Pay to Win? Please tread carefully, this game can be amazing

Nope, if you want to compare to League of Legends it would be like if you had all the items in the game already at your disposal but you could only use some of them on certain days OR you could pay to buy them permanently.

The pillow is not a nag screen when a legendary pops in there. I'm sorry but I had 878 games to analyze this situation and I already told you my opinion.


Not gonna bother with a reply for Blindsight since he's making my point for me :

 

How is it not a nag screen when a legendary pops in?

So the arbitrary number of games you've played makes your opinion correct?

At least to me, you're point isn't clear. From what I understand given what you've posted:

• You don't think the game is as big as WoW or FFVI, and thus somehow not worth price
• You believe the game is Pay to Win because you can spend money as a resources instead of time to gain random items
• You are right because you have 878 games played

I can only assume that you are taking my response to your saying "they actually dare to ask for even more (adventures / skins / etc)." out of context and applying it to your P2W model you have of the game. That, or your point is that people should be able to buy cosmetic items.

 

I think that if something as big as a MMORPG (doesn't really matter which) can make do with similar or lower prices than CardHunter (which is a browser game), they can do better.

That's my definition of pay2win, you're not playing to win, you're paying to win (items in this case).

I posted the number of games played to show that I'm not someone who played a few games, got his ass kicked and came to cry on the forums about pay to win.

Contrary to what you might think, I do want to keep playing this game because it has given me more entertainment than many other games in the last few months. That doesn't make it any less pay to win.

 

1. When you see the pillow, you already won the current battle. Compare that to games where when you lose a screen pops up asking you to pay money to get revived at full life and win. In Card Hunter you don't "pay to win", you pay for items that might or might not slightly increase your chances to win. Even if the pillow was gone, you could still have the same effect by spending money on chests.
2. Anything in the game can be achieved by playing. Card Hunter is not "pay to win", because you have the option to play to win instead. After having played a large number of battles, the item on the pillow will be something you already have anyway, so you don't need an ongoing subscription for a long time. The club is only useful in the first month or three (depending on how much you play).
3. Final Fantasy XIV just came out the SECOND time. The first version was so unplayably bad that Square Enix recalled it and made a new version. Paying something like $20 for Card Hunter is a FAR better deal. And if you don't want to pay that money, you get the option to play for free. FF14 makes you pay for the box before you can even try it, and then the monthly subscription isn't optional, and you lose everything if you stop paying. In Card Hunter you can stop paying and keep all the extra items you got from pillows, or the extra adventures you bought.

 

I'm assuming you by "they" you mean CH devs and by "better" you mean lower price. Going off of those assumptions, large book stores, for instance, are able to undercut smaller mom&pop shops because they feel that can make it up with volume. MMO companies often have other projects that help float the MMO until it gets critical mass, and they NEED the volume (and thus lower prices) in order to stay afloat. There are a lot of other factors playing into price than size or technology used in a game.

Additionally, as I have discussed previously, I think lower prices are actually discouraging to the greater population through the assumption if the price is lower, almost everyone you end up fighting against has paid and thus you're the only one on the outs. It's a perception thing, but very influential none the less.

Either way, the market will determine what the accepted price is. The devs can set it to whatever they feel is optimal for them and I'm sure they've done (and continue to do) cost analysis, population targeting and price point analysis.

Well then yes, you can Pay to "Win" items. Nobody can argue with that. You didn't state that this was your definition of P2W. Most people believe P2W means Pay to Win the game. Items are one of only three (skilled/controllable) components to winning.

So you can call it P2W all you want, but by community definition you don't actually mean P2W the way most do and are only confusing the issue. Thanks for the clarification.

 

Ok, tell me a game that fits the community's definition of pay to win.

 

The Mighty quest for epic loot. You can pay your way to top level of everything when building your castle, and even instantly.

I'm not aware of any other continuing multi-player pay to win games since I generally don't stick with any F2P games long enough to care about the P2W effect on it.

