The icky reason why P.o.E is the only Game i Despise the notion of spending money in

Key point - this is NOT about cosmetics. Please, don't even bring them up.


DAMN, it's already somewhere close to 10 years playing this game, and despite it being among several other games with MTX,ingame-shops,etc -which I played and purchased during the same time, GGG's PoE is the only game where it feels idiotic even spend a penny on. I've spent money on it in the past, purely out of their about-to-be-mentioned tactics to prod money out of players.
And as a response, them being denied hundreds if not thousands in profit, from just me.


The problem:-

GGG has monetized the storage, and to maximize their revenue from the stash/storage (ALERT -I am not talking about cosmetics, and they are irrelevant to the matter, so nobody bring them up), they have warped and deformed game design, mechanics addition (every new thing has to be a currency or item that eats storage, and a new "convenient" stash for sale),and the entire trade system- ALL JUST TO MILK PLAYERS HARDER.

There is NO utility, no practicality, no efficiency, no scam-proofing they seek. Their entire inventory-storage-trade system is designed to "work just enough, but with the near-maximum amount of pay hurdles just for convenience". It's like they will cover your path with rusted spikes, and then offer you a dried branch from a dead tree to sweep the spikes away - for 10 Dollars. per swipe.
But, not MERELY monetized it. Rather, juiced up their meticulous controlling and calculated crippling and slowing of item movements across stashes (in and out) in such a way as to have a "win-win-win-win" situation for them, while players lose time actually "playing" the game, time actually crafting and doing things with friends, millions of wasted hours weekly globally, purely because GGG wishes to make abnormally more money from stash sales. The messed up thing, is they KNOW this, they have ALL the numbers, ALL the data. And the continue doing this, year after year.

Following are some ways how and why the TRADE SYSTEM is the ONE thing that has not been touched, merely hovered over with mild contact at best :-


-You can't name your stash without paying for it, you can't even LIST ITEMS IN-GAME WITHOUT PAYING FOR IT. How is that not "PAYING for an advantage"?? You have to be self-deluding maximally to somehow believe this is just a cosmetic, non-game affecting pay barrier?? Every single nano-second of time saved you get over other players is an advantage. Pure and straight.

*- GGG artificially inflate their "online numbers" by forcing people to stay online, awake, and logged into their character if they wish to make a sale. Because of this, people in different time-zones only have access to certain items where 2 zones' activity points converge momentarily. Markets are segregated by momentarily inter-lapping spaces. You can extrapolate the rest of the consequences of this.

*- GGG has turned a 2 second transaction into trades that can last several minutes, because of the loading screen hopping, chat copy-pasting xN times with no response!!, and one player being pre-occupied by a horde trying to kill them as they try invite and reply to you whilst not dying (or risk losing a sale). AND losing a portal if they're in a map, by either dying, or just coming out alive to sell you the thing.

*- The entire game design has been turned into a filthy abomination of "content" updates, which are just stash eating majority-garbage item/currency releases. They all must sit at the brainstorming table, and warping entire game story and future and shoving it into a "new content MUST eat space in stashes" mold, and the rest is secondary. It's a facade, every other league feels like a stash stuffing facade. With mechanics which most players could think up of on their own, within days at most! "enemies drop a bunch of little things", then you take those things to a thing or a npc, then that will make another thing to kill emerge!!" genius.

*- STACKS LMAO. chaos -10 stacks, essences -9 stacks, completely identical items UNSTACKABLE. Eventually I realized WHY Stack limits exist in the game design; GUESS why. Just in case - it's to stuff your stash, or make you buy appropriate Stash tabs, which release with pretty much every expansion/relevant content update/league.
*- The slower your items sell or move out of inventory, the faster it will fill up, or the more time you will burn optimizing what to keep and discard.

*- Trade items' searching/pricing/comparing has been moved to third party softwares without which people will waste EVEN MORE TIME online (which is a pro for them).

*- Since item selling is VOLUNTARY, people can choose to price an item where someone would buy it, buy NEVER sell it, for weeks and months. This feels harmless when 1 person does it. But when Thousands form indirect "Fixer-F**kwit-frats" where they collectively control and take over massive parts of the market by fooling people into selling lower, which they buy and sit on, because of their falsely priced items.


*- ONE currency stash tab which you pay over 7 USD for, a stash tab which stores a limited number of LIMITED quantity of currency (something which MANY ENTIRE GAMES don't even charge for their full product, which includes storage. And EVEN THAT won't solve the issue properly, they are not blind morons, THEY are designing and controlling every "inch" of this game, anything exists because they put it there or left it there.

And despite this, they sell you HALF-solutions to Manufactured problems, just so you have to buy 2 of those half solutions, until you need a THIRD! At which point, they become third-solutions, not even half anymore lol.

Please, add your take on the whole thing below, and any addition or critique/defense you'd like to make of my post, or GGG's business ethics.

There's no need for me to add "what ggg can do to fix it", they know exactly what they're doing. Their M.O is profits over experience. The sole feedback is - stop being so damn greedy, and give players the actual choice of spending money on what they want. Not where they will suffer if they don't. HOW ESOTERIC IS THAT??

Key points for reply enjoyers :- Thank you for your time contributing.
Rationalization is not a refutation, "but it's voluntary" is not a refutation, "but devs have to eat too" is not a refutation, "My anecdotal experience says the game can be played perfectly with 0$" is not either. "I think it's worthwhile" etc/
For the reflexively defensive simpsters, please don't bother writing anything if this post cause you to feel bubbling negative emotions and internal shrieks of hate, and you may feel the urge to express those to me, while virtue signaling your own self to the ethereal ingroup, kind of chimpy. It's a primitive response and I'd much rather reply to productive people.


