General Discussion - Can we stop pretending that Path of Exile is free to play? - Forum - Path of Exile (2024)

Or, that it's not pay to win. Either format works.

Backstory: I've been talking to quite a few people about Wolcen and Last Epoch as alternative games. Not trying to sabotage PoE, but these people were unhappy with the current state of the game and looking for an alternative.

Almost exclusively, I was met with, "Those games aren't F2P! I don't want to pay for something if I don't know I'll like it yet!"

Okay...aside from the fact that everyone that played games did exactly that up until a decade or so ago when F2P became a thing.

I want a real discussion on the elephant in the room.

I started playing PoE regularly on the 3.0 release. I first played about 3 years before that, but had no idea what I was doing and got frustrated/annoyed and quit.

In 3.0, I got my first character into maps and played for a good long while without spending a dime. I understand it's a game, and the devs gotta eat and all...but "ethical" F2P has always been based around cosmetic MTX and such.

~-~-~-~TIME WARP TIME~-~-~-~

Here we are. It's 2+ years later, and there are SO many leagues mashed into the main game, that I'll go ahead and just say (beyond a shadow of a doubt in my mind) that it's a significant detriment to gameplay not to have at LEAST all the stash tabs (which comes to what? $40-60?).

Beyond that, I guess it's mostly optional. You can quasi-SSF by never getting a premium tab...but I can't imagine experiencing the entire game without putting a good bit of money into it.

Imagine having just your base four tabs. Things you might want to build out your character would be...

Fossils, resonators, shaper/elder bases, all four conqueror bases, high tier regular bases, uniques, alchs, chaos, annuls, exalts, etc...

On top of that, breach shards/stones, betrayal shards/stones...

All that to fit in the size of a single quad tab.

Technically, it's not strictly pay to buy immediate power, but it's at the point where the detriment caused by NOT buying tabs is LOTS of time, potential power, and stress.

~-~-~-~AND THEN...~-~-~-~

I know, I've put a good amount of money into the game. I enjoyed it for a while and I'm playing less and less now (just less time, and 3.9 isn't doing it for me).

All I know, is any of my friends I've tried to get into POE in the last couple leagues have ALL said that the game feels pay to win with all the extremely limited base storage combined with all the nonsense that drops constantly.

They're also the same people that refuse to try other ARPGs that I'm enjoying a lot right now, because of a $30 price tag.

Just a thought process I've been going through. Kinda feels like 4 small tabs doesn't justify the "F2P" tag anymore.

Thoughts?

my thoughts are you don't need more than 4 tabs because you'll either up-trade currency you have too much of for smaller, more valuable amounts and you are not going to use 99% of the items sitting in your stash tabs ever. If you aren't wearing the item or selling it it doesn't need to be there, and you'll try to sell items for 5 chaos that will sit in the sales tab for years and never be bought. You don't need those tabs to succeed at this game, but they are extremely convenient and I am sure a huge bulk of GGG's money comes into the game because of those tabs so they won't be changing it

It makes you wonder how many times even GGG has considered tipping over the line of free to play and pay to win. How much do those Chinese pay for their pay to win version of PoE? We doom ourselves by paying for this crap

Honestly didnt read your post but i am not sure who is pretending, it is quite accepted that game is buy to play with extremely extensive demo version, that lets you try game out for 10-20 hours without feeling you playing a demo.

P.S. and for extreme poor or masoch*sts you can play past this point.

P.p.s the only exception to above are kids who have pc but no access to money.

Free to play. You will want to pay for it though. You'll want close to $60 in tabs... maybe $80. That doesn't make it P2W. You're not winning because you have tabs. You're playing a game that is the same game regardless as to how many tabs you have.

Your friends are cheap. They don't see the value in spending $30 on a game. I'm going to blow close to $200 on diner tonight... probably more.

I mean, I get it. You download it, you load the game, you're playing it.

FREE. TO. PLAY.

