[TLE] Why pay to win?

I disagree. I don't play the game as a race. I cooperate with my friends/group/raid, I don't compete against others. I don't play EQ2 as a PvP game, even in the sense of competing against other players to be 'first'. I'm not saying your way is 'wrong' or 'worse', but neither is it 'right' or 'better'. My opinion is just as meaningful (or meaningless) as yours.
I would, however, have an issue with heroic and raid gear being sold for real money. That would be paying for something that makes the game easier rather then playing the game to 'earn' those items.
I don't have be be competing with people to be opposed to (what I call) pay to win

You obviously played a different WoW then I did. I got to level 20 in as many minutes, and I didn't even buy my spells or upgrade my gear. (cause I didn't know you had to buy spells in WoW ala Eq1) and I was so bored I left and never went back. nothing about leveling was even remotely difficult.

leveling in Eq2 was NEVER an achievement. it was just a level. why wasn't it an achievement? because you could never lose it, and it's not hard to do. it wasn't 8 hours of work and then Ding..only to have the next death put you back to the previous lvl. I was 50 in vanilla in maybe, tops, a few months. 3 at best.

in eq1, in three months, I might have been 20 out of 50. not counting how many times I got deleveled meditatiing, or by a bad pull, or a crap respawn, or a train...etc. oh and lets not forget that soloing or even duoing in Eq1 was nigh impossible unless you were very specific classes.

so yes, leveling was an achievement in EQ1 at one point.

it was never an achievement in Eq2, and it sure as hell wasn't in WoW.

First to 50 in EQ2 was an achievement. Not because it was difficult, or took extraordinarily long, but because everyone was gunning for it. Goes back to the whole.. race thing.

If you're not competing with people, why do you care if other people can buy gear with real money? Furthermore, even buying gear with real money isn't "pay to win", because you can have gear and still be awful and unable to complete any content in any meaningful capacity.


So please, tell me: In what way do YOU win, exactly? Because it must be something so abstract that, in no way could vitality potions affect it one way or the other, and your opinion is nullified in matters related DIRECTLY TO the sale of vitality potions.

You're a Channel 45 meteorologist advocating weather balloons on mars. That's not how this works. Let the astronauts and planetary scientists have the conversation, so everyone else doesn't get confused and think that you're providing meaningful contribution to something you admittedly have no connection to.

Gearing being available on the marketplace changes the entire tenor of the game and affects the balance the game is tuned to. Just like having plat available for loyalty tokens has affected the economy of the game (prices on the broker, etc). Because this is an MMO, the what gear other people are wearing, how much plat they've got, etc DOES end up affecting the entire community.

I did probably since I said vanilla WoW. Leveling in EQ1 was a lot harder I don't think I ever said it wasn't. I said a lot of the stuff was just plain dumb in the game. An EQ1 max level is a higher achievement than WoW or EQ2 no one is going to debate that but to spend several months to hit max level is still a commitment. Please don't get all EQ1 WAS SO HARD IT WAS THE HARDEST NOTHING COMPARES. Also 3 months and only level 20? Seems more like you were doing something wrong

I don't have a dog in this fight, but let me give you a couple of admittedly absurd examples why somebody who doesn't view the game as a "race" would still care about "pay to win":

Let's say they made a set of gear available on the cash shop that allowed people to receive 5x the amount of harvestables from spawns, got a guaranteed rare each time, tracked all harvestables (crafting and shinies), and allowed the player to be unmolested by hostile mobs while in the field.

What do you think would happen to the crafting market as a result?

Here's another one - armor that made you invulnerable to the attacks of epic level mobs while on the world map. You wouldn't want everyone to have it so to be "fair" they price it at $500 or so. How successful do you think other people would be in taking down world bosses?


The point is that in an MMO everything is economically connected (and 'economy' covers a lot more than just currency). An obvious, ongoing balance issue is raid gear (this isn't a pro or con raid thing - just development reality). Players raid and get geared up, then they keep that gear on while they do their solo stuff, heroics, agnostics, or whatever else they do. They can get through that content much easier than people without the raid gear so the devs have to do a balancing act (again, this isn't an EQ 2 issue - it's true in pretty much any MMO with various playstyles) between not letting the raiders steamroll and corner the market on everything while still letting non raid-geared players succeed in the solo and group content.

