Do you have gamer guilt?

“Grind”, “pay to win”, “no endgame”, “nothing to do” and so on have become meaningless terms because of over-use.

People now just randomly use those things to say “I don’t like this thing / person so I’m gonna accuse it/them of something that everyone will agree is bad”, regardless of the “official” meaning of the term even remotely resembling what they’re criticizing.

In politics the word “fascism” suffered a similar fate for many years, so now if the real thing shows up no one recognizes it because of how much the original term has been distorted by over-use. :stuck_out_tongue:

By themselves they’re completely devoid of information nowadays.

“Grind” in particular is so personal that I doubt you’ll find two people that will completely agree about where the line is between “too grindy” and “not grindy at all”.

Might as well just say “this game has cooties”, would mean the same thing. :man_shrugging:

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I agree, except with this one. Litterally it can only apply on games where someone or a group can win something, but to make things easier to understand it is now also rather often used in any situation where you can pay real life money for something that makes your play easier.

We would either have to accept that it now has this meaning as well or write out half a book to explain what we mean…

And yes, there are things in Boundless that fall under that, you do not need to pay money, you can play and play, level up, get cubits, but throwing actual money at the game makes it go faster.
Want to mine on a planet you do not have protection for and no skill points left? Got no skill reset points left either? Forget this idea for a bit until you leveled more and have the cubits to buy those skill reset tokens OR pay real life money and do it NOW.

Just 2 simple examples. Not winning anything by using these methods but using real life money to get something made easier fo you which other people might not be able to do due to money restraints…

Yes, that is exactly my point, the gaming industry already has a different term for those types of things.
They’re ‘pay for convenience’ and ‘pay to skip’.

The second being exclusively used when the paying allows you to skip long and tedious grinds that ‘free’ players have to go thru to get the same thing, but it also falls within the definition of paying for convenience.
Things like bags, bank space, +% experience potions, crafting materials, things of that nature are all within the convenience category.

Convenience is not winning because the same goal can be reached, albeit slower, without money, so it is entirely optional, and the player just has to decide if their time is worth the money asked, or not.

A lot of people rail against this kind of thing being used in games, but they’re important for example so that people with full time jobs don’t get completely left in the dust by (for example) younger people that have a lot more free time to play, but the games that include 'em have to be designed ethically.

A game that adds additional, unreasonable, grind (or constantly showers you with more quest items than you have inventory slots, etc) in order to ‘force’ you to pay for what amounts, in those cases, to non-optional convenience, is not ethically designed (and should be avoided) but it’s still not pay to win.

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If you say so, have never heard anyone, not even from the industry, call it that.

But the NAME doesn’t matter, that’s the annoying thing about some discussions anywhere, it’s about why one would wanna call it.

Not important…

Important thing is that there are things in place where real money can give you something. Doesn’t matter if it was intended for people work a lot blabla, fact remains that people with a lot of money can use it to do things that people who do not have a lot of money or do not want to spend a lot of money on it can not do…

The rest, how it’s called, who calls it that, is sooooo not important and don’t get why at times people can get so hung up on that…

Then accept the fact that all the other ways money can buy you stuff to help out like in your other definitions that some people can call it p2w. No need to start replying with “but there’s no winning in this game!”, no, focus on what else is said instead.

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Of course it matters. If we start randomly calling bananas “long yellow apples” and grapes “tiny apples” communication will just break down entirely.

If you’re saying no to paying for convenience and calling it ‘pay to win’, a developer may read that, look at their game, see no pay to win in it, and just ignore the feedback.

If you’re unfamiliar with the terminologies of MMO microtransactions, perhaps you could, you know, inform yourself. Having access to google helps with that. :slight_smile: Or watching things like the Extra Credits youtube channel, if you don’t like reading.

That’s the difference, anyone can do it, with money or without. That’s the key difference of paying for convenience done ethically. If you can mine 10000 igneous in a couple hours, and alternately you can pay $10 to get 10000 blocks or raw igneous, then clearly you don’t have to pay to get the thing. Anyone has access to it, and the person buying (or not buying) merely evaluates what it takes longer to do: earn $10, or mine.

Someone unemployed, or some teenager still in school, might look at it and go like “$10? That’s crazy. I’ll just mine it myself”. Someone with a time demanding job, would look at it and say “Oh wow, I can finally build a house in less than a year without sacrificing my social life”.

There’s an important difference in the implementation between convenience and ‘winning’. If you’re selling something that people can’t otherwise have, say a hammer that lasts longer and mines faster than anything you can craft, that would be pay to win, because there’s no other avenue for getting the thing other than buying it.

I can accept that, as long as you can accept that those people are calling it the wrong thing. Words have specific meanings for a reason. We can’t have communication when the same word can mean just about anything and its up to the person reading/listening to try and decipher it. At the very least, it gives the developers ultimately unusable feedback.

I guess I focused on everything else you said. Happy? :slight_smile:

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I’m not delving back into this larger argumenttoday.

But “pay to win” doesn’t just mean “win.”

It’s short hand for paying IRL money to gain an advantage, no matter how small.

And it should never be in any game, ever.

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This factorio game looks awesome. I may have to try it. Lol

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No guilt, games have to be good to be played. If it can’t drag me from the game I am currently playing then it isn’t good enough…