Map Stash Price and Ethical Behavior

Why are people bitching about the price of the map stash tab? Because it's unethical to charge so much? You are missing the forest for the trees. There is a much more basic, and important, question you should be considering:

"Does GGG honestly represent what it is selling?"

Well, let's have a look now, shall we? Go take a look at https://www.pathofexile.com/game and see this in the first paragraph:

"

The game is completely free and will never be "pay to win".

Are they telling you the truth? Is the game completely free with zero "pay to win" elements?

The answer to that question used to be "Yes, but with a small caveat here and there that you can ignore easily enough." Then premium stash tabs came out, and the answer changed to "Yes, but with some large caveats." With the release of the currency tab, and (importantly!) the simultaneous refusal by GGG to raise stack limits for currency in standard tab, the answer became "Only if you love GGG enough to wear blinders." The continuing release of more difficult-to-sort random crap (anyone out there enjoy sorting essences in a standard tab?) and other specialized tabs (pretty much all of them except div will save you from a lot of pain) has only consolidated and strengthened that answer.

No one can reasonably argue that a game with an indisputable win condition of wealth accumulation per hour can remain completely free of pay2win elements if it sells you things which increase your wealth accumulation per hour.

(You might argue that there are other win conditions, but none of them is disconnected from the above win condition, and in fact all are connected very tightly.)

So am I saying that GGG has gone full-on retard mode similar to mobile games? Of course not. There are many differences between those two business models.

But there is one important similarity: A game which represents itself as free2play but which is actually pay2play leaves a bad taste in the mouths of many. People hate mobile games because so many of them use deception to make their money.

This is true regardless of the mechanisms behind how much you pay, what you pay for, the degree to which the game is pay2win, etc. GGG can ethically charge whatever it wants, for anything it wants, if and only if it advertises its own game accordingly.

Is an annoyance model ethical? Of course it is! You just have to be transparent about the fact that your game uses an annoyance model.

Is GGG fully transparent about this?

Fuck no.

That is what is important here. Actual prices are irrelevant to the ethics.

Your post isn't necessarily wrong but you are forgetting that this is just your opinion. I don't see how wealth aquisition is 'winning' in this game. And you can do anything any other person with 100x tabs can do. Just abit more awkward. That is still far away from p2p. And that's my opinion.

https://www.pathofexile.com/faq/#q14

Try that one for unethical.

Boast free2-play, never update requirements in over 5 years.
Allow people to play story content (non-hardware intensive) and support development.

Then shut them down once they get into end-game and meta-playstyles.
(6x sextant vaaled 40% pack size maps etc)

I imagine some dude, starting up 3.1 after it launched, supporting for a couple of years and enjoying the game and then simply going "well this shit no longer works".
Without any warning or information around requirements or targeted machines for next expansions.

And they keep adding and bloating the game to serve the masses, so i reckon this will only increase.

Similar to your post, it's a bait and switch. Game runs smooth in story mode (mostly) just like four stash tabs are enough for it.
Then you reach end-game and shit hits the fan from all angles.

Take into account a person can easily spend a couple hundred hours before they even touch maps in this game and get this cold shower.

Then again i posted about this model or "set-up" like three years ago, nobody will understand the ethical side of this so nobody will care, just like then.
So i agree, providing the information or simply being upfront about it would be the ethical move, but a company is not created with the ideology of being ethically correct.
It's created to put food on the table.

Peace,

-Boem-

"

Miská wrote:

Your post isn't necessarily wrong but you are forgetting that this is just your opinion. I don't see how wealth aquisition is 'winning' in this game. And you can do anything any other person with 100x tabs can do. Just abit more awkward. That is still far away from p2p. And that's my opinion.

It's about availability of information and human ethics.

"leaving a sour taste in your mouth" kind of thing that happens.

Though admittedly it's a very high standard the OP and i are putting on GGG.
Then again, they have only themselves to blame for that.

Peace,

-Boem-

"

Boem wrote:

"

Miská wrote:

Your post isn't necessarily wrong but you are forgetting that this is just your opinion. I don't see how wealth aquisition is 'winning' in this game. And you can do anything any other person with 100x tabs can do. Just abit more awkward. That is still far away from p2p. And that's my opinion.

