This is one of the few threads I've actually enjoyed replying to the people in.....I feel I can actually be an educator and a person here as well. Hopefully my stuff is read and not utterly ignored...
P2W has a definition I do teach in classrooms, because over half of the students I have at all grade levels I've taught play games. Girls are more exposed to the P2W games than the boys are, while boys are more into Console Games. Sorry, but I hardly hear of many people in schools talk about PC games unless its on a console....
The definition I teach is the following in three tiers:
Pay2Win is a player-created term meaning that real money is used in purchasing gameplay advantages for the said player in either a passive form or an active form. This form causes gameplay to become unbalanced in the presence of other players, and in some titles it becomes a dependency for progress to continue. This term applies to Online Games where the action is either PvP or PvE.
I asked students in my classes first as an entire class as I wrote them on the whiteboard the following question: "Please tell me something you come across in an online game that can be bought with real money that you feel is unfair."
The students asked me "You're a gamer... Aren't you going to add anything?"
and I said "This is your class, so I want you to generate the list so we can define things. I don't want to introduce personal bias, because trust me... I am human, and we're all biased creatures."
10 minutes later we have 23 things on the board.....
I said "Please do not use your ipads or smart phones." You noticed that I numbered these from 1 through 23. I am giving each of you a sheet of paper. Write your name on the back of the paper, not the front. On this paper you are going to vote on the top four things listed on the board you feel are a disadvantage.
Your first choice counts for 4 points
Your second choice counts for 3 points
Your third choice counts for 2 points
Your fouth choice counts for 1 point
I have a program launched on the projector which I wrote in which I will push the button and it will tally the votes corresponding to the four places. Once you give me your paper, you can not change your mind...
I also need a volunteer.
The class representative is going to read the votes. If you have less than four elements chosen, we will accept them. If you have over four, only the first four will be accepted.
Basically if a student did not like item #22. they would write "#22. 1st
Combined across the classrooms I've taught, Ive kept class-results and combined results. Programming is a nice thing....
The top eight elements students have actually voted on being considered to be unfair in a game are:
1) Having little to no inventory space to grab everything while people can have 2 - 6x more space from paying money for it.
2) Being restricted to the kind of character one can have from not paying for a game.
3) Knowing the person next to you has double to five times the rare drop rate and is always walking around with a boost because he "pays" for a subscription...
4) Dying in a game and being told that if you pay real money, you can buy an item that will resurrect you....
5) Guilds and Teams being Segregated based on subscription or expansion/DLC ownership.
6) Playershop taxes and restrictions over subscribers
7) Boost Items in cash shop regardless the form of acquisition...
Equipment / Levels hidden behind gates, requiring special order purchase or subscription based purchase...
I picked three students and asked "why?" on each of these eight....
combined paraphrased responses were:
1) Its feels good but when we get to tokens and raids, you need double to triple the space to pick everything up or have to lose what you fought hard for.
2) Its just not cool to be given so many options in a video on youtube to find you can only be what you want to be if you pay for it.
3) the reason I win is because the guy next to me pays for a boost which benefits me indirectly....
4) Its just not cool....
5) "I am in two games now and I can't join any good guilds because I am not subscribed or own an add-on"
6) It takes us longer to get our drops, so why should we pay more taxes for selling the same thing someone got easily?
7) the students gave examples of PvP and PvE where entire groups were on boost items and how that changed the game...
This one I feel is universal as everyone had something to say and the intensity and desire to give answers had more than three answering.
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The next part of the assignment was to determine "Severity"
I explained that P2W started from player-mentality, and so we to answer the following question:
"Suppose you knew a game was coming out next week. You are hyped and you know you want to play it. You find out the game you are going to play is going to have someone of these eight things... I want a show of hands starting with one. Once you fail to raise your hand you can not raise it again until the end.
How many of you will play the game you want even with one of these things existing? Around 75% of the class actually raised their hand. Usually around 75 - 90% raise their hand....
I learned that people seem to hover around ODD numbers because it was similar for two....
So I asked....
How many of you will play the game you want even if three of these things appeared?
Less than half the class usually to around 50% raise their hands.
(This is important because this is in fact saying that HALF THE POPULATION refuses to play a game that has three of these eight elements in it.)
I asked
"How many of you will play the game you want even if five of these things appear" and this fell already to 25% or less......
So I had to ask
"How many would play the game you want if seven of the items on this list appear in this game?" ...and usually there is around 1 - 2 people in an entire class that actually raise their hand.
I ask them "why?" and they say "If I think I will like it, I will play"
//==========================================
I said "Do you wish for me to comment on these?"
The class said yes....
I said "human beings are biased. I am going to tell you my experiences with the eight...and what I feel, now that you've gone through this...."
1) The current game I play starts each character with 50 inventory spaces, but by the end of the game there will be more than 50 drops and all the players are after tokens. Surviving on 50 slots shared with your equipment, armor, etc.... is a pain and I (and many others bought to 100 and then 150)...
