Hmmm so the new xpac has been out a while now would you say its P2W?

[Crab Fear.8623]

37 minutes ago, Stand The Wall.6987 said:

diablo immortal is buy 2 win, gw2 is buy 2 play. full stop. LEARN THE DIFFERENCE

Well, they need to fix overpowered NEW specs quick, or this can't be true.

[Pimsley.3681]

That's the one issue w/ Anet - they are very slow to update balance issues. That was the case during core days. Then on June 2015, they altered the trait system entirely to prep for HoT. 

[Crab Fear.8623]

18 minutes ago, Pimsley.3681 said:

That's the one issue w/ Anet - they are very slow to update balance issues. That was the case during core days. Then on June 2015, they altered the trait system entirely to prep for HoT. 

Yeah, they don't know what they want.

Now necro is a tanky pp thief with a aoe float, and willbender is godmode shiro rev with godmode redo thanks to the meditation.

[Pimsley.3681]

1 hour ago, Crab Fear.8623 said:

Yeah, they don't know what they want.

Now necro is a tanky pp thief with a aoe float, and willbender is godmode shiro rev with godmode redo thanks to the meditation.

 

It's a good thing most ppl just copy  and paste builds because there are more powerful degenerate builds that's thankfully not played as much for both WB and Harb. 

[Stand The Wall.6987]

2 hours ago, Crab Fear.8623 said:

Well, they need to fix overpowered NEW specs quick, or this can't be true.

it is true cuz anyone can reach low plat and stay there with the f2p version. expecting the ability to reach legendary or play in tournaments without paying any money is nonsense and no one with a working brain thinks this should be a thing.

[voltaicbore.8012]

"P2W" discussions are becoming more complex (or at least, larger in scope) than they used to be - in no small part thanks to studios and publishers trying to find ways around that accusation.

@Stand The Wall.6987and @Dadnir.5038both provided the most classic definition of P2W; the cash shop has to sell stuff like "Sword of OP lmaoEZgg +20" when the highest weapon an F2P can reasonably expect is "Flaccid Weapon of Sadness +15". The spending of money literally gives players a direct and obvious advantage.

@Kuma.1503represents a more current response to the tricks and shenanigans that many games try to hide behind to avoid direct accusation of P2W. Maybe there was a time when "pay for convenience" was a meaningful category separate from "pay to win," but increasingly it seems that studios and publishers are willing to intentionally handicap the non-paying experience to intentionally encourage paying for access to more "premium" stuff. The problem with the newer forms of P2W is that players who don't pay (or just pay only the box price and don't use cash shop extensively) can still "win"; the problem is that the experience of getting to that win usually sucks substantially more for the non-paying player.

While GW2 clearly escapes the P2W accusation under the classic definition of that term, I think the case is murkier when it comes to the more current approach to that concept. That being said, I think GW2 still is NOT P2W because of design intentions. For me, a game is P2W if the box or expansion price only gets you a crippled version of the game, while paying extra beyond that pretty much brings you up to a more "normal" or reasonable experience.

Some games are very clearly designed in a way that cash shop players get a reasonable experience, while non-cash-shop players suffer a severely crippled experience. The clearest example I can think of is Black Desert Online, which is absolutely egregious in this regard. Again, it's not that cash shop players in BDO have a "premium" experience, per se - it's that you have to expect to pay a certain amount above and beyond the box price of the game just to get back up to a normal experience. Without spending that extra cash shop money, players who only pay the box price for access to the game look hideous, can't even use most dyes in the game, and run out of bag slots and weight capacity way too quickly to actually make reasonable progress in the game.

In contrast, while GW2's gem store has certainly improved my gaming experience to a great degree, I actually had a pretty good time leveling my first 2 core characters (a ranger and a guardian, in that order) up to 80 and getting them fully geared in exotic completely for free (I started playing after the core game went F2P, just opened my 6th birthday gift a couple nights ago). I figured out pretty quickly how to make my own 20 slot bags, so my characters had a 100 slots without too much trouble. Even though both of these characters carried an extra set of gear in their bags, the looting was generally easy to control with salvage kits, depositing mats directly from inventory into the bank, and selling on the TP directly from inventory. I could give many more examples, but overall I was impressed (and remain impressed) with the baseline QoL GW2 offers to free players. For PvE at least, the game didn't feel designed to oppress you into spending real money. As for the extras that I wanted from the gem store, the pool of gems in the gold-gem exchange is always well stocked by the whales, and the exchange rates are such that many nice upgrades are within reasonable reach of in-game grinding.

Now the topic of this thread is probably more directly about sPvP (and maybe WvW) as well. This shifts the discussion away from the cash shop and puts expansions under the spotlight. While I am generally opposed to including expansions in any discussion of P2W, I think to be fair I need to use the same standard as the one I used above: does the game seem designed to (1) handicap the non-expansion player more than it (2) offers improvements to expansion players?

