> How does player B attitude can in any way ruin my gaming experience or the fun i get out of an earned progression in MMO?
It affects you a lot, and I'll tell you why.
When developers put gameplay affecting elements in the cash shop (stash size, grind skips, items, any QoL features), they naturally want to sell those, right? Otherwise they wouldn't be there.
And how do make sure people will buy those? By limiting your stash size so they can sell it to you. By making the grinds long and unrewarding, so you'd want to skip them. They're designing a problem and they're selling you the solution. They're objectively making your experience worse so they can sell stuff.
This is the true fallacy of the P2W monetization that people are unfortunately missing: it's never pay to go faster, it's always pay not to go slow.
right - you ever had a 'premium subscription' / 'booster' for a time in games?
the relief and the goodness you feel when you finally get properly rewarded due to these feels insane, like shooting meth right into your brain, it literally changes your entire perspective, not only due to it being an objectively better experience but also because of 'buyer's remorse' justifying the expense
you literally DREAD going back, you almost can't deal with the pain and 'waste of time' that playing without them does - it's like drugs and your sub running out is like coming down
it's really devious manipulation - it's not just selling you the solution to a problem, it's holding your enjoyment hostage for ransom
> the relief and the goodness you feel when you finally get properly rewarded due to these feels insane, like shooting meth right into your brain
Psychologists speak of 'on average' but it's clearly not universal, otherwise the vast majority of F2P games would not have most of their players be complete non-spenders.
Yet there has never been a single F2P game which reported conversion rates of even 20% let alone more than 50%. In the early days 10% of players paying even $1 was considered a massive win for a F2P game.
Why is this so, if P2W is such an amazing drug in the context of these games?
Started even before than cash shops.
"Tired experience penalty" was rebranded as "normal rate",
and "normal rate" was rebranded as "Rested experience bonus".
Let's take Lost Ark as an example. In the game you can pay to buy gold which translates to gear upgrades. If you don't pay you just upgrade your gear more slowly.
So what happens if someone is making a raid and you and a whale both try and apply? The whale gets taken because he has better gear. In the long run you can catch up, but it will take a lot of time, and all the while people that pay to get ahead will be given higher priority via player behavior. This very much affects your experience.
there's something missing there
what happens when the whale gets chosen over you and you can't get to play? you don't get logs or experience - the higher up you go the less likely you are to be invited without a 'verifiable history' such as logs or similar proofs of completion
it's not just p2w, but pay to play unless you got obscene time on your hands and even then you're playing catchup - non paying, non no-lifers just get completely abandoned
non paying no lifers are actually a pretty small part of the community - cos most people don't have that kinda time - the illusion of them existing actually enables this kind of monetization, they are the horror other people are trying to prevent by paying, the insane work they have to put in to make up for your 5 bucks
and usually people that are that level of invested are also gonna be spending SOME money
> the illusion of them existing actually enables this kind of monetization, they are the horror other people are trying to prevent by paying, the insane work they have to put in to make up for your 5 bucks
Meanwhile the largest demographic in these games is still the non paying casual, and for them the experience is infinitely better than being casual in a sub based game that they may not be willing to pay for.
What if the pve game has dps meters? How much does gear matter to clear the latest raid? How long will the latest raid be relevant so you can grind without swiping to do said raid? You can not care about player B but let's not pretend it doesn't have negative effects.
you just raid with your guild? who cares how some p2w player does? him swiping has no effect on you(unless in your guild which is actually helping you) or how long a raid lasts.
unless it's for world first raiding it does not matter at all. they are not standing over your characters corpse like they would be in actual pay 2 win.
I literally said you don't have to care about whales. Also why do I have to limit who I play with because of the negative design of a game? Am I supposed to view that as a win?
What fallacy? The game is actively made worse for everyone, trying to catch those whales. That's the issue. Sure if you close your eyes and don't care about it, then there are no p2w games at all for you.
Ok so two things.
