Should PoE have been pay to play?

I always find those elaborate but in its core weird takes highly amusing. You guys try to complicate something that is in its base very simple and that shows all the time with statements that are eigher directly contradictory to your assumptions or just don´t make sense.

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1. GGG only secures revenue from players that decide to pay. That's likely to be a relatively small proportion of players with the result being that the game will be continually tweaked to conform to what paying players find rewarding.

Allright, and forcing everyone to pay up front would somehow increase the playerbase? What´s the logic behind that? Here you have a basically unlimited trial period, then u spend like 60 bucks on stash tabs and you are set for life, there is not a single penny u ever have to spend to be able to compete with the top end players on an even playing field. What about people that can manage to pay this once, but are pushed away by a pay-2-play-approach with monthly costs? You ever thought of that?

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It's no accident that player progress is deliberately retarded, that lights, sounds, reward systems and so on, all replicate the same actions used in gambling machines.

Just because you are not able to make progress doesn´t make the progress retarded. Actually, while there are games with a more deterministic approach in crafting that also gives items on the ground meaning (Let´s take LE for example), PoE is not at all the slot maschine u make it to be. Crafting 3 out of 6 mods on an item is pretty simple in many cases, getting the 4th is also pretty reliable and when u add a handcrafted on top this is pretty far into the item-progression while also leaving enough room to make perfect items unbelievably hard to get. Just because you need to have 100/100 gear-power and can´t live with 90/100 doesn´t make the progress stupid.

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3. If you're not paying for the game, then it's in the interests of the game company to either encourage you to quit (because you're a drain on resources), or engineer the game in such a way that you become part of the reward system for the paying players.

That´s like saying tomorrow it will eigher rain or be cloudy or sunny. You will always be right with that statement, be it for F2P, pay 2 play or any other model. Therefore, that statement is completely redundant.

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Essentially, there is a strong design incentive for non-paying players to become the servants to the paying Pharaohs by doing all the low level grunt work of farming Divines, Fusings and other items desirable in bulk.

And you deliberately ignore any effect in the opposite direction, being that more experienced players craft and sell gear to those too lazy or to inexperienced to produce it on their own - and taking a royalty on that for their time spent. Your critique on that economic market situation sounds like a marxist dystopy, where lower players are forced to give their money to other players. No one does that though. It is a beautiful system where at any point of the economic chain you are allowed to step in and contribute your part. Being it at low level farming for content, farming the actual endgame of that content and selling drops from those or craft gear with those drops for builds that are then again picked up from others. Just because you haven´t figured out what part of that process might be more profitable doesn´t mean the whole process is flawed.

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So how might the game look if anyone playing had to pay for it first, and then pay a small amount for each League?
Well, the game would be incentivised to actually provide an enjoyable and rewarding experience for all participants, not just those that optimise the game.

While you only believe that people enjoy the game that minmax the s* out of it, I say it´s the only game that even offers enough complexity to push it that far in the first place. Of course it attracts a certain crowd and are you really surprised the balancing act between those extremes isn´t easy? What PoE lacks are enough tools to get new players engaged and going as it is really hard to get in. Once you´re in though, its very rewarding.

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The pressure to keep people playing for an unreasonable time would be removed, it's then about the quality of gameplay rather than the marathon endurance effort.

The only thing in poe that feels like a chore are challenges. Experienced players beat everything there is within a week or two. If that´s too much to ask in a 3-4 month league I don´t know what you actually want. Diablo-esk level of difficulty where it literally doesn´t matter what you click or do?

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GGG might however realised their fear of appealing to the masses resulting in a product that is successful financially, but not something they are proud of.

So are you really critizising a company for NOT introducing a more predatory model to earn more money but rather staying true to their vision of the game? Very interesting take.

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Potentially, yes, but I'm not sure how much pride they can derive from the current gambling simulator that they have developed.

See above. Just because you don´t understand crafting doesn´t make it a gambling simulator.

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As I said in another post, I'm currently bored of the game so this at least provides some fodder for some hopefully interesting perspectives that might prove more entertaining than yet another run of Acts 1-10.

Yeah, starting a new character every 3 months and be forced to play a campaign for 5 hours. The horror...

The game definitely already is. $50-$70 in stash tabs is not required, but it is absolutely necessary to have a reasonable playing experience. Playing for free is somewhat possible with the 4 tabs and free accounts for muling but that really isn't that reasonable. Even further, trading without premium tabs is not a fun experience.

That seems like a good deal though for unlimited updates and new content every 3-4 months for over a decade and still going.

Is it good for GGG? Who knows? They've made it this far with this monetization model so my assumption is that it's okay. There are people who support even though they have everything they'll ever be able to use as well (this group includes me) because it feels ethical to give back when you have the means because you play a ton. So it's not just about forcing people to buy tabs.

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DarthSki44 wrote:

During he Expedition League Baeclast (when that legaue of nerfs went over like a lead balloon), CW did break down, generally speaking, what the revenue streams looked like. This was mostly in response to the ethical conflicts of the mystery boxes.

He said it was around 1/3 for each, Mystery boxes, tabs, and then all other mtx combined.

