GGG: Is the Orb of Alchemy vendor recipe working as intended?

Selling bank tabs is totally fine with me provided they're being used in what I feel is their intended purpose: to keep items that you might want to use or sell later.

As soon as a recipe gives an inherent productivity advantage to those that buy bank tabs I feel it is quite simply no longer "ethical". Who cares if it's 5, 10 or 25 alchemy orbs? As soon as GGG break their core philosophy of "ethical only" they might well continue down that path (and thus completely put me off the game I've been following for a year now).

I mean this barely even affects me - I will buy tabs - I just can't support GGG if they are lying about their ethical micros promise.

Another thread where this has come up.

My (unique) posts on the matter have been thus:

"

Increased stash size is indeed p2w, but no argument seemed to make a difference back when the devs were deciding to allow it or not. "It's a convenience", "It doesn't give you any obvious advantages", "You can already mule with separate accounts" were the listed justifications.

Being able to hoard rares for alchs/regals recipe is incredibly game breaking, but whatever.

"

There are two recipes: sell 2 rares of the name for alchemy orbs, sell 3 rares of the same name for regals.
Normally it's very hard to accomplish this recipe as you'll have to spend a lot of time trading and only picking up the smallest items (daggers, wands, 2x2, etc) to hope you get the names right. Then you also have to track these items out of game somehow.
With 28 stash tabs, you can dedicate a tab to every rare that starts with "Golem", etc.
Instead of selling the rares to vendor for alterations, you can fairly quickly amass alchs and regals instead, which is a huge advantage.

It's possible to do this with muling and trading, but it's MUCH slower than having it all in one stash.

"

Yeah, this is exactly what I'm talking about. Arguments belittling the purists instead of acknowledging that it is an advantage that you can only get by paying. Many of the purists are the people that are choosing PoE (and choosing to support it) because of their promise to stay away from pay2win.

I'm sure you'd be against selling alch and regal orbs directly (assume it was 1 available for purchase per X hours played), but it's somehow okay to sell something that amounts to the same.
...
EDIT: And note that I'd be perfectly okay with selling stash tabs if the alch/regal recipes go away. It's the only thing that stands out to me as abusive.

"

For both the "stash tabs" case and the "muling" case, the M.O. is grab every rare you see and stash it. Now compare:
- "stash tabs" can now use a browser plugin to just search for matches and convert them all to orbs in one fell swoop. Even without any code, it's very easy to sort in one stash on one account.
- "muling" either enters them by hand somewhere else or gets to write a tiny little db and scrapes a stash page for each account (adding webserver load). After finding the matches, somehow automate moving matches between accounts (speaking of server load, I can't imagine that having "transfer instances" filling up the game server is a good thing either).
...
Since this is time-sensitive (any time you waste optimizing your alchemy grinder is time you could be out farming some more), you'd be losing game advantage (in a league-based game) by not having stash tabs. Not just a little either, but I'd say my gut number is multiple alchs per hour with lost experience as well.



And lastly, I don't expect very many people to do this. I'm sure as hell not doing it -- I don't need a second job. For the people that are making money in secondary markets and for the people trying to grab top spots on the ladder, it's a required purchase and the very essence of pay2win. (It also deflates the value of alchs and regals, but that's not necessarily terrible.)

"

I'm still waiting for a counterargument to "extra stash tabs is pay2win as long as the alch and regal recipes exist".

The only things I've ever heard are:
1) Nuh-uh. (see also: fuck you.)
2) It's not that pay2win and I like my stash tabs.
3) A misunderstanding of math and/or how much faster it is to generate alchs/regals with multiple stash tabs in comparison to muling (especially with the handy dandy chrome extension).
...
I'm not going to leave because of this issue, but I absolutely think GGG should not mince words on their stance on pay2win. There is a difference between "We are 100% against pay2win" and "We are 100% against pay2win, except when it's smallish and a lot of people will want and will pay for it."

"

Given enough stash tabs, every rare becomes an alch. Thus as the number of stash tabs increases, the value of every rare approaches an alch. You can talk about an increase of stash tabs as an increase in the rare->alch ratio. I don't know what the count of all the rare name pre- and suffixes are otherwise I'd be more than happy to do the math myself.
...
If GGG sold something that gave you 1 dps on Cleave, would it be pay2win? What about 10? What about 100? Isn't it just easier to say "we don't sell anything that affects the game other than cosmetically" and not have to deal with creating arbitrary pay2win thresholds?


EDIT: And if you don't think that someone who can convert every rare he finds into an alchemy orb or more is going to win (read: be able to buy pretty much anything he wants), then I don't know what to say.

I really want to debate this and have spent a fair amount of time thinking about it, but I've yet to come across an argument that has debunked this or a GGG post that has said, "This is just the way it's going to be, take it or leave it."


re: Chris's post at the top:

"

Chris wrote:

This is a system that people tell us they really enjoy. They like stashing the items and reaping the rewards when they randomly match.

People would enjoy being able to buy character respecs. Is that also going to happen?

"

Chris wrote:

I was initially worried that it'd feel like a "pay to win" system (because obviously paying for more stash tabs allows you to match more items), but we've seen users match items across multiple accounts with great success. Accounts are free (once we enter Open Beta at least!) and have four tabs by default, which is a lot of storage.

So... you're saying not only is it knowingly pay to win, but you're encouraging people to make a bunch of bullshit accounts and mule in a way that takes extra time and server resources per person? What the fuck?

