I'm here to defend PoE against any accusations of being a "pay to win" game

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ajo wrote:

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Exile009 wrote:

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ajo wrote:

With an upfront cost we would not have all this bloat and micromanagement that essentially means 'cough up the dough'.

That was an entirely speculative claim

Yeah it's a speculative claim that we have this bloated design as a result. Are you gonna argue that this is not the case and pure coincidence?

Are you ever going to back up your overconfident assertions with any proof, or are you just going to keep engaging in rhetorical games? You've got nothing bro.

And you've once again changed your claim. You didn't claim that PoE's, in your opinion, "bloated design" is a result of being F2P, you claimed it wouldn't be bloated if the game weren't F2P. In other words, being F2P is a necessary condition for PoE to have said "bloated design", failing which it would not be like this. You keep moving the goalposts, which is a sure sign of argumentative weakness. The larger games ecosystem, with its many pay-to-play + microtransactions-based games, shows you up as wrong.

I'd much rather have a discussion on the ethics of their monetization strategy toward game play habits and gamble boxes which imo, are sketchy AF.

P2W is weak-sauce because let's be 100 here... there is zero in win in PoE.

Even if you wanted to somehow quantify "winning" in a mostly solo PVE experience, everyone will have different standards of "winning"

Is it finishing campaign & getting to maps? All red maps? Lvl 100? Shaper kill? Atlas unlock? All Atlas passives? Wealth acquisition PoE stock market domination?And so on...

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ajo wrote:

Wtf are you blabbering about.

I think that bit says it all really. You don't even get where you got it wrong.

^And I don't think you know what even counts as personal attacks, given you don't seem to have a firm grip on how debate and logic itself work. Suffice to say your argument fails on the logic.

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ajo wrote:

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Exile009 wrote:

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ajo wrote:

Wtf are you blabbering about.

I think that bit says it all really. You don't even get where you got it wrong.

^And I don't think you know what even counts as personal attacks, given you don't seem to have a firm grip on how debate and logic itself work. Suffice to say your argument fails on the logic.

I don't know what kind of drugs you are on.

You probably mean Single payment model or one-time payment model, Not upfront cost. It is about being precise and Why it is important. He is picking on what you misspoken. Like the ripe apples to be picked easily.

PoE is more of a "pay 2 endgame".
Which is perfectly fine considering you can have ton of fun before endgame.

Since it's more of a "pay for entry" than a "pay for advantage", it's an extremely honest pricing scheme imho.

PoE is pay to win stash tabs give you a distinct advantage in the game and that's pay to win all argument that "poe isn't pay to win" boils down to "poe isn't too pay to win" which would be a fine thing to be but they're advertising the game as "never pay to win" and that's a problem.

Someone should take a moment to do a venn diagram between what I view as the three main possibilities and their characteristics: F2P, P2W and Pay to Play.

I think it will display why this isn't so cut and dry.

Just as a simple example, I think most would say that a simple rule of paying for something to get an advantage or be able to progress is P2W. There are games that you can't proceed further without paying.

An odd example is D3. You could do Skeleton King runs as long as you wanted without paying anything, but if you wanted to go further (which could be considered winning or being able to progress), you had to pay.

I don't think D3 is classically P2W in any form. But by that narrow definition it gets wedged into P2W.

I do think the complete drop off in benefits within POE is a major point to be made in where the game falls; especially since the benefits drop dramatically well before you pay what a AAA game would cost. But again, this whole discussion is a false dilemma between two things where semantics are debated ad nauseam.

It's pointless. I hate myself for posting again.

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awesome999 wrote:

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ajo wrote:

I don't know what kind of drugs you are on.

You probably mean Single payment model or one-time payment model, Not upfront cost. It is about being precise and Why it is important. He is picking on what you misspoken.

The problem is in his assumptions. He's discounting a real possibility.

To quote myself, he claimed -

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it wouldn't be bloated if the game weren't F2P [in other words, if it had an upfront cost]. In other words, being F2P is a necessary condition for PoE to have said "bloated design", failing which it would not be like this.

This is easily proven untrue, since there's many games out there that have both an upfront cost AND microtransactions. PoE could also have been one. He's pretending that possibility away, pretending that having an upfront front necessarily means it wouldn't try to nickle and dime us like it does. He's claiming that not being F2P would have prevented the mtx business model.

When you say single/one-time payment model, you're basically combining the two parts into one and therefore granting him more than he actually spoke. A single payment model means PoE would not only have an upfront cost, but it would ALSO not use microtransactions - which is MORE than what he said. In his argument, the latter part - not using microtransactions / not being bloated - resulted FROM having an upfront cost, whereas in your terminology of a single payment model, both elements - the upfront cost and the lack of mtxes - are combined together. You're not just rephrasing his words, you're adding to it.

Lastly, the single/one-time payment model thing is itself kind of a pointless thing to say - you're basically saying PoE wouldn't have mtxes if it ... didn't have mtxes. That's just a truism. So even IF he'd said that, it would still be bad. It wouldn't be wrong - because truisms by definition can never be wrong - but it would be rather empty. He'd just be assuming the issue away. It'd be like saying Jack the Ripper wouldn't be a murderer if he didn't kill people. Well obviously, duh! Saying PoE wouldn't have mtxes if it's business model didn't involve using mtxes is similarly vacuous. No point in saying it.

I am not sure what “advantage” having 4 vs 40 stash tabs creates.

Google defines advantage as “a condition or circumstance that puts one in a favorable or superior position.”

To have an advantage there would need to be a competition and outside of the gauntlets and other community funded events there is no real completion for anything, and maybe a requirement of any race event should be played on accounts with no extra stash tabs to insure parity. What I am saying is PoE is at its core not a race, unless you want it to be.

It’s just an experience, a way to pass the time, or more a puzzle that can be solved over and over again.

Does someone who buys stash tabs have a different experience than someone who does not? Yes.

The folks who don’t buy tabs are not competing nor are actually negatively effected by those that do. They will have an inefficient experience and will have difficulty making it deep into the end game, but they can play.

There is an illusion that is at play that somehow our experience in Wraeclast are shared ones. Unless you are playing in a group they are not. Each league my journey is different than yours. It’s mine and I own my experience.

So saying that purchasing stash tabs is P2W is a bit of a stretch. It more pay for a different experience or at the very least pay for QoL.

Thanks for reading and try not to worry so much about what other people are doing.

There are three additional tabs that introduce a lot of QoL , that i personally would rate in this order.

Currency tab. Allows for way bigger stack sizes than base tabs.

Map tabs. Can have 100+ differet maps and dozens for each individual one.
Extreme useful.

One premium tab. Allows to dump stuff into the market after using as sale tab. Makes room for new items if sale complete.