I play a LOT of online video games. At one point or another, I have seen or tried just about all of them. Back in the early 2000’s, if you wanted to play an MMO you had to shell out a $10-15 per month subscription fee, but that quickly changed as more and more companies discovered that it was feasible to not require such a payment. The next logical step was to figure out exactly how the server would be paid for. Thus, the idea was born to offer players the ability to buy virtual items with real money, an idea most popularly attributed to Project Entropia and Second Life, as they were the games that I feel had most to do with ironing out such a concept.

How a Cash Shop works: the player is given the option to purchase (with real money) a virtual currency unique to the game and can use this currency to purchase special items. Normally these items are simply superficial, such as new skins or unlocking features that normally must be obtained through gameplay. Not all are created equal, as every game has its own way of determining what the items are worth and what items should actually be sold. According to popular culture (IE: people that play games but know nothing about them) just by having a Cash Shop, you are officially Pay to Win.

What started as a way to cover costs in America was adopted by the Asian MMO market like wildfire, and resulted in the ability to buy every gun in most of such games for real money, with other games creating special weapons unique to paying customers that have better stats. This bled right back into the American market during the World of Warcraft remake craze and like most inbreeding created a terribly long line of games that charged you real money  for the best weapons. Examples of actual Pay to Win games are titles in which the best weapons can only be obtained through the Cash Shop, and where the balance of the game forces a player to pay in order to be viable in combat, or doing so provides an unfair advantage.

The problem is actually determining whether or not a game is Pay to Win is another matter entirely, as it requires hours of studying the game and determining what advantages and disadvantages paid and free players receive. Obviously, most people just see the Cash Shop, ignorantly scream Pay to Win and go play more Call of Duty. A real example of P2W would be All Points Bulletin, which freely sells you endgame weaponry with added abilities that cannot be replicated by a free player without months of effort, giving you the choice to either play the game for a year, or spend a few bucks for a sniper rifle. This is a very extreme example, but an accurate one. The opposite example would be a game such as Team Fortress 2, which allows you to pay for “rare” versions of items that are mechanically equal to what a free player has access to, or various DOTA clones that provide the ability to purchase clothes.

This black mark on the genre of MMO’s has stained the gaming culture pretty bad. If you were to look through Steam Greenlight at the various multiplayer games being designed, you would see most of them ignorantly proclaim they are not Pay to Win as if they actually know what that entails. The common belief is if you can buy a weapon or advantage in the market the game is automatically Pay to Win, which is false. This is what makes the topic so absolutely murky, but like everything else in gaming, it is a case by case basis that most people lack the intelligence to comprehend and balance.

If the freely available weaponry is comparable to the paid items, then there is no actual imbalance. In theory that is. For the sake of easy comparison let us assume we are playing a generic shooter that a big gaming company can create in a month with no effort (Halo, Call of Duty), and provide a shopping option. For ingame points you could potentially buy various weapons and armors but for cash you can purchase chemical guns that do extra damage. However, if we were to present special armors that can be purchased by free players that reduce chemical damage unique to the paid weapons to a manageable amount that negates 2.5% of the 5% bonus is it still overpowered? Hard to say really, as this tells us very little about the combat applications of either object. This tends to be how muddy the design of such weapons can be, as without exposing these weapons to the market, most designers are reluctant to understand what they are looking at but rely on their player base to inevitably figure it out for them. We don’t know how much damage they do, how accessible the free equivalents are, and how the overall balance of these items are.

The fact of the matter is unless you can join the game, buy a bunch of equipment with cash and proceed to kill everybody you run into with no effort, there is a pretty good chance you are playing a well balanced, not Pay to Win game. Even that is a very muddy definition, as of course you are going to decimate a bunch of new players (Often your first opponent in such games) but how does your gear stand against the pros? Since they know the game much better than you do, if you can really beat them with little effort, then I would say you may have a case to cry foul. Even then it’s still an ignorant argument, as in order to figure out if the game is pay to win, yet abstain because of the suspicion, it is a self fulfilling prophecy as you are not bothering to figure out how to overcome that advantage but just proclaiming that you somehow know the game’s balance without playing it.

It’s an arbitrary complaint about an arbitrary metaphysical concept on a loosely definable virtual realm given by people that hate losing too much to figure out how to prevail, and spout this phrase in a misguided attempt to regain face that they don’t even need to bother with in the first place. In short, yes P2W Exists, in very isolated examples of games that nobody not paying plays. But going into a new game and demanding that they not be pay to win is the same as Baseball fans expecting their team to never get a single out. It’s just not going to happen except for very rare circumstances, yet people are afraid that it will become a common problem and think it is.

Fans don’t realize that making a videogame is not a templated endeavor, there is not a rule that all games have to fit one genre, use the same cash shop, or even be alike to eachother. We just adhere to these genres because the fans expect the same 5 games over and over again. It’s this close minded thinking that created the problem in the first damn place. They also do not realize that what is broken in a game can be fixed through enough effort, it’s just that most companies also tend to be incompetent.

-Necroscourge 4/28/13