POE is not a FREE TO PLAY

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SeCKSEgai wrote:

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Miská wrote:

We went back to the f2p discussion because of 1 troll. Good lord.

Well he does keep bumping the thread every time it drops off the first page.

It's a holy war it seems. Wikipedia can handle this much better than this forum ever could.

I just don't understand why they are letting 1 scrounger pollute their main forum with this thread.

If someone has valid points, that's fair enough. But just the topic of this thread is already delusional.

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SeCKSEgai wrote:

And that's why you will never have a credible argument. You don't understand the original reasons why that was done nor have you experienced the roots. You might as well argue that everyone gets a mirror every year.

Basically people have already said why its not unethical many times over -- if you truly thought it wasn't ethical you wouldn't play the game and wouldn't bother posting.

I thought we mutually agreed that neither of us was going to "understand" the other party, so I don't see any point in continuing this discussion. However, I will respond to this part for the readers' benefit (if there are any).

a) I didn't say I never played D2, I just meant that I wasn't willing to go back to a 2-decade-old game as part of your little experiment.

b) Even if I didn't play D2, it wouldn't invalidate my criticism of PoE, which, in case you haven't noticed, is a different game. In a different time.

c) Just because I'm troubled by one aspect (or five) of a game, doesn't necessarily mean I'll throw a fit and quit. If that's your usual m.o., more power to you. I like to criticize games that I otherwise enjoy, so they can improve.

d) I don't know how you came up with that "mirror" argument, but that was cringe-worthy, at best.

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databeaver wrote:

Spoiler

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NemoJr wrote:

I think you're the one who didn't quite understand my point there. What I don't get is why some people actively encourage GGG to keep selling stash tabs, as if they're getting a cut from the profits; it doesn't make sense.

I think they should keep selling stash tabs because I like being able to increase my storage without a limit and selling storage space is the only realistic way to do it. Giving everyone unlimited free storage is a recipe for disaster.

The other alternative is to stop selling storage space and put a hard cap on how much you can have. Maybe the cap would be higher than four tabs, but I'm sure it would be lower than the number of tabs I use for hoarding stuff I'll likely never use. In every game I've ever played with capped storage I've run out of it, and I'm thankful that PoE allows me to bypass that issue by paying.

Now, if GGG decides to give some more free space for everyone, I'm certainly not opposed to that. In light of the trade manifesto it wouldn't be amiss from them to give one premium tab free to everyone.

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NemoJr wrote:

No thank you. That game is old enough to get a driver's license, so feel free to call me "entitled" just because I expect certain improvements in it's spiritual successor. And feel free to call me "cheap" because I consider selling such an important feature in a F2P game unethical.

A 12× improvement in storage space is not enough then? Granted PoE has more items too, but still playing Diablo II is more like playing PoE with a single stash tab. Diablo II's stash could barely hold all the items you need, and you could forget about trying to collect anything or keeping a spare set of equipment for your next HC character. Mules could alleviate the storage issue somewhat but without a shared storage space using them was difficult and risky if you played on Battle.net.

I appreciate your efforts to continually come up with reasonable arguments and to keep the discussion civil. That said, I think the real "recipe for disaster" is coming up with new ways to sell tabs, and making them more and more convenient to the point they're considered mandatory. We've discussed this point at length in the "other" thread, so I'll leave it at that.

Besides, "unlimited" is a bit of an exaggeration, don't you think? I'm sure a happy medium can be reached, keeping in mind all the items they've added to the game since "the good old days". After all, the tabs (and their contents) are most likely just "lists" of coordinates, item types, affixes, and exact values. Or something along those lines, i.e. not very resource / space intensive.

And about D2: With all due respect, my point was that I consider "D2 had very limited space, so PoE has enough space" a non-argument -- it would be unfair to treat them equally. It's akin to someone complaining about Fallout 3's inventory system, and me defending it by saying "it's less shit compared to FO2".

Fallout 1 & 2 were great games with a shitty inventory system, which would be unacceptable by today's standards. Diablo 2 is similar to them in that regard.

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It looks like this thread is doomed to either get locked, or continue to be about the semantics of "Free-to-Play", so that'll be the last out of me here.

Looking forward to the next one just like it.

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NemoJr wrote:

d) I don't know how you came up with that "mirror" argument, but that was cringe-worthy, at best.

It was an example of a completely unreasonable request - like expecting a business that relies on microtransactions to sustain its bandwidth usage, hardware maintenance, staffing costs, etc without charging an initial fee and still expecting unlimited space?

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drakgoku wrote:

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Johny_Snow wrote:

Game is a fremium where you need to pay to get all the advantages. Nothing strange here. Also why so adamant on defending its F2P status? Playing a fremium wont make you an a-hole......