LOVE U THANKS

I agree with some of your points, but playing the game for 10 years and not dropping a cent. That’s something else lmao

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siimduud wrote:

I agree with some of your points, but playing the game for 10 years and not dropping a cent. That’s something else lmao

I think I mentioned that I have spent money on this game in the past. Sorry if i forgot to add that. Maybe around 50$.
In comparison, i've played dota2 for less time, and spent nearly 20x on it. Purely because they don't design broken systems within the game just to prod people to the MTX shop.

They've never said they're not in this business to make money. They've only said that they will try their best to make the manner in which they do so ethical. Most agree that they've succeeded in that. Sorry that their monetization doesn't suit you. It can't suit everyone.

It's a whole lot better than most games out there in this regard. Stash tabs are a one-time expense. It's really minor when you factor in how much you get. They could have charged a maintenance fee.

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Shagsbeard wrote:

They've never said they're not in this business to make money. They've only said that they will try their best to make the manner in which they do so ethical. Most agree that they've succeeded in that. Sorry that their monetization doesn't suit you. It can't suit everyone.

It's a whole lot better than most games out there in this regard. Stash tabs are a one-time expense. It's really minor when you factor in how much you get. They could have charged a maintenance fee.

As i said, the argument is not to stop them for making money, or against it in any sense. You are missing the point by focusing on this, because I've not said a single negative thing about any actual cosmetic in the mtx shop (be it for 1$ or 1000$), which don't give people advantage over others. I wish they made BILLIONS instead of the odd 77 millions, if it was by selling non-advantage-creating products in-game.

Also, stash tabs are not a one-time expense. You keep needing more, and the game design/progression is forced into a mold that prioritizes stuffing stashes with hordes of little items, and making new storage units each league or so. IF you don't buy those, sure you can manage still, but players who buy every stash, will spend a lot more time farming than you will. Pure advantage giving product. P2W with layers of random general-purpose rationalization.

It just feels like you overlooked most points, and concluded "he's saying ggg making money is evil and that they should go bankrupt". But all good, people have rights to have opinions, but I'm talking about the objective state and intents behind a major part of the game's design and where players purely suffer (regardless of awareness), and GGG roids up their stash sales and purely gains. And they can only be refuted by objective statements.

The player is not considered. And the profit is god.

No they don't, I haven't bought a stash tab since the currency tab was added

Want to stop having storage problems? Stop storing shit its as simple as that.

They cut down on stash storage space usage by like 80% when they made fragments stack its easier now than ever. If you want to be a completionist pony up, if your anyone else stop storing garbage like a squirrel hording nuts :p Winter aint coming.

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Shagsbeard wrote:

They've never said they're not in this business to make money. They've only said that they will try their best to make the manner in which they do so ethical. Most agree that they've succeeded in that. Sorry that their monetization doesn't suit you. It can't suit everyone.

It's a whole lot better than most games out there in this regard. Stash tabs are a one-time expense. It's really minor when you factor in how much you get. They could have charged a maintenance fee.

True.

Then again, the monetization scheme does indeed come with incentives for the devs to make the game less enjoyable for players - or do you actually enjoy having the around 300 (last count I did was in the high 200s, but that has been a while) currency types this game has? It's not about how much you get, it is about the bad incentives and the fact that the game could be better than it is.

Personally, I've become convinced that I would prefer a pay-to-play (either one-off or maintenance fee / monthly charge model) over a free-to-play model a long time ago. Honestly, I don't think I will invest time into any free-to-play games after PoE - at least I haven't done so so far (unless you count things like Wordle).

I have spent about $40 in TEN YEARS on stash tabs and I've never felt pressured to buy any more. Considering the game is 100% free and they basically require you to buy a few stash tabs is fine imo.

I do agree with the point that every player should have 1 free public trade tab. Never thought about the p2w aspect of that since it was the first thing I bought way way way back.

Stack sizes serve another purpose besides storage stuffing. They deter and slow down botting. Do I think they could update the stack sizes to more modern numbers, yes. But infinitely stackable items can be extremely dangerous in a game environment like this one.

But the point that new content being designed to specifically be a pain in the ass and lead players to buy a dedicated stash tab is a good one.

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jsuslak313 wrote:

I have spent about $40 in TEN YEARS on stash tabs and I've never felt pressured to buy any more. Considering the game is 100% free and they basically require you to buy a few stash tabs is fine imo.

I do agree with the point that every player should have 1 free public trade tab. Never thought about the p2w aspect of that since it was the first thing I bought way way way back.

Stack sizes serve another purpose besides storage stuffing. They deter and slow down botting. Do I think they could update the stack sizes to more modern numbers, yes. But infinitely stackable items can be extremely dangerous in a game environment like this one.

But the point that new content being designed to specifically be a pain in the ass and lead players to buy a dedicated stash tab is a good one.

i've always supported the notion that GGG should give players at least one trade stash by default, perhaps as a bonus after killing kitava or something.

that said, i really wish GGG allow players to have much larger stack sizes.

50/100 stacks in inventory and maybe 1000 when in stash.

i can understand "how it used to be" and how they designed the game in a way people would eventually by stash tabs.

i would say they have accomplished this with great effectiveness.

i really cannot imagine playing without a map stash, currency stash, frag, div, ess etc...

players will buy em eventually. that said i really prefer if ggg eases up a bit on the stashes.

Nice things GGG has done. They added stash tab affinities to regular stash tabs. As the OP mentioned, they allow stacking on some fragments now. Storing 5,000 items in the currency tab, fragment tabs, etc. is a huge amount of space saving. I'm sure I've missed some other items?

On the other hand, the gem stash tab and the flask stash tab were made very small, probably to get folks like me to buy the 6 gem tabs and 2 flask tabs that I bought.