Bad Business Model or Ok?

I agree but the people in that thread are screaming at anyone who disagrees. I was just wondering if you wanted to add your opinion to it.

"P2W" doesn't mean that there are items you can only get by paying real money. It means that those items are so powerful that someone who doesn't spend real money on them has no real hope of winning against someone who does. To say this is the case with SWTOR is absolutely ludicrous. The benefit of CC gear barely rates above "cosmetic".

Technically "P2W" is any gear purchasable by cash-only means that provides any numerical advantage in combat when compared to what can be obtained for "free" (pay-walls included). Even one or two points higher would *technically* be P2W, though typically it wouldn't be viewed as such until those one or two points start stacking up into 40, 50, 80 points across all gear, which is a visibly significant advantage (*cough cough*ARTIFACTS*cough*).

Let's evaluate this condition then: So I got the Eradicator's Set way back when, and rolled a new Inquisitor to use it on. Every piece of green gear I dropped on Korriban had better stats. What, exactly, did I win? I got the look I wanted for that toon right out of the gate, and really, that's it. So it's purely cosmetic. People do love to point out the "evils of the cash shop", and in some games, I mentioned one such game earlier in this very thread, they are correct. You very definitely can P2W there. Here? It's more "SWTOR went F2P in a year, so it's fail, and oh, btw, P2W CS", even though nothing really supports the claim. You can unlock some +41 crystals for lvl 10, but really, if a player having a crystal is making somebody else lose, I'd say the loser was doing something wrong.

To elaborate on the crystals, in order to be P2W, Bioware would have to release +51 Hawkeye crystals, as opposed to the +41 Hawkeyes we have in game now, and put them ONLY in the cartel packs. No other way to get them as mob loot or craft them. Then, and only then, would the cartel market be Pay to Win.

As it is, it's not. Not even by a long shot.

But hey, I guess it's better to pretend that it never happened and go down the lane of late servers transfers and 1,5M lost subs again. If you want this game to succeed ift should be in your interest that the devs try to keep as many subs as they possibly can and that's not going to happen when they sit idle by for every major launch.

yes there is a we.

go to mmorpg.com go to massively go to any mmo site and see for yourself we the mmo community wanted a truely immersive star wars mmo like swg was back in the pre-cu. what we got was this. better? no i don't see this game doing better i see servers bleeding players, i see people going nuts for something truely new like WildStar. I see pvper's leaving for WildStar as WS offers some of the best pvp ever. I see raiders leaving for WS as the raids are hard and it takes skill and time to get into them. role players are leaving tor as WS offers them so much more.

and it is p2w every game that has a cash shop in it is p2w. all of those items should be gotten in game via playing the game. not something you spend irl money for.

You sir, are correct. People love to throw around the "P2W" term, but most don't actually really know what it means. There are very, very few true P2W games released in the west. If anyone wants to know what true pay to win is (and from where the term sort of has its origins), they need to read this article about ZT Online:

http://www.danwei.org/electronic_gam...away_in_zt.php


Well, you see, that shows a misunderstanding of the business that is gaming and the business that is MMOs. It is actually bad business to base your development cycle off of someone else's development cycle. Blizzard likes to time announcements and PR around such releases, but that is a different animal than an actual development cycle.

Spend a few years analyzing the gaming business and industry, and a few more studying the psychology of gaming and you'll understand that, ultimately, there is much ado about nothing here, or in any other game where this exact same forum post is repeated again, and again, and again, for years on end - only the game's name is different.



Yes, you are correct. There is a "we." There is a "We" for every side of every opinion and feeling. However, in the end, it appears that your "we" is not quite as large as the "We" of the people playing and enjoying the game. SWG was dying for years. The false belief that the impending release of SWTOR had anything to do with SWG's cancellation is just that. In the end, the numbers support that fact that the style of this game is preferred by the majority of gamers over the style of SWG (and any sandbox game), and the very, very small community of the various SWG emus out there.