They wanted them without doing any work so they could have an advantage and clear content faster. That in itself is a benefit. Time is the only real currency in gaming. Everything else is just a mechanism to regulate how players spend their in game time. My dog might be able to play a spear mage better than anyone alive without buying gear. That’s not the issue.
Whether you consider it a big benefit or not is subjective I guess. But clearing faster => winning.
Blizzard took a commission on each sale. They had a direct interest in the transactions.
They designed the system for buying and selling. They designed a pay to win system.
Which is what makes it different from third party RMT.
That is what the RMAH did. Another player had to find the item first. But Blizzard still got money each time someone traded.
Who made those droprates?
Who made actual money on players buying items from other players?
The answer begins with a B.
Time is money and all that.
Clearing faster = benefit.
Now, whether is it more fun or not, is a very different topic. But also not relevant.
Look at another heavily pay to win game (or pick whatever other mobile game you want); Genshin Impact. No pvp, no competition with others. People pay because they want to progress faster and further. It represents a tangible benefit for them.
Mostly. They’ve stepped in it a few times. Heroes of the Storm, Overwatch, and Hearthstone have never been far from controversy. Everyone makes mistakes. I’m quite sure they have considered things that would horrify us all before wiser heads prevailed.
I would gladly pay for skins like in PoE, if there was a store on diablo 4, instead of just overprice the game, like diablo 2 remaster ( actually the remaster price is 3 times the original game price on launch … ). Please blizz give it a shot, instead of P2W elements, sell skins ( for reasonable prices, it must be cheap or else people wont buy … its better to sell 100.000 skins for 5 $ than a 100 for 200 $ )
Seasonal skins for sale can garantee a profit every season and keep the game interesting
Going price for a triple A game is $59.99. Anyone thinking D4 will be less is dreaming. Microtransactions are big part of why I wouldn’t play it even if it was free.
I doubt they’ll sell P2W elements in any case. It’s a controversy they don’t want to deal with.
With HotS everything was earnable by playing the game, OW, has always only been cosmetics, all earnable in game, same for HS. I have roughly 90% of all cards and only spent $1 on the beta to test Arena.
People may not like it but they’ve been pretty fair and tame compared to the rest if the industry.
The biggest complaint in HotS was that they were constantly releasing new overpowered characters so often the average player couldn’t possibly earn them before the next one came out. HS had the same issues but you can bet your tuchus people were stomping other people the first day with cards they bought. It was a very short term advantage but it was there. Like I said they were skirting quite near a fine line. A few times they ended up nerfing things that were too much. Yes compared to Ubisoft and EA they were angels but those guys are flat out abusive.
Yep. Blizzard has always had a habit of making their new stuff overpowered. In pay to win games like HotS and HS that is only much much worse. It makes good business sense to make your new stuff OP in those games, to sell more stuff to players.
However, Blizzard also often do it in WoW with new classes, and Diablo 3 with new/revamped sets, so it genuinely might not happen only because they want to sell more power. Not that the alternative explanation is that much better (Flavor of the Month balancing)
It’s very rare for anything to happen only because. It’s also very rare for anything a company does to have a single explanation. Life just isn’t that simple.
What was there to do after you did beat inferno, which btw I did with far less than BiS gear. Try different builds, done that.
What get to new shines faster, if true then those ones wouldn’t have stayed much longer anyway so it doesn’t matter. Those ones would’ve went to those other games even without BiS gear anyway.
Unless a person works almost 24/7, which btw means he has no time to play games. How much money does a person make when they are not working or running a business (their downtime)? Unless they have investment income or royalties. But even those can make money for you while you are playing a game.
If you have a life outside of playing games then that should take priority over gaming anyway.
It gets interesting if you make money playing games like those that make content on youtube or twitch. Ones that have sponsors that pay them to do what they do. So they will still get money even if they don’t have all BiS gear. As long as they are still making content and doing what their sponsors are wanting them to do in order to keep them as sponsors they are fine.
Some actually wanted that gear faster not because they wanted to do the content faster. No instead they wanted it because it was BiS gear.
To be perfectly honest how many players really cared how fast anyone could clear the content.
Please see the above reply so I do have to type it out again.
You know that by that token the gold AH was just as much pay to win. Why because you could use real money to buy gold. Then on the gold AH us it to purchase the gear you wanted.
Since Blizz didn’t have an in game vendor like the Blood Shard vendor in the PTR that sold the following items for real money.