It's about availability of information and human ethics.

"leaving a sour taste in your mouth" kind of thing that happens.

Though admittedly it's a very high standard the OP and i are putting on GGG.
Then again, they have only themselves to blame for that.

Peace,

-Boem-

I understand that, but I guess I just vieuw games like PoE different then other people. I have played alot of games that previeuwed being free to play and where they frustrate you so hard, that you have no choice to either pay up or leave. I never had that feeling in PoE, but then again I started playing long before all this extra clutter was added.

The question this thread and some others are asking are probably on the table at GGG aswell. We can only wait and see what they decide is the right course of action. (Maybe a free premium tab or something).

GGG has a model where base character models and default stash space are beyond awful. That is made on purpose to make people spend money. And yeah you can refuse to do it, but if you don't realize that fact you will never get the chance and think that you are freely choosing to do it, when there are strong game conditions that are leading you to it and that have been put there in purpose by the developers. Some people just can't understand that fact and will defend their ignorance to death.

"

Miská wrote:

The question this thread and some others are asking are probably on the table at GGG aswell. We can only wait and see what they decide is the right course of action. (Maybe a free premium tab or something).

In fact I think that such a freebie is completely unnecessary and, conversely, that it would not be enough to address the problem.

So what would be enough to make me happy? A change on the overview page to something similar to the following would be a very good start.

"

Path of Exile is free to try, and in fact you can play through the entire game without spending a penny, but we do recommend that you purchase some of the following to get the complete Path of Exile experience:

(Followed by a list of a reasonable number of stash tabs, premium stash tabs, and all currency tabs with the exception of the div tab, along with their current prices.)

Along with this, some of the official rhetoric used in interviews and the like will require some adjustments.

Also, what Boem said about listing accurate requirements. There as well the description can be nuanced enough; it need not be all or nothing.

"

The requirements for the basic game are X, but the endgame experience is much more demanding on hardware. For that we recommend Y.

Would you say this is a reasonable request?

"

gibbousmoon wrote:

"

Miská wrote:

The question this thread and some others are asking are probably on the table at GGG aswell. We can only wait and see what they decide is the right course of action. (Maybe a free premium tab or something).

In fact I think that such a freebie is completely unnecessary and, conversely, that it would not be enough to address the problem.

So what would be enough to make me happy? A change on the overview page to something similar to the following would be a very good start.

"

Path of Exile is free to try, and in fact you can play through the entire game without spending a penny, but we do recommend that you purchase some of the following to get the complete Path of Exile experience:

(Followed by a list of a reasonable number of stash tabs, premium stash tabs, and all currency tabs with the exception of the div tab, along with their current prices.)

Along with this, some of the official rhetoric used in interviews and the like will require some adjustments.

Also, what Boem said about listing accurate requirements. There as well the description can be nuanced enough; it need not be all or nothing.

"

The requirements for the basic game are X, but the endgame experience is much more demanding on hardware. For that we recommend Y.

Would you say this is a reasonable request?

Looks totally reasonable to me.

I don't think it was done on purpose, but the amount of stuff added to the game over time while keeping the original inventory model static, led to tabs being mandatory.

Bought the map tab. Hefty price even on sale. Can only put one series of maps in it.... It's like GGG enjoy punishing their "senior citizens" who have been here long enough to own more than one series. A lot more than one in my case.
Still not sure why I can put a circle-with-spikes in the tab but not a circle or a square, even in the rare cases when it's the same name and tier.
Bad move.

"

johnKeys wrote:

I don't think it was done on purpose, but the amount of stuff added to the game over time while keeping the original inventory model static, led to tabs being mandatory.

Bought the map tab. Hefty price even on sale. Can only put one series of maps in it.... It's like GGG enjoy punishing their "senior citizens" who have been here long enough to own more than one series. A lot more than one in my case.
Still not sure why I can put a circle-with-spikes in the tab but not a circle or a square, even in the rare cases when it's the same name and tier.
Bad move.

I see your point, but from a pragmatic point of view, that's less of a problem if you are not a collector. All new maps that drop will fit into the new stash tab.

And if you don't think the process described above was done on purpose, then surely you don't think the exclusion of old maps in order to encourage you to buy more than one map tab was done on purpose. ;)