The objective in any MMO or game is to make your character stronger or more powerful. You do this by collecting loot / gear, completing content or game designed hurdles, and increase the level of your character. Game designers usually put hurdles in place to slow down the process and take up your time to complete. Usually everyone is on equal footing on the required time it takes to complete the content and advance your character in power.

Now here comes my pay to win definition. When you purchase items in a cash shop to bypass standardized hurdles that a developer puts into a game, you are paying money to win.

Purchasing a potion to speed up the rate at which you acquire experience to bypass the standardized leveling process, you are paying money to win.

Purchasing gear, purchasing levels, purchasing crafting material, is all paying to win. You are paying extra money to bypass the established hurdles in the game. You are paying extra money to win at that game.

Some people are more apt to dismiss the minor cash shop purchases that enable them to bypass hurdles. Such as an experience potion to level up to game's max level or say the horse they included with the collector's edition. But when you have an open ended system in place such as the champion system, things start to get a little sketchy. Add in the power gamers / whales that will dump a lot of money to get any advantage over everyone else, things start to get nasty.

Remember the anger when they released details of the Imperial Race with the collector's edition?

LordSkyKnight wrote: »

The objective in any MMO or game is to make your character stronger or more powerful. You do this by collecting loot / gear, completing content or game designed hurdles, and increase the level of your character. Game designers usually put hurdles in place to slow down the process and take up your time to complete. Usually everyone is on equal footing on the required time it takes to complete the content and advance your character in power.

Now here comes my pay to win definition. When you purchase items in a cash shop to bypass standardized hurdles that a developer puts into a game, you are paying money to win.

Purchasing a potion to speed up the rate at which you acquire experience to bypass the standardized leveling process, you are paying money to win.

Purchasing gear, purchasing levels, purchasing crafting material, is all paying to win. You are paying extra money to bypass the established hurdles in the game. You are paying extra money to win at that game.

Some people are more apt to dismiss the minor cash shop purchases that enable them to bypass hurdles. Such as an experience potion to level up to game's max level or say the horse they included with the collector's edition. But when you have an open ended system in place such as the champion system, things start to get a little sketchy. Add in the power gamers / whales that will dump a lot of money to get any advantage over everyone else, things start to get nasty.

Remember the anger when they released details of the Imperial Race with the collector's edition?

Very well said.

To me p2w is items that greatly boosts player power. But these items also needs to be hard to obtain by playing the game normally. Otherwise it's not p2w, not when you can get the same thing in reasonable time for free.

Convenience is when you pay for something that's relatively easy to obtain, by playing the game normally. So you're only saving a bit of time when using your credit card.

But CP is not easy to obtain by playing ESO normally, also why a big exp or enlighten boost affecting CP could potentially be p2w if offered by the store. By that I mean a significant boost, something that let's you obtain CP three times faster than people not paying.

Kuettbullen wrote: »

DISCLAIMER: I don't want/intend to turn this into a hate thread and please keep that in mind if you post a reply!

Which is exactly what's going to happen, so why even continue to beat this horse, just let it die.

My definition of pay to win is something that gives a statistical advantage that is impossible to achieve in game.

I think majority would agree.

Kalfis wrote: »

nimander99 wrote: »

My definition of pay to win is something that gives a statistical advantage that is impossible to achieve in game.

I think majority would agree.

There are several definitions of P2W. This is one of them.

People, XP potions ARE convenience. If you don't use XP potions, it will take you a little longer to gain champion points.

Why is that so difficult to understand? No one is gaining a direct advantage over you.

In a system with a hard cap, this would be true. If CP capped at 120 or something similar and you actually had to choose where to put your points, then yes, it would simply be a convenience item.

The problem is, the Champion system is (effectively) uncapped. Continued play will simply keep grinding out further on the wheel.

At that point the 50% boost is something that you can't "catch up" to, without either coughing up cash yourself (when they don't) or continuing to push forward assuming they actually stop to let you.

Now, a 2 hour 50% boost is fairly meaningless on it's own. That's less than 1 CP while enlightened... but, assuming all things being equal, someone who is pushing forward has a strict competitive advantage over someone who never coughed up for boosters.

Eventually you would catch up with them... seven to ten years down the road, when you finally hit the 3600 cap. But... until then?

Now, if boosters only apply to reaching Vet14, and not to CP? Yeah, that's not Pay to Win because at worst you're looking at being behind the curve for a week or two. It's a capped progression. You reach the end of the ride, and you're done. You don't have, literally, years of benefit from it.

DDuke wrote: »

starkerealm wrote: »

DDuke wrote: »

In fact, rarely even in other P2W MMOs do you see such power disparity granted by $$$ as I linked above.

Given the amount of money it would cost to cause that amount of disparity? No, that's about on the mark. Maybe a little better than some. Still, not a good situation.

No, independent of the amount of $$$ required.

It doesn't matter if P2W cost 1 million, there will always be those few players who can afford it.

