The 'Pay To Win' Myth

Communications Center General Discussion
41

Which is totally true if you consider my example in the OP. A person may simply be making up for not having enough time to be able grind. In what conceivable sense are they ‘winning’ over and above someone with the exact same ISK income who is doing the longer grind ?

The whole issue of time inequality just gets ignored. It’s bizarre that people make a fuss over others spending more cash on the game…they object to that inequality…and yet there are equally inequalities in how much time people can devote to grind, but no-one makes a fuss over that.

As with many Eve issues, cognitive dissonance reigns supreme.

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42

So long as they’re spending their cash with CCP and not some third party botting site, I really don’t care. It’s their money. If someone is cash rich and time poor, then I can understand the motivation, they want to get on with the fun stuff, not shoot rocks or red chevrons.

Personally, I just pay for my subscriptions and use ISK ground up in game to buy my stuff. I have a habit of flying ridiculously expensive frigates with snake pods in wormholes and 0.0. When I lose a ship, it’s one c5 site to replace it. A mid grade pod is two more, a high grade pod is six. If I started thinking “well, that’s $50-”, I’d probably stop playing.

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43

Funny thing, I wanted to point out something in the same alley that OP does but from the opposite end :slight_smile:

Generally speaking I think I am ok with P2W (and am now questioning my own post against it). If somebody has ton of RM to burn let them and maybe some of it will end up in something cool CCP releases.

Consider parallel universe in which Jack started playing EVE Online 10 years ahead of Joe. There is no way Joe could ever catch up with Jack SP-wise …or is it?

What if in their flash of genius CCP allowed new players to actually do catch up with old stagers? Wait a minute! The booster packs! Duh…

You can buy infinite number of packs despite their being apparently one-buy per account. You can (theoretically) buy the whole set multiple times after transferring your character to another and another and another account for €20 per transfer.

One full pack set with a character transfer costs €429,86 and gives 6'250'000 SP plus 321 Omega days and 2400 PLEX
Pack name Price € SP Omega days PLEX
Apprentice bundle € 9,99 50000 0 0
Novice bundla € 19,99 350000 0 0
Graduate bundle € 22,99 700000 0 0
Prodigy bundle € 28,99 1050000 0 0
Master bundle € 42,99 1750000 0 0
Platinum starter € 99,99 650000 90 1500
Gold starter € 49,99 500000 60 500
Silver starter € 19,99 250000 30 0
Bronze starter € 9,99 100000 14 0
Starter € 4,99 250000 7 0
Soldier pack € 24,99 150000 30 100
Industrialist pack € 24,99 150000 30 100
Explorer pack € 24,99 150000 30 100
Enforcer pack € 24,99 150000 30 100
Character transfer € 20,00 - - -
Total € 429,86 6250000 321 2400

I know, It is not as much SP for such a load of money but Joe works hard IRL and can afford in a year what Jack has spread over the years.

So to get to the 150mil SP, Joe would need to booster-loop 24 times and fork out ~€10’317 to also end up with 24 omega accounts for 321 days each and 57600 PLEX worth 259’200’000’000 ISK (@4’500’000 ISK/PLEX rate) on the final account :stuck_out_tongue:

PLEX can be transferred between characters like any other commodity, just take it out of PLEX Vault into your item hangar and contract it to the temporary character on next account.

Additionally every new account could be created by using friend invite (I could spam link mine but I won’t - I am not greedy :stuck_out_tongue: ) which gives 1’000’000 SP to each new account and some PLEX to every few new eccounts and the main account. This PLEX can too be rolled forward.
This would grant Joe additional 23mil SP on top 150mil SP with total 173mil SP, and possibly overtake Jack :slight_smile:

This heap of SP would not teach Joe anything game-wise ofc but would grant him very wide repertoire of not time gated choices to learn New Eden ways without stressing.