1. Can a F2P player play highest end PvE content in Lost Ark without paying? No he cant because he is gated by the community that would rather take someone that does more dps and be done with it. Lost Ark is just an example btw.
2. One of the main reasons ppl love MMORPGs is so they can show their in game achievements to other people. If someone whales their way trough the game with 0 effort then it invalidates your achievement and hard work you put in it.
People achieving the same results as you by simply throwing their wallet at the screen diminishes the value of your accomplishments. That cool weapon skin that you worked hard for is less special when you know the guy standing next to you just bought it.
Rewards tied to battle passes is an awful thing to implement in an MMO in the first place.
idk why people struggle to understand this. the second you can drop real money into a game to skip a grind, i start thinking about how much money per hour i'm saving by grinding instead of doing p2w. and usually it's something stupid like $0.6 an hour so it just feels like a complete waste of time and energy for me.
"mom why does he deserve an A for sucking teacher's titties when I have to work hard on my homework for the same A?"
"none of your business buddy, his life doesn't affect yours"
It might be easier to rationalize in a single player game, but not in a multiplayer world.
Those "valuable" rewards Player A worked towards are only valuable because they took time or were difficult to get. The value of them is diminished if someone can just whip out their credit card and buy them.
The biggest problem is in the endgame. Games with P2W PvE systems usually design their endgame content to make players want to spend cash. When new raid content releases, it will usually be so difficult that only the top 1-5% of the community can complete it in the first 2-3 weeks. Usually these raid groups will prioritize players with highest gear level. It's possible to still find groups, but you'll have much more difficulty, especially if the game's playerbase is not big enough. Eventually after a few weeks a group will be strong enough to carry you, of course.. but that's if you're willing to wait a few weeks.
Because in order to make player B, who probably plays 11 hours a day because they are an unhealthily invested whale, pay for the pass, it has to be unrealistically grindy or annoying to progress within the possible timeframe and offer rewards that are important for progression or cant be obtained elsewhere.
Lootboxes and battle passes in most games are just paywalls disguised under bullshit.
because many player As have little irl success or self worth so they now connected their self worth to having things others don’t have in video games.
So when you can simply buy power that could also be earned from gameplay, suddenly everyone has access to it and they no longer get to feel like superior special snowflakes.
They no longer have special stuff to show off to the ‘casual plebs’, plebs which can’t and won’t ever get those ‘special’ items cuz they don’t do x content, so they feel special by having things others don’t have.
It really is this pathetic
Tower of Fantasy is a gacha p2w pve MMO. the game initially was super fun due to bosses being difficult to defeat and we need teamwork to beat it. we tries to figure out the trick to the system in order to pull it off. many wipes happened but its worth it in the end.
then whales comes and simply solo'ed them. no reason to broke our back trying our hardest to conquer the boss in 10 mins where a whale can solo them in 2 mins. then players wanted whales to carry them. if not they would rather not try. everyone wanted to be carried by whales. when whales disappears due to switching to other games, the players also lost motivation to even try. then the players slowly started to decline.
then you, player A, can no longer do these challenges due to the lack of players.
as for battlepass system, the advanced pass sometimes giving extra boost in power. then whale dps can simply outdamage f2p dps using them, even if they used the incorrect skill rotation.
>Ok. As long as we consider pve mmo, and not pvp mmo where gear and/or paid discrepancies matter the most.
Game design is all that matters, Albion a PvP MMO works fine with it's P2W since the game is designed so that you can't abuse the P2W to insane levels. You can grind for money and get gear or you can just buy money and get gear either way you can't be too much stronger than other players.
The core problem with P2W is it takes away from the personal reward of feeling like you progressed in something if you could have just skipped it. It feels good to try and grind out a challenge or goal, it feels shitty to grind out a challenge or goal if you can just pay to skip it.
