Pay to Win? The Cartel Market

[Knockerz]

You can get item modifications like Advanced Resolve Armoring 27 off of the GTN. That's a level 63 item budget, on par with Dread Guard gear. A player can go lower to Advanced Resolve Armoring 26 if you want something akin to Black Hole and Campaign Gear that you're sporting.

 

As the poster above says you can't get the shells. But ... if you want a set bonus, you can just use your free Tionese gear with these mods.

 

Or just use some moddable gear you like the look of and skip the set bonus.

 

So the OP is right, you can spend credits to pick up a set of gear that is comparable to end-game raiding gear.

 

The problem is, each of those mods costs over 1 million credits. Each one. They take 2, 3 or 4 mods depending on item. And then you bother to augment them. The price is insane.

 

The OP is also right that you can spend real life dollars to buy stuff in the cash shop. And then place that stuff you bought on the GTN. And sell that for in-game credits.

 

So yes, it is possible to "buy" end-game gear.

 

But it's not worth the money you spend.

 

You can do that in any game including wow. You buy a trading card gaming and sell it for hundreds of thousands of gold. The spectral tiger mount for example can be sold for about half a million gold in wow. You can also go the route of buying gold or in swtor credits from 3rd party websites. It's nothing new to mmorpg's. Likewise, mmorpgs are very unlikely to ban any one who buys gold/credits. At worst they will just take away the stuff you bought with it. They only ban if you sell gold/credits.

 

Thus, if a players is willing to spend real life money there is always a way to get around whatever restrictions a game imposes and buy in game currency with real life money. Personally, I think mmorpg should embrace that format and allow people to buy and sell in game currency with real life money. People who have no life can sell in game currency so that they can pay for their subs and to make real life money while people who have money in real life can gain an advantage.

Edited January 27, 2013 by Knockerz

[Toweleeeie]

This thread is simply stunning. Most of you are very miss informed. The reason why there are somany people crafting high end items is because of an exploit or bug.

 

Crafters are buying crafted end game gear off the GTN, which you can NOT reverse engineer. Well the work around is putting it into a piece of gear then removing it. That takes away the restriction and you RE it.

 

The Devs have not commented on the subject that i have seen, so it can be unintentional. But its too late now obviously.

Edited January 27, 2013 by Toweleeeie

[Oggthebase]

This thread is simply stunning. Most of you are very miss informed. The reason why there are somany people crafting high end items is because of an exploit or bug.

 

Crafters are buying crafted end game gear off the GTN, which you can NOT reverse engineer. Well the work around is putting it into a piece of gear then removing it. That takes away the restriction and you RE it.

 

The Devs have not commented on the subject that i have seen, so it can be unintentional. But its too late now obviously.

 

I can't find the yellow quote since it's months old now, but EAWare actually did confirm that it was unintended but they also stated that they had no intention of fixing it (probably because they can't technically unless overhauling some major mechanic). So for the time being, you'll have to live with the fact that all endgame gear is in fact obtainable through credits, and that the cartel market is a way to buy credits with real money, hence allowing people to obtain end game gear with real money.

Edited January 27, 2013 by Oggthebase

[amnie]

This thread is simply stunning. Most of you are very miss informed. The reason why there are somany people crafting high end items is because of an exploit or bug.

 

Crafters are buying crafted end game gear off the GTN, which you can NOT reverse engineer. Well the work around is putting it into a piece of gear then removing it. That takes away the restriction and you RE it.

 

The Devs have not commented on the subject that i have seen, so it can be unintentional. But its too late now obviously.

 

actually, you are the one being misinformed.

 

this is not a 'bug' and it is most definitely not an exploit.

 

it is simply somethign that was 'overseen' by the devs.

 

the problem arose because of these two things:

a) the PURPOSE of legacy gear is in fact to be able to get high end mods to your alts so you can gear them up.

b) high end MODS drop in the high end operations. THESE MODS are SUPPOSED to have a chance to be REd. (these mods are 'rare' drops, and the 20% chance still applies. so technically the market would not be overrun by 'end game crafter'

 

what the devs oversaw was that the mods from the ITEMS can still be REd, and unlike the PVP mods they still give out the schematics. (because of b)

 

 

 

 

but none of this really matters, because it's not pay 2 win by any means.

