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Comment by ocdtrekkie | Hacker News Reader

So pay-to-win gets a lot of bad rap, and it's not entirely unearned... but I've really come to appreciate the value of microtransactions if you're a busy working individual.

In the traditional multiplayer space, the players with the best stuff and most progression are lifers. Those real addicts: The people who are online all day every day, whenever you sign in. A lot of them are kids, and I used to be one back in the day. But as a full-time employee with a wife and a kid, I can't ever compete with that.

Pay-to-win games give people who work good jobs a way to compete: If I know that an item it'll take me three weeks to grind out will cost me $20 to buy outright... I make more money working in real life, so why not buy it in-game instead of wasting my time grinding.

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That's exactly why I hate most IAPs: developers intentionally make parts of the game annoying so you'll be tempted to pay to skip them.

TBF. all online games are annoying regardless in terms of respect to time. At least you have a choice here between saving money or time, instead of neither with an MMO.

Guess that's just the literal cost of wanting a game that constantly updates. People can argue that single player games are the best bang for their buck, but it really depends on if you're the kind of people who will play a snigle game dozens of times or if you're one who want to mostly experience the main content once.

> If I know that an item it'll take me three weeks to grind out will cost me $20 to buy outright...

Why do you think that desirable item takes 3 weeks of grinding to acquire? Pay2win is bad because it incentivizes developers to make their game an annoying slog, then turn around and sell the player a solution to the problem they just created. They’re not helping you by giving you the option to pay to skip part of their game; they’re the ones responsible for the grind you’re trying to avoid.

How traditionally are we talking? Traditionally, many genres of games haven't had progression for someone to have the most of. That guy who played a billion hours of Quake, or Halo 3, or Starcraft 2 doesn't have anything you don't have. Hell even the likes of League of Legends, it doesn't take that much IP to buy any one champion the free way, and you can't buy power for that champion. I guess you could say you're paying to win by buying the strongest champion in that patch with cash each time, but honestly if you really have that little play time you're probably hurting your performance more than helping it by champion hopping that much.

I probably speak mostly in the scope of MMOs: Games that are fairly grindy by default, and always have been, and have social/competitive aspects. Generally they've always had items and tiers that take weeks or months to grind out, and the idea of paying your way through that is often looked pretty far down upon.

But if you're making more out of game than in-game, it's just good time management.

It's the red queen effect though, as soon as you make the IAP, you quickly advance, but then you will soon hit the next plateau. So you're stuck again unless you keep making IAPs. If a game is pay-to-win, you have to keep paying and paying and paying. It's not like you can pay once and then you're good.

I mean--it used to be that you bought the game and you got the stuff and you had to ladder up within the context of a single game in order to get to the good stuff. Why should grinding be rewarding at all, except to put players on an external addiction loop rather than one based on the moment-to-moment fun of the game?

Counter-Strike was never my game, but during the course of a match you could ladder your way up to an AK (absolutely reasonable for most gameplay) within the first couple rounds and it was pretty difficult not to be able to get an AWP at least for a while if you wanted to. I played FireArms Half-Life and The Opera instead, where you built your loadout and everybody had access to everything, save for in FAHL specific skills that laddered up throughout a match themselves.

Why not play games that don't suck?

You pay $20 to win? For $15 I'll call you a winner. Visit my OnlyFans.

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