You can do that now buy buying plex then buying injectors with that isk, or the much cheaper option of buying a character directly, litterally 10x cheaper.
200mil sp char will cost you about 180b, to inject it will be close to 1tril, to buy sp online directly would cost close to 1.5t worth of isk if you use the biggest plex packs as reference for isk/real money conversion value, if it where even possible which it isn’t yet.
Buying sp online will always be terrible value compared to just buying a char.
The reality is that the ‘pay’ bit is often considerable, and the ‘advantage’ bit is often not some huge step but something the player feels they ought to have surpassed by now anyway.
For example…14 days training to get the Tech 2 entropic disintegrator for my Vedmak. The T1 weapon already does pretty well. The T2 is not some huge advantage. But it is certainly better. The question then is…do I really want to buy PLEX and spend 900m ISK to buy a Large Skill Injector that reduces the wait from 14 days to 5 days ?
In the end I decided no. It just was not worth it. This is the sort of thing people call ‘paying to win’…but the ‘win’ here was little more than getting a slightly higher placing on kill mails for doing more damage. Heck, I can wait 14 days for that.
Here is a take on it. Selling charachters has as far as I can tell always been there. So you’ve always been able to short cut your way to better ships on the back of someone else’s efforts.
However CCP cannot benefit from that beyond a one time transfer fee.
Now people have other options to sell bits of a charachter instead of the whole thing by stripping skills. CCP gets to benefit more regularly from this and so it keeps the game alive that much longer with a lower entry level for players to become sellers in the market.
However the cost of skill injectors is almost prohibitive. So until you can comfortably afford a billion in game for just a couple hundred thousand skill points you have a few one off bundles to help you get started. You can’t buy multiples. Once you’ve bought them you have to wait till you can afford the player generated ones. Meanwhile their sales keep the game alive a little bit longer.
Eve is old. Most companies would have moved onto a newer product by now and we’d be left with eve 3.0 with completely dumbed down economy, a player auction house instead of a market and a safe rookie area people can stay in doing monotonous stuff for ever. Eventually they might launch eve classic but it wouldn’t have the players for the sandbox to reach critical mass. We’ll only have the game as long as it’s viable business for the company that runs the servers so let’s not begrudge them the income that’s keeping the lights on!
That’s nonsense. It cannot be ‘pay to win’ if one is not actually ‘winning’. If the cost outweighs any supposed advantage then overall it is a loss, not a win.
I did exactly that a while back but couldn’t get past the new simplified talent tree. It was terrible but i grinded out the new stuff in the latest expansion and attempted the rivendreth grind and i just don’t have time for any of that. It never ends.
Anyway it isn’t p2w because you need gear and then any pvp you go into your own choice. It is instanced and oldschool word city raids and pvping is pretty much dead. If you join pvp after paying for max level, you will get annihilated by people who have played (grinded) for longer.
If there were gear sets that were absolute max stats to biy then yes, it would be p2w.
Oh actually you can straight up buy gold now so yes you could indeed p2w through the auction house but without knowing each class, their talent tree’s, their spell and attack cooldowns, you would still get annihilated.
Thats is where playing arena is a whole different level. Matches can be lost on popping a cooldown at the wrong time too quickly or before it can be used to counter another cooldown spell or attack. Max level and gear wont beat experience.
Would that be the reality where I spent an entire career working in logic ?
How about the actual reality where you pay regardless. You think that time is worthless and you have an infinite supply of it ? You have absolutely nothing better to do with your time than watch a mining laser for 4 hours ? Of course you do…so you are paying with your time.
Someone who can mine for 10 hours a day has an unfair advantage over someone who can only mine for 1 hour a day. They will be ‘winning’ the game quicker !
Oh…that’s convenient isn’t it. Completely miss out the fact that there can be just as much of a time ‘unfair advantage’ as a money one.
But surely the whole point ( that you struggle to miss ) is that someone who is suffering that unfair time advantage can make up for it with money.
In your ideal world, people in retirement homes with 24/7 to mine would be the winners of Eve, whilst some person with a 4 hour a day commute to London and 7 kids to look after and who can only spend 30 minutes a day in Eve would be the loser. And you think THAT is fair ???
