Lolwut? Are you serious? Do you honestly not see a difference between two players who start at the same time, one who buys ISK and injectors and one who doesn’t? You see no advantage for the first player?
So, where is my advantage? Did all of those skill points and ISK keep them from ganking me? Nope…
That’s an incredibly stupid objection. In any other pay to win game you can buy the premium extra damage ammo and still lose because you’re terrible at the game and even having bonus damage isn’t enough to make up for the lack of skill. But it’s still a pay to win mechanic.
Experience and time played is the only advantage anyone has in EVE…
And you’re delusional if you think this is true. If you have two players with equal experience and time played, one who buys ISK and injectors and one who doesn’t, the player who participates in the “pay to win” mechanic will have a major advantage over the other. They’ll have better stats on their ships, better resources to spend, etc. So what is that, if not an advantage?
And, again, why are you so stubbornly defending such an absurd position? Do you buy PLEX and injectors for your characters and hate it when people judge you for it?
I assume he’s defending the ‘absurd’ position that EVE is not a pay-to-win game, because he believes EVE is not a pay-to-win game. And neither do I.
I, for one, would never play a pay-to-win game, because I’d never play a game where I’d have to pay with real money in order to get balanced fights against other players. Luckily, EVE is not a pay-to-win game.
In EVE, you never get balanced fights, and if you do, one of you did something wrong, or it is an arranged fun fight, in which case ‘fun’ or ‘getting experience’ is your objective, not winning.
In EVE, any advantage you have through ship choice or skills, regardless of whether it is obtained with plex or ratting, is negated by the fact that you skip the fights in which you don’t have the advantage if you have that choice.
If I see someone who has a titan and I’m in a tristan, I wouldn’t engage. Does that make the other guy ‘win’? Does the way he got into his titan (plex or ratting) matter at all? No.
EVE is a subscription based game in which you can pay to skip a grind. It is most definitely not a pay-to-win game by the common definition of pay-to-win games: games where paying players have an advantage over players who do not pay. In EVE a player in an expensive ship will not have any advantage over another player in the same ship with the same fittings, even if he paid his way into that expensive ship with plex and the other guy didn’t.
EVE is not pay-to-win. And stop calling it like that, it scares off potential players looking for a fun game.
This is a blatant lie. If two players are otherwise equal the one who pays for cash shop upgrades will have an advantage over the one who doesn’t. The fact that you can come up with scenarios where a player who doesn’t buy upgrades has sufficient other advantages to offset their lack of cash shop purchases does not change the fact that you are directly converting cash into in-game advantages.
And stop calling it like that, it scares off potential players looking for a fun game.
If new players are scared off by the reality of EVE’s pay to win system then it is good that they avoid EVE before making an investment they will regret.
In EVE you (or your enemies) choose your engagements. If players are otherwise equal at point of engagement, ‘paying to win’ must have happened before that moment and during the fight itself it matters not whether the ISK for the ships and fits came from rats or plex.
True, pay-to-skip-grind exists in EVE and can put a player into capital fights from day one if they’re willing to pay for it. But in those fights they don’t have any advantage over their enemies.
You do get to choose engagements, but you don’t have full information when you make that choice. For example, if you see a character in local that was created a week ago how much of a threat are they? If they have not bought any cash shop upgrades they’re a negligible threat to a veteran player. If they have bought cash shop upgrades they could be flying a high-end ship with maximum skills (and may be the alt of a veteran player with the skill to use it right).
If players are otherwise equal at point of engagement, ‘paying to win’ must have happened before that moment and during the fight itself it matters not whether the ISK for the ships and fits came from rats or plex.
But that’s not what I mean about “everything else being equal”. I’m not talking about a literal 1v1, I’m evaluating who is better at EVE. If both players make their characters at the same time, devote the same hours per week to playing, use the same strategies and career paths, etc, the one who buys cash shop upgrades will indisputably be more effective at everything they do. This is clearly an advantage.