For the record, I don't consider vitality potions "pay to win", although I do think 8x is excessive.

The devs in this game are in a bad place though of needing to come up with ways to get players to inject cash into the game while not alienating the free to play players who are necessary to keep the MMO afloat (goes back to that 'global economy' thing).

Good, we're making progress. So then you admit that things which don't necessarily pertain to your exact situation can have detrimental effects on the economy and game balance in general.

So... about those Vitality potions being harmless...

I'm not saying seeing it as a race is the only way in which a "win" scenario occurs. Certainly not strictly in a leveling sense. I'm saying that to define "pay to win" you have to have a clearly defined "win". If you don't, you can't say whether it is or isn't "pay to win". And you can't "win" without someone else losing (aka, competition). Otherwise, it's not winning, it's just playing. I'll agree that Vit pots don't make it "pay to play". Pay to win, however, is defined differently.

In every definition I can come up with, "winning" is MUCH more easily obtained by being ahead of the curve, which vitality potions are REQUIRED for. There's no way to keep ahead of the curve without them. They ARE the curve.

Hell, even before the vitality potions came out, being just slightly ahead of the curve enabled a lot of people on Deathtoll to obtain the Lavastorm collections and make insane amounts of plat off of them by selling them on the broker. Like, in the ballpark of 10-20 krono from the shinies alone.

Imagine getting to that gold mine uncontested.

Now, if the bonus from vitality WAS something like 20% instead of 600%, they would STILL give an absurd advantage in the long run. At 600%, they're practically required to compete in any meaningful way.

I never said or even suggested otherise. I almost specifically stated that from the start, actually.

So then, you're against the sale of vitality potions, on the grounds of imbalancing the game, disrupting the economy, and offering a hugely profitable advantage based solely on one's ability to spend real money on the game.

In every possible sense of "winning", besides maybe.. roleplaying definitions of winning, vitality potions are necessary.

To simply play the game, they are not necessary.

EQ2 isn't pay to play, but it is pay to win, in as meaningful of a sense as possible, as long as outrageous boosts like this are available.

Personally, I'm unaffected regardless. I have the plat and kronos to afford potions should I choose. That doesn't make it a good design decision, and I am very much against an ignorant player base being an excuse for poor design decisions.

Anyone downplaying the significance of vitality potions is vastly ignorant of the benefits (especially on progression servers), and generally ignorant of how this game functions in the most significant of times. Those people giving the green light to continue one of many game-wrecking design decisions is giving me a hernia.

And hemorrhoids.

Hernihoids. This is Hernihoids levels of frustrating.

No, I don't think vitality potions are pay to win. I don't see how getting to top level a few hours or even a day earlier then somebody else gives any real advantage. Unless, pehaps, such people take advantage of some unintended mechanic and devs change it.. but that's not a pay to win feature, that's an 'exploit as long as possible thing', which is an entirely different can of worms.
As far as getting to the max level soonest, time is a bigger contributor then money there.

I don't buy krono (with money or plat) and I don't buy or sell loot rights. I prefer to earn my gear by playing.

So then your opinion is "Because vitality potions don't interfere with my style of gameplay, in ways that I can fathom, they are okay to have and can't be considered pay2win."

Now you did.

Getting to top level first doesn't make more plat. People who don't want to run the content themselves may give you their plat for gear, but there are ALWAYS people who buy loot rights because they can't or don't run the content the gear comes from. Selling krono also doesn't 'make plat'. Both those activities just move it from 1 person to another. On live, I'm seeing people selling (and more baffling still BUYING) gear from advanced solo zones. That has nothing to do with 'being first'

People are going to buy the gear anyway. I don't buy or sell loot rights. I know how it 'works', but I don't pay attention to it. How does 'getting to the top first' give you an advantage? Sure you can sell gear 'first'... so?

From what I can see, people spend real money on krono. People who sell loot rights buy the krono for plat, and then the people who bought the krono with real money then buy gear from the people who bought their krono.. effectively giving the plat back to the people who bought their krono...

You underestimate how much people are willing to PAY to have your "first" leftovers. Master books selling for 5 krono each on TLE before the market got flooded. Random legendary/fabled gear, even shinies are absurdly profitable. There's a reason monopolies are frowned upon/illegal in a real capitalist system. It's just.. unfairly profitable.

