I personally think games that force you to pay for items to even stand a chance at winning are bad games, but the ones that have items that you don't have to buy if you don't want to are good ones. On the p2w side, there are advantages, but sometimes they are too big for normal players to have any chance at wining against them. And on the normal side, this allows others to have a fair shot at winning when in a match or duel. Wartune, Eternal Saga, etc. These have proven they don't play by the rules, favoring the money over the players. This is the only game in which I payed money to upgrade my account: This game never gets boring to me, and the fact they never force you to pay for anything is a solid bonus. There are three types of accounts: Free Player, Guardian, and X-Guardian. All require only one lifetime payment, never a subscription fee every day of your life. I've become a level 70 Guardian Dracopyre sub-class. And I freaking love it! They even acknowledge your contributions, and i'm happy they think of the consumer first. If not, I wouldn't play it anymore. So what are your thoughts on this topic?
Consider then that for the most part, "Pay to Win" games follow a free-to-play model. That is to say, cash purchases are the company's only source of income for the game since there's no purchase or gameplay subscription. Therefore, if the developers and company behind the game want to make their wages, they need to incentivize cash purchases somehow. Players aren't going to spend money on a free game unless they feel that they get tangible benefits for doing so. Basically, they only get paid if the players pay. And yes, you can follow a model of cosmetic-only cash purchases, but this is (in a sense) not a particularly effective model. Not every player would consider a cosmetic purchase a benefit worth the cost, is one such consideration. An effective implementation of the model would probably be Planetside 2. All cash purchasable items are either, A) Also available for purchase with in-game currency (certs). B) Cosmetic variants of items purchasable with in-game currency. C) Purely cosmetic items like voice packs and the like. A good way to describe it would be to call it "Pay to not grind".
My point is, making you buy something to just to advance is a cheapskate method. It's why people often leave a game and never come back; just proves that if it's done in a way that doesn't seem forceful, then yes, it could work.
I hate this. I used to play Evony, until the cities I built up over six months were wiped out by a pay-to-win player who was able to advance higher than me in less than a week. It kinda soured me on the whole system.
On a related note, I've played games before that weren't video games - tabletop and the like - which also used expansion systems where whoever had the latest expansion was heavily favored to win any match against another player. This happens an awful lot in card games, especially when obvious pricing differences emerge between the more competitive expansions/cards/whatever and the less competitive ones. At that point, whoever has the most money automatically jumps into a higher tier of play, and if they've got the skills to back it up, they're automatically one of the top players, while skillful players with less money get shafted. It's a pretty brutal way to play a game.
If it's a free to play game I won't mind much. I don't know too many paid games that follow the pay to win idea.
That's less of a flaw with the actual mechanism of in-game cash purchases, and more of developers being greedy or apathetic.
I've gotta disagree on a small technicality; it might be considered a flaw of the actual mechanism that it doesn't pair well with paid games that use certain design structures.
And here I have to disagree in turn. It's only really a flaw if paid content is in some way objectively better than content accessible without monetary investment. Again, I cite Planetside 2, where paid content is either also free content, or purely cosmetic.
I'd like to break that down word by word. "Objectively better" as a concept probably isn't going to get us anywhere considering there really is no such thing, and if there is we have yet to identify and agree on it. Great example by the way, but if the Paid Content is really the same as the Unpaid Content (free content), then the gamer isn't being forced to pay to play the same game as their fellow gamers, and therefore the experience is still equal in all measurable ways, regardless of which metric you'd like to use. Nobody is being forced to pay, which effectively means it is not a pay-to-play system, it is a system with optional pay. Of course, if the gamer in question is being forced to pay extra to have the same content as other gamers, then the experience is no longer equal and defies at least some measurements of fairness. I know that's not exactly what you were saying, but it leads me into my real point below... Returning to this premise -- which I can understand as being coherent if we redact the clause of objectivity as I have above -- I think I can muster a sufficient counterpoint: you are using the term "better" to classify the content, but regardless of what you think is better when comparing the Paid Content or Unpaid Content, you still recognize that there could be differences in the two types of content. We must also assume that different people like different things and are allowed to think that different sorts of gaming experiences are better; these are the subjective opinions of those gamers and are the reason I reject the concept of "objectively better" as you have proposed it. It is possible, following from everything we have observed so far, that some people might invariably find the Paid Content to be better than the Unpaid Content, regardless of what the content itself is; it is commonly thought that you can't please all the people all the time. Therefore, there will always be the possibility of some perspective observing the Paid Content to be better than the Unpaid Content, which is the inherent flaw in the design that I referenced in my earlier post.
I disagree; you can very well argue that there is such this an objectively better item or ability within a game. Honestly, a trivial example would be an item which posses higher values for every beneficial attribute, although it's sufficient for just one attribute to be higher assuming all others are identical.
But you're assuming that "better" is "more efficient at [doing the thing the item does]" in that case. Some players purposefully elect to use less powerful items in order to seek a greater challenge in games, and therefore your "objectively" better item is only subjectively better.
A less powerful item that poses more challenge is scarcely considerable 'better', since better does have a formal definition attached to it, notably, But at this point we're just arguing semantics.
No, it definitely could be "better," since it would be "more appropriate" for their purpose of getting a greater challenge out of the game, and the "advantage" of it could be getting greater satisfaction out of their greater challenge, while it would be "well advised" to use it for their specific end, considering their investment in desiring a greater challenge. You see, words aren't these two-dimensional things that have only a single application in the language. A definition is broadly applicable to many ideas and situations. The stance that you've taken up in this argument is beset on all sides by a history of philosophical problems, so when you assert that something can be "objectively better," I counter by saying that your definition for better is limited in the smallness of its application. Things can be better in all kinds of ways, in all kinds of contexts. What's better, a shovel or a sword? Well, my best guess is that it depends on what you're going to use them for. Both have qualities that can be evaluated, but because they are different they have different potentialities and therefore neither is capable of being objectively better. To be objectively better, it must be conclusively better in all situations, from all perspectives. Anything less is only subjective, not objective. Unless you can produce an example of such a thing, I rest my case.
I've seen lesser item user overpower a higher grade items user, it's not the fact that paying helps you win; it's the fact that paying players get too much of an advantage and level faster than you can keep up with unless you pay to win as well. But in a fair game structure, both could overpower the other, or keep going until the other lost.
It's Pay to Win.It makes money for the developers.More money than Free to Play games.Nothing gonna change. After all, users that isn't willing to pay anything/don't have a credit card won't do any $ for the devs anyway.
[ QUOTE="Diamond, post: 733973, member: 10799"]It's Pay to Win.It makes money for the developers.More money than Free to Play games.Nothing gonna change. After all, users that isn't willing to pay anything/don't have a credit card won't do any $ for the devs anyway.[/QUOTE] That's not exactly right, it isn't that simple. Pay to Win is one of the worst ways to go about a game, not only does it make the game matches unfair, it also damages their reputation too. Games should be fair, not give a huge gap of an advantage to paying players. This only creates unbalance. I only had to pay once for a lifetime account upgrade, not constantly pay for items from a cash shop, that's the difference between a P2W and a F2P game. Some items are for guardians and X-guardians, and are not expensive like other games, I only paid $25 to be a guardian status. There are no time hastening items, or huge advantages, only locations, exclusive guardian-only items. A free player can rival a guardian with most free items, there's no real gap between them. But In AQW(Adventure Quest Worlds), it seems to be drifting toward P2W, Adventure quest is the only one of their games that doesn't involve that issue. Most of the game is just PvM, player vs Monster, nothing more.