 

Wartune is great example of a F2P game that is P2W. you can buy wings and cloths with real money that up your stats and F2P players can't get these upgrades in game play. there are some mounts as well that can only be gotten from real money and they too up your stats a lot. and you can have the same lv toon as a P2W guy but you'll never beat him cause he will have more hp and damage output than you. that is P2W.

in this game all items can be found though play and never bought if thats is how you want to play. so ya you can P2get items faster but a non-paying person could have the same items as you also and can beat you. plus the only thing thats not random is paying for pizza and turning it into gold to buy the loot at the shops, the chest are all random and you could spend your money and not get anything really good out them as well.

 

haha, then I guess we need a new category of games

1. free to play
2. pay to win
3. pay to get

I still don't agree that you can call cardhunter f2p when you have games like dota, lol or hon that are truly f2p.

 

Ok, my earlier post was to see which definition of pay to win the arguing people were using. This time I want to check if people engaged in the debate should even be discussing pay to win in the first place.

People who do not belong in the discussion, would be people who fundamentally disagree with non-cosmetic micro-transactions at all.

For that, there is a very simple test:

For Single Player:
Take Final Fantasy 7 (or any lengthy game you mostly enjoyed that takes a long time to completely clear). Would you be willing to pay $10 to make the game 5 hours shorter?

For Multi Player:
If the opponent links a paypal in the chat, and offers to resign if you send him $3... would you do it?

If you say no to both, then you just plain don't like microtransactions. Sadly that means your potential game selection is quite narrow these days.

If the first sounds good (maybe you hated the Golden Saucer, or wanted out of Midgard faster), then you like pay to advance (if you would like having the game require you to pay $20 every time you change disks, you like pay to win SP)

If the second option sounds good, then you like pay to win. At least when you are the one paying. rephrase the question to "Chat pops up informing you that the opponent just donated $3 to the game developers, you are now required to forfeit" and you can check if you like pay to win when you are NOT the one paying.

 

Not to mention the fact that although different a bit in gameplay I think cardhunter is still a form of CCG (collectable card game), and ALL CCG's online works in similar ways pay ways, it's part of how the genre works.
anyone disagree with card hunger being a form of CCG?

 

So that's not pay 2 win ? When you are paying a guy to give up so you can win the game ?

This would be funny if it wasn't so sad. Enjoy your "f2p" game. I'm done arguing with strangers on the internets.

 

Wow, you stopped reading before you read the rest of the post did you? he answered that at the last line
you're the sad person over here now.

 

Except p2w isnt a binary issue. You don't auto win when you pay$X. Making it into that situation is ridiculous.

You also conveniently pretended that magnitude doesn't matter. How much Pizza do you have to buy in order to win consistently based solely on your cash? even a guy dropping $100 isn't going to have anywhere close to an overwhelming advantage. Good f2p games allows you to bypass grind. Its useful. It doesn't auto win the game. Assume it does/would is stupid.

@ players of equal skills. One spends $20 (on starters or w/e). Another spends $99 on shop + starters + chests. how much difference would it make? Will his win percentage be 5% - 10%? Doubt its higher. How long would that last with the other player gaining items with time?

not taking those things into account is ridiculous.

That was just a ****ty analogy. Its the worse analogy i've seen in a long long time.

Lots of people don't want to pay to auto win. But they want to not have to grind to be competitive. Is this distinction difficult to understand? I'm not willing to pay for a prostitute, but i am willing to pay to show a girl a good time to present myself in a more desirable manner, then see where that goes. Your analogy is like saying willingness to take a girl out to a posh restaurant equivalent to willingness to pay for prostitute.s

 

Ok, for a brief moment I am going to go ahead and join the rest at "losing at internets" (ie - arguing online).

You see, the point of an analogy is not to completely re-create the exact conditions. If you wanted that, just keep talking about the thing you are actually talking about. The point of an analogy is to re-frame the discussion to highlight a limited scope. I specified in that post what my limited scope is, a rare treat to accompany an analogy with explanation of the purpose, but apparently not appreciated.