 

a) pay to win in pve content is pretty .. herp.. anyway

b) the cartel market doesn't hand out a single item that is BETTER than what is optainable in-game. as long as everything is optainable in-game it is .not. p2w

(not forgetting to mention that according to my calculations from the previous page it would cost someone roughly 100 dollar to gear up and if someone's willing to do that, more power to them)

Edited January 27, 2013 by amnie

[SnoggyMack]

You can do that in any game including wow. You buy a trading card gaming and sell it for hundreds of thousands of gold. The spectral tiger mount for example can be sold for about half a million gold in wow. You can also go the route of buying gold or in swtor credits from 3rd party websites. It's nothing new to mmorpg's. Likewise, mmorpgs are very unlikely to ban any one who buys gold/credits. At worst they will just take away the stuff you bought with it. They only ban if you sell gold/credits.

 

Thus, if a players is willing to spend real life money there is always a way to get around whatever restrictions a game imposes and buy in game currency with real life money. Personally, I think mmorpg should embrace that format and allow people to buy and sell in game currency with real life money. People who have no life can sell in game currency so that they can pay for their subs and to make real life money while people who have money in real life can gain an advantage.

 

The difference between this game and others like Everquest and WoW (at least when I played WoW) is that you can't buy items with in-game currency that are as good as the best raid gear available. You can buy items that are great and certainly really useful but they usually only put you at the front door of the raid progression. This game you can buy stuff that is as good as the top tier.

 

It's not a big deal to me. Because it's still far easier to just bite the bullet and raid for your gear. Unlike the OP I don't really care about it. I just understand the mechanics of what the OP is talking about so when people chime in here and say "The Cartel only sells vanity items" I do agree with the OP that they are missing the whole point of what the OP is saying.

 

Yeah, in this game you absolutely can buy your way to level 63 quality gear.

 

I just think it's the least efficient, and most stupid way of going about playing the game. I think for most players it works for like one or two items, because over the course of your time raiding, you can and will collect a lot of credits. So you can end up skipping the need to roll for, say, a few mods so you can outfit a piece or two of your gear. But to actually consider kitting out your entire character with GTN purchased Advanced XYZ 27 mods? It's just too much money.

[CrazyOldMystic]

Ill be the first to say when the devs are screwing up or messing the game up. This is just a bad post and a massive stretch. Credits or RL money do not buy my toons Elite warhero gear. Nor do they buy you the highest tier gear of pve. The only aspect of the cartel Market that is pay to win is space. Like others I now refuse to do space, until they get a real space sim in swtor with a cockpit view.

[Propane]

A long time ago in a Galaxy far far away, I had the expectation that SWTOR would not allow players to "pay to win".

 

When Free to Play was announced, I was fine with the idea. Afterall, allowing new players to experience the storyline of SWTOR might very well hook them on the game and increase subscriptions. The Cartel Market never worried me because I had seen similar ideas in other subscription MMOs, and buying from the online cash only store never affected your game play.

 

What I didn't expect was the ability purchase items on the cash only store that could be sold on the GTN. In some games, even that would not have had as big an impact as in SWTOR, because in those other games there's an extremely limited amount of gear that is useful in end game content that can be purchased for in game currency.

 

In SWTOR, PVE content is completed using gear that can be purchased, in its entirety, from crafters selling on the GTN. What about the set bonus? Well, in other games with an armor set bonus, this would be a problem. In SWTOR, you are given commendations enough to purchase a complete set of Tionese gear at level 50, all of which can be upgraded to the latest standard of gear while maintaining the set bonus. Or you could get the same from running a week's worth of flashpoints and operations.

 

To summarize, in game currency is now sufficient to purchase the highest tier of gear for all PVE content. Since you can sell Cartel Market items for outlandish sums on the GTN, it is very easy for someone to turn real money into in game currency and then into in game items that improve their performance.

 

This is, of course, what is meant by Pay to Win. The only thing worse, and less subtle than the route Bioware has chosen to follow, would be to include the highest tier mods in the armor they sell on the Cartel Market. Bioware has chosen the smarter route, which is to allow players to handle the exchange themselves, thus avoiding the immediate ire of everyone who hates pay to win.