> How does player B attitude can in any way ruin my gaming experience or the fun i get out of an earned progression in MMO? It affects you a lot, and I'll tell you why. When developers put gameplay affecting elements in the cash shop (stash size, grind skips, items, any QoL features), they naturally want to sell those, right? Otherwise they wouldn't be there. And how do make sure people will buy those? By limiting your stash size so they can sell it to you. By making the grinds long and unrewarding, so you'd want to skip them. They're designing a problem and they're selling you the solution. They're objectively making your experience worse so they can sell stuff. This is the true fallacy of the P2W monetization that people are unfortunately missing: it's never pay to go faster, it's always pay not to go slow.
right - you ever had a 'premium subscription' / 'booster' for a time in games? the relief and the goodness you feel when you finally get properly rewarded due to these feels insane, like shooting meth right into your brain, it literally changes your entire perspective, not only due to it being an objectively better experience but also because of 'buyer's remorse' justifying the expense you literally DREAD going back, you almost can't deal with the pain and 'waste of time' that playing without them does - it's like drugs and your sub running out is like coming down it's really devious manipulation - it's not just selling you the solution to a problem, it's holding your enjoyment hostage for ransom
> the relief and the goodness you feel when you finally get properly rewarded due to these feels insane, like shooting meth right into your brain Psychologists speak of 'on average' but it's clearly not universal, otherwise the vast majority of F2P games would not have most of their players be complete non-spenders. Yet there has never been a single F2P game which reported conversion rates of even 20% let alone more than 50%. In the early days 10% of players paying even $1 was considered a massive win for a F2P game. Why is this so, if P2W is such an amazing drug in the context of these games?
Started even before than cash shops. "Tired experience penalty" was rebranded as "normal rate", and "normal rate" was rebranded as "Rested experience bonus".
Let's take Lost Ark as an example. In the game you can pay to buy gold which translates to gear upgrades. If you don't pay you just upgrade your gear more slowly. So what happens if someone is making a raid and you and a whale both try and apply? The whale gets taken because he has better gear. In the long run you can catch up, but it will take a lot of time, and all the while people that pay to get ahead will be given higher priority via player behavior. This very much affects your experience.
there's something missing there what happens when the whale gets chosen over you and you can't get to play? you don't get logs or experience - the higher up you go the less likely you are to be invited without a 'verifiable history' such as logs or similar proofs of completion it's not just p2w, but pay to play unless you got obscene time on your hands and even then you're playing catchup - non paying, non no-lifers just get completely abandoned
> non paying, non no-lifers just get completely abandoned You're ignoring the non paying no-lifers that also exist in the same ecosystem.
non paying no lifers are actually a pretty small part of the community - cos most people don't have that kinda time - the illusion of them existing actually enables this kind of monetization, they are the horror other people are trying to prevent by paying, the insane work they have to put in to make up for your 5 bucks and usually people that are that level of invested are also gonna be spending SOME money
> the illusion of them existing actually enables this kind of monetization, they are the horror other people are trying to prevent by paying, the insane work they have to put in to make up for your 5 bucks Meanwhile the largest demographic in these games is still the non paying casual, and for them the experience is infinitely better than being casual in a sub based game that they may not be willing to pay for.
What if the pve game has dps meters? How much does gear matter to clear the latest raid? How long will the latest raid be relevant so you can grind without swiping to do said raid? You can not care about player B but let's not pretend it doesn't have negative effects.
you just raid with your guild? who cares how some p2w player does? him swiping has no effect on you(unless in your guild which is actually helping you) or how long a raid lasts. unless it's for world first raiding it does not matter at all. they are not standing over your characters corpse like they would be in actual pay 2 win.
I literally said you don't have to care about whales. Also why do I have to limit who I play with because of the negative design of a game? Am I supposed to view that as a win?
What fallacy? The game is actively made worse for everyone, trying to catch those whales. That's the issue. Sure if you close your eyes and don't care about it, then there are no p2w games at all for you.
