Sigh....P2W is here

pay 2 win = Paying money and winning because your opponent didn't pay money.

The idea that it is only pay to win when players cannot buy items with in game currency was created in games where players could avoid competing against paying players by participating in PvE.

Only? Are you high? We are talking about a single weapon here.

I assure you people would be complaining if the highest was changed to 700.

If you want a game to last years, the last thing you want to do is make unlocks the only reason players will want to stick around. That is plain stupid. Even more so when the game has so few things to unlock that they expect you to spend a month to get a single weapon.

SOE and the Planetside dev already are putting them selfs in the ground. When i first logged on saw that guns wher 1000 certs, i lol my head off. They are really being greedy messing up this game for me, and most new players. Ive been playing for a while, but this totally turned me off. If 500 wasent enough, then they went to like 750, and there final product was 1000 for the good guns. DIG DIG DIG DIG DIG DIG DIG DIG, been playing online game forever. Not hard to spot when something might not be the best thing for planetside 2.

It's a time issue. The provider will adapt to his costumers eventually to satisfy the needs of many. They don't got the Intel yet to make decisions.

its on edge of p2w like most western f2p games are nowdays anyway

if it is only cosmetic it is not p2w (like LoL that everybody did get on f2p bandwagon for)
if it is money for advantage (like boost of ressource gain, buy weapons much faster) it is under definition p2w

only real diffrence is that you can gain that power by spending time on it. I will say free2play is the new "trial" accounts and paying accounts get addvantage, but then again it is money they want to make

so you can rather say pay2majoradvantage
with alpha squad + 6 month subscription you get 60% , it will give them a massive headstart but beyond that later in the game it no big deal

but final line is, you did know you could do it. you agreed to it is fine by install and agree in term of use to play this game so I dont see why you complain on it?

And let's bring up this crazy idea yet again. Play for fun, not for grind. It's not like they can buy nukes.

Counter measures are 100 cert points.

Everyone has bought rocket launchers or pods.

Where does that leave me, unable to pay to beat their rockets?

That's probably pay 2 win right there.

100 certs - 3 hours - deal with it

I don't think TF2 is a fair comparison at all. For the reasons below:

1) TF2 was a game you had to buy for four years before it went free to play. Since it is so good, Valve made a killing on it.
2) The ongoing infrastructure needed to support the environments isn't even remotely comparable.


As an aside, I've grabbed a few things including a weapon. I am so terrible, it's an epic event if I get a kill. I think my K/D is somewhere in the .05 range. I really hope the P2W kicks in soon, because I need the help.

nothing good is free? Valve wishes to disagree with you on that philosophy. It's all about catering to those who could give you money. Right now SOE is not catering, they are EXPECTING money.

Once again, I have to admit that people are throwing around the P2W term too much because it is just easy to slap that label. I on't feel PS2 is P2W, but it CERTAINLY is not fun with it's free player service. There are other F2Ps that offer a better service, and i will take my business there. I understand PS2 is new and can't support handing out oddles of free items a week, but over a week of hard work for ONE item!? That is too much and begins to feel unfair and unbalanced. I was gonna buy some SC for the cosmetics, but not anymore, not when I feel like I won't play this game very long.

Yes it is free, but lets put it this way you have three guys offering you free things. The first guy has a random grab bag bag with a LOT of stuff. You don't know what you are gonna get, but it is a LOT and he offers you to come back next week for more.
The second guy lets you enjoy a bunch of items for free for a week only, then those items change into other items for one week.
The third guy has one shiny item and is holding it HIGH HIGH above your head, and he is laughing as he dangles it just out of your reach.

The third guy is PS2, the other two are two other F2Ps who have different then normal free player models. This is a BUSINESS and there is COMPETITION in a business, and it's more then just selling a product when it is F2P. It is SELLING A SERVICE. PS2 has given me CRAP service so I am taking my money to a BETTER service! I am letting SOE know this, and I am complaining in the event it makes a change. The customer is always right, because it is THEIR money that the business wants!

And by the time you or anyone else can upgrade through grind to challenge him, he ALSO grinded points for either new weapons or MOST LIKELY for actual certifications to improve his performance or defense! So that money is freeing up 1000 certifications he can use on whatever he wants!

But this is where I point out that at least three others in the F2P business understand full well the casual player mindset and give out MORE then enough items a week. Not wait a dang month. TF2 has 8-9 item drops a week as the maximun and player get a item drop every 15-75 minutes of gameplay, LOL has a selection of around ten heroes that anyone can play for free every week, and DOTA2 is supposedly COMPLETELY free for everything except cosmetics.

This is a business and SOE is not learning from their competition in the F2P market. When you market a game as F2P you no longer just focus on one genre for an audience, you are expanding it for a more casual audience too.

Unfortunately for all F2P game companies and fortunately for gamers, those games have MASSIVE competition they are FAILING to even consider in their strategy. TF2, DOTA2, and LOL are all examples of superb F2P models that cater and even outright SPOIL their players. LOL pulls it off by having every hero you can buy be availble for free but with a weekly rotation of the selections. DOTA 2 and TF2 pull it off by having EVERYTHING be availble for free. TF2 has a random selection so you never know WHEN you will get an item for free, but with item drops up to 8 or 9 items a WEEK, then that random drop thing quickly is ignored under the sheer plethora of item dropping. If SOE wants our money, they need to learn from their competitors, because they lost the money I WAS gonna give them.

