Dewie Cheecham
Villore Sec Ops
Gallente Federation
677
   |
Posted - 2012.08.17 06:08:00 -
[1] - Quote
Corvus Ravensong wrote:Again, what did they force you to buy? NOTHING!! What they have done is drag some other extras in front of you and offer to sell you THE EXTRAS, you don't buy em, cool, your game still works just like it did before.
You got THE GAME free, you want the DLC skins, and DLC items, well, for those you get to pay - but your game still works FOR FREE even if you don't buy them..........
I'd guess that when you go to a store's grand opening you go for the free hotdogs and then ***** about them trying sell you stuff.......
This is where I have to step in. There is a difference between Free2Play and Pay2Win. Most of us accept that Free2Play involves micro transactions in order to finance the game. In this case those are in the form of Aurum.
I honestly don't like them, but they are there.
Where the chain breaks is when these micro transactions enable players to pay real money in order to gain an advantage, any advantage, you enter the realm of Pay2Win, and it is here most people tend to get emotional. Especially in the light of CCP's promise that Dust would never BE Pay2Win, that there would be NO items or services available for Aurum that could not be bought for ISK. A promise CCP were forced to make in the face of a mass exodus of veteran players, and players severely disrupting the in game economy of EVE Online in protests. (A non-bannable offence in EVE I might add)
Some people excuse this with there being a Player driven market, but we haven't seen that market yet, and it is dependent on people actually selling AUR Items on that marked.
That is just not good enough.
But the real problem is that there are items that breaks CCP's promise of no P2W, however much P2W proponents/deniers yell there aren't.
1) Most P2W items in DUST are ones that looks like higher tier items, but are available at lower Skill cost than regular items, some with minute stat improvements, though I recall a few with slight nerfs, most have a 5-10% better stats on a few attributes.
The lower SP budget could be palpable, if that were all, we have that kind of Items in EVE, it is called "Faction" items.Though these are still ONLY available for ISK, or if you get them from the source, with LP (Loyalty Points) to the faction selling them, and ISK. See LP as War Points, earned in the service of a specific faction.
2) Then there are the elephants in the room, and some people just don't understand just how big a deal this is. P2W items with a far lower resource requirement than their standard ISK items. Some P2W items, especially Prototype level weapons, have far lower CPU and Power Grid requirements, often about HALF that of their normal counterparts. This is a phenomenal advantage, one that CAN lead to a P2W fit to be significantly better.
I know this for a fact. I did this in the previous build. The CPU/PG saved allowed me to fit more Damage mods and better items overall on a cheaper suit even, and this fit fairly easily killed Marauder tanks, where the normal fit using the ISK only Prototype Swarm Launchers could not.
THAT is the deal breaker, because THAT is where people paying Aurum can get an advantage over non paying players, an advantage that is hard, if not impossible to meet without Aurum, even if the non Aurum player have to grind much harder to get the SP earnings an Aurum player can get (with the Skill booster, and presumably the other booster packages on the Augmentations screen), and have to earn twice the SP on top of that, because the Non Aurum Prototype items easily cost twice the SP to get. In other words, an Aurum player can get a similar suit about 3 times faster.
My Advice to CCP is, and always will be: DROP AURUM ENTIRELY, and let players buy ISK through a similar mechanism we have in EVE.
In short, I'm not talking about Free2Play, I'm talking about Pay2Win.
I'm not talking about the UVT, though I am outraged that they did this, and even more so at the prices they charge, and the initial lack of information, leaving us to speculate for most of a day before any information came out of CCP.
Corvus Ravensong wrote:J'Jor, for your amuse I postulate that:
1. every game that you call "pay to win" is also "free to play", it's a common issue with the business model.
2. "free to play" means exactly what it says, you (can) play for free.
Check out DDO, LOTRO, DCUO, Maple Story, Free Realms, and WTF, why not, all the "whateverVille" games by zynga - all of which are "free to play" with optionall paid content. Just because they aren't giving away the table, doesn't mean the hotdogs weren't free......
Those are OFFICIALLY Pay2Win types, DUST were promised NOT to be Pay2Win, but it IS. |
Dewie Cheecham
Villore Sec Ops
Gallente Federation
677
|
Posted - 2012.08.17 11:39:00 -
[4] - Quote
Iceyburnz wrote:Dewie Cheecham wrote:
DUST were promised NOT to be Pay2Win, but it IS.
No its not, no offence, but maybe its just you aren't as good at fps games as you think you are. If you look at the stats, there is no difference in gun stats as aur stats, in fact some of the isk guns actually do more damage (look at sniper rifles). Incase you havn't grasped it yet, heres how it will work: AuR WEAPONS allow you to use a weapon slightly sooner, so you don't have to grind. AuR Armour does nothing except make you look cooler. With industry you will be able to build everything we use in game with crafting. With the free market, people will be free to sell aur stuff for isk, and people with isk will be free to buy that. Hope this helps. 
Use the name of the items as a guide. Wyeirkomi Swarm Launcher vs the "Haywire" Wyeirkomi Swarm Launcher etc. and compare stats. Do the same for grenades, unless they have changed those. The difference between the named and unnamed variant were about 10% higher blast radius and damage in the previous build. |