NSO Operatives (the Robots)

Well if that's your opinion. I obviously don't agree. However paywalls is an extremely accurate term, a non-subscribed player can't even look at NSOs' equipment in-game. I had to base everything off the friggin' wiki! Anyway, "pay X to continue playing" is just Pay2Play, ish.

Oh believe me I do. I don't suppose you've ever played the game Warface? It's free on Steam. It's incredibly anti-consumer and very Pay2Win last I saw and makes PS2 seem very generous in comparison. But being considerably worse in terms of balance between paid-players and non-paying players (and also just about every other kind of balance) doesn't make PS2's mild Pay2Win-ness any better. PS2 objectively gives advantages to people that spend their money and in my opinion the game would be better if it did not to any capacity. It's acceptable but not desirable.

Yes, one such reason why PS2 is mildly Pay2Win is because with enough money certs mean very little. In an "ideal" world PS2 would make its money by either selling the game as a AAA title or by selling only ES cosmetics which were very vibrant and obviously pertaining to each respective faction. (No greys, no giraffe, no pink, and no actual camos unless they're sold for certs only.)

Regardless the logic behind calling these things "meaningless" is flawed at best. Going by that path of logic "Pay2Play" is meaningless too, since most games have an upfront cost. The terms describe the way the game can be played. "Alive" and "healthy" and "obese" and "unhealthy" are all very common words that have simple and often broad qualifiers yet they are not meaningless.

I mean, yeah? That's kinda the point in a competitive game, no one is supposed to have an inherent "material" advantage. Only skill, knowledge, and experience should determine a person's chance to win. This is why games like CS:GO are popular mainstream competitive games and (one of the reasons why) PS2 is not.

PS2 is pay for convenience. The starter weapons allow you to rock and roll or there are cheap and useful weapons to get while levelling up. It is pretty standard fare for most F2P titles which aren't considered P2W. It is how they keep the lights on and their devs fed.

Your statement, however, "If a weapon or other piece of equipment offers some advantage which makes it better whether as a niche or in general but is withheld by a monetary payment it's Pay2Win. Note the significance of this is irrelevant to the offence", is what makes the term P2W meaningless because to you even a side-grade is P2W regardless of its source. You do not even care if it is better or not, just the mere fact it is useful troubles you.


Pay2Play is just a choice depending on business model so I am not following there. It has been the case such games less often are P2W though since they have a guaranteed and upfront profit per unit sold (though we all know how EA and other companies and have stretched this model to its breaking point with micro-transactions). A subscription used to be popular too but no longer viable given how quickly games are consumed. That leave us with either Pay4convenience or P2W and I'm glad PS2 fall into the former.

CS:GO also have a gigantic advantage of being the follow-up to the single most important competitive FPS games in gaming history. It is a perfectly constructed arena shooter with years upon years of being refined, it does one thing extremely well. Its popularity is also how it can sustain itself and it is something PS2 will never ever have because it is not appealing to the wider audience. Most people want a quick game against similarly skilled players. Furthermore, PS2 isn't a competitive shooter either so it doesn't have the MLG or E-sport draw. They're not comparable is what I'm getting at and I do not think the current team could actually handle this becoming a big success.

It is not. Sure a player can make things faster with money, but every time a person unlocks something with cash they're saving certs. Certs that can be used to unlock two things whereas another player gets only one. Stack this on top of membership and boosters increasing cert gains dramatically and you get members who have objectively more equipment and upgrades purely because of payments.

Then consider things like the increased nanite regeneration, confusing camos and cosmetics, and duplicate guns for cheesing directives with only the best stuff and it becomes quite clear, to me at least, that paying money gives a real advantage.

They can make money through non-advantageous purchases such as clear-cut ES "camos" as I mentioned before. There already exists a good handful of very clearly faction-specific camos that don't help players blend in or pretend to be another faction. These don't offer in-game advantages but do allow players to spend money to look better/different and stand out. There's also the matter of all the stuff for ES vehicles and ES stuff for NS vehicles. We don't need the ability to buy advantages like we do now to make money. Warframe (not to be confused with Warface...) is very pay-for-convenience. It offers almost everything through gameplay and what cannot be earned can be bought with currency traded from other players for in-game loot. There is no way for a player in PS2 to get a forest camo without spending cash, which gives an unfair advantage.

