5941

The things you directly need to buy–like special ammo, for instance–don’t directly require cash, just in-game currency. Indirectly, yes, the best way to get that currency is to buy a premium tank and have a premium account, but again those are indirect. In game, there is nothing you can go right out and buy, that you can’t buy with in-game currency, that will give you a direct, immediate battlefield advantage. Premium tanks certainly don’t, as their value is long term for money making.

I disagree. The fact that you can theoretically buy gold ammo for silver does not mean you will afford it without paying some real money first. The fact that you can grind 10 games to afford 1 uber game (using all gold ammo and consumables) also doesn’t really mean that you get to “win” without paying.

Here is a sample pay-to-win strategy. Obviously, it’s not the only one, just one of many.

Create a new account. Buy a premium T8 with 100% crew. Heavies - Lowe or T34 - will make a bit more silver but JagdTiger 88 or M26E4 will allow you to use (and level up) the same crew on the tanks you will buy later. Play a couple of dozens games in it. Pay to transfer exp to free exp. Get yourself a Hetzer or M4 (or Stug or M4E2 or M4E8, depending on the playstyle and tier you prefer), pay for 100% crew (if you got heavy premium) or use the crew from the premium (if you got the correct type). Buy modules, gold ammo and consumables with either real money or the silver you earned on the heavy. Enjoy one-shotting your enemies and your 70% win ratio. It’s a lot of fun too.

Anyone can do it and get to the “win” part within a day. To maintain it, either continue paying for gold or play the premium tank once in a while to get silver. If you have a premium account you probably won’t even need to do that, the uber tank will pay for itself.

There is simply no “free” alternative to the above for a new player to achieve the same results without paying. None. A new non-paying player simply will not have enough silver to sustain running uber tanks with gold all the time. If that’s not “pay-to-win” then I don’t know what is.

Though I have to say, even in my relatively competitive clan (VPG) there are people who compete very well with standard accounts, though I think everyone has premium tanks.

Sure, if you are already in a good clan, if you are not that interested in leveling up new tanks, if you already have a bunch of tanks you like or have to (for clan wars) play, if you already have considerable experience with the game, then sure you can do fine with no premium because you basically don’t need exp or credits. I did that for a couple of months until I decided that I get bored without trying out new tanks.

But when talking about whether the game is pay-to-win or not, we are not really talking about people who’s been playing the game for years, acquired most of the tanks, have gold income from their clan, etc. We are talking about an average Joe that starts playing the game and whether he is able to pay real money to quickly get himself significant advantage over someone who didn’t pay.

And in these terms, yes, WoT is still very much pay-to-win, no matter all the marketing BS from Wargaming.

5942

Huh, I see what you mean, from your perspective; it’s easier if you pay, and there are paths to success that are not open to those who don’t pay. True enough; it’s easier to level and sustain activity while paying than while not paying. Whether that is actually pay to win though is not so simple a question, to me. It’s certainly “pay to make it easier to play,” and indirectly easier to win, but it’s not like being able to buy a super tank for cash and defeat everyone in a match, for instance. You are defining “win” in a long term sense, and yeah, I’d agree, if you don’t pay something (premium time, premium tanks), the game isn’t going to be fun over the long haul, because chances are you will never get to the long haul, you’ll die of tedium long before that. In the short term, though, the game is not pay to win on a match per match basis, and everything worth having (end-tier tanks, the most powerful tanks, whatever) is technically available to all.

But indeed, Wargaming has fine-tuned their money siphoning mechanisms, that’s for sure.

5943

It looks like we are defining “win” differently.

You are defining it as acquiring “everything worth having” and you are absolutely correct in saying that all that is “technically available to all”. Let’s not get into how unbearably long it’s going to take to acquire multiple tier 10 tanks (to be eligible for clan wars as we used to know it) as shortening the grind really can be considered a “pay for convenience” feature.

However, I am defining “win” as gaining a consistent advantage over other players that ultimately allows me to kill them more often. WoT provides a lot of opportunities to gain advantage - player skill, modules, tanks that perform better than others in certain tiers, consumables, gold ammo, stuff like that. Now which ones you can pay to get? Well, everything except for the player skill.