And TBH I’m not sure why this is a controversial concept. If cash shop upgrades didn’t provide an advantage then why would people buy them?
But in those fights they don’t have any advantage over their enemies.
Only if you compare players 1:1 and ignore the strategic situation. An alliance with players that buy cash shop upgrades will have more capital-capable players as they push new players into capital ships in a shorter amount of time, which translates into a major strategic advantage.
It’s a controversial concept because games that are ‘pay-to-win’ are generally considered trash games which offer whales the chance to keep paying to have an advantage over the non-paying free playerbase. A game being called ‘pay-to-win’ is therefore a huge red flag for a lot of potential players.
So be careful when you take the definition of pay-to-win a bit too black and white and apply it to a game such as EVE, which -even though it does technically allow advantages by paying- is a subscription based game in which you can pay to skip grind.
Ugh why even play eve if ur that freaking lazy. Go play some idle mobile game or something where you can farm billions of whatever without even looking at ur screen
Here is the actual issue you people have. But don’t worry, we don’t have to. CCP designed this stuff in a way that it is just blatantly obvious that it matches all the criteria of what people who don’t try to be the white knight fanboy call Pay2Win (hint: they don’t get triggered if “win” is not meant litteral).
You can continue to ignore it. New players will not, and they don’t care if you tell them how little it matters in the grand scheme of things. They don’t see that yet and they will not believe you because EVERY game out there has a fanboy brigade in their forums who pretend how not pay2win the game is no matter how greedy the devs are.
But realize that you are actually part of the problem. CCP devs as all fallible humans are susceptible to confirmation bias. And if 1 player defends their ■■■■ and 10 protest they will see the one only because they already agree with his position because they think it’s not an issue and nothing will change. In fact they will continue adding new shitty monetization vectors as if everything is ok and probably add literal gambling next month… oh wait, we already got that.
The problem tho is that I’m not so sure you actually understand the world “winning”. “Winning” is not limited to “being the first in the ranking system”.
Behing stronger than before, in any way, shape, or form, is “winning”.
Basically if you believe it’s not Pay To Win because “it is possible to loose”, then you also consider that an Athlete using doping substances is actually not cheating because he might still loose the match anyway.
Exactly, this is the issue people have when some people call this a pay-to-win game. The issue with calling EVE a pay-to-win game or on other words ‘a terrible game that players should stay clear of’, is that it scares off potential players.
Any game with a player-driven market will have a black market on the internet that allows people to buy advantages with real money, or outright buy powerful characters from these black markets.
The smart move that CCP made was to legalize this by becoming the middle man. CCP introduced plex and character transfers for plex. This way the inevitable transactions of $$ for ISK and $$ for characters are in hands of CCP and the profits of these transactions flow to the developers of the game to further improve the game.
The alternative to this ‘pay to win’ system would be that these profits would be flowing towards the creators of bots, bot farms and people who hack accounts in order to sell them on the black market.
I am 100% behind this choice of CCP to sell the plex themselves as it is a lot better than the alternative, even though I’d never buy plex myself. I pay for my Omega time and gaining ISK is part of the fun, but I get that some others are willing to spend more money and want to spend less time on gaining ISK. But now it happens in a way that benefits CCP and all of us, instead of benefitting the people who ruin this game for the rest of us (bots).
Next time you call EVE a pay-to-win game, I would like to know how you envision a viable alternative.
You ignored every single point I made in my last post and just repeated the same crap that was already said a gazillion times and has nothing to do with what I criticized about your statement.
I said “Next time you call EVE a pay-to-win game, I would like to know how you envision a viable alternative.” - emphasis on viable. Also I don’t know what gambling and alpha state have to do with pay-to-win.
Which, now that I look back at it, wasn’t the subject of this thread at all. We’ve drifted off topic. Feel free to make a new thread about pay to win, I can repeat what I’ve said here in that new thread.
I ignored the name calling (fanboys, white knights, greedy devs blah blah) and noticed just one ‘point you made’ in your last post. Sorry about that.
