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

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Kiss_Me_Quick wrote:

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medicated03 wrote:

It is a %0 chance to beat someone in 30k usd of gear as a free player, you will lose 100/100 times. Infact in true pay to win games that guy will 1-2 shot every free player lol.

You're only arguing over the magnitude of it, not on the matter of instantly winning after paying money.

If you have the best free gear and I have the best p2w gear then when I went AFK, you could kill me - there, I lost although I paid money.
This is not even the most vivid example and it's not a 0% chance.
It's never a 0% chance unless the opposing player is instantly defeated after the credit card goes through.

You might say that it's unfair but this example is only to demonstrate that you're arguing about the level of advantage, not literally winning instantly after paying.

Wow why am i not suprised.

Afk ? get teh fuck outta here with your nonsense.

In a game where items ONLY come from cash shop and exist for every function in the game buffing and usually accessing content and rewards you cannot access without the money its not longer a level of advantage , its like 2 different games ...... Its obvious you have never experienced a real pay to win game nor is there any point in dicussing something with you are you will just continue with obscure out of context things when already proven wrong.

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Antigegner wrote:

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

I play actual pay to win games

Just curious. could u tell me 1 or 2 of them? I'd like to have a look at what winning is in those games. Since you say those are clearly pay to win and not pay for advantage.

Sure, no worries. Although I've let both sort of slide since going back to Guild Wars 2 (which I'll come back to in this response in a sec), I have played Fate/Grand Order (mobile gacha battle game, anime tie in, waifu collector) and Genshin Impact (mobile gacha Breath of the Wild clone, Chinese made, waifu collector) quite a lot.

I've probably put around $2k into F/GO since 2018 when I finally succumbed to the Fate franchise's weeb allure, maybe a bit more, which is dolphin territory if you divide it into monthly chunks. The game has a very extensive 'story' feature (it boasts over a million lines of dialogue, but that was years ago), most of which you can experience with what the game gives you for free. But if you want to 'pull' your favourite characters from one Fate instalment or another, most of whom will almost certainly be 4 or 5* (SR, SSR), you gotta pony up ($20 USD or so for a 'ten pull'). It's not unusual for a 5* to take several ten pulls to get. Getting multiple copies also strengthens them.

And these top tier characters are usually MUCH stronger than the freebies. There is no pvp, which traditionally in gacha terms isn't a 'winning' condition anyway. But good luck getting through some of the harder content (especially grindy events) without putting some money in. Somewhat infamously, F/GO has drawn media attention for its addictive gacha: one dude has spent somewhere around $70k USD trying to complete his collection and max level the lot of them. (https://www.wsj.com/articles/meet-the-man-whos-spent-70-000-playing-a-mobile-game-1521107255). There is also a secondary financial mechanic: you only have X stamina per day to do anything, and can use 'fruit' to restore stamina. You are given a lot of fruit for free (gacha games are incredibly generous with their 'free tastes'), but CAN also buy them for the virtual currency. Also, if you're defeated, you can spend virtual currency to resurrect at full power rather than start the fight over. These are all classic mobile 'pay to win' features.

To date, F/GO has made well over a billion USD. There is SOME knock-on effect from this insane amount of profit, related to the strength of the Fate franchise itself: fans are 'treated' to incredibly well made tv anime series and movies (I'm off to see one at the cinema next week, incidentally. An anime movie based on a chapter from a mobile game, playing at a Sydney, Australia cinema. WTF is this timeline even).

Most mobile gacha game anime tie-ins are pretty dire attempts at getting more players after the fact, although it seems the multimedia companies are realising that if you do a high quality, engaging show *before* releasing your game, you can land a ready-made playerbase happy to gacha for their waifus. The latest to pull this off would be (brace yourself) Umamusume: literally 'horse daughter' and literally a show about cute girls named after real life racing horses...racing. The show has 2 seasons and is very well made, and the game just came out and is already making serious bank. What a surprise.

