Ok I'm fucking triggered and I think this warrants a separate discussion

Battered wife syndrome OP, they will take the lesser punishment because it's not as bad the really bad ones.
And they've being doing for such a long time, that they think the devs/publishers are entitled to these mechanics now.

Any game that has you paying for something in game that you can not get otherwise is Pay To Win. Cosmetics is fine, but anything besides that is horseshit. I laughed my ass of when someone threw the term "Side Grade" at me. I think pay to win verse pay to not grind are the same thing. Normal MMO games prefer to use pay to not grind 3-4 years as their excuse to be called Free2play and NOT pay2win. If free players need to grind for 3-4 years to catch up to the paying customers. Then the game is pay2win for how long it takes the free players to catch up.

So never play a game with paid for features. Even cosmetics can lead to a slippery slope.

YOU SHOULD KNOW BETTER

Also, anyone or any community that defends these practices should be burnt alive.

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Problem comes when user asks about a game, you tell him it's p2w trash and suddenly an army of rabid apologists like arrives and starts bullshitting you with semantics and straight out insults.

Yet they're the ones who will send you to reddit and halfchan and all those places. I don't even know how to reply to such people.

That frog was so out of place in that anime.
She belongs to some one-off quality product, not shitty generic naruto clone.

what am I apologizing for?

Shit thread, but I am here for the frogs.

Well I would analyze it as such.
2 Types of MMO's where "micro"transaction shekels are required for devs:
1. PvP games & 2. PvM games.
Now, what different types of things can your shekel be traded for?
1. Appearance
2. Consumable Items (stat change/adjust/wipe/rare % increase/wep upgrade chance %)
3. Endgame weapons (this makes me mad)
4. Immersion breakers (teleports, faster mounts, easy mode, population splitting shitty DLC's)

Concerning PvM:
It is probably justifiable to have pay2win gear (or anything above) in PvM since its okay to be OP against artificial intelligence/monsters. Its all to make the game more 'fun' for any level. Examples are private servers (any old "from the grave" mmorpg) and 'casual' multiplayer games off the top of my head - /psobb/pso2/rocket league. All 4 points can be used here without making the game embarrassing or unfair.

Concerning PvP games:
Well I experienced plenty of games that throw pay2win down your throat (fps games - MAT Online, Crossfire, Combat Arms, Chinese counter strike online 1 or 2, any korean mmorpg past 2009 probably). Is it a delicate balance of what dev's put in to microtransactions? Not really, any edge of performance, even 5% can make anyone buttmad including myself, and they do it anyway because they want money. Which reminds me of tf2 and hats which I have never played, but that sounds shitty. Either way I don't personally like games these days becoming dress me up simulators, look at me I spent $100 to look cool, or i'm better than you because I spent $50.

To conclude I would say Oldschool Runescape has a great microtransaction idea. They split f2p and member subscription servers, you can hop from either as a member, and most importantly there is a lot of f2p things you can do - skills, quests, wildy. When a f2p has done enough and liked what he saw, he can give the dev 7 shekels to get 10 more tradeskills, hundreds of quests, a much bigger newly accessible area in world map, etc. Nothing immersion breaking once a member, nothing to gain an edge, and cosmetics is NOT a selling point of endgame (like shitty PSO2 nipland game is). In the end a game thrives on good design from all aspects. Its a simple thing for a good dev to tweak things around and make a player base happy, but also the temptation of free shekels from any 4 things I listed above is in their mind, and they don't give a shit about the game being detriment-ed from greed. tldr; Fuck most games, I want more in my life and end all these self centered shitty consumerism games that plague the current world.

Do you know what apologism is? No, it's not literally apologizing for something.

Don't fucking tell me you endorse p2w practices too.

NAILED IT

No I don't, I just think it isn't really something necessary to say here. Maybe in one of the shit threads like the mobile phone cancer or overwatch shit. Also, where is the frog?

I strongly disagree.
I don't mind cosmetics and dress up, espcially if the game is causal friendly like PSO2, but dear fucking god it's not fine to have gameplay enhancement even if it's PvE game, even if it's minor shit like storage space or exp boosters.

Except when some shill comes out and recommend you something like PSO2 or PoE or god forgive me Warframe or anything along those lines, and you say that it's p2w, and it fucking is, shitposting ensues.