So clearly stash tabs, while nearly essential from a gameplay & QoL standpoint, are an important, multi-mullion dollar a year part of monetization. Quite frankly, even though it's probably the "right" thing to do, they can't stop monetizing this specific QoL area.

I do wish they would be little more creative and player friendly here though. Like letting someone upgrade 4 premium tabs to a quad tab. Or even a promotion where if you buy 1 or 2 quad tabs you get the currency, map, or fragment tab, for free. I think that would actually help with sales & retention. Playing this game without a currency, fragment, or map tab, must be a nightmare...

I am playing without fragment. Totally fine. You can just spam all your 50 rusted whatever of the same kind in one trade window once you acumulated a certain mass and then just price one stack. Your stacksize is visible so someone will buy all of them for his growing hordes or whatever, no problem... Obv you need premium tabs for trading, can't go without them. But i will probably buy a fragment tab at some point...

On the topic pay to play probably doesn't work very well with new content every 2-4 months, so gotta be subscription type of then and those games didn't last very long except of course wow...so they did everything right.

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Nubatron wrote:

There are people who support even though they have everything they'll ever be able to use as well (this group includes me) because it feels ethical to give back when you have the means because you play a ton. So it's not just about forcing people to buy tabs.

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for me PoE is a free to try. The game can be played until the end end game without spending anything, but to really enjoy the game content you will need the basic package of chest tabs. I would indicate: Currency (mandatory), map (mandatory), Ecensse, fragment, Skil Gem, Unique and Flask in addition to about 3~6 premiun stash tab. this at a promotion is just over half the value of D4. a fair price in my opinion. There is also the possibility of playing with friends and everyone contributing to a guild chest which is much cheaper

Yes, yes and yes. So glad I'm not the only one to realize the points expressed here. These practices have led the game to become the simplistic casino for wealthy players that it is today.


The most player-friendly way to gain money from a game has always been the way it was before mega-corporations entered the scene: Non-service based. Pay the game, you own it, it's yours. They can't take that from you. Pay for every extension if you want, (every four months in the case for Poe, IF YOU WANT IT) and you OWN it; they can't take away your access later. If the devs want you to buy it, it has to be good.

This makes for both the players AND the devs' freedom to make a quality game, for the most people. This pushes for a good game. ALL players and devs drive the game's decisions, if the game is to be good.



What happened in Poe is the equivalent in gaming environment of "opening for investors", but those investors are players. From that moment, you don't have the control anymore; the highest bidder does. And the highest bidder, of course, will be the one that is addicted, wealthy, and/or makes money from it, like streamers and sellers/bots.

People get addicted to repetitive flashy things, not smart ones. Hence Poe as what it is today; with 99,99% of its content being unusable trash so it doesn't get in the way of quick action casino play.


A higher and higher number of things in the game, and a lower and lower number of actual things in the game.

Giving the illusion of complexity and challenge way too many are fooled into. They achieved a game to actually be ever easier and easier while making it seems like its ever harder and harder, lol. "Ruthless" is the culmination of that. Way too many people actively think "long" means "hard" in this game. That's casino thinking in a nutshell.

The only use of most of the playerbase is to farm to make trade functional to the high pay players. If you are a ssf casual, you have exactly zero value.

Not so different from the Diablo immortal mode, just harder to see.

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JJJaaaMMM wrote:

Isn't it pay to play already?

I challenge any and all white knights to play throughout a whole league on a new account without spending any money and stashes or qol improvements and come back and tell me an awesome experience they had.

no problem in ruthless

I wish it was p2p with a monthly subscription or a season/league subscription.
It would have improved a lot of different things right at the beginning of the game lol

I'm probably the thriftiest most stubborn MOFO live service gamer in existence.

Never paid in Diablo Immortal--the more they pushed me to start paying by constantly reminding me of it, the more I won't pay them a cent, never paid in Undecember same reason as DI, once I discovered that they were pushing me to use resurrection scrolls(their way of pushing you to pay), now I'm determined to not ever pay a cent. Never paid Torchlight Infinite, wasn't satisfied with the end game, Never paid Genshin impact I didn't like there limitation trick scheme. None of this Pavlovian tricks will work on me. ALL of these games I still play today.

POE is the only modern live service game I've paid for. I could've go on and on playing f2p but I've decided I've played enough of it--they let me play enough without annoying me about money to explore the game fully. This remains to this day the only live service game I've paid for.

I don't have a problem playing F2P forever because I have this frame of mind where I see F2P as another mode in a game much like Hardcore, Softcore, SSF, Ruthless mode and on and on. To me playing as F2P is just another mode challenge.

Nope spent nearly 500+ on this game over the last 10 years and if it was pay to play I probably would have barely spent 100. Imagine if every expansion was 60 dollars and you had to pay for each one every time they come out and when you start back up after a long break from the game you'd have catch up payments it would be awful.

Poe has the 2nd best f2p model in gaming the only one that's better is league of legends also a game I'v spent 1000's on because of the availability of riot points sold at stores.

Edit

Also I don't think aprg like poe and diablo are popular enough in the game industry to ever have a pay to play model anymore imo. Everyone that comes out that try's a p2p model ends up failing pretty fast.