Transfering a character requires it to be in a NPC corp. You can tell with 99,99% certainty if somebody booster-looped by glancing at their funny looking employment history tab which could look something like this:

Employment history
Badass corp to this day
NPC corp for 1 day
Badass corp for 1 year
NPC corp for 1 day
Badass corp for 1 year
NPC corp for 1 day
Badass corp for 1 year
NPC corp for 1 day
Badass corp for 1 year
NPC corp for 1 day
Badass corp for 1 year
NPC corp for 2 months
Is newbie Joe a bad boy because of using cash to catch up with the veteran Jack?
  • No
  • Yes
0 voters

Fun fact:
(…)As of 10 July 2023 there are 466 different skills in EVE, with a total of 2,211x training time multiplier, and a total of 566’016’000 skill points. Every Omega clone character can potentially learn every skill, but it would take over 23 years of skill training even with 32 points at all attributes, or 3,462 Large Skill Injectors, to achieve.(…)
(source: EVE University)

Booster-looping to max possible SP would require 77 transfers at the expense of € 2’617’635 :exploding_head: :rofl:

Buying 3’462 Large Skill Injectors (for ~200 PLEX each at 4,5mil ISK/PLEX) would cost 692’400 PLEX. May be obtained from EVE Online Store by buying 35 packs of 20k PLEX for ~€ 650 each which would require just ~€ 22’503 :slight_smile:

44

It is a pay to win game. The miners pay for a mining permit, and everybody wins.

45

EVE is not a pay-to-win game, because you can’t win by playing EVE; you can only lose.

No they don’t. No matter how true it is, the majority of people don’t interpret it as such. And what matters in the grand scheme of things is the viewpoint of the majority, and not the select few who actually spent time on philosophically analyzing the situation.

Go read Steam reviews if you need to see for yourself. For context, I’ve read nearly every Steam review of EVE over the past decade.

46

Well he could if he ‘bought’ a character. Strange how people moan about alleged P2W yet no-one raises an eyebrow over some bazaar where entire characters can be bought.

Well…skill injectors and such are absurdly expensive. Its something like 900m for 10 days worth of SP. So at 90m a day that works out at 2.7bn a month. For someone to catch up with 10 years of SP, that would work out at 328 billion. I calculate that ( based on £100 worth of PLEX being around 14bn ISK ) at £2,342

There again…over 10 years a person would have paid well over £1000 in Omega subscription anyway…so you’d subtract that from the ‘cost’ of catching up those 10 years.

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47

Pay to win what exactly?

The most ISK sitting in some dusty wallet never to be touched?

Buy, yet another, maurader that sits abandoned next to all the others in some long forgotten hanger?

Secure a section of null sec that, will never change because conflict and resource denial is no longer a thing?

Maybe engage in some ubiquitous n + 1 battle that, quite frankly will be long forgotten and did absolutely nothing?

Seriously, what is it that these people are paying for to “win” exactly?

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48

mh1gghyc6g2y

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49

Yeah, but they still get to say the things they want to say, and there’s a lot of these people, so what now?

50

The right to be ganked in a blingy Paladin. Priceless. For everything else there’s Mastercard.

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51

Seriously,

I started this game about 4 years ago now.

I don’t have the skill points of a 12 year vet.

I don’t even have isk that is close to even some of the noobs running around (looking at you Altara)

Now I have a choice to make. I can whine and complain about how its not fair and expect someone to swoop in, and make it all even, and equity of outcome.

Or,

I can square my shoulders, strap some guns onto my hull and go out there and play to the best of my ability and stop making myself miserable by comparing my metrics to that of someone else.

This whole idea that EvE is pay to win is absolute rubbish. And the noob whale that falls into the trap believing it, creates very good content for those that recognize there is more to the game than raw skill points and isk.

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52

So basically it’s an unreasonable grind designed to make you pay the upgrade to access the more powerful ships and modules. Pretty much every single person except a blinded fanboy would call that pay2win.

But it’s ok, you think you defend your favored game and that includes lying to everyone and yourself that this isn’t blatantly pay2win because you fear players would think lesser of the game if it was labeled this way. Even though everyone and their mom can clearly see how pay to win it is and you are just making a fool out of yourself by showing everyone how easily you have convinced yourself of that ridiculous illusion.

In reality you don’t defend this game. You defend this absurd and over the top monetization that damages the game and makes it pay2win. It’s pay2win because of people like you who pretend it isn’t and that everything is fine.

Both is equally damaging for the game. One brings CCP money the other doesn’t, and that is about the only difference.

It has not, it did not eliminate RMT nor did it eliminate bots. It however legitimized CCP controlled RMT and completely diluted the game experience. When before, buying ISK was cheating and frowned upon, now its completely legitimate and even encouraged by CCP. It’s completely ridiculous that someone actually defends this as being good for the game…

You like to defend the over the top monetization methods that destroy the game and you don’t care about people literally cheating by using out of game resources to influence their in-game wealth. It’s completely ridiculous, but that’s just the gamer of today I guess.

