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this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2024
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It’s a bit of a gray area, but at the end of the day PoE is totally free. There’s 0 p2w, and all game features are available to a free account.
GGG finances themselves purely from MTX sales, so yeah, they want to expose you to other players’ skins in town, trades, and party play to hopefully get you to buy some. You still don’t have to though.
The gray area comes in with the stash tabs. I think default free account comes with 4, and you really want at least 10 or so to play comfortably. You need to spend 20 bucks to get the most useful stash tabs for your account, and it’s a 1 time spend that applies to all leagues available forever.
So, maybe not exactly free unless you’re willing to deal with the pain of mule accounts like we did back in the D1 days. But also pretty dang’yo ethical when compared to D4 tactics of charging AAA price for the game, then gouging you on MTX as well.
So overall I agree with you and I will probably be playing PoE2 at least through the campaign. But there are 2 things:
For just the premium stash bundle, sure. That effectively makes it possible to play the game as not as Solo Self Found. What I mean is: to effectively get to the higher map tiers (at least when I played a few years ago) trading was more or less mandatory. You could effectively do minimal trading with what the few free tabs allowed but storing useful gear and enough space to trade was difficult. Though I went and looked and if you wanted all of the unique tabs plus the $20 premium bundle for loot, you're looking at 815 points or $85 (with 35 points left over). So between $20-80 for the game's base price to get the full experience.
But the main problem I have with their store is the cosmetic prices. I used to play a lot and for a while started spending money at the store for cosmetics. I'm probably $150-200 into their shop. But you get so little for your money there. As I said: a single armor set plus portrait, a spell effect, cape, etc that all match is $60 and those change every 3 months. That's an entire full priced game for a single flashy set of gear. I might actually still be spending money on that game if those prices were more reasonable.
And then there's the Loot boxes which are preying on people's gambling urge. Overall I'm not a fan and wouldn't spend money there.
There’s a lot of truth to this, and I don’t necessarily disagree.
I think to play effectively with fewer tabs, you just have to be a lot more choosy about what you put up for sale on the tabs you can dedicate to being public/searchable. With limited tabs it doesn’t make sense to try selling all those 1-5c items, you just have to vendor them and wait for that big drop which is worth the space. You also need to be willing to sell those big drops for less, to move them quickly and create stash space. This idea of stash space pressure is an intentional design choice by them, but admittedly it is a questionable one.
Ultimately I think this ends up being a better experience for the player, because less time trading means more time enjoying maps. But it’s difficult for newer players to approach the game this way, so that is a significant hurdle. As a seasoned vet with more stash tabs than I know what to do with, I find myself using lots of them in first two weeks of a league, and then ultimately using very few after that.
I’m pretty excited for poe2, it looks just as good as D4 graphically (which has always been a Poe shortcoming), and it will almost certainly have much more replayability.