Newbie asking dumb questions, and offering dumb opinions

Drunkenrhyno · June 2016

I keep seeing people talk about how P2W this game is, and I can't help but wonder... how much is it, really?
Looking at things, I generally see the people who bought their gear pretty much just being floormats in PVE and PVP. (in other MMO's, myself and my guildies called these "Wal-mart Characters") And the more I look at it, I see that this game's system requires some modicum of patience and skill, in each class (though some classes require more or less than others) And as many people I see breaking their food budget on sea chests and the like, I'm not terribly concerned about most of them. Some, yeah, pretty much use their credit card to skip the whole grinding process, but know their class to the nth degree. And I'm... kinda okay with that. I'm a lot more concerned about total idiots making it into my queues than I am about how they got their gear.
TL;DR: I see a lot of butthurt scrubs whining that they can't earn gold fast enough to keep up with people who saved up keys from previous patches, and calling more experienced players P2W's because "How could *anyone* be better than me?!"

Drunkenrhyno · June 2016

I guess I contradicted myself about halfway through there. Gonna clear that up here. Basically, I'm more worried about the P2W players slowing me down in dungeons and the like, than I am about them leaving me behind in progression. There are a few that understand the class already and pay for convenience, and that's completely fine by me. Honestly, letting that type of person pay to skip tedious farming isn't costing the game anything, and isn't hurting the people behind them in progression. They were probably going to be the first ones with the BiS gear anyway.

Nopi · June 2016

Only way to block yourself from pretty much every trap player out there is to make a solid static and play only with that. You will find lots of traps in IMS and some traps in LFG. So a static is the way to go if you can't stand what you'd consider trap players.

SaphirKanzaki · June 2016

Drunkenrhyno wrote: »

how much is it, really?

As you stated yourself, the P2W component in Tera is next to zero.

As a typical P2W, I would expect this:
- throw in my credit card
- get gear that a F2P player cant get (e.g. Starfall +50)
- frikken WIN! WIN! I wont to rock DPS meter with zero skills! WIN

Fortunately, this is not the case. The max you can buy is SF+15 which is exactly the same as F2P gear. You only save time. There's no "WIN" in this. But people will call everything P2W as soon as they feel temselves in any kind of disadvantage.

TheGreyWolf · June 2016

Anyone can earn gold in this game if they know what they're doing. Anyone. Swiping will only get you so far. And at the end of the day, this game is still more about skill than it is about how much gold you have. BiS gear will not make you god-like unless you at least have a small amount of skill to complement that gear. Bad players will still be bad players even in +15. And the reality is that most of the people who get BiS gear on day 1 of a new patch, only got that gear because they already had a million plus gold saved up from the previous patch; not necessarily swipers.

Full disclosure: I have sold EMP before. When I was new and going broke trying to +12 my mid tier gear. I could have spent X number of hours grinding for that gold, but I chose to take the convenient route (because at the time I didn't really know how to effectively earn gold). Now I know that a smart player can earn tons of gold without ever dropping a single dollar on EMP. So this game is absolutely not even remotely P2W. The people complaining about P2W are the ones who are either too lazy / not savvy enough to earn gold in game, so they just assume that everyone who has +15 must have used daddy's credit card for it. I guess it never occurred to them that some F2P players have figured out how to work the game in their favor.

As for trap players, I agree with Nopi, you either need to find yourself a static or a good guild to run with. If you instance match or use LFG, there is a chance you will end up with people like me in your group who have no experience with a particular dungeon - or worse, people who have run the dungeon multiple times before but don't try because they're used to being carried. I'm guessing that the majority of bad players are just super casual F2P players; either they're new or just never bothered trying to learn the content, or they're playing with really bad ping or bad computers, or don't speak English very well and are therefore having a hard time learning the game, etc. Or just lazy and not particularly bright. Sure, you might have the occasional whale who swipes for all of his gear and has no idea what he's doing, but I don't think those players would stick around very long after realizing that VM gear doesn't make them into the immortal gods they thought they would be.

Minazuki · June 2016

If pay to win mean to having some nice costume in game.. then Tera is pay to win lol
For some people, any adventure/convenience that could get from paying real money they would think it p2w.
It just the standard of the win is different for each person. But clearly Tera not p2w while everything you can get from game just need spend TIME.