Note the “consistent” part in my definition. It’s important because if you have to grind silver for an hour on your “regular” tanks to be able to afford one fight in your uber tank, you are not really in a “win” situation (as I see it). And the only way to play uber tanks only without having to grind silver to support them is to pay. Hence pay to win.

Maybe I’ve spent too much time on this topic now. :)

In other news, I’ve discovered the most fun tank I have ever played in WoT. :) It’s the T-71, the US T7 light. It’s not all that uber and being a light tank, it gets thrown into fights with all kinds of tiers. But! It allows you to feel comfortable in all those tiers. I often find myself dealing the most damage in tier 10 fights. It will certainly not hold a flank alone against multiple enemies but it can help (and switch his help from one flank to another) like no other tank in the game. It’s a scout with a freaking powerful laser beam-like gun that hits (and damages!) all kinds of enemies from any distance on the move. And it’s a freaking joy to drive too, you feel like you are in a drift racing, if I remember the term correctly. :).

T71 is extremely dependent on its team, so when decides to die in 3 minutes, there is nothing it can do (but who can, really?). But every time I drive it I am having so much fun, even when my team is losing. It’s a bit hard to learn because it’s so fragile and every mistake will most likely send you back to garage but once you “get it”, no other tank can do the stuff this little bugger can. Awesome tank.

Oh and British TDs suck. :)

5944

Only “Pay to Win” has a set definition. You can’t change it to whatever you want. There is no pay to win in WoT anymore and there was never much to begin with. Things taking longer is 100% irrelevant. That is PURE convenience and nothing else. When a free player gets in a match with a paying player no one has any advantage over the other. I know a guy with plenty of Tier 10s that has never paid one cent. He plays them every day even. It’s far more a matter of managing your resources. At one point he had 14 million credits. This is a person with no premium tanks beyond the gift ones (T-127, Tetrarch). He saves credits and free xp and does just fine - he’s sitting at a 56% W/L and is an extremely good player. The only things ever ever were pay to win were gold ammo and consumables, the ammo is silver and the consumables will be. If they don’t charge for convenience how the hell are they supposed to make money? Take donations? They’re running the best F2P model ever devised. No content restrictions, no pay to win, all you ever pay for is bling and convenience.

5945

Get rid of gold ammo altogether, imo. I might actually play it again if they did that, too.

5946

I haven’t gotten the T71 yet, being still stuck on the T21. I’m not very good at light tanks anyhow, but everyone I know who plays the T71 says pretty much the same thing, that it’s a hoot. The only reason I’m even in that line is to get, eventually, a T57, because right now CW is “World of Autoloaders,” but by the time I do things may change–hell, after 8.6 maybe the E-100 and Maus will be back in force, who knows?

Premium ammo has been a problem from day one, and it’s only gotten worse in my opinion. I do think that making it purchasable with credits rather than gold did democratize it, but you still have the problem of many tanks being ineffective–or downright useless–without it, and the feeling that game balance is built around premium ammo, just like it’s built around 100% crews and heavy module use, all of which of course contribute to pressure to spend money. It’s not a necessity, but I do think it’s true that the game focuses very closely on pushing players into situations where they have to either endure a lot of crap or spend some money.

It doesn’t bother me, really, because I treat WoT as an MMO of yore–I pay fifteen smackers a month for premium and maybe once in a while a bit more for some gold, like I’d pay for expansions or other crap in another subscription game. But no way in hell would I play this game seriously without premium–don’t have the skill or the patience to make that work.

5947

Oh really? I might have missed the newsletter. Why don’t you post it then? Together with the link to the authority that finally decided to standardize the language used on Internet, I would like to look up a few terms. :)

The anecdote that you posted has very little to do with I was talking about, so not sure what is your point. I know a guy with 43K matches played and 42% win ratio, he is a pretty bad player but he really enjoys the game and I think he has a couple of premium tanks. So what?