I don't save pictures on my computer and googling or gelbooring each time just to post is tiresome. Do it yourself really.

AAAAUUUUGHH

You are lazy.

That is some weird fetish.
What's so special about head pats?

clearly you've never had an imouto

When it comes down to it, nobody will ever admit that a game they play is pay to win. There will always be some retarded mitigating circumstances for why buying extra attempts or extra healing or extra damage or extra stats don't constitute p2w in this one particular instance. I saw some faggot go on for hours about how revives that were only available for cash was not paying to win.

There is no reasoning with these people, even the most blatant cash shop sword of winning wouldn't be p2w because "lol, you can't win at a pve game".

Don't make me come down there, Satan.

It still hurts me how that third gif is from a completely unremarkable anime, that nobody remembers outside of that particular gif, and the fred chicken one.

clearly you haven't either.

IRL little sisters is pure fucking cancer. Teenage ones doubly so.

There's three primary forms of f2p nowadays.

Demo Mode

Cosmetic Microtransactions

Warframe-Tier
>Game example: Warframe who basically set the market on the structure for f2p games.

Only one of the above archetypes allows you to play a game, fully, for free with no one else having any form of item or gear advantage. Everything else offers some form of gear or product advantage.

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Because they technically aren't pay to win, still gay though.

Warframe has both 2 and 3 though, because almost all of the cosmetic items are paid for in platinum, so if you want more than 10 colors or a cosmetic that isn't one of the 10 earned through grinding, then pay up.

That's almost more or less why Warframe-tier is in it's own tier of f2p.
You can literally pay for goddamn EVERYTHING.

Not advocating shit practices or anything, but in Warframe you can trade certain rare drops for platinum with other players and then spend said platinum on whatever the fuck you want, including cosmetics.
So since you can acquire premium currency with in-game means they went batshit insane with it and allow you to buy literally everything.

You can't pay for everything, you can't pay for mastery rank, or to level weapons, if you discount trading you can't pay for event items or vaulted primes, you can't pay for ducats so anything bark sells you have to grind for yourself. You can't buy mods either. I think that's everything you can't pay for, which is a pretty small amount of things especially if you do count trading in which case you really only can't pay for xp and mastery rank which you get by actually playing the game and not waiting for the foundry to finish making something.

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Arche Age?
Black Desert?
Tree of Savior?
Cen and Sor?

>>>/tumblr/
go blog about it

I always thought that runescape had a pretty satisfying f2p/membership system.

I came here for froppy and I am disappointed.

I'm guessing you just played a localized gook MMO like ArcheAge or Black Desert. They're all like that and nobody with a brain defends them.

I'm not sure what's worse, that or PTSD. Hang them by their mothers' tendons.

To play devil's advocate, most games have ways around the paywall, via grinding or just playing the game for a longer time.

So you get two types of players in this model:
1. Someone who will grind to not have to pay
2. Someone who will pay to not have to grind

It solves the issue of people who feel like shit because they have more money than time to play video games, and I can see why companies have adopted this model.
Early games were marketed towards kids or NEETS who wouldn't mind putting in the hours, because they don't have jobs, responsibilities, or really anything else to do but play video games.
Games are growing up, as well as the audience that enjoys games. A lot of them went on to get jobs, go off to college, etc, and don't have a lot of time to play their favorite video game.
So we get "pay2win".

I don't even play games like this anyway, but my personal opinion is that this practice is fine, but it's when the free grind either doesn't exist, or becomes to absurdly time consuming, to encourage people to just buy shit instead.

Literally who are you?

No, it is not fine.

We both know I'm never ever gonna get laid

Never give up

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HungryBox aka Juan Debiedma is that you?

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m8. quality of life updates are updates like having the loot box appear where the player's mouse is when they loot an enemy as opposed to having it appear in a static location in the corner of the screen.

they're logical reductions in busywork in games to make them more accessible to newfags.

whatever you're talking about is not and should not be called a quality of life improvement. If there are people who actually are calling shit behind a separate paywall a quality of life update then that's retarded and they should fucking stop.

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Path of Exile? Doesn't bother me.
worth it for free

Of course it is unpreferable, but it doesn't get in the way for most players, so they don't have a disadvantage and don't pay money.

I don't need more than 3 loadouts saved. I don't need more inventory slots. I'm not disadvantaged and I'm not paying, therefore it is not pay2win as far as my position on the game is concerned.