2) This one borderline gets me to not play an MMO or any game for that matter. I find that to be cruel and for the same reasons you have. Nothing is worse having to pay to play the super cool character class you want to be, but even worse is playing the basic class that is going to be killed by the overpowered class you wanted to be which actually cost money.
3) This one I feel is just wrong on so many levels. I subscribe to support the games I like to play, but I know the advantage I get late game stacking everything together. If the company removes the advantage, it replaces it with a placebo and players have no real way to measure it. What I wish is that if we have a Rare Drop Rate, that at least we know what the original Drop Rate are for items to show real proof that every little bit helps..
4) This one is the worse in games that only allow one to revive in this way or lose a lot in Death Penalty. The worse part is that in older games one would get resurrect and then RAGE-QUIT if one dies again five minutes later. In fact there used to be games that allowed this in Spawn-Based PvP..... which was the worse. Now anyone with a wallet could get buy another life or even a continue...
5) This one is everywhere. I played a game where a person became a friend and then said he could not talk to me because he said he was German and I was American and his group did not want anyone who was not German in the group or in their presence. I remember being told I was causing discrimination in a group I put together because I only allowed Americans in the group who lived in NA. I had to actually send a letter to the parent company when my account was put on hold saying that my recruitment is up to my own business and the reason I recruited in the three hour timezone was in order to organized and run better.......... and yes... I've been in Guilds where if I don't buy the latest expansion or continue subscribing, I can't be part of those guilds... This is a problem in F2Ps...
6) This one I agree with you as well because of the games where non-subbed players charge a lot lower to deal with the higher taxes and then Rich players snatch it up and resell it at the lower tax rate. This one I can actually attest that it has actually been addressed as a P2W mechanism and has actually ran into Legal trouble.
7) At first I thought it was ok, but a paid- advantage (even on chance) is an advantage...and whether its obtained by chance, or by the player picking the boost, or what not. I've found this to be my own personal opinion of Pay 2 Win. Its not the idea that I can get one of these items, Its the idea that I can dump as much as I want and hope to get more than one....or trade my paid stuff for more of these. Its not the idea that its sold in playershops in different games, but that only by paying for them can you get your hands on them and you get both, a boost and a time-advantage when they are released and they can be applied. This actually covers the ground of Direct, Indirect, Passive, and Active advantages, and they even overlap. Items like these should be rewards to the very best of the very best for going through the worse the game has to offer to prepare them to go even further....
POWER TO THE PLAYERS EVERYONE!!! Isn't it great when EA, or Gamestop...does this? Rather than start fair, everyone picks sides or is unbalanced from the start? How about Early Access??? That was your #12....but my #5....
Apologies for this post being SUPER-LONG.
Everything that I wrote here I am able to teach in 45 minutes when my classtime is 70 minutes to teach per class period. I tend to throw homework and writing assignments on top of stuff like this....
The aim of this unit was to teach how opinion is generated and how voting allows the focus of opinion to exist as well. Gaming is hot in the schools and they should know what they are in for....it goes into critical thinking, logic-theories and a lot more. Its a unit that I spent a week teaching.....
My point is:
Regardless who you are here....
If you play MMORPGs, or PSO2, or some full 3D online video game, and you can argue that "Its not P2W" when many elements show it is and many students explain what they feel is P2W....
....it means you are ONE OF THE SELECT FEW who is willing to enter, PAY for a GAME regardless the sheer amount of P2W elements agreed upon. I can walk into a classroom of 11th and 12th graders who havent been completely broken into "accepting their gaming fate" and "giving their money away" without resistance....
...and you know what the difference is between my students and myself?
They are students on the way to becoming adults....
while most of you are adults....
Instead of saying "I PAY MONEY AND ITS NOT P2W" its far better to say "Its P2W, so what? I like it....and as long as I like it, I will play"
I also covered point of view arguments in argument writing.
I had half the class represent P2W players and half the class represent non P2W players in a scenario and we even simulated it with the help of teacher aids in the area and that is when they learned how power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely....
The people who refused to PLAY were not oppressing others and in their argument writing, their writing was VERY SIMILAR to what I have seen in this forumboard and many others...
The writing of people who have been tainted by corruptable power and the American Identity that one has to finish whatever is started because that is what MEN are supposed to do and if men don't do it, they feel dishonored...
When men and women were asked what hurts their feelings the most in a poll a few years ago, I remember for men around 84% of the college poll hovered around the answer saying "Not allowing us to finish what we started...and feeling dishonored and disgusted from being relieved and deprived on what we felt we could handle (or meant to do), taken away from us"
..and I get angry if some hack relieves who is not AT LEAST BETTER than me in the area, but even so......I WAS TRUSTED with the assignment...trust me to finish it or at least help with the danger or reassign me within the same assignment....shit!
not that I follow orders, but that I like to see shit done...
Originally Posted by Megidolaon
I would probably rage at this, if gathering wasn't for the epic skill rings. At first I thought gathering was nothing but a pathetic attempt to copy other mmos but the application is amazing.
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