why is the SWTOR community so against "pay to win"

Actually, I agree with the poster you quoted. I admit my goal for doing things like ops and flashpoints are usually for the gear. Sometimes the exp. Mostly the gear.

What I don't understand is why more people won't admit that. What's wrong with wanting ****** gear in a game in which you gear so heavily impacts a great deal of what we do?

We're a competetive species, too. Wanna to be better than others? Awesome, do it up. Couch it in false altruism and fake nobility and one just looks like a moron though, or so I think.

Because society demands that we at least appear less selfish. There is a reason many religions say that greed is a sin.

Although I admit I prefer to only collect gear that toon will use.

But if we want to look like fools playing at nobility in a game where none of this matters, why take that fun away. I like lording my Champion of the Great Hunt status on my BH.

But there is work put into those things, so there is value. It is why there is a value. Free things have little to no value. And if those things were put up on the cartel market, it is more likely to be considered little more than collectable trash for us gear hoarders who want all the fashions.

Part of the problem is the length of time it takes developers to produce new content in the form of end game PvE.

If I could wave a magic wand and somehow cause a new flashpoint to be added every other week, and a new operation every other month, the freshness of the new content would potentially be enough to keep everyone playing them, regardless of any rewards (or lack thereof)

Of course, that is just me being unrealistic.

Some games solve content delivery problems by turning "content" over to the players themselves (e.g. Eve Online). Some solve this by being Single Player games and have an ending.

The dynamic of an MMO is an interesting one. It grew out of the idea of "playing games with others". It's business model predicates people continuing to play it. Therefore it needs reasons to keep people coming back. The "new shiny" is one approach, and is particularly common in PvE based games.

It seems to me that any attempt to "innovate" a better P2W game would require designing it that way from scratch, rather than taking an existing game, such as TOR, and changing it into one.

I'm typically surrounded by people that don't really mask their ambitions, though your points are all fair and apt. The error the might be mine, forgetting that greater society is quite as you observe.

And what of those who would find the game less fun if the pay2win option was added? They chose this game because it was not pay2win. Would it be fair to drive them away by adding it now?
Yes, there is a problem with operations. Namely, they are repetitive. Running an operation is fun in itself for the first time, and maybe a second time, but after that it becomes boring. The enemies are always in the exact same positions and behave in the exact same way. If you find it fun to repeat the same thing over and over, good for you. But I suspect I'm not alone in finding repetitive things boring.

Replay value can come from a number of sources. One of them is limiting the amount of progress you can make per playthrough, requiring many playthroughs to complete the game. This is the model used by practically all MMORPGs for their endgame content. It provides a large and easily scalable amount of replay value, at the expense of enjoyment.

Another source is providing multiple paths through the content and only allowing you to take one of them on a single playthrough. This is most often found in single-player games, but SW:TOR's story content also contains a few examples of it. Multiple paths provide a limited amount of replay value and require substantial developer effort.

A third source is randomization. When used to the fullest, the entire game is randomized, making every playthrough different. A notable example is the Civilization series, where you get a fully random game world. Another example is the Diablo series, which has partially randomized environments and items with fully randomized stats. Randomization provides potentially infinite replay value, but world randomization in particular requires a specific type of game to work well.
Every game is characterized by a set of features. Whether it is pay2win or not. Whether it is subscription-based or free2play. Whether it focuses on PvE or PvP. Whether it is single-player, traditional multi-player or an MMO. These features factor in players' decisions to pick up any particular game. If an important feature is later changed, especially in an online game where the update can't be avoided, players will feel betrayed and leave the game.

Yes, the gaming industry evolves. Today's games are very different from those a decade ago, and those were different from the ones we had two decades ago. Yes, having games with different sets of features is a good thing. SW:TOR is different from Wildstar, which is different from ESO, which is different from Guild Wars. But should all games try to implement the feature of the year? I think not. There are plenty of games out already, with more being released constantly. Those players who feel pay2win is important should perhaps look for a game that already implements it.

wrong

What's this? Me agreeing with SLC? Sound the apocalypse sirens.

The error is not yours. If society ran the way you read to be, blunt and to the point without fancy nonsense, then things would likely get done faster. And then lawyers and politicians would be looking for new jobs.

Anyway, otherwise back on topic, why should work be surpassed by cash in this game? Work keeps us playing.


And it is starting to look like the topic has been beaten down to death because I haven't seen anyone point out how pay2win is a good business model for this game?

Personally, I don't use cartel crystals on my lowbies. For one thing, it makes the game too easy and I find that dull. But most people consider that the first 50 levels are story and the competitive part of the game starts at 50 outside pvp. It would be very bad if you could buy expertise gear at any level. If you were to be able to buy an advantage there or at 50 for pve, it would truly suck because you'd be skipping a lot of work that others put into gearing their characters. It's just not acceptable.