Mempo of Twilight, Lacuni Prowlers, The Witching Hour, Inna’s pants, Tal Rasha’s chest, Nat’s ring, Vile Ward (IIRC was BiS shoulders), and then either The Furnace or Echoing Fury as the weapon were BiS for all classes and all builds since the orange text didn’t exist back then.
If Blizz done that and had all of the above with all of the right affixes then it would be truly Pay to Win because of the fact that the items are being generated in the game without anyone finding them.
We know that someone had to find them. So that point is not important.
Okay I will tell you want we can do. From now on I can call all AH’s in all games that support them pay to win. After all players in those games have a way of buying currency for real money. So the trading system designed by the devs to give the players what they need was designed by that company. When the company turns a profit from the game they are making money off of those sales. So it is pay to win.
We need to make a campaign to have all AH’s removed from all games that support them (which are MMOs).
Next on the chopping block is cash shops that sell anything. Yes even cosmetics are pay to win as well. If you have more money than me it means you can customize your character better than me and that is an advantage so pay to win. That means that we need to have a campaign to end all free to play games and make them paid to play with paid expansions and downloadable content.
Without a way of proving that D2’s original price was around thirteen bucks I would find that hard to believe. I think you are another one that wants D2R to be either free or five bucks at most.
A lot clearly. Since they keep paying to make it faster.
Blizzard gets no commission on those sales. GAH is not pay to win.
Again, RMT is not pay to win. The game company making money on power being sold, is pay to win.
Pay to win is pay to win. Sure, if Blizzard created the items that were sold, it would be more pay to win. But 50%, or 10%, pay to win is still pay to win.
Blizzard is in control of all parts of the supply chain here. Their game generate the items people find, and can then sell to others, and then Blizzard get some profit from that sale.
Quite a few apparently. It’s anecdotal but there massive amount of complaints on the issue. Your rambling wall of text serves to confirm that you too believe there are benefits to buying gear.
They were missing on the forums. I seen no threads complaining about player x clearing content x or act x faster than they did. No, instead it was that player x had better gear than they did. Those threads were small in comparison to the threads of hatred on the RMAH.
I am trying to show you that I can stretch things to fit my definition much like how you are stretching things. If players didn’t need to find the gear that was posted. If Blizz did item generation and posted the best items on both AHs then you would have a point about pay to win. But since they didn’t you have to stretch it to make it fit.
This proves that you know you are stretching what you are saying to make it fit.
Since you can see that I can stretch things just as good as you can to make them fit some crazy definition of my own making. Then the logical thing to do is drop this line of discussion.
The only complaints that I saw on the older forums were ones that stated player x had way better gear than they did. They didn’t complain about time at all. That is due to the fact that nothing was timed.
When you don’t have any timed content and players are immersed into the game. Players then can spend a lot of hours if they don’t watch the clock all without even noticing it.
The only ones that would know how long anyone took to clear an act would be ones that watched streamers. Most streamers would have better gear than the rest of the players due to their supporters and maybe sponsor.
Of Course they did, constantly. They complained about how hard to get gear it was and how long it took to get it. Bad drops, bad itemization, on and on. While the auction house was up they complained how hard it was to farm gold. Like I said time is the only real currency in gaming the rest is imaginary. Player time not timed content.
So if complaints about other players that are able to clear content faster than others due to better gear on the older official forums Diablo 3 forums ( I guess I have to treat you like a computer now). Or you are getting nit picky again.
No, instead the gear complaints were not based on time but on quality. This is not an all or nothing fallacy. Where if one exist then the rest exist with that one complaint.
No, it isn’t because if it were then I still say that the GAH as well would be pay to win due to some of the gold being bought with real money from RMT. So that is stretching things to make them fit your definition and I showed you earlier that I can do the same quiet easily.
Again another all or nothing fallacy. If any one makes a complaint about gear then they are complaining about everything under the sun concerning gear.
I never seen a thread on the older Diablo 3 official forums that said player x cleared either a quest or a whole act faster than another player. The reason was the content wasn’t timed content. Mr. Clock wasn’t a thing until GRs along with leader boards were introduced.
Unless you and Shadout are saying that the majority of players back then played with stop watches to time how long it took them to complete content. Then others would brag about it clearing it faster than others. Nothing I saw on the older official Diablo 3 forums ever talked about it.