Honestly I am tired of having people attack the current system call it 'P2W' that just ends up IGNORING the whole point. Right now it is 'Grind to get anything', and that is just NOT fun gameplay. When a vast majority of weapons cost the same amount of grind as virtually an ENTIRE certification tree, then I get upset because that is waaaaaaaaaay too much time in the grind.

(Not like anyone's gonna read this post, but I'll try)
It is not p2w, for several reasons:

1. All items are obtainable in-game. Therefore there is no advantage a paying player can have that a free player can't.

2, Items must be upgraded through certs, only attainable through actually playing the game. You bought a new weapon? Cool. Watch me annihilate you with my fully upgraded standard weapon.

3. Most items are side-grades, and some are downright worse than the standards. But they all have specific areas of use. Some weapons may seem like upgrades but that's probably just a balance problem.

4. The TTK (time-to-kill) is so fast that, even if a weapon is technically slightly better at killing than others, the outcome of a battle is more determined by your tactical skill, including positioning and the element of surprise.

5. There is no "winning." The game continues forever, and all factions have a roughly equal spread of free and paying players, so it balances out.

I rest my case.

100 certs doesn't take that long to get, I got 30 certs in like half an hour, defending bases and repairing/healing racked those up. Sniping is the SLOWEST way to gain xp/certs, and there's an awful lot of snipers in PS2 right now.

Reason why I mentioned Need for Speed: World in my previous post is because in that game you cannot progress past the "free" cap at all if you don't pay anything, you cannot obtain upgrades/cars ingame so you have to hit the cash shop to progress, it's a pure P2W game. This game and many other F2P games aren't even close to P2W that some claim to be, GW2 has zero P2W in it because things can still be obtained in the game.


The paying player obtaining the item vs the amount of time it takes for a free player to get the same item isn't P2W either, it's just getting ahead of everyone else but eventually the others catch up.

I really wish this argument would stop happening in every single F2P game's forums ever.

If it really bothers you insanely much that someone else is able to shave some time off of their character progression, while not being any more powerful than you in the long run, go play something else. Every realistic analysis so far of the F2P system in PS2 has been that the unlocks grant you options, not power, with a very few exceptions. Get over it, move on, and stop whining.

They out-right give you items in the game that make you good in all situations. You can pay or play for being put into a specific role. Sure you are really effective in that role, but you will then be awful in others. You can play all parts of the game right away and be effective, but if you want to fit a specific role in the battle, that is your choice.

I got about 130 certs in a 2 hour session, however I have 60% exp rate. figure that same 2 hour session for someone who has paid nothing will be 78 certs. this means if they get 78 certs for every 2 hour session, it will take about 13 2 hour sessions to get the one weapon 100% free (assuming you don't get more, and don't get less).

in all of beta, I used the default medic gun as my main weapon. It was good for longer range as well as closer range (not best at anything, but not bad at anything). IMO the fast firing NC medic weapon is better for close combat, and not -to- bad for longer range, but it is 100% unnecessary and I only got it due to alpha squad. the things I spent my SC on are rocket pods, rotatory, skygaurd and cosmetic junk (because why not). I will be using the default weapons for everything else until I unlock them (well, I have a 6month as well so I will get 500 SC a month, and dump that into things).

Other than the sub, I spent basically $60 on the game, 40 for alpha squad and 20 in smed bucks (1x coz i missed all the good deals). If you can't drop $60 on a good game then you deserve to grind or don't have a job (so you can play more right?).

This doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Pay to Win is the idea that one's wallet will provide an advantage over someone unwilling or unable to pay that that person could not attain through other, free, methods. Because a game allows a user to spend cash to save time does not equate to P2W. If buying a weapon is unfair to the freeloading player, than so too would it be unfair for them to face off against another free player that has simply spent more time in the game. That other player's increased time in game has given them an unfair advantage apparently.

The fact that most P2W screamers tend to overlook is that there is zero difference between a freeloader facing off against another freeloader with a ton of time and a paying player who bought the weapon in their hands. Both have a potential advantage over a free, day 1 player, but neither method is more or less 'unfair' to the newbie. In addition, P2W assumes that having these additional weapons, whether earned or paid for, affords the owner an insurmountable advantage that freeloading players simply could not overcome. While some titles may offer items like this and some genres (namely MMORPGs) may allow for this lopsidedness, there's no denying that SKILL takes precedence in PS2, not items, and a newbie with the drop on someone with a loaded wallet still has the drop on them.

I will agree with you that some of the items offered are not sidegrades as SOE would love to suggest, offering instead straight upgrades (the rocket pods being the favorite example there) but having access to something sooner is not P2W. Having access to those pods exclusively on the other hand, would be. This is a key point that everyone yelling P2W continues to overlook.

This...SO MUCH this!

The difference is in the skill of the player. Situational awareness, tactics, teamwork, aim, dodging, quick knifing, use of cover, feints, ambushes. The weapon is the smallest part of the equation. It's about abusing weaknesses in the enemy's skills and equipment while utilizing your own strengths, not which sidegrade you're toting.

It's worrying how many people make up their own definition of terms and claim them as fact...

If I defined P2W as being able to buy purely cosmetic items it wouldn't make it fact.

And it's not fact when a few people define it as the ability to purchase weapons which can also be purchased via ingame currency.

Oh, look, this thread again.