If something is useful and cannot be obtained through means of gameplay it offers an advantage to those that pay for it. Things don't have to be overpowered to give an advantage, you're looking for "premium ammo" type Pay2Win when the current reality already fits the bill. (For the record, I personally don't care if some sidegrade can be bought with cash if it can also be earned through relatively normal gameplay as well. Too watered-down at that point to matter. But if some sidegrade is literally unobtainable it objectively carries an advantage for the correct situation to whoever has it unfairly.)

Personally I think Pay2Win mechanics in a Pay2Play game is just corporate greed. Especially with the case of EA, who already make more than their money's worth from initial sales. Just trying to squeeze the player for all they're worth before dumping them. I hope they're all forced to play Fifa in Hell.

Ever heard of The Hunchback of Notre Dame II? Just because the predecessor was something popular and significant doesn't mean the sequential release will also be good or popular because of it. CS:GO is popular on its own merits. As it just so happens, it's also balanced around an equal playing field where everyone has access to the same equipment and has weapon skins with no gameplay advantages. They even make money off these skins by taking a small amount off the top of every player's sale on Steam.

PS2 is absolutely a competitive shooter. It's literally a competitive first-person shooter with absolutely no PVE elements at all. If not engaging in PVP there is no game. PS2 even tried to draw the E-sprots crowd and it shows with the MLG decals. Nobody took the bait though because PS2 is a fundamentally broken and at times terrible game with very little in the way of true balance. Bastions are almost a testament to how badly balanced this game is.

As a robot faction member. The factions is bugged as heck. We don't get ESF's or MBT's. Our max suicide attack is bugged. Most Directive auraxium's are not even available. We don't even have a robot voice pack for default. Our 'scout' hover bike is weak as heck. Everything needs reworked.

Devs need to fix out the bugs that are plaguing our 4th faction.

This does not work whenever I try it. I'm trying to finish leveling my NSO, and can never STAY on the same faction as my friends. Does this only work if I start the squad? Because the game always kicks me out of the platoon when I shift continents, even if I stay on the same faction...

We get some fun stuff (Javelin, Kuwa, NSO max shield to help with pushes) but man a lot of our stuff is useless (ie Javelin "weapon", or MAX self destruct for less power and smaller radius than C4 at 3x the cost).

But I would rather have a pay 2 play faction be underpowered than overpowered, that would send the *wrong* message I think. I'm leveling my NSO in the hopes they'll add more stuff later...

Fair enough we tolerate different things.

If you believe CS:GO got popular on its own merits you are completely ignorant of what came before it, how it came to be, or how CS:GO was made. The super TL;DR version is CS 1.6 got so damn popular it became a standalone title (and Valve was smart enough to pick it up). All they did was apply extra polish and refined the exact same mechanics as its predecessor. I was lucky enough to experience the transition first hand as I started playing CS b0.6 and played competitive CS in 1.6 (but never got quite good enough to actually join a pro team). Both CS1.6 and Starcraft 1 laid the foundations for the E-sport industry we see today. Activision Blizzard with its new policy on their mods is there exactly for the purpose of not letting another DOTA escape their grasp (Valve, it seems, foresaw this one too as they own DOTA 2). One would have thought more devs would realise the potential in mods rather than to strangle modders creative vision at this point.

When I say competitive I mean it in the sense someone actually cares/remembers a win, not a massive zergball fighting itself and its outcome becomes one more alert win which is lost in history. There's obviously more to it but yeah, it is competitive in the sense if the players decide it is then it becomes a competition (but most seem to care about certs and a good fight so...).

The MLG aspect was ambitious but ultimately doomed to fail since they had no infrastructure at all for it. I mean, ffs, they basically expected Server Smash to carry it by using their test server. The whole MLG initiative was a meme from the get-go (I loved the MLG montage parodies it spawned though). Even as someone who took himself really seriously and went full TactiCool in PS2 I knew it would never take off. It was A LOT of fun though with faction and outfit rivalries and I am so very happy I got to experience the first 4-5 years of PS2. I loved every minute of it.

Buuuut I think we might just have derail this thread a teeny tiny bit.

Don't get me wrong, I know CS:GO started up high, but if it wasn't a good game on its own it wouldn't stay popular. If the developers starting tweaking things in a way which made it similar to PS2 it probably wouldn't have stayed as much of a staple.

I think we might disagree on the definition of competitive for games. If players are competing against each other, it's competitive in my opinion.

I think the whole MLG idea was a pipe dream right from the start. It just wasn't ever going to work out, even with just the servers and hit detection and all that crap being enough to stop it from really taking off.

Heh, yes...