Is offline trading pay to win?

It's not P2W because the only instances where you can "win" anything happen in SSF.

Trade leagues essentially do not matter, if you want to trade and cheat your way out of the item hunt game it only affects you. How much are you willing to pay for the convenience of not playing the game yourself to find things in a looter? Do the people not trading care about what you are doing? No.

It is however obnoxious they make you pay some amount to even engage with the new system. They certainly should have given everyone one free merchant tab. It's just an example of greed though that they didn't.

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dookleeto#7813 wrote:

Just wondering if this leaves a bad taste for anyone else. I already bought tons of premium tabs, and will probably go back to SSF next league, so I have no interest in buying merchant tabs, but I was excited to try trade for the first time in years. It was obviously a bit disappointing to see that I cant use it.

This seems a bit unethical to me. I am interested in the opinions of trade players.

You don't need trading to win this game. I will consider offline trading as pay for convenience instead of pay to win.

there's always something lol.

the way i would put it. poe is a game where the drops are balanced around the existence of trade. if you dont trade, you will experience a harder time.

as for p2w. the most commonly accepted definition of p2w is based on the question:

"can you buy anything officially from the game with real money that can give you an advantage over a player who doesnt?"

stash tabs make trade easy, make organization easy. it saves a huge amount of time and effort.

a lot of people downplay how much time and effort is saved. suffice to say its a huge lot over time. a good example is currency tab. i can easily ctrl click all my currency and it will go into my currency tab. all the currency goes into a specific dedicated slots and i can tell how many i have just by glancing. the exact number i have is displayed.

if a player doesnt have it. their currency will be all over the place. even if theres a feature where currency is arranged into neat rows (it doesnt exist) as a f2p player, it would still require you to do math. count each stack you have then multiply by the max stats.

suffice to say it is p2w. a lot of GGG defenders say its a P2P feature. to me i find its copium. they cannot accept that it's P2W. i would agree partially where players are expected to get them if they intend to play the game long term. most of the preem stashes are too good not to play without.

but regardless. it fits P2Ws definition no matter how you want to use mental gymnastics to call it a cost of playing/P2P.

It’s $3 to be able to sell with async trade. You can buy without paying anything.

I think it’s worth it to have that as a hurdle to bots participating in trading honestly.

I think it’s an incredible stretch to try and paint this as a MEANINGFUL pay to win element. A key part of pay to win tends to be that you pay more to win more. I’ve really found no meaningful benefit to having a ton of merchant tabs. 1-2 is just fine. If you fill up more than that it’s because stuff isn’t selling, meaning you are either trying to sell garbage or don’t know how to set prices.

Honestly anyone that does try and make this a huge deal - or act like it’s just as pay to win as something like the Korean MMOs - is just flagging themself as someone that shouldn’t be taken seriously.

I think that the existing stash system is far more pay to win than these merchant tabs, and overall I don’t find any element of POE truly pay to win in a distasteful way given its free price tag.

I do think the cosmetic prices are absurd though.

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exsea#1724 wrote:

as for p2w. the most commonly accepted definition of p2w is based on the question:

"can you buy anything officially from the game with real money that can give you an advantage over a player who doesnt?"

stash tabs make trade easy, make organization easy. it saves a huge amount of time and effort.

suffice to say it is p2w.

"Advantage" requires competition. You do not get any advantage from trading, you "save time" which means you "play less" which is not in any form "winning." This is not some PvP centric open world experience where a whale is going to walk by and one-shot you because they spent more money on the game. That is what P2W means at its core, they paid money to win against you, people don't like being on uneven terms in competitive games for non-skill reasons. There's no competition here outside of the SSF races, this is effectively a single player game with coop and trade options. How anyone spends their time or money in it has no effect on your experience.

it was cheap on poe2 and it works in poe1 as well.

i had enough left over ggg coins from last purchase.

i get what you mean though. if i had to pull out the CC for this single tab id be sad.

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Astasia#2760 wrote:

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exsea#1724 wrote:

as for p2w. the most commonly accepted definition of p2w is based on the question:

"can you buy anything officially from the game with real money that can give you an advantage over a player who doesnt?"

stash tabs make trade easy, make organization easy. it saves a huge amount of time and effort.

suffice to say it is p2w.