As for the Chinese made, Japanese-aimed zelda-ish clone Genshin Impact, it's a little trickier. You can play all content for free, and it's a huge open world full of shit to climb, caves to explore, all that. The story is also free, and you can absolutely clear it with the free characters. The catch is in the endgame: daily grinds to max out characters cost a form of stamina. The devs are hoping that by the time you've gone through the story, gotten to know the characters, maybe pulled a few good ones from their free taste offerings, you'll be invested enough to want to put in to make them shine. I never went there, and have only put about $60 into the game to enable their version of a 'battle pass' (more rewards for doing dailies). But the game must have its addicts when it comes to gacha because it cleared $100m USD within weeks of release, and has I believe sailed over the 1bil line recently (https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2021/03/24/genshin-impact-1-billion-in-mobile-revenue-and-the-six-highest-earning-characters/?sh=763245e32b80). Genshin's simultaneous release on mobile, PC and console certainly didn't hurt.

A Genshin Impact anime is absofuckinglutely inevitable.

What both games have in common is they're very high quality in a field typically dominated by lower effort works trying to make a buck -- F/GO is ridiculously streamlined and really well written (it's essentially a 'visual novel', true to the franchise's origin), and Genshin is the first real 'f2p Zelda clone' to use the gacha angle to my knowledge. Believe it or not, quality matters even in the p2w field. Japanese designers have been slow to catch on here: most gacha games have utterly awful UI, layers upon layers of f2p mechanics and a p2w currency type for every sort of upgrade they can squeeze in. F/GO and Genshin both keep it very simple in this regard, and they're both polished to hell and back, and they 'win' as a result.

So that answers your question...but while we're at it:

I mentioned Guild Wars 2 earlier, and this is sort of where I find the midpoint of acceptable f2p/p2w offset. As with its predecessor, the genre-smashing Guild Wars 1, GW2 released as a buy to play game with virtually no mtxes beyond stuff like character slots and some storage. A handful of years later, the game went essentially free to play by offering the core game for free (which is fucking huge) but with plenty of inconvenient restrictions. You can then pony up and become a paid player but all that does is lift those restrictions and give you a daily bonus. Since making this shift, GW2 has gained a HUGE amount of unpleasant f2p features that would be classed as p2w by GGG's original standard, such as level boosters, paid premium gathering tools for resources, waypoint unlocks, teleport to friend items...all of which fall under 'QoL' or 'pay for convenience' elsewhere. It still doesn't have paid power in the direct sense: you can't just go on the cash shop and buy a big powerful weapon, but you can just go buy gems, convert them to gold, hit up the marketplace and THEN buy a big powerful sword. Although it must be noted that again as with GW1, 'power' is given to you by the game; what you're paying for/grinding for is the look. If you don't care about looks, you'll be swinging the same power for free as someone who's put either a lot of money or time and probably both to run around town with a ludicrously well animated zweihander.

Why I call this midpoint is all these QoL vectors of revenue give ArenaNet (and parallel developers such as Warframe's Digital Extremes) the flexibility to offer a lot of content for free (including fairly regular story updates), and to keep their mtx prices much lower than PoE's. You won't find an armour skin on GW2's cash shop over $20, and even the cheapest looks worlds better than anything in PoE. Conversely, since PoE does not have all these safety net mtxes and revenue streams, it's still sort of relying on the goodwill of players who aren't averse to buying skins for $30+ even though, with the way the game works, they'll almost certainly never really notice those skins the same way an MMO skin can be admired up close and personal in town or even just running around the world. Once you remove the moral/support angle from PoE, I just see no motivation to its overpriced, ghastly aesthetic mtxes. Which is probably why its their non-aesthetic mtxes that very likely make most of the money. Which brings us back to why PoE is not p2w but simply pay for convenience -- a term I typically find really means 'pay to not suffer deliberately clunky, awkward mechanics'.

That all said, the most egregious p2w game I ever played wasn't Japanese or Chinese, and it didn't rely on gacha/loot chests. It was a Russian f2p MMO called Allods Online, and basically it drew you in with a mixture of WoW-inspired mechanics and distinctly Russian aesthetics...and then around level 30 ramped up the difficulty so much you HAD to invest in 'runes' for your gear just to not totally and completely suck. It was insidious and brilliant. I'm willing to bet they've moved away from that by now (if the game's even still going) but at the time, it was by far the most audacious p2w I'd ever seen in a PC game.

...you weren't expecting a short answer from me, were you? :)