 

Bioware understands very well that if they were to make the cash shop items Bind on Pickup, rather than Bind on Equip, their revenue might drop. A significant portion of the purchases made on the Cartel Market go straight to the GTN, and that would no longer be possible. That said, as a counter argument, even more real money purchases might arise, because players in the game wouldn't be able to spend their in game credits to purchase them, and might actually want a lot of what is being offered, and therefore be forced to pay real money for it.

 

The Pay to Win practice pushes away players who play for the love of the game. It is especially disheartening when you see introductions to the GTN like the new speeder with protection against falling off that exceeds speeder piloting III. Only an incredibly small portion of the SWOTR population can receive a mount with a similar ability by playing the game (the NiM Denova Tank Mount), and even that is a matter of luck, since it is a rare drop.

 

As it now stands, you can purchase everything used for space content and PVE content using either directly or indirectly purchased goods. Only PVP gear is sacred at this point in time (other than the expertise crystal), and it would not surprise me to see the introduction of a Cartel Market item that allowed players to get around the valor limitation as well.

 

Furthermore, Cartel Market items tread on the corpse of Legacy, allowing players to purchase Legacy only unlocks using cartel coins instead of credits. I wouldn't mind this particularly if it wasn't for the fact that in doing so they also eliminated the requirement of Legacy Level to use these perks, and have not bothered to introduce any Legacy Level perks over level 25. Nor have they kept any of the Legacy level perks sacrosanct to Legacy. If you have money, rather than time, you can simply purchase them with cash and ignore the effort level normally required to earn such rewards.

 

This wholesale approach to this game via the Cartel Market has left a bitter taste in my mouth. I'm not ditching my subscription just yet. I've enjoyed previous Bioware games, and respect the quality they normally bring to the table. However, I am becoming more and more certain that the long time players, those who would pay a subscription for 10 years straight in return for quality, are not the players Bioware is currently catering to.

 

I could go on to list bug fixes left undone since launch, UI features that are so basic that they should never have left Beta without them, etc, but in reality, my chief complaint is the Cartel Market. I'm not interested in Pay to Win. The rest of the stuff, even a ready check, I can improvise around. I'm having difficulty coming to terms with a subscription game where you can simply buy your gear with real money.

 

What do you think?

 

Yuppity yup yup.

[GuruVII]

Awesome necro.

 

 

Also, does the person doing this gain anything a player not doing this could not? Does it guarantee that this gurantee superiority to people not doing this.

Nope, they can still achieve the same. So, no it is not pay to win.

 

And even if we assume it is.

If I wanted to gear 1 character in top of the line gear, it would cost me roughly 40 million credits (if you bought modifications directly form the GTN, though I should not the late hour at which I gathered the info, so the prices might be high because of it), give or take a million. In average selling packs is the best way to make money, each pack costs 345000, so I would require to sell 116 packs or 4.8 pack bundles, each costing 6192 cc, meaning you need 33400 cc, with 5500 costing 35 dollars, it means that you could gear a single character for roughly 210€/ US$277.

These are optimal conditions, now count in the amount of hassle involved in selling 116 packs and the fact that the gear doesn't make you better but equal and we can safely conclude this isn't a very good pay to win option.

Edited July 24, 2013 by GuruVII

[Gavin_Kelvar]

So far as I'm aware you can earn lots of credits by just grinding all the dailies (or focusing on the ones with the highest credit rewards). Will someone who sells stuff on the GTN earn it faster? Maybe, but that really depends on whether people buy it. For example I had a CM speeder (earned from a gamble box I bought on the GTN) on the GTN and it took me a week maybe week and a half to sell it. I'm pretty darn sure that, in the end, by grinding dailies I earned close to the same amount of credits in that time frame. So yes one day I logged on and boom I had a boat load of credits in my mailbox but given how long it took to sell said item it was probably no more efficient than just playing the game.

 

IMO P2W is when you get a near instantaneous benefit from your cash purchase that can't be acquired without spending real cash, not one that could take a week or more to see any in game currency benefit whose value is completely dependent on a player driven economy.