Slow Cert Gain != Pay 2 Win

You can be useful and have fun without any of those extra bits.

If you are going to boil this down to a very basic, almost classical business model, then you are pretty much saying Riot Games and LoL should not exist in this universe.

I am pretty sure it has come out of the horse's mouth, or devs, in this case, at SOE, that they are looking to emulate what League of Legends has done so masterfully. Monetize in a F2P without creating a disparity in gameplay.

You are thinking short-term, and that is fine. If SOE want to do that, it is fine as well, but it is what we are arguing. If they want to make the truly large amounts of money and acclaim and fanbase that LoL and Riot has, they need a game and development team that are dynamic and constantly improving.

Short-term < Long-term always.

Money expenditures should only provide aesthetic or time based opportunity costs for casual players or those who cannot put in those long hours of grinding. The game should always reward skill, and not be jeopardized by monetization.

If you want evidence, just google free to play games. All the major ones follow this, all the crappy burnouts get greedy and screw up the business model.

"You get what your pay for," are the thousands of players playing, to add to your experience. If this was a single player game, then it would hold true, but the free players need just as much incentive to actually make the game a multiplayer game.

If the pay to play was so emphasized, then it should just be a subscription based game. If you start trying to blur the boundaries of which is which, you screw up the game and the business model, and possibly your argument.

Pretty much though, I am still a loyal, subbed, and still money throwing fan. But, I think there is still a long road of changes that need to be made, and need to be made with greater haste than is the present. And as it stands, the game is NOT pay 2 win.

Play Vanu or TR. Both have 2 starting guns that are require no replacement.

Who freaking cares! If you like the damn game support it instead of being a cheap barstool!

7 bucks - thats not even a full mac **** meal!

I log on a brand new Vanu or TR (more so VS), and can immediately compete. No time or money invested. Ain't no "Pay 2 Win", pick the correct faction and stop your crying.

Wonder how dumb those "this game is P2W" guys are really.

Unless you spend HOURS on this game as a free player, you really aren't gonna get that far.

Whoever thinks that this game isn't p2w at least to some extent, has never in their life played Quake,UT, CS or any competitive FPS in that matter. Those who have will know that even a 1% damage or health extra will give favor to the party that has it over the party that doesn't have it. Now you can argue all you want that the 1% can be overcome with extra skill (which can) however that renders all arguments about this game not being at least a smidge p2w useless.

If I was in SOE's place, I'd take a few pages from TF2's book. Steam knows how to balance things without having half the community complain about the game being unfair.

As a free player, I feel constrained in my progression in game not comparative to others who may (or may not) pay, but by the cost of items in certs themselves...especially when many certifications are considered must-have in order to fill a given role. I understand well the need to have progression and the incentive of progression, but on the other hand quite a few things are just ridiculous.

Take the medical tool, for example. The experience you get is per tick, and per revive, not per amount healed. The level 5 revive tool is considered must-have in order to seriously play medic, without exception. Reviving also gives you the most experience of any individual thing you can do as a medic.

Why would I want to upgrade a level 5 revive tool for the sake of reviving people at 75% health, when I can revive them with a level 1 revive tool (and then heal them) for more experience? Better, why would I bother healing them at all so they can immediately die again so I can revive them for even more experience? What's rational for me (given it yields the best XP/cert gain) is downright ****** to other players, and bad for the team.

That's 190 cert points I have to save up and spend, that actually slow my XP/cert gain later. Level 6, by the way, costs 500 more certs for the privilege of no follow-up healing and even less XP.

The way the system is now is workable, but on the other hand the certification system could really stand to be streamlined to knock out a lot of the counter-productive or downright inhibitive crap.

EDIT: And for the love of Raptor Baby Jesus make the S-AMS cost at least 200 certs. I'm sick and tired of idiots getting into Sunderers who have no idea on Earth why, where, and when to deploy, let alone idea one the Sunderer can actually transport troops (though this may be a blessing in disguise, considering these yokels could just as easily get an entire squad wiped due to incompetence), just to rake in free deployment XP, in no small part because S-AMS is a dirt cheap certification.

pay to win inst a yes or no thing its a scale this thread shows this as some people think its ok others don't. but for me the speed that a paying play can progress over a free player does push this close to what i feel is pay to win with a subscription and an exp booster you can get unlocks in 1/2 the time of a free player doing the same thing.

This game is borderline P2W, tipping towards P2W

A P2W game is defined by two things.
1) are there straight upgrades in the game, either situational upgrades or universal upgrades? To that answer it's an easy yes. A solid example would be the zephyr or the dalton, who honestly thinks that the shredder is better then either of those? Also there are upgrades in the form of performance enhancements (aka rival/racer chassis or nanoweave) now while you can't buy these directly, all the certs that would go into buying weapons goes straight to these, giving them a sizeable STAT advantage.

2) is the accessibility of those upgrades. If it takes a solid 100 hours of play to acquire an upgrade that you could buy for $7, that's P2W. Because in order to remain statistically even with your opponent you are required to put a ridiculous amount of time in. So you are in essence forced to buy an upgrade with money, or be at a significant disadvantage.

The second reason is why I believe it's borderline, not fully p2w. Cert gain is a massive grind, but it's manageable. You don't need one hundred hours to acquire anything.

The reason it will most likely tip to P2W? more items in the shop that will be better then the old items. So if you aren't paying you won't be able to keep in the front of all the new gear, and because of 2 that would make it P2W.

The incentive to play is the fact that this game delivers combat on a massive scale for free. It does something that no other game currently does. I have played UT99, Quake, BF1942. There were no unlocks in those games. The "incentive" was to have fun fragging your opponent to oblivion. No experience points. No perks, no unlocks. It was the experience of playing the game and if you were good enough, winning. This game delivers the same fun experience wether u pay or not. The experience is merely enhanced if you pay. It's that simple. Really.

Especially in light that it takes 20-100 hours of playtime to unlock the stock item of your choice. It takes another 20-100 beyond that to get it in the service condition you would have it be. Especially when you have to do that multiple times over, like for example upgrading weapons in a Sunderer.

Squad leader certs are another really bad example. 1500 certs for a critical role on the battlefield, in which you get practically no certs beyond capture XP, that consists of sitting in a transport staring at your map screen. Considering a cert gain of 50/hour, which is fan-freaking-tastic for a free player, that's a thirty hour investment just to lead squads. Sure, if you're going to lead squads, you need the hours played to do it properly, but on the other hand that's thirty hours' of certs you're not spending to improve your actual combat effectiveness.