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Is this game really Pay to win?
Sarariel
Member UncommonPosts: 301
This seems like a really fun and good game,
If it's pay to win then I think I'll avoid it.
Comments
Also! Is the game dead in Europe?
The only versions I'm aware of are the Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and English versions. If you're in Europe, then presumably you play the English language version. And no, the server isn't dead.
Is it pay to win? I guess it depends some on what you'll do in the game, and some on how sensitive you are to that. If you're the sort of person who will never pay a dime and expects to have no disadvantage as a result of that, then you'll be disappointed. But you'll also be disappointed in pretty much every game ever made.
The business model is mostly one of, a complete game given away for free, and then an item mall loaded up with stuff that shouldn't even exist if it were a subscription game. So you're never going to slam into a wall of, you must pay to continue. But stuff like +30% sailing speed, experience, fame, or skill rank gain from the item mall does help you.
If you're willing to pay a little but not a lot, then special shipbuilding permits should be by far the highest priority. You pay nothing for a month or three until you've got 30 million ducats or so laying around, then you pay $10 for some special shipbuilding permits to upgrade a ship greatly (and permanently!), and then you're set for the next several months without needing to buy anything else (because the $10 is enough to upgrade your next several ships).
If you want to be a pirate, then the "pay to win" complaint has a lot more merit. But for adventuring, trading, crafting, or fighting NPCs, you really don't need anything apart from special shipbuilding permits.
If you're afraid that pirates are going to buy a bunch of item mall stuff and then gank you endlessly, then don't be. I get attacked about once a month. Often, getting attacked means I run away and log off for a few minutes to wait for the pirate to go away, so I don't even lose anything. I did lose a few battles early on, but those were mostly blunders on my end from not knowing how to handle PVP.
I was going to start a new thread, but will just add to this one.
If you want to just craft and trade, can you get away with not buying anything from the item store? I heard to build ships you will need to buy them (unless there is other ways of getting them), but what about other items?
Originally posted by Quizzical
The business model is mostly one of, a complete game given away for free, and then an item mall loaded up with stuff that shouldn't even exist if it were a subscription game.
So Wrong. The Business Model is not to give away the game for free, but to buy it one time and pay for expansions. Like gw1.
The item shop is just a extra to that which makes them get more money from the start - not like in gw1, where it was added later on.
That's news to me. Because I never paid up front, and never had to pay for any expansions. The only thing I bought was special shipbuilding permits ($10), and it gives me access to all of the content. Guild Wars made me buy a box (or buy a digital download) for each of Prophecies, Factions, Nightfall, and Eye of the North.
You can download the game for free, create a character, play all levels to 65.. and all this without paying a cent.