No, I meant, "given the amount of money you would have to spend to achieve those modifiers, it is close to the going rate in pay to win games, if not a little more generous than some."

Not, "yeah, I'm okay with that because it'd be too expensive." Because, I'm fully aware, most members of the Free to Grind market gets through the cold winter months on stored whale blubber.

For me the "win" in Pay to Win adds an extra dimension of argumentation. What is "win" etc etc.

I think of it as 2 things: 1) Pay to Advantage or 2) Pay to Skip.

1) Shelling out $$$ that gains you ANY advantage over another player that does not.

2) Shelling out $$$ to skip content that another player that doesn't must go through.

That's just the nuts and bolts of it for me. What really MATTERS to me is how BAD is it? How MUCH advantage is the $$$ providing, how much of a shortcut is the $$$ providing.

XP potions fall under both. Just one example. One player essentially gets to skip content over another player and for example, kill 50% less mobs to be at the same position as someone else. As well as (in the case of CP) gain advantage over another player if they both kill the same number of mobs. Now granted in PvP the "advantage" can be much more noticeable but I see some people saying there is no advantage in PvE and I say hogwash. Someone else could easily be picked over you to be invited to a trial for having more CP as a factor. Someone else could be harvesting more nodes faster and get more mats from each node, allowing them to make and sell goods cheaper than you without said passives. Some people can run around faster than you, kills faster than you, etc which allows them to spend less time doing the things you do, an example of how this might be competitive is new gear, new recipes, new motifs, a better char can get easier and faster and sell for 40k while the stuff is still "hot" and by the time you get to it it's only worth 300 gold.

As long as there is a competitive market, and as long as there is content that not everyone can do (if everyone can do all the dungeons naked for example), than you have a competitive environment in some form.

For me, P2W is a gray area.

To further complicate things. If there were no pay elements at ALL, then what about TIME as a resource just like $? If someone had 10 times more time to play and kick ass at ESO then me because I have a to sludge a 40 hour work week, should that person be seen as "bad" and in order for me to compete should think about quitting my job?

In this situation I think, well, I'll substitute my lack of time in game because I work all week with $$$ that I get from working to make up for it. Seems like a fair way to try to keep balance.

And I say try because there is no perfect balance.

And throw in people that have both time and money? They skew things for sure but there aren't that many of them.

It's one of those happy medium situations. Where the game doesn't FORCE people to pay or make them feel like they HAVE to in order to be effective or have fun. Can't please everyone but the goal is to please the most and try to keep things somewhat fair.

And that all is to facilitate the over all goal. Maximize profit for the company.

TL:DR - it's complicated.

Kuettbullen wrote: »

DISCLAIMER: I don't want/intend to turn this into a hate thread and please keep that in mind if you post a reply!

Hi!
With alot of "X is Pay to win! Don't put it in the game!!" threads lately I want to know what everyone conciders P2W and I'll try to explain my point of view as thoroughly as I can in this post.

First and foremost the EXP potions I think they arent P2W, because I know it might cause that some people are SLIGHTLY ahead in champion levels I don't think it will be anything major. My reasoning for that is even if you dont have the EXP potion you can still reach the same champion level as someone who is using the potion as without, though it's obviously going to take more time. Quite alot of people simply don't have the alot of time to spend on the game to really get their champion levels up. Consequently there will be some of the high-end min-maxing people that will use it to reach new heights that just some other people have a very hard time reaching. Still I dont concider it P2W.

I've also seen some threads about changing class/race. If hypothetically ZOS implements a race changing feature in the crown store it will neither be a "gamebreaking" nor "P2W" feature. Because you're not paying to (for example) get a set of armor that is better than the best crafted/dropped in the game. Though a class changing feature to much to ask no matter if you are for or against it, simply because in such a game as ESO changing class on a whim will actually create imbalance issues and people will switch back and forth between classes because class X is flavor of the month. Also restrictions on race change (quite obvious but it needs to be said), if you are in faction X you should only be able to change between the races in that faction unless you have the any race for any faction feature unlocked.

I dont concider things to be P2W unless they create significant imbalance issues or if there are items/skills that you cant obtain anywhere else other then the ingame shop.

Do you agree or disagree with the examples and reasons above? Please respond and motivate why you think that way.

in my opinion pay to win = paying then winning
esos "pay to win" is paying crowns then vanity items which aren't pay to win resulting the exp boost of 10% for eso plus i dont think its pay to win though the pay to win potions should not be as op [maybe instead 50% 25%] even if there are real i mean who knows its just not a troll with photoshop that stuff is easy

genchaos9b14_ESO wrote: »

By this definition here it makes IC look like the game has finally gone P2W. Unless of course people who don't subscribe or buy the DLC still have the same access to all of the gear available in IC.

Was waiting for someone to say this.

I believe it's just a phrase that is in vogue at the moment. But as it often the case with such things, the vast majority of use of the term is in-fact misuse.

There is not one thing in ESOTU, when looked at objectively, that could be considered 'pay to win'.