quick wrote:

"

innervation wrote:

"

1. You cannot "Pay to Win" because there is nothing to win

This is the most common argument in the discussion.

The problem of this argument is appealing to a narrow, malleable, personal and subjective definition of the word "win"

That is precisely what you are doing in the following bullet points though.

You deleted the second part of the sentence where I explain that a definition giving and narrowing has to be done in order to have a discussion only to tell me that I've given a definition and narrowed it.

Yes, I am precisely doing the thing that I said that I will do.

"

Kiss_Me_Quick wrote:

The problem of this argument is appealing to a narrow, malleable, personal and subjective definition of the word "win" which can be only combated by giving it a clear definition for it's dynamic in it's environment.

If you can't avoid 'problematic' hypocrisy in point 1, why bother with the rest?

I want my 30 s--

jk

tl;dr

(too lazy: didn't read)