I fully understand what the term means, and that it's technically playable for free.

But SO many games have gotten SO much sh*t for extreme versions of "pay for convenience"...looking at every Korean MMO I can remember (TERA comes to mind).

I'm just wondering what magic fairy dust we're getting fed that makes all the POE players blind to the fact that it's doing basically the same thing.

Fortnite is "real" F2P in my book. Same with Apex Legends. Mind you, I hate the hell out of Fortnite and I haven't played Apex in a while, so it's not a "fanboi" thing.

If we're not discussing past the base terminology, then it should be perfectly fine for companies to come out with an ARPG with NO free stash, NO free inventory space, and one character slot.

You can load the game, make a character, and theoretically get all the levels and items you want. However, only what you can equip and nothing more until you pay.

It's not even that I'm disagreeing that the game is technically playable, it's that the level of ability to be played (compared to the amount of content that exists) has been drastically reduced over the last two years.

**EDIT** And please, I know what the internet is like. Spare me the "I could get a level 100 and kill AWK8 Sirus with only ONE basic tab!"

The point is barrier to entry, not people that have 10,000 hours in the game already.

You're exaggerating our position. We're not saying that PoE is a game you'll enjoy equally if you don't pay for tabs. It isn't. You'll want your tabs.

P2W and F2P are terms used to indicate structures within a game.

In a P2W game, there is a distinct advantage given in the game to people who pay for that advantage. Tabs tread pretty close to the line on this one. It's pretty easy to argue that tabs are desirable, but do they give an "advantage"? No. They don't. They make the game more fun, but the guy without tabs and the guy with tabs play the same game.

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Shagsbeard wrote:

Free to play. You will want to pay for it though. You'll want close to $60 in tabs... maybe $80. That doesn't make it P2W. You're not winning because you have tabs. You're playing a game that is the same game regardless as to how many tabs you have.

Your friends are cheap. They don't see the value in spending $30 on a game. I'm going to blow close to $200 on diner tonight... probably more.

1. Are you though? With leagues as the main game type, you're on a time limit. At that point, isn't time limiting the same as content limiting? If it takes you longer to get farther, and it all gets swooped to Standard at the end, doesn't that make it more than just cosmetic?

2. So glad to know you're spending that much on dinner. A perfectly on-topic argument that doesn't at all make you seem like a walking disaster of morality and humility. Sorry some people aren't millionaires. I guess making choices like a normal person doesn't come naturally to you. My condolences.

Even if I accept your premise, at some point you don't win more by buying more stash tabs. You reach this point after spending maybe 50 dollars on tabs. That's it. Spending more doesn't make you win more.

Have you ever played an actual p2w game? In gacha games for example, you have to spend the above mentioned 50 dollars like every two weeks just to stay competitive. And if you spend more, you win more. That's p2w :)

By the way, if you play a game for hundreds or even thousands of hours, I won't shed a tear for you if you feel the need to spend a couple bucks on it.

I'm glad that Wolcen didn't go the free-to-play route. I sure won't be missing the added inconveniences of a bloated item system that you can somewhat "bypass" by spending money.

And IMO, poe should go full pay-to-win. There is no need to pretend that the game is above all other free-to-play models and "will never be pay-to-win" when the game clearly funnels the players into buying non-cosmetical conviniences by design.

POE should have no tabs whatsoever in my dream scenario. Items, currency, fragments, cards, maps and all the other bloat shouldn't even need the amount of manual sorting that is required today. But since selling the "solution" is more profitable, we need to drive those new average non-paying player into the microtransaction by frustration.

And that's why I say that poe should go full pay-to-win and just admit it. You can't have a grayzone without affecting both payers and non-payers negative. Adding too much convenience would decrease the need for the purchased advantage while too much convenience would make the game appear more pay-to-win which TGGG is very scared of. So we get something mediocre instead that gets better if you pay, but still pretty bad in order to fly under the pay-to-win radar.