So I have an honest naive question. Simply put, why are people playing Pay to Wi...

matheusmoreira · on July 11, 2018

I didn't know it was pay-to-win at first. I just installed the game from the app store and started playing it. It was somewhat fun. Turns out performing repetitive tasks in order to increase a bunch of numbers in a database can be enjoyable if you hide that fact behind some nice drawings.

Eventually I made some friends and joined a group of players. We started battling other people and winning. We got so excited we started buying stuff. We rose to the top pretty quickly. I was among the best. It's a nice feeling. It wasn't even that hard to keep this up, I just had to spend a few dollars a month for some items.

At some point casual players got tired of losing to us and quit the game. Eventually, the population of my server got so low they merged it with another one. This introduced more strong players into the server, making it harder to compete. It wasn't so easy to stay on top anymore. I started spending more money but I wasn't able to keep up with the best players.

Then they merged servers again and I realized I'd have to spend hundreds if not thousands of dollars a month just to keep up with them. That's when I stopped playing. It doesn't matter how much I spend, someone is always going to spend more.

watwut · on July 11, 2018

Cause they are fun, at least initially, and cheap (free). You don't care about pay to win thing unless you are far in ladder and most people know they wont be among top anyway. I suspect that most people mind pay to win aspect much much less then noise about it would suggest.

Flat cost games have to be paid before trying which means that you cant just pick them up out of curiosity.

Unless you have a lot of friends to show you, it is hard to find flat cost game for you. Here I am projecting, I used to like games and they either ceased to make them for me or I was not able to find them for some reason. I was able to find pay to win I like and suit my lifestyle, after I finally actually tried them without bias (I was initially strongly biased toward the "mobile games must be shit" and "it is all pay to win crap" so I resisted long).

dragonwriter · on July 11, 2018

> You don't care about pay to win thing unless you are far in ladder

IME, P2W generally substantially effects gameplay and UX everywhere, because a P2W game is invariably designed to stress you into paying. Now, there's a big variability in the degree of impact this has, but it's pretty consistent with the degree to which a game is P2W, not orthogonal to it.

> Flat cost games have to be paid before trying

Limited scope playable demo/intro (including multiplayer) with pay-for-full-scope upgrade (or pay per feature which isn't P2W) have been around longer than P2W model, and F2P with pay-for-cosmetics is also a model which lots of games have succeeded with. The alternative to P2W isn't just flat cost games.

watwut · on July 11, 2018

I never found them stressful. I don't even know which aspect is supposed to be stressful. The ones I played a lot were literally catered to people who cant or wont commit hours long stretches of time. I know about one stressful mobile game, but that was not pay to win and was not successful.

Limited scope playable demo/intro were pretty much non-existent for years. Creators argued that demo lowers sales. Which is possible, but I stopped playing games entirely, because too many turned out not what I expected and very disappointing after I bought.

I never understood paying for cosmetics, honestly. I would pay to support creator, but it is not something I ever cared about and perceive as waste of money.