That analogy is to see if you fundamentally disagree with paying AT ALL. Your "degrees of payment" to avoid grinding falls primarily in the first case: Paying to make FFVII a shorter game. Because the only purpose of this game is to acquire equipment. So if you use money to acquire some equipment, that removes the need to use time to acquire it, and thus reduces the total amount of entertainment time available to you from this game.

But if you do not enjoy the acquisition, only the using, then it is perfectly reasonable to skip the part you don't enjoy to get to the part you do enjoy. Thus the expansion on the first point to talk about skipping portions of the game you simply won't enjoy.

And then in the second part it is indeed boiling things down to a raw binary check: Do you fundamentally disagree with paying to win. It is not a matter of degree, it is a yes or no, do you want to win because you paid, or lose because you did not. Asking if this game is pay to win or not and (if it is) just how completely binary pay to win it might be is completely secondary to asking if you care about the result at all. Because anyone who is 100% against pay to win in any form and degree... has no say in the debate past that point. State that you hate pay to win 100%, that you believe nobody should be able to beat you because they put in more money, then move on. Later you should consider if you are also upset if someone can beat you because they invested more time in the game than you did. Competitive events might just not be right for you.

But anyway, gogusrl has demonstrated twice now that he doesn't care to actually read what I write. Which is precisely what one expects on the internet, and why arguing online at all is automatically losing. And yes, saying that you are walking away from a conversation is still arguing, so you still lose. The consolation is that nobody wins at all, if that helps.

With luck, the debate which has hijacked this thread might die out as other posters heed the call to just ignore the people who continue to engage in it. I believe that the original poster has made his point, and the community has responded well enough to give the developers a good sense of what the community impression is. So it doesn't really matter if the thread continues to be hijacked or not, it is well and truly long dead.

 

Yes, but that doesn't men you get a blank check to simplify the situation to the extend that its nothing like what its supposed to be an analogy of.

Your analogy is just plain inapplicable.

The question is "what is your acceptable rate exchange for money for power/convenience" where one of the many many options is zero dollars.

There is no such thing as pay to win as you define it (aka binary, aka pay $3 to win).

This makes your question entirely irrelevant.

Just like how my analogy is to see if you fundamentally disagree with paying to spend time with a girl?

I make a comparable analogy to illustrate how ridiculous yours is. I made it into a binary system in the exact same way you did and shows you how absurd it is. Unless you can somehow show a difference between the 2, your analogy isn't valid.

i don't care what he said, whether he read your comment correctly or not doesn't matter. your analogy is still wrong even if its not for the reasons he stated.

 

Guys we all feel strongly one way or another but that's no reason to be less than respectful to each other.

That said I'm right you're all wrong nener nener!

 

To the OP:

Ask yourself how much you really understand the way traditional video games are designed. Maybe if you are a designer yourself, or read a crap-ton of content on Gamasutra, or have some developer friends who talk to you about game design all the time, you might know something. Otherwise, you probably don't.

Then consider that designing free to play games is even more complicated than this traditional model you know nothing about!

These comments are not meant to offend anyone, but the blunt, honest truth is that making blanket judgements about this business model or that business model are guaranteed ways to get your feedback ignored.

How you feel is how you feel. It is not a statement about larger systems, or has implications about anything other than your emotions about the game. Sharing those emotions is good. Trying to extrapolate your feelings into universal sentiments is egocentric and not very helpful for developers.

 

The one thing I really dislike is the use of taking things away from you (the club item) if you don't pay up. The game is basically saying "You won this amazing item, but you can't have it unless you pay more money."

 

I would just like to add my thoughts on the pay-to-win argument. I am a pretty heavy MP player and have worked my up the ladder without paying a dime. If it is possible for a mediocre player to work their way up to 1600+ without paying then I definitely don't think that it is a pay-to-win situation.