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[ragnar119]

You'll notice nothing in the list above has the words 'stash' or 'tab' or 'Quality of Life'.   Being able to trade faster, having more slots to store things, having to spend less time screwing around re-arranging your stash are all gameplay advantages.  Small, yes, but in a game with limited time leagues, being able to trade faster and collect more items clearly offers an advantage.

So yes, they lied.  It's a good game. It's worth the price! But clearly they've already departed from their initial promise they used to reel in players who were wary of supposedly free to play games.  Lying is lying.  Feel free to make your own decision about whether you consider it worthwhile, but don't claim they haven't broken their promise.

Answer me this, if I was to play against another player of the same level as me, who had the same items and had played for the same time as me, but who bought every single thing PoE sold, would they have an advantage over me?

I get what you're saying about that there is an advantage by being able to store more stuff and trade more quickly, but you can already store LOADS and create alt accounts if you really, really need it. The portion of players this meaningfully affects is also absolutely tiny. I also understand the worries of a slippery slope, but until it actually has a tangible affect it's not an issue.

Yes, they would have a advantage. I can explain it why. Person that has 10 stash tabs and premium stash tabs will have a better time with selling items compared to someone that has only 4 stash tabs. You would need to make multiple accounts to use more stash tabs (and switch between them and also you can not sell items from different accounts if you are not logged in), and that takes time. Time that you could invest in grinding on the ladder or for items. Overall person that has more stash tabs can sell more, collect more crafting recipes and have a advantage with currency, items and time compared to player of same level and time investment that doesnt have more stash tabs, premium ones and similar.

I think there is no doubt that there is a advantage in buying stash tabs and premium stahs tabs. The thing is, you dont need this things to complete the game, and if you do not compete, this is really not a problem. For me personally the bigger problem is premium stash tabs, because they put trading improvements behind them. And I really dont like where they are going with that, as important mechanics in game are put behind a paid feature (note I do have premium stash tabs). Chris from GGG said that they know they are walking on edge of a sword, and are considering giving everyone premium stash tabs that you can unlock if you get to late game (so that they prevent massive boting of low level characters). I think its important that they do not sell game mechanics and features.

[Aklyon]

The thing is, you dont need this things to complete