I'm a little uncomfortable with attachments being able to be purchased with SC.

what does it matter to you? How does it affect your game?

Not to mention this remove any sense of progression for weapons. Whats next is this going to be for vehicles too?

I would be uncomfortable with it too, if their cert cost was similar to the cost of a gun.

Cert cost is so low for attachments that it doesn't feel like you are being forced to pay for it.

If the guns themselves are sidegrades, then the attachments cannot be upgrades.

With the exception of exmags and the laser, all attachments come with downsides to balance them out. The exmags are balanced by being rare and with opportunity cost, and the laser is balanced by being generally worse than a grip on most guns in how PS2 combat generally runs

As I understand SOE were a bit cash strapped. They didn't and still don't have the money EA etc have. Possibly why PS2 was released when it was. Hence why we see devs pulled off of ps2 and onto h1z1 instead of new people being hired. Or why they've made redundancies several times.

I think PS2 has helped there fortunes and it's my hope that h1z1, landmark and EQN all do well and generate a lot of money for SOE. Hopefully some of it will then be recycled into development for all their games. Ps2 included.

TLDR: We are struggling for money

Sony recently sold off their Vaio computer division. There television business has been flat for a long time and just did a restructure. According to the economic journals Sony makes most of their money from insurance, yes Sony does many things and most are not making a whole lot of profit.

From my view, the guys at corporate Sony look to be pushing all divisions to be profitable.

How would any of you here make Sony's Online Entertainment group profitable and prevent this group within a larger division of the company from being put on the chopping block?

Make the games pay to play with monthly membership?
Make things in the game pay to play while also adding benefits for membership subscribers? <-- current
or for philosophical reasons keep it F2P with no buy-in and let the game run as long as they can pay the electric bills?

They could always be sucked wholly into their parent division and only make games for the Playstation, would that make anyone here happy?

I don't like pay to win either but feel SOE has limited options.

All that said, sounding like a fanboy for SOE, I can't stand their PS2 development process. They had roadmaps out years ago and we still haven't seen most of those come to fruition, heck they even stated that Hossin was being designed before PS2 launched, the lack of meta game is killing the enjoyment, the constant "balancing" nerfs impact every player, the dev processes just feels piss poor structurally and yet I'm still here for at least another 10 levels of play. It's a love hate relationship I have with SOE. Love the potential, hate many of the implementations and just hope someday they get it right.

What do you grind for?

That's just not true.

How do I get, say, a gun without Station Cash? I save up 1000 certs and buy it. Now, someone who pays? He just buys it and that 1000 certs goes to something else.

Pay2Win is a game that sells you power. XP and Resource Boosters in PS2 are a classic example of Pay2Win. More XP = More Certs = More Power. That's Pay2Win. More resources = more vehicles/explosives = more power.

Guns are a fine line because guns can be balanced. However it was pretty blatant what SOE was doing with how it released all the guns as insanely OP, let it go for a while, put them on sale and then nerfed them, and repeated.

There is plenty of Pay2Win in PS2 and all it takes is for people to put away the Rose tinted glasses, stop drinking the Koolaide and to analyze it objectively.

In a game where Certs are power, Certs are meaning less and less and Station Cash is beginning to fill all the voids Certs fill. This is a major P2W issue.

I don't need to instantly, automatically wtfrape everyone in the game for there to be Pay2Win. Vastly better players will still beat me.

But just because I can get **** with Certs does not mean it is not Pay2Win. Let's say I wanted to unlock a piece of armour and it was 5000 certs. That's something like 80-100 hours of constant play, depending on how good your cert gain is. Or I can buy it for 500SC.

For those 80-100 hours I will be weaker, automatically, than everyone else who went and bought it. And meanwhile, they can spend SC on 5 or 6 different power items, and I wont be able to match that with Cert gain because I can only grind up one item at a time. Because of this massive disparity, paying players will perpetually be stronger than I am, just by virtue of cutting out all the grind and coughing up cash.

Paying may only give you an allegedly temporary advantage, but that is compensated by the purchasing of new power-content. If I keep buying stuff, the gap between you and me in terms of power disparity widens further and further.

it is not true.

having more grenades and MAX suits doesn not make you a good player.

You cannot buy aim, movement and better positioning

Only thing that is a clear advantage is quality of DSL connection

I don't grind. Ever.

A game which requires me to grind for something is simply not worth playing. If I can't have fun actually playing the game (grinding does not classify as fun), I'll just not play the game.

Eventually, yes, those certs go towards something else. Something you most likely already have.

If you're comparing two complete newbs, sure, the one who paid for his game does get an advantage over the one who didn't. Fair and square.

Which, again, is completely fair and square.

The comparison people are mostly saying is that they will now all of a sudden get large foreign objects inserted into their pretty lil' backsides by new players who bought their power, which simply isn't true.

Sure, it might make a F2P-newb die faster to a P2P-player initially but then again, if they're both completely new, there are other, more deciding factors which will probably play a lot more into which one of the two will die the most.

You kidding? MAX suits are easymode farm suits which you can buy at any infantry term.

Now you can even outright buy upgrades for them so they're even more powerful.

I recently got ESO and am enjoying quite a bit. Don't think I'll be playing this turkey of a game for a long time.

I still dont understand. Yes, a new player with a bought weapon has an advantage, but so do a MAJORITY of the players that are going to kill you in any given battle. We all play on the SAME battlefield. If you get killed by a shotty, it could have been a BR1 or BR 100.

Is it really that much of a difference if a BR1 guy killed you with a fully certed weapon? What really is difference between a BR1 killing you and a BR100? They both can have the same weapon. Certs are purely a personal thing. It doesnt affect the battlefield. It SHOULDNT affect the battlefield. The game is not about 1 v 1 duels.

This game would be JUST as playable if everyone was granted BR100. Not much would really change.

its a matter of time, when will be certs packs for SC

They aren't removing the cert option. Frankly it should have been this way right along. I like account wide unlocks. If people want to give SOE money to invest in the game you play at absolutely no harm to you except arbitrary reactionary emotional responses you want to have, that's their and SOE's business, not yours.

Anyone who thinks attachments are p2w has no idea what p2w even means.

I think it's fine, fwiw there are no issues from me.

Doesn't bother me at all. Its not like attachments take long to grind for anyway.

Pay not to grind != pay to win

MAX unit are slow and now they are easily spotted on the MAP . You will have a big target placed on you head basically.

I have played a lot the MAX on my server and I can assure you that maxes are only a tool for the outfits.

In the hands of a solo player it is just a hindrance

I'm just finding it odd that after all this time, when those guys who just killed you with lolpods, a zephyr, dalton, HE round, OHK shotgun, whatever, could have literally just thrown down $10 in a rage just two minutes before they killed you weren't P2Wining, but some guy that buys an attachment to a weapon is now all of a sudden P2Wining.