[edit] Here is a link to a post (quoted in the first post on that page), whose author also believes the term has been well defined long time ago. Only his definition sounds to be different from yours (although you didn’t provide yours, so not sure). And from dozens of other people in that thread, in fact, everyone there seems to have their own definition.

They never will get rid of gold ammo because selling expensive ammo that provides players with advantage is one of the staples of “the best F2P model ever devised”. The other one, by the way, is releasing overpowered new tanks while nerfing the old ones, hoping to persuade players to unlock those new tanks with “free” exp, gold and premium accounts.

5948

Oh here, the closest I could find to an “official definition”. No matter how ridiculous “official definition” sounds in regards to any slang being

pay-to-win

Games that let you buy better gear or allow you to make better items then everyone else at a faster rate and then makes the game largely unbalanced even for people who have skill in the game without paying.

It seems this definition is in line with what I was talking about.

5949

It’s a very healthy way of looking at things, I am trying to be more like that too. :) The game is what it is and if it’s a bit more arcady or random than what I’d prefer (or than what it used to be) then so be it. I don’t mind paying a few bucks here and there because, in the end, it’s a hell of a fun game that I spent more than 3 years with. :)

I might not like the direction the game is moving towards but you can’t argue with the fact that the game is much more popular now than what it used to be a couple of years ago, especially in Europe+Russia. Even in the US, I see the numbers tripled over the last 2 years, they must be doing some things right. :)

5950

I pretty much see it the same way; it’s not 100% what I’d want, but it’s good enough. It’s actually kind of funny how similar WoT is to, say, games like WoW, in so many ways. Buff/nerf cycles? Check. Elitist striation of the endgame player base? Check. Endless grinding for the next shiny (see point one)? Check. Stat whoring/obsession? Check. But all of those things make games addictive–sort of like the active ingredients in narcotics I guess!

Anyhow, this upcoming clan wars tournament/weirdness with the M60 at the end of the rainbow promises some interesting drama if nothing else…

5951

I see it much the same, the pay to win aspect is still there, and your friend the tier X guy? Is he a non clan wars player? He must be consistently amazing to actually be able to make money while playing without non-premium tanks and without a subscription and only high tier these days. I rarely make anything with my IS-3, even when I win and have the top score, and that’s only Tier 8. And if I lose, I pretty much negate my next couple of wins. My artillery is even worse. I’m not an amazing player, but I have an over %50 win rate, and there really is a wall for non paying players who aren’t at the top of the bell curve for skill. I’ve gotten around it by purchasing just a single premium tank, which I’ve justified to myself as a something that’s not a bad idea considering how much I’m playing and enjoying the game.

5952

I have a stable of premium tanks that I hop through every day. It’s not a grind because I enjoy playing them- an hour spent in 8 matches* is not like the 3 hour raid grind in other MMOs. I select achievable goals for my non-premiums and only try to level up one or two at a time so that I consistently make a pile of money each day to buy the next tier tank. I have yet to burn out in this way. The addition of gold ammo has forced me to be financially aware since I have a rule that my money-making premiums don’t use gold and my XP oriented tanks do.

*My average life span per match is 4 minutes. I may be a tad too aggressive.

5953

He plays all sorts of tanks, but his most played tank is his IS-3 by a long shot, think he’s on his like 6th skill with those guys or something insane.

He doesn’t play clan wars or company battles or anything. CB maybe if there is a gold event, but that’s pretty rare and even then he only plays a few matches.

I don’t see how anyone can claim “pay to win” in a game where money buys you… nothing really. You make more money and xp and nothing else. It just speeds up getting through the tiers.
And:

Games that let you buy better gear or allow you to make better items then everyone else at a faster rate and then makes the game largely unbalanced even for people who have skill in the game without paying.

None of those are true of WoT - hence it isn’t pay to win. ALL paying does is make grinding go a bit quicker. And my example was that my friend gets 56% W/L having never spent a dime. If the game was pay to win that would be beyond impossible. I know plenty of people who throw money at the game like it’s some sort of life support that are terrible. Hence paying doesn’t help you win, it just shortens the grinds. You can’t buy a tank of awesomeness that wins all the time or hire crew with skills that can only be bought with gold or anything of the sort. Gold rounds and consumables were the only things you could buy that gave advantage (and it was a fairly small one most of the time), and those are both available for silver, which takes money out of the equation completely. Now compare it to say MWO, which has bought modules that are straight up better than the ones you can get without paying (at least that’s my understanding from this forum, never played the game).

