Foreword
P2W aka “Pay to Win”… using real money to obtain some kind of benefits that have an impact on gemeplay. Benefits that are not available to the non-paying customers.
People usually try to counter this by saying something like:
“Oh, but you can get all of the content too, you just need to grind 342345534
hours for that!”
I always laugh when I see something along these lines. Yes, theoretically (in
some games) non-paying players can do that, but it doesn’t change the fact that
before they will unlock all the required content they are at disadvantage
compared to paying players. It also causes a psychological pressure - a feeling
of inferiority that doesn’t improve your winrates and experience in general. The
same pressure pushes you to whatever spending money or whining about the game
being P2W on some kind of forums.
Hearthstone
One of the most famous P2W examples.
Quoting Dogtastic Doge on Hearthstone, I couldn’t have said better:
“Pay to have an advantage against not paying players in terms of cardpool and variety of strategy, leading to increased winrates at same time spent and skill level”.
It is important to note that card games like Hearthstone are in a somewhat different league. Just like paper-based collectible card games, they are designed to be P2W. Yet some stupid plebs, or probably trolls, still manage to claim that their favorite card game is not P2W.
Collectible Card game will not be P2W only under the following circumstances:
If you will make a brand-new account, after login you immediately receive access
to all the cards, all the expansions and all the game modes. Meaning you can
play anything and build any decks.
Would this kind of model be viable? Very unlikely. But this is another story. In
addition to being P2W at their core, card games are often a moving target with
new expansions coming at a steady pace, phasing out the old ones and practically
giving you no choice but to invest more resources into the game.
There is another aspect to the card games. They are RNG based. This subject
probably deserves its own article, but just a thought:
What do we get from combining P2W and RNG? Pretty much gambling Σ(O_O)
Path of Exile
This is probably the best game in its genre. This is what Diablo3 should have
being. How is it P2W? Quick answer: stash tabs.
Initially every user receives 4 normal stash tabs. Maybe this was enough at the
time of the game launch, but right now the amount of loot increased
significantly and keeps increasing as more content is being added. With only 4
tabs you are forced to pick-and-choose loot more aggressively, ultimately losing
on value and making so-called “loot hoarding” practically impossible.
But there is a bigger problem related to premium stash tabs and game market.
The game is balanced around you interacting with other players, buying stuff
you need, selling things you don’t need. This is where premium stash tabs come
into play. They allow you to set a price for an item and put it on sale. But
here is a problem, premium tabs aren’t free. Without them it is hard to
impossible to buy/sell things at reasonable prices. Without tabs there are two
options to sell items.
- Trade chat:
- You would probably need to use some sort of script or bot (like everyone else in there) to have a chance of selling something.
- It is full of people wanting to scam you and even if not, most of the items there are overpriced.
- People try to avoid trade chat in general and a common recommendation for everyone is to do the same.
- Official forums:
- It is a chore to create and maintain threads listing things you want to sell/buy or reading threads from other players.
- Many people who do pay for tabs ignore forums just like they do with trade chat.
- There are 3rd-party solutions to automate some of the tasks but they are still far from the premium stash tabs and often ask for your game credentials.
Not sure how to call this, but until they fix it, people should stay away from this game. What would be a fix? Tough question, but increasing the amount of normal free tabs to 10 and giving at least one premium tab to everyone would be a good start.
Overwatch
I bet some plebs would say right away something like:
Why Overwatch is even mentioned here? It is definitely not P2W because you have
to buy it!
True, but it has something in common with games based on F2P model - lootboxes.
At the time of release, Overwatch was advertised as a Pay-to-Play game. Meaning
you pay a high price once and receive all of the content. Developers talked
about how they reviewed F2P model and decided that it won’t work. But later paid
lootboxes were introduced. With this, game was promoted straight to scam
category, which is even worse than P2W.
BTW, what a surprise! This game is by the same developer who is responsible for
Hearthstone! Gambling and Scamming from a once respectable company. Can it be
worse? Perhaps some kickstarter/early access scams, but in these cases they are
at least trying to make it less obvious.
Afterword
Why these games specifically? Mainly because they are quite different. There are
many other games, perhaps they will be covered in a different article.
Why Path of Exile instead of Diablo3? I didn’t mean to make this article about
Blizzard specifically. Also I wanted to mention games that I actually played. I
have waited for Diablo3 for like 10 years but ended up not playing past few
starting zones due to the game not meeting my expectations. So not sure about
P2W aspects of this game, but judging from the official article on D3 website,
from 2013, it is probably the hell of a scam too. Quote:
Play Diablo III for FREE
Anyway, some games are more P2W than others. Sometimes this can be forgiven, sometimes it makes you move on to other games. What’s important is that there is no in-between. One can not claim that the game is not P2W just because its P2W-ness is within the limits he can tolerate. Also only a stupid pleb would try to defend Blizzard in case of Overwatch.