Not if the entire argument is ‘unfair advantage’. You cannot argue loudly that money gives an ‘unfair advantage’ whilst at the same time totally ignoring the ‘unfair advantage’ that exists in the amount of time people have to log in…which undoubtedly gives the person with more time on their hands an advantage and helps them ‘win’.
But consistency of logic is never a strong point on these forums
I never said there were not such mechanics. I said paying does not necessarily mean winning. You cannot make the automatic assumption that a person who has paid has gained an advantage over someone who hasn’t. But you are just loosely throwing the term about as if it did.
Look…
PERSON A…mines for 10 hours a day and makes 1bn ISK
PERSON B…mines for 1 hour a day, makes 100m and buys PLEX to get another 900m
Person B has ‘paid’ yet has exactly the same ISK as person A. They are ‘winning’ ??
Your whole argument is about that there are players that are playing 8+ hours a day or players who play this game for 12 years+ already and thus they have such a huge advantage over you or just any new player that even buying 100.000 PLEX isn’t giving you advantage over them.
Well that is completely irrelevant.
Again for like thousand times, “pay to win” is a term. It refers to paying cash to get any kind of advantage in game over those who doesn’t pay. It doesn’t literately mean winning despite it is called as such. The amount of advantage you are getting for you money doesn’t matter, it can be almost negligible and it still would be pay to win. Hell, players are often referring to pay2win in games that aren’t when developers creates a cosmetic apparel such as skin that creates usually unintended advantage (such as the character with this skin being harder to be seen, or his hitboxes are slightly fatter/thinner than normally - this is usually fixed eventually as developers of not-pay-to-win games don’t want their game to be called as such even if it is kinda bull ).
By your logic, nothing that CCP can ever sell, such as overpowered ships is pay2win. Likewise, cheating and botting in games is also fine because it gives new player or player who can’t play as much time per day means to catch up to those who play the game years and who play 8+ hours daily. As catching-up is not advantage.
But even if I accepted your argument. You crafted yourself a best case scenario for this to be valid. But that is not the only case is it? You forgot (or just deliberately ignored it) to mention the PERSON C who miners 1 hour a day, makes 100m and doesn’t buy PLEX.
The whole P2W term seems to morph in definition depending on what argument is being made. Every now and then one gets the obligatory retreat to ’ oh…but pay to win doesn’t actually mean ‘win’ '…followed by 100 posts in which it is used in exactly that ‘win’ manner.
The position of ‘advantage’ is then fallen back on. Hell no…‘advantage’ doesn’t mean ‘win’. Quite how one has an ‘advantage’ without ‘winning’ in any sense is never explained.
And then the position is fallen back on that hell no…not even ‘advantage’ is being argued, as that would mean having to admit that an advantage equally as much exists with regard to time available for login…and we can’t have that can we as then people would see that that whole ‘unfair’ ( never mentioned but always implied ) bit is really a time vs money equation.
The definition for P2W never morphed anywhere. The definition is a given and generally accepted. If you disagree with the definition you can discuss it on wikipedia itself.
The only peoples who are morphing the definition are those who are playing pay2win game themselves, but they don’t want to admit that they are playing such game because they hate pay2win games and would never played such game, so they are coming to the discussion with their own personal definition of what this is, most commonly taking the “win” literally. All in order for the game they play not being pay2win.
It was already said, that using the term literally would make probably no game on the market to be pay to win, because:
the advantages that game companies are selling are almost exclusively not absolute and a skill or knowledge is still needed (ppls say that Diablo Immortal sells absolute advantage and it might be possible, I didn’t play it, is there anything else? card games maybe?)
a lot of games doesn’t have definite way of “winning”, which is a case of EVE and all other MMOs
Well, I only replied to you because I agree with you with lot of other things and I thought you didn’t read the whole thread so I repeated it all for you again from scratch. But if you are unable to accept the reality because it would compromise your personal stance on pay2win games then obviously nothing that we can say is going to persuade you. So I am not posting on this matter anymore. This time for real!!!
so yes you could indeed p2w through the auction house but without knowing each class, their talent tree’s, their spell and attack cooldowns, you would still get annihilated.
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