As far as premium rounds, I’d love if they limited them to like 10% of your loadout (or even 20% to make the math easier). Most really good players are actually in that boat as well, but they seem to have no intention of doing it.

5954

There’s also a huge difference between playing on your own and playing in even a mildly competitive clan in Clan Wars. With tank locking, if you’re in a clan that does CW you have to have a stable of top-tier tanks, and really, there are some that are always in demand and others that nearly never get used, so there are specific grinds you pretty much have to do if you want to play consistently. Each of those top tier tanks has to have 100% crews, and there are certain skills (Sixth Sense for Commanders, for instance) that are pretty much required. And of course you only run premium ammo and have at least a premium repair kit, often a premium fire extinguisher too. And this is just for modestly competitive play. If you’re aspiring to unicum standards, yeah, you’ll be sinking either more time than a full time job into this, or money, plenty of it.

But, on the other hand, if you’re playing just to blow stuff up and have fun–which the game excels at, really–and don’t care how long it takes to get to tank X or Y, you can do that for very little to no money. Depends on your level of tolerance for the pacing, and as noted, the grind here is actually not bad if you’re playing it casually. It’s nothing like dailies and faction grinding, etc.

5955

I disagree with your statement about it taking money out of the equation, because attaining any sort of meaningful amount of silver, enough to shoot gold rounds all the time, cannot be attained on a non-premium account that doesn’t have premium vehicles to farm silver with. It’s different from League of Legends in that in LoL, it’s relatively easy to grind out enough runes for at least one champion and be competitive without ever paying a dime. In WoT, if someone has lots of money, they can have lots of silver, which means they can shoot gold rounds without regret. In contrast, before I got a premium tank, I wouldn’t ever shoot gold rounds, as it was crazy expensive and I could never afford to. Any game where there can be two classes of people, and the one who pays money has an obvious advantage over the other while competing with each other, has a ‘pay 2 win’ element. I’ll agree that letting people buy with silver helps, but it mostly just lets those who have bought premium tanks get more for their money, and leaves the non-paying customer at a disadvantage.

As for your second statement, that’s not a bad idea. =)

5956

All true, though it raises an interesting question, particularly the bit about “non-paying customers.” This is a problem created by the whole F2P model. If you say something is “free,” people rightfully expect it to be, well, free. If you then encumber that “free” experience with so many caveats that it becomes unpalatable, then you have to question the honesty of the whole paradigm I guess. This is of course not something unique to WoT. In most contexts, if you don’t pay you don’t have a say, but in the case of F2P games, the publishers create a situation where they entice you to play based on not having to pay, then pull the rug out from you to some extent.

Interesting quandary.

5957

Sure, its a hell of a lot more of a grind if you play for free, but nothing prevents you from having everything someone who pays does. Your Tier10 is just as good as his is in every way. It’s just more of a pain in the ass for you to get there. Once you’re in the battle though, you are equal. Hence why it’s not ‘pay to win’. You can’t buy any advantage over another person. There is no Premium Equipment that’s just like the regular stuff only better (say a gun rammer that’s +60% instead of +50% or the like). The grind is enough that spending money makes sense, but you can easily go without if you’re willing to play some Tier 5 and 6 tanks to make silver.

Again. “Pay to win” means an in-game advantage you can buy. In WoT there aren’t any. It used to be gold rounds and consumables, but those are going/are for silver now. So a dude with 100k gold can’t buy anything a guy with zero can’t. He can just get to things faster, which is all you get for paying them money - faster progress. It’s like XP multipliers or the like in other games. They don’t make you faster or stronger, they just save you time. Which is fine. Once you start selling Premium Sword of Awesome or the like, it becomes a different story.