First, EVE doesn’t require a lot of skill. Like 99.9% of the in-game activities are completely brain-dead and you could probably train an animal to do it.

Second, if that is your bottom line of what constitutes pay2win then CCP could literally do anything you would still defend it, because it’s impossible to sell “player skill”. That goes for every other game too. If that is your argument, you basically already agreed to everything no matter what they do.

You have very low standards for computer games it seems if it takes that much for something to be pay2win for you.

And even if CCP would introduce that to a shop, some person like you would be in the forums and defend it with the same arguments you did. That’s just a fact.

53

It’s a free temporally-unlimited trial account. Of course you’re not going to have access to everything.

CCP did a real disservice when then made the alpha clone state. It confuses people like you into believing that the game is “pay2win.”

It’s not. Alpha accounts can win just as much as an omega. Because in a sandbox, winning is extremely subjective. And if you think Omega’s don’t grind it out, you’ve clearly not played this game.

Bring back the 2 week all access trial accounts and ditch the alphas, CCP.

54

Just telling yourself that will not make it not pay2win. I paid 10 years subscription and it was fine, because everyone had access to the game on equal terms. This isn’t the case any longer and this changes the game.

And the subscription isn’t the only thing. There are many many layers of pay2win in this game today and you know it, because it’s obvious.

You are just afraid that if you call it that it will discourage new players from trying the game. They can see that the moment they open the game for the first time, no one has to tell them. All you are doing is legitimizing the over the top monetization that has slowly destroyed the game over the last decade and is continuing to do so. This literally helps no one.

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55

Gosh…I wouldn’t exactly call myself rich…not when its taken 2 years…

altara_worth

That’s about half my ‘total’ wealth of 26bn across 12 characters. That actually works out at 66m ISK a day…not exactly a fortune coming in !

Most of if is tied up in 1 Nightmare, 2 Leshaks, 3 Apocs, and a host of other battleships and smaller ships.

56

The thing about bringing money in, is that its pointless bringing in more than one needs or can actually spend. One may for example have 200 ships in any char…but one can only fly one of them at a time. Cash may obtain the ship sooner…but without the skills to fly it one is just as likely to lose the ship sooner. Personally I have never bought skill injectors…I consider them a waste of money.

57

That is some of the most demented reasoning I’ve ever seen.
Paying to play =/= pay to win.
By your definition, any game you pay for is “Pay 2 Win”. Which is an absurd position to take.
By my definition, Pay 2 Win is when there’s items in a game that are either required for success or make success far more likely, that can only be acquired through purchase. Gold Ammo in World of Tanks being the prime example of this.
Without Gold Ammo in WoT, you can easily find yourself in a situation where you simply cannot damage an enemy, let alone kill them.
THAT, my friend, is Pay 2 Win.
Paying to play is paying for a service. No different to a netflix account.
That ccp offers the alpha program is very generous of them. Prior to alpha clones, you had a 14 day trial period. I hope you agree that 14 days is far too short a time to even begin to scratch the surface of EVE.
PLEX, despite your froth mouthed rant, has actually been quite successful as an anti rmt measure. Given the choice of a legit method of swapping rl$$$ for pixelbux vs some shady website that might steal your credit card info and the use of which can get your account banned, most people prepared to use $$$ instead of grind will choose the legit method. This increases ccp’s income, which let’s them feed the server hamsters, pay their staff and post a profit. I’ll grant you that plex has changed a lot since it’s introduction, but the fundamental reason for it is sound.

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58

And declaring that it is, doesn’t make it inherently true.

You’ve diluted yourself into believing that, and you’re desperate in trying to get people to validate your claim.

It’s why you’ve created this strawman argument:

You have nothing to work with. So you fabricated something instead. And that something is “but the new players! Reee reee ree!”

And, how could you possibly know what I am and am not afraid of saying? Further evidence of your desperate attempt to fabricate a straw man.

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59

People are just as likely to be discouraged from playing the game if the only means of making ISK is via PvE grind…as many people ( myself included ) simply cannot stand PvE and did not sign up to fight NPCs in a MMO game or spend hours gazing at a mining laser. The only reason I do any PvE at all ( ratting ) is for security status, but beyond that I hate it. If I wanted to play vs AI there’s no end of excellent single player games for that. I’m far from being the only person who is only in Eve for the PvP.

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60

Your 10 bil more rich than me!