And that's just considering the PVE TLE advantage. In TLE PVP, it's even more insane because it means you can farm without any competition from opposing factions.

I think maybe you're viewing this from a non-TLE perspective, which would be hugely inappropriate in a TLE-specific thread.

Additionally, If you don't think "moving all the plat from one person to another" is meaningful.. well, I'll gladly allow you to "move your plat to me". No problem. No loss for you, since no plat is destroyed. No gain for me, since no plat is created.

But guess who can buy anything and everything and strangle the market.

This guy.

When the TLE servers first went live, and I base my opinion on my experience playing on Stormhold, grouping was abundant at all levels and it stayed that way and didn't start to decline until they released the vitality potions. When they announced they were going to starting selling vitality potions on TLE I knew it was going to destroy grouping and that soon the TLE servers were going to feel just as dead as the Live Servers were (prior to the server merge). I didn't mind them selling mounts, appearance gear or that type of fluff to make $$$ because that didn't affect progression. I thought the whole point of TLE was to allow people the opportunity to start fresh and revitalize the grouping experience and feeling of community. Of course, I soon realized it was merely a cash grab to tide DGB over until the release of the new expansion and nothing more. So sad really, at least for the players any how (whether they realize it or not).

I guess since I don't care about 'being first', it never occurred to me that people would pay stupid amounts of plat to be 'second' (ie get your leftovers). I find this even MORE odd on the TLE servers where they aren't really 'frist' at all, since it is all old content. But then people were charging 'live' prices on TLE for basic stuff, so *shrug*.

The whole who cares about being first a day before everyone else argument is so annoying. If you pay to have an item give you an in game advantage over doing something normal it's pay to win. Whether or not you care to be first doesn't matter it is part of the progression of the game. If I found an exploit that got my character from 1-max level instantly would it not matter and not be considered an exploit because "leveling doesn't matter"?
Leveling does matter it effects the entire game. With all the examples and analogies given in this thread if you people can't understand how buying XP bonuses is a form of pay to win (lets not even call it pay to win call it pay to progress) then congratulations on just being brain dead.
Again the game is old enough where I understand why XP pots were introduced. On TLE the reason I understand is that the vote was NO but DBG decided to wait a few weeks and then add them so that they can just suck the money out of people from a broken TLE server

I think there are two conceptions for p2w:
- You can pay to obtain things faster.
- If you don't pay you can't obtain highly needed things.

In my opinion the truly p2w is the second option. And also the first one when it's the second undercovered (pay or grind one thousand hours). I simply don't want to play this type of games.

About the first one, we must take into account that winning is something different to everyone in eq2, so p2w will be a different thing too.

I'll never bought potions to aid my character to level faster, nor start it directly at level 90 because I think I must build it step by step with my own effort. Nevertheless, I bought the mercenaries feature simply because with so few people in low levels I can't do heroic quest without them. So, in fact, It means I have paid to obtain an advantage vs the game environment.

Also I undestand people that have already leveled 4 characters through all content and want to level their fifth in fast pace.
Don't forget that there are other ways to level up "not really by your own means" by in game play: join a high level group and do nothing, just march on the rear and eat XP, or give a lot of money and great objects from high level characters to the new ones.

I play the game on my own way and don't bother about what other players are doing.

I can only guess that you don't pay much attention to the broker then.

There is a HUGE advantage to being first, where the supply of an item is artificially low. Normally, the laws of supply and demand work pretty well in an MMO like this, so the price determines the supply of an item on the broker as well as determining the demand of that item (yes, price determines supply and demand).

You can see a similar effect work in reverse once a server gets 'top-heavy'. Thing like shinies from lower level zones will be priced much higher than ones from the end game because fewer people are farming them. The supply at the top is artificially high, while the supply at the bottom is determined by price.

There was one player in WoW who raced himself each time a new server opened. He tried to find the most efficient ways of leveling and beat his own time to max level. That kinda sounds like fun since he was trying for a personal best each time.

Personally I just don't understand the nya nya nya I got there faster than you did phtttttttttblt thing. Kindergarten mentality.

I really should do some testing and run the math live vs TLE, but I suspect vit on TLE is applying the bonus to the amount of xp that would be given on live.

ACT can't track it because the #'s don't go into the log on TLE, you have to mouse over the xp bar to see the change in #.