5958

Most people above the age of 14 understand that the game needs to be paid for, and generally accept it. I mean you can play for free, but obviously someone has to pay something in or the game wont be around for long. It just gets bad when they keep throwing it in your face. Like those stupid boxes in Neverwinter or the sometimes blatantly invasive “give us money” NPCs. WoT is pretty subtle. They show you how many credits/xp you would’ve got if you had premium. So it’s there to tempt you without beating you over the head for cash for things.

5959

It’s not about “getting” or “having”. “Having” a tank in your garage does not provide you with an advantage. It’s about consistently “using” it.

Have you ever driven a fully decked out M4 with all gold rounds, gold consumables, etc.? We did for one of the tier 5 tournaments, it kills EVERYTHING. In random tier 5-6 fights, it one shots 3/4 of the enemy team. And two shots the remaining tanks (IIRC it takes only about 8 seconds to make those 2 shots btw). It’s not unkillable by any means but being able to one shot most of your enemies is a HUGE advantage. And it’s an advantage you have to pay real money for.

Yes, you can get this kind of tank without paying and keep it in your garage but YOU WILL NOT BE ABLE TO USE IT. Well, maybe once a day. And twice on holidays. :)

Being able to drive that tank 100% of the time is overpowered and feels like cheating. Being able to drive that kind of tank 100% of the time is NOT achievable without paying. Hence “pay to win”.

The same applies to a bunch of tanks. T69’s (one of the newest tanks, US tier 8 medium) top gun has penetration 173 mm. That’s the worst penetration in the tier. It’s worse than some tier 7 tanks. Driving with that is an exercise in frustration and getting 170K exp with it to get the next tank is awful. At the same time, a gold round on the same gun has 300 mm penetration. That’s the biggest difference between the regular and gold round in the game among all tanks (BTW, ask yourself why the devs did this). And, of course, with that kind of penetration, it’s a completely different game. There is no way in hell you will be able to drive the T69 with gold rounds only without paying real money.

Does T69 with gold rounds has an advantage over “regular” T69? HUGE. It’s not about who will level up faster, that’s the poor guy’s talk. It’s about more pew-pew every fight and making a real difference during the fights. And one has to pay to get this kind of advantage, hence “pay-to-win”.

Now combine the above. Then add some more tanks that perform MUCH better with gold rounds, which is all of them really but some perform exceptionally better, like the ones I mentioned above or E100, for example. Top level arty is a completely different beast with gold ammo, good player can win matches with it and it will absolutely drive you into the ground financially if you don’t pay.

Ask yourself, why one of the newest tanks - the FV215b(183) - does 1150 damage with regular rounds (in line with some other tanks) and 1750 damage with gold rounds (IIRC the highest damage in the game). IIRC this is the only tank in the game that does more damage with gold rounds, usually only penetration increases.

A paying customer can have a stable of overpowered tanks (“overpowered” when compared to their “regular” peers that use no gold ammo and consumables), switch from one to the next and play them all the time and have that huge advantage all the time. Running a farm like that will cost you hundreds of thousands credits a day and the only way to afford it is to pay real money.

Hence “pay to win”.

Lol, I am surprised I wrote this much about this mostly moot topic. I usually don’t engage into prolonged debates. :)

5960

It should be true, yes. Intellectually, it probably is–most people when asked whether a developer should get paid for a game they’re paying will agree they should. In game, though, it’s a different story. Many matches feature someone, often more than one someone, bitching about “wallet warriors” or premium rounds or whatever, and often bragging that they never pay a dime. There’s a disconnect there, of course; if no one ever paid, there would be no game. But when faced by the advantages that people who do pay get–and Strideregg, while I don’t agree 100% with his interpretation of pay to win, I think has it pretty much right here–an amazing number of otherwise presumably intelligent players seem to really resent the existence of purchasable anything.

I do think WoT is more or less subtle about how they go about it, in that they just assume you’ll buy premium this and premium that, and don’t hard-sell the idea of buying gold, but rather offer inducements in the form of sales and bundles. But the underlying structure of the game is very aggressively pushing you to pay–which as I’ve said, I don’t mind. Hell, I’ve gotten more fun out of WoT than most games, so far, so paying what little I do is fine by me.