In my opinion, HoT/PoF/EoD are much more about (2) than it is about (1), so I do not think the expansions are P2W. In PvE, I never felt that handicapped in the core world by the lack of gliding. It made some things simpler (could now just jump off high places after getting a vista) but I didn't feel like my core game experience suffered without it. Mounts, as incredible as they are, still feel like they added an improvement instead of highlighting a handicap of the pre-mount era. Fishing, skiffs, and the turtle are even more situational than the PoF mounts, so I also consider EoD upgrades even less gamechanging, so the game without EoD is (by logical extension) not really crippled by EoD's absence.

As for competitive, I've had a great amount of success on core specs in competitive. While I dabbled in bunker sidenode druid back when it was still good, my best seasons were on core ranger and core guard, with some core necro sprinkled in there too. As for the other classes, I've been absolutely dominated by good players running core ele, mesmer, thief, and even a core engi when I was running an elite spec, so I learned quickly that success in sPvP was much less about a particular spec and much more about being able to respond to the meta, the other team, and the map properly.

I really can't speak to WvW at all because I hate it and very rarely set foot in there.

So yeah - while I admit both the gem store and the expansions do make the game much cooler, in my opinion the fundamental level of fun in the game is high enough without paying more money. That is why I don't think GW2 can fairly be called P2W.

 

Edited June 3, 2022 by voltaicbore.8012

[Sahne.6950]

On 5/25/2022 at 6:20 PM, Kuma.1503 said:

While this might be a controversial statement, GW2, in general, is a P2W game.

A fun, beautiful game with gorgeous artwork, great voice acting, and the most engaging MMO combat on the market in my opinion, but still P2W nontheless. 

You can credit card swipe your way to level 80, full ascended, full infusions, legendary weapons, getting a massive head start on a player who tries to grind these things out... Yes you can earn these things in game, albiet slower, but that's a classic smokescreen that more predatory games use when they say "you can technically earn it in game so it's not P2W". Time, afterall, is a valuable resource. 

Elite specs are pay to win in the most literal sense. Anet is not afraid to butcher core specs into near unplayability if it will tone down the elites. 

For example, If you play core engi and you card swipe for either PoF or HoT your chances of winning in competetive modes just increased substantially. Trying to go F2P as an engineer player is a massive handicap because it is arguably the worst class in competetive without elites. 

 

While the term p2w is not right.... Anet sure is nerfing all the previous specs and then  raises the new specs to a level that the old ones could only dream off. Major League monetization right there! POG!

[Crab Fear.8623]

13 hours ago, Stand The Wall.6987 said:

it is true cuz anyone can reach low plat and stay there with the f2p version. expecting the ability to reach legendary or play in tournaments without paying any money is nonsense and no one with a working brain thinks this should be a thing.

 

What?

Yes, people expect to be able to win with the same specs they always won with, or heroes.

New heroes equal winning? This is called......dun dun dun dun dun.......p2w, if you have to pay to get the heroes.

Buy a different spec, not a superior spec.

If the difference is superior, how is that not at least inadvertently p2w?

I bought the expansion so I can play the story, but my competitive choice should not be dumpstered by the new stuff.

Brrrrrr goes willbender and harbinger.....

[Swagg.9236]

For GW2:

PvE could be described as "buy to play."  Players get content (what little there truly is), but there is generally also the knot to address where new specs have historically released in states either outright better than previous build iterations or, at least, receive a number of generous touch-ups to "quickly" (at anet patch release speed anyway) elevate them to equal or slightly higher than their predecessors.  What this really means, though, is due to how homogenized all the possible options are, player choice and commitment doesn't really mean anything.  This can often lead to exclusionary nitpicking in team environments, but it also doesn't inherently give the solo player enough of a challenge to feel like their choices matter.  It's B2P at the expense of being an engaging experience.

PvP, however, could be quite arguably described as pay to play.  Statically, if you really want to look at it without the Damocles sword of "my time invested in muh GW2 PvP skillllll" looming over your head, it's not difficult to spy the trend of expansions dropping like a 9.0 earthquake on a decrepit parking garage.  It's not always a complete turnover of class/spec representation, but the issue is that GW2's skill ceiling is not truly defined by a universal, interactive slope of progression but far more by jarring up-and-down jerks heralded by patch notes; and to refuse to buy an expac in the midst of one's release is akin to being thrown into a surfing competition, but only receiving a boogie board:  sure, you'll hit the waves, but you'll never truly stand up if you don't buy in to all the required equipment.  This isn't a game like Quake, Melee, or TF2 where you can see the skill difference across a continuity of similar player tools; GW2 patches are deliberately designed to overpower or smother what players are currently doing prior to their respective releases.

By this point, though, with how most PvE players who regularly do that content have collectively gone full 180 from the days of "But, you can't kick me from your Arah party just because I'm a Necro/Ranger/Engie!" it's actually kind of hysterical to see GW2 be so abrasive and neglectful of the people who just want to see what it's about.  Either somebody gets duped into buying all the expansions, or they probably just get bored with the core game like most people did back in 2012 lol (nobody remembers this game's pop going from maximum hype train to a comparative ghost town in only about 6 months post-launch; and don't even try to defend it with how dead things got in 2014).

tl;dr GW2 PvP was never really competitive from the outset, but people who invested so much time into GW2 want to justify their loss.  Just accept things for what they are, dudes.

Edited June 4, 2022 by Swagg.9236