"Advantage" requires competition. You do not get any advantage from trading, you "save time" which means you "play less" which is not in any form "winning." This is not some PvP centric open world experience where a whale is going to walk by and one-shot you because they spent more money on the game. That is what P2W means at its core, they paid money to win against you, people don't like being on uneven terms in competitive games for non-skill reasons. There's no competition here outside of the SSF races, this is effectively a single player game with coop and trade options. How anyone spends their time or money in it has no effect on your experience.

notice the deliberate use of the word "advantage".

if i had a pen can i write better than a bloke with a pencil? i can keep writing for long before the dude with a pencil needs to sharpen. there is no competition but you can see the obvious advantage.

you do not get an advantage from trading? sorry in what world are we living in where we do not get advantage from trade? i've played this game for 10 years. in every league that i start fresh, i cannot remember a single instance where i dropped a good melee weapon that can out class a cheap 1 chaos unique that i can get off of trade.

also is time saving not an advantage? you're really trying too hard to make it seem like time advantage is not an advantage but it simply is. many mobile games use time based energy system or time based progressed systems that can be bypassed by simply throwing money at the game.

in such conversations i usually bring up world of warcraft. you can buy a max level item using in game purchases. many people would say its p2w. i would point out that to get to max level in wow, its only a matter of time and effort. thats exactly what you save a huge lot on with stashes in poe (not even talking about trade yet). if max level potions are p2w by the virtue of them saving time and effort, how different is that with stash tabs which also save time and effort? in fact if we're talking about measurable benefits, max level potions despite saving hours or days of time, actually loses out to stash tabs, as you save time and effort on an infinite level. you never need to manually organize stacks of currency ever again, you never need to calculate how much currency you have ever again. you never need to search every nook and cranny for a currency stack that got mixed up some where. its well organized.

look at how i phrased the commonly accepted definition of p2w. it talks about advantage but never once mentions competition.

can you not "win" in a single player game? i've played countless RPGs/jrpgs which are single player with no competitive aspects. i got to the ending and i won the game. is that not winning?

or are you trying hard to use mental gymnastics to defend ggg's stash tabs as not being p2w. it is simply p2w.

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Astasia#2760 wrote:

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exsea#1724 wrote:

as for p2w. the most commonly accepted definition of p2w is based on the question:

"can you buy anything officially from the game with real money that can give you an advantage over a player who doesnt?"

stash tabs make trade easy, make organization easy. it saves a huge amount of time and effort.

suffice to say it is p2w.

"Advantage" requires competition. You do not get any advantage from trading, you "save time" which means you "play less" which is not in any form "winning." This is not some PvP centric open world experience where a whale is going to walk by and one-shot you because they spent more money on the game. That is what P2W means at its core, they paid money to win against you, people don't like being on uneven terms in competitive games for non-skill reasons. There's no competition here outside of the SSF races, this is effectively a single player game with coop and trade options. How anyone spends their time or money in it has no effect on your experience.

[Removed by Support]

Pay to win is an extremely easy to grasp colloquialism meaning does spending money give you advantage you otherwise wouldn't have, and pretending otherwise is counterproductive to the argument.

I've quoted you because you happened to be the one I read as I decided to reply, but this applies equally to all similar responses; "p2w" doesn't require you to literally win a game as in a game of chess or dominos. It means paying money to advance in a way that you wouldn't without paying that money. This is the context in which games are judged as pay 2 win or not.

Having to explain all that in answer to this utterly asinine position completely takes away from the fact that the level of pay 2 win in PoE is almost nonexistent compared with essentially any other ostensibly free game, certainly any that has remotely as much content as it does. It absolutely SHOULD be the case that everyone has at least one merchant tab available whether they buy them or not, but in the absence of that, this is still not terrible.

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Pathological#1188 wrote:

It means paying money to advance in a way that you wouldn't without paying that money. This is the context in which games are judged as pay 2 win or not.

Having to explain all that in answer to this utterly asinine position completely takes away from the fact that the level of pay 2 win in PoE is almost nonexistent compared with essentially any other ostensibly free game,,,

,,,, this is still not terrible.

yeah my point being. poe IS p2w BUT it is a form of p2w that players can accept.

on the scale of p2w its pretty low. just that it annoys me whenever people defend poe as being fully f2p. or saying its p2p.

its simply inaccurate.

but if we take away semantics and talk about feels. poe is a free demo. you buy the game by buying the preemium currency stashes. then you only truly get to enjoy the game the way you're meant to.