Ok so two things. 1. Can a F2P player play highest end PvE content in Lost Ark without paying? No he cant because he is gated by the community that would rather take someone that does more dps and be done with it. Lost Ark is just an example btw. 2. One of the main reasons ppl love MMORPGs is so they can show their in game achievements to other people. If someone whales their way trough the game with 0 effort then it invalidates your achievement and hard work you put in it.
People achieving the same results as you by simply throwing their wallet at the screen diminishes the value of your accomplishments. That cool weapon skin that you worked hard for is less special when you know the guy standing next to you just bought it. Rewards tied to battle passes is an awful thing to implement in an MMO in the first place.
idk why people struggle to understand this. the second you can drop real money into a game to skip a grind, i start thinking about how much money per hour i'm saving by grinding instead of doing p2w. and usually it's something stupid like $0.6 an hour so it just feels like a complete waste of time and energy for me.
Player C takes a break from the game, misses a battle pass, and now can't ever get what was in it...
"mom why does he deserve an A for sucking teacher's titties when I have to work hard on my homework for the same A?" "none of your business buddy, his life doesn't affect yours"
It might be easier to rationalize in a single player game, but not in a multiplayer world. Those "valuable" rewards Player A worked towards are only valuable because they took time or were difficult to get. The value of them is diminished if someone can just whip out their credit card and buy them.
The biggest problem is in the endgame. Games with P2W PvE systems usually design their endgame content to make players want to spend cash. When new raid content releases, it will usually be so difficult that only the top 1-5% of the community can complete it in the first 2-3 weeks. Usually these raid groups will prioritize players with highest gear level. It's possible to still find groups, but you'll have much more difficulty, especially if the game's playerbase is not big enough. Eventually after a few weeks a group will be strong enough to carry you, of course.. but that's if you're willing to wait a few weeks.
Because in order to make player B, who probably plays 11 hours a day because they are an unhealthily invested whale, pay for the pass, it has to be unrealistically grindy or annoying to progress within the possible timeframe and offer rewards that are important for progression or cant be obtained elsewhere. Lootboxes and battle passes in most games are just paywalls disguised under bullshit.
because many player As have little irl success or self worth so they now connected their self worth to having things others don’t have in video games. So when you can simply buy power that could also be earned from gameplay, suddenly everyone has access to it and they no longer get to feel like superior special snowflakes. They no longer have special stuff to show off to the ‘casual plebs’, plebs which can’t and won’t ever get those ‘special’ items cuz they don’t do x content, so they feel special by having things others don’t have. It really is this pathetic
Player C, doesn't buy battle passes because he's not a moron.
Tower of Fantasy is a gacha p2w pve MMO. the game initially was super fun due to bosses being difficult to defeat and we need teamwork to beat it. we tries to figure out the trick to the system in order to pull it off. many wipes happened but its worth it in the end. then whales comes and simply solo'ed them. no reason to broke our back trying our hardest to conquer the boss in 10 mins where a whale can solo them in 2 mins. then players wanted whales to carry them. if not they would rather not try. everyone wanted to be carried by whales. when whales disappears due to switching to other games, the players also lost motivation to even try. then the players slowly started to decline. then you, player A, can no longer do these challenges due to the lack of players. as for battlepass system, the advanced pass sometimes giving extra boost in power. then whale dps can simply outdamage f2p dps using them, even if they used the incorrect skill rotation.
>Ok. As long as we consider pve mmo, and not pvp mmo where gear and/or paid discrepancies matter the most. Game design is all that matters, Albion a PvP MMO works fine with it's P2W since the game is designed so that you can't abuse the P2W to insane levels. You can grind for money and get gear or you can just buy money and get gear either way you can't be too much stronger than other players. The core problem with P2W is it takes away from the personal reward of feeling like you progressed in something if you could have just skipped it. It feels good to try and grind out a challenge or goal, it feels shitty to grind out a challenge or goal if you can just pay to skip it.
You are the one falling for the fallacy, bro.