Pay money to increase the number of alchemy/regal orbs you can get


There is no way that statement can be interpreted as "ethical" or simply "cosmetic"!

Chrome has nothing to do with this; the recipe itself is the problem.


Stop saying you have to get chrome to be able to get alch orb, not everyone is super lazy and some people do organize their stash.


edit: those are toward earlier posters.

EDIT: Sorry, was writing this as you edited, and yours made your stance much more clear.

yes, sorry, i read the first few post and was posting to response to those; then i realized the rest of the thread is about the p2w aspect.

"

wxyjac wrote:

Chrome has nothing to do with this; the recipe itself is the problem.


Stop saying you have to get chrome to be able to get alch orb, not everyone is super lazy and some people do organize their stash.


edit: those are toward earlier posters.

This is nothing to do with "laziness" or slightly concerning obsessions to do with order. It's a case of a poorly designed recipe paired with an unfair advantage when you have a larger stash.

The fact that someone can be "lazy" in a video game is laughable. I don't think anyone has said you "have to get chrome" - you'd just be rather daft not to.

I'd get rid of the recipe. It's abusable by those who can afford more stash tabs, as others have pointed out. (Here people are buying convenience and saving time to do a task, which can simply add to your advantage over others.)

Though, in a way, a lot of the recipes can be abused in a similar manner. This is just the most blatant. As another example, with the number of (useless) rares that drop, it's much more likely for someone with more stash tabs to save enough of those rares to form more complete wearable sets (for the chaos orb). The drops are (pseudo) random, but someone who has more tabs has more bins to accrue more complete sets, on average.

Someone pimping out their character and getting the pink neon ice spear mod is not paying to win. The guy who has 10 times the stash tabs that most other players have has an advantage.

I called this thread to Chris' attention (one of the nicer duties of a forum mod, that) because I find it quite a difficult subject to broach. IF Path of Exile has anything resembling pay to win, the alchemy recipe+chrome extension is definitely it. Chris has, with his typical candour and honesty, acknowledged that the stash tab sales will hopefully be a large part of the financial success of Path of Exile.

While it is absolutely true that you can mule across accounts for free (come Open Beta), the concept of convenience is quite stretched here. On the other hand, 'free to play' is not 'free to make and maintain' so they're going to have to make their money somehow. If this is to be one such way, so be it.

I have suggested in the past that their be an npc who can identify matching rare names in your stash, thus expediting the chrome extension's function. I suggest that because I actually do enjoy that recipe a lot! It makes random rares suddenly quite valuable to me. As one streamer so cleverly put it, 'each rare is potentially half an alchemy orb.'

This, however, is not the solution to the core issue, which is that extra stash tabs (bought for real money) can equate directly to more alchemy/regal orbs. As a paying customer, I think that's clever and good for GGG: more money to them. But in the spirit of a free to play game with absolutely no pay to win, it's much less tenable.

Then again, the philosophy behind pay-to-win (more money=you do better) is impossible to erase completely -- everyone knows that the Diamond supporters get to interact directly with the devs and 'have the devs' ear', so to speak. So while I don't believe that you can eradicate pay-to-win as a concept, I do believe that GGG have done their hardest to remove it at all but the most subtle levels.

Once you start viewing the ability to keep more items on a single account through real money contribution/purchase as 'pay to win,' then Path of Exile is unfortunately pay-to-win. There's no arguing that, assuming you take such a stance. Even without these recipes, the ease with which a person can store such items, swap them around, sell them, twink them...that's going to eclipse the difficulty of traditional D2 style muling.

But the idea of 'pay to win' is typically much more aggressive. In the case of games like Allods Online, it was either 'buy the rune buffs or deal less damage, take more' to a point of uselessness; in other games, it's buffs, actual items that give an advantage to the character, mounts, etc. These are things that you cannot overcome for free no matter what. Yes, the alchemy recipe is VERY convenient with extra stash tabs, but it is not, as Chris pointed out, impossible without them.

That is the point and that is what GGG mean when they say 'the game is not pay-to-win'. They are not, I believe, saying the game is free of paid perks that give an advantage over someone who isn't paying, but there is no guarantee that someone with a hundred stash tabs is going to get That Item, while someone who has only four tabs might drop it with no effort. That's a luck factor, and yes, the odds are in favour of the stash tab hoarder.

This is the line I see between traditional pay-to-win and Path of Exile's 'pay for better odds'. It's not concrete. You cannot BUY the item you want, you can only, effectively, buy perks that make it easier for you to keep gambling for it. That is as close to pay-to-win to Path of Exile gets, in my opinion.

NOW while I enjoy the alchemy recipe, I'd rather rares just sell for alchemy shards, honestly. Even if it's just one shard per.

That doesn't solve the problem though, does it? My 20 or so stash tabs (I don't have that many, btw) can still carry more rares, equip more characters, and eventually hold more 5 and 6L items for me to alch/regal/exalted up.

I think the chrome extension spoilt people in getting around this most inconvenient of recipes. I for one am not going to keep track of all my stored rare names by hand.

So half of me wants GGG to be filthy rich (tm) and to have enough money to make lots of content for my favourite game -- that half is like, bring on the stash tabs and the recipes!

...But the other half of me wrestles with whether or not this is pay-to-win, and if it is, why am I not winning yet?