For dungeon run... none are good at the beginning... the only different is - willing to learn/improve or no.
Used pug/ims back when in Asia server on some mmo so this end up a hobbit for me to use pug/ims mainly.
Pug/ims sort of a way to help improve/teach some new player skill... yet I know it going get tried someday... specially when you met someone refuse to improve/learn and all they do is - blame other for their fault.
I admit... I tired from try to help/teach some players in pug/ims...
If you want everything pugable/ims, you gotta spend time to help other to improve/learn the dungeon - that what I believing...

Elindra · June 2016

If you don't want trap parties but your friends aren't online and you have to PuG you go LFG and /inspect it's that simple really.

TheGreyWolf · June 2016

@Minazuki you hit the nail on the head on the whole P2W argument. Time. Time is all it takes to get what you want in TERA. If you don't have the time, then you spend money. Someone who plays 12 hours a day will probably end up with about the same progress as someone who works 12 hours a day and spends RL money to get what they want. Time is money, and money is time. Why should working people who spend money to keep the game going be punished because they have bills to pay and can't spend all day playing TERA?

I really don't understand the problem. Money is what keeps the game running. The devs, mods, writers, translators, etc., all have to make a living, same as anybody else. Do you expect them to work for free? Games cost money to develop and maintain. Without paying customers, TERA wouldn't exist at all. They have to provide some incentive for people to give them money, otherwise they would go bankrupt. They could have easily taken the route of making the game blatantly pay-to-play or pay-to-win, but they instead chose a model that allows people to play for free and the ability to acquire all the same stuff as paying players, while also offering a handful of non game-breaking perks to people who spend real money. Yet some ungrateful people will still complain, because they expect a free lunch, and then think they have the right to complain about the quality of the food that they didn't even pay for. Paying players keep the servers running so that F2P players can enjoy the game. If you truly expect everything in game to be 100% free, then we can just replace the loading art screens with advertisements and fill Arborea with billboards for Nike and Coca-Cola.

In this and other "P2W" related threads: naïve people who don't seem to have the slightest clue about how the world works.
Video games cost money to produce.
Computers cost money to produce.
Servers cost money to maintain.
Interwebs cost money to maintain.
Electricity costs money to produce and maintain.
No money = no game.
Deal with it and QYB.
It's not anybody else's fault that you don't know how to make money either in real life or in video games.

/rant

Oh and sorry, this wasn't directed at the OP. It was directed at all the whiners complaining about TERA being P2W. OP's arguments are legit.

Catorii · June 2016

Honestly, you really don't encounter that many people who bought their entire set of gear nowadays. It's become less common, and with Starfall so easy to get this patch (and not far behind VM7, except for tanks), a lot of people have made their own gear. I used to see a lot more people who'd obviously bought full +15 sets a few patches ago, but not so much anymore.

There's also the fact that, even if someone does grind out their own +15 set, it still doesn't mean they're going to be good, so regardless of whether you swipe to buy gear or just craft it yourself, if you don't bother to learn your class or the game, you're still gonna suck, whether in Idoneal or +15 Imperator. That's why I don't really make a distinction, and I always give people a chance even if I notice that their gear is bought. Personally, I wouldn't get +15 gear on a class I hadn't become familiar with yet, but...to each their own.

TheGreyWolf · June 2016

@WolfieYu I can't tell if your post is sarcastic or not. If so... perhaps you misunderstood what I was saying. I'm not saying I think TERA should be "pay to win". It's NOT pay-to-win. Even though you have to ability to swipe and then sell EMP for gold, you can just as easily earn that gold yourself by playing the game. And all the gold in the world won't help you "win" TERA anyway, because you still need some modicum of skill in addition to your gear to clear most of the content. Ultimately this whole P2W argument is patently ridiculous anyway because almost no one buys thousands of dollars worth of EMP just to outfit their video game characters in VM gear. The kind of people who would do something like that are rare... not saying they don't exist, but if free players honestly believe that everyone who has ever bought EMP or elite status is some kind of billionaire who melts down bricks of gold to trade for virtual gear... absurd. Most paying players maybe spend an average of $20-30 a month on the game, give or take, to buy elite status and the occasional cash shop mount or costume. Only the super filthy rich, the "one percenters" are actually throwing down thousands of dollars and outright buying gold and gear. These people are a tiny and mostly irrelevant minority who shouldn't even affect your opinion on the game. ALL I was saying is that TERA needs to keep generating income in order to survive, and they generate that income mostly from people who buy EMP and elite status, that $20 or so every month that some of us choose to give.