It's everything I wanted to hear. Thanks.

Yep, it's obviously you only want to hear people who agree with your incorrect opinions. I saw your stash where you were hoarding junk you didn't need and then asking what you could possibly do besides pay for me space.

The answer is obvious. Anyone can see it except for you.

Drop some stuff to make more space. Then, and here's the important part... don't pick it up again. Allow it to decay with the instance. It's gone, and now you have more space.

The key point here: That didn't cost you anything, and PoE remains what it is.. what it always has been, and what it continues to be... Free to Play.

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Synopse wrote:

The whole discussion is about what definition of free-to-play are you using.

Let's take wikipedia's definition as a broadly excepted definition in Internet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-to-play):

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Free-to-play (F2P or FtP) video games, also known as free-to-start,[1] are games that give players access to a significant portion of their content without paying. There are several kinds of free-to-play games, but the most common is based on the freemium software model; thus, free-to-play games are oftentimes not entirely free. For freemium games, users are granted access to a fully functional game but must pay microtransactions to access additional content. Free-to-play can be contrasted with pay to play, in which payment is required before using a service for the first time.

According to wikipedia, PoE is free-to-play and can be considered freemium due to purches of stashes, and it is not pay-to-play.

We can cut the whole discussion short by reduction to if wikipedia provides an acceptable definition or not.
If yes, we are done here.
If not, I propose to continue your discussion at wikipedia.

Thanks for reading and enjoy playing the game.

What this proves to me, I already believed, that GGG's definition of F2P is reasonable and widely accepted. Good luck on the proposal that the discussion move to Wikipedia. :-)

I did read through the wikipedia talk page on that article. It is clear to me from that, with comments going back before PoE was even a game, etc., that PoE fits the wikipedia article definition of F2P and that the article was not written by anyone from GGG. Here's a link to the talk page.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Free-to-play

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NemoJr wrote:

Besides, "unlimited" is a bit of an exaggeration, don't you think? I'm sure a happy medium can be reached, keeping in mind all the items they've added to the game since "the good old days". After all, the tabs (and their contents) are most likely just "lists" of coordinates, item types, affixes, and exact values. Or something along those lines, i.e. not very resource / space intensive.

The thing is, I have about 50 tabs of stuff in standard (plus 14 empty tabs), and some of those are special tabs which hold way more of their item category than would fit in a standard tab. I think that's a completely unreasonable amount to give for free to every player. At the same time I like keeping my 20 tabs of uniques, 7 tabs of skill gems and whatever else I have. I also like the fact that if I run out of empty tabs I can always buy more. So it seems that the only satisfactory solution is for GGG to continue selling stash tabs.

The amount of stash tabs provided for free is a separate issue and one I'm mostly indifferent about. But whatever happens on that front, I think the sales of stash tabs should continue in some form to satisfy the hoarders like me.

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NemoJr wrote:

And about D2: With all due respect, my point was that I consider "D2 had very limited space, so PoE has enough space" a non-argument -- it would be unfair to treat them equally. It's akin to someone complaining about Fallout 3's inventory system, and me defending it by saying "it's less shit compared to FO2".

I was mostly responding to the part about expecting some improvements. I think PoE's stash, even with only the four free tabs, is a vast improvement over Diablo II. Besides being larger it also offers search functionality to locate items more easily. Not that Diablo II needed one, with its pitifully small stash.

That's not to say that it couldn't be improved still. The delve currencies in particular are a questionable move, being unstackable and some of them being rather large. And I wish the search would highlight items from within the map tab's sub-tabs.

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databeaver wrote:

The delve currencies in particular are a questionable move, being unstackable and some of them being rather large. And I wish the search would highlight items from within the map tab's sub-tabs.

Assuming that GGG makes Delve part of the core game, there will probably be a new special stash tab for fossils and such.

28 pages and not enough time to read them all right now so sorry if I'm repeating someone's thoughts.

The only change to the default tab system I can see is morphing one of them into a premium tab since GGG made their own trade website. One premium tab instantly shows the value of a premium tab and the power it can bring to this game. A new player can list items for trade and make sales. It's a big part of this game and character progression: earning alchs and chaos orbs outside of doing the recipes.

Is this game pay to win? Yeah, slightly. Four non-premium tabs either pushes you into installing a 3rd-party application (bad!) in order to play Path (balanced around trading, btw) or to wallow in SSF and quit because of the difficulty.

Sure, you can play story mode with one tab. Hell, could even do it with just your character's inventory since it's all about shedding gear and grabbing all those incremental upgrades. But is that doable for someone just hopping into the game? I doubt it. At least with one premium tab they can name it "Rings" and save up all those special-sounding drops.