There is absolutely nothing wrong or unfair or "pay to win" about giving paying customers perks that allow them to level up quicker, or buff themselves without buying charms from the merchants, or getting twice as many reputation points or dungeon entries... they're not giving us free +15 gear or passive skills that give us higher power and crit chance than everybody else; hell even the so-called "loyalty rewards" barely give us any kind of advantage in terms of enchanting RNG (and before you ask, I'm only tier 5 in "loyalty", so no, I haven't given EME $12,000; I supposedly get a small boost to enchanting, but not nearly enough to compensate for the fact that I just have bad RNG luck overall). My guess is that more than half of the players in this game who have shiny titles and high PVP rankings and +15 gear are free players who never or almost never spend real money on the game.

Success in TERA (whether it be clearing dungeons, earning gold, or winning in PVP) mostly comes down to brains and skill - or at least having the sense to roll one of the new OP classes to make up for your lack of skill

Has next to nothing to do with how much money you throw at your screen. Because even the richest of the rich tier 10 loyalty players can throw their Rolexes and Maybachs at the screen all day long and still end up spending the majority of their in-game time polishing the floor.

seraphinush · June 2016

Nowadays, i tend to throw in a couple of traps in dfhm just to make the run more interesting. nice to see me and a few guildies left standing while others just licking the floor haha

Lambnet · June 2016

I kinda get confused on how this game is pay to win the amount of money you'd need to spend for each piece of starfall and god forbid you want to pay for imperator gear is nuts. Each SF piece perfect PVE roll or Mixed is around 350-600k if you sold emp at the normal rate of 1:30 you'd need to spend 12k emp almost per piece for weaps almost twice that. Then you look at Imperator its almost 1.2m per piece or more I've seen cheaper but still its near 1m. I can't see that lol ofc I come from games like Allods where people spent thousands in 1 sale without blinking but like OP said how skilled are they after they swiped thousands of dollars.

aeee98 · June 2016

Not even sure if it is supposed to be a newbie question, but yeah, this game is 50% gear, 50% skill. Generally, once you have skill and have enough time to play the game (making monetary investments if it is impossible to play it fulltime), you can get everything in the game.

Elite is not P2W. It is P2PF (Pay to Progress Faster). You progress a whole ton faster in Elite, there is no denying it, but anyone can get them. There have been people who have shown that you can effectively pay off an entire month of elite status in 2 days by gold value (the first one without elite would be about 2-3 times longer but it is still less than a full month) if you want to grind it out.

It is only truly a P2W game if a person can achieve a standard that is inherently impossible without paying money. This meaning either you pay lots of money or you will never get there. TERA is one of the earlier few games that steers clear of the instant P2W concept.

There will always be players who complain they don't do DPS like a +15 do when they are having weaker gear. This happens in all games, not just TERA. However, reaction speed and game knowledge (with some help from good computer performance and low ping) can get you very far in this game. One of the reasons why I dislike the new Neophyte Ressurection system,alongside all the avatar weapons and nerfed dungeons, is because it is not aiding newbies at actually learning the dungeon and the game. While buybacks are handy when you lag (I admit having deaths due to bad computer processing is an actual problem), eventually once you are skilled in the dungeon you will have to face it without dying.

There will also always be people with horrible crystal setups. I am talking about people who just go 4 pounding, or even worse, 4 mutinous, just because it is whatever its left in their inventory. This is because while the game rewards players for hitting milestones, doesn't really teach them the concept of how the game is played. Subtle hints tend to be ignored by newbie players who are used to destroying everything in the lower levels, and that is THE problem of the game. These people tend to also be the ones who end up on the floor on the simplest of level 65 dungeons, and will eventually be the ones who whine about the P2W concept.

Even with all that being said, I will still disagree that the top players in the crusades are F2P. Most players in that board have purchased something in someway or another. However, what makes the difference between the ordinary player is not the money spent but the effort in learning the honestly simple game.

There is nothing wrong with spending money on this game at all. Some people may not like the newer classes being naturally stronger than the rest (I am one of those), but if you like the game, you will spend money on it. The shop is largely cosmetics after all.

PS: if people are saying P2W when someone enchants a +15 gear, don't take it to heart, it is usually a joke statement.

Newbie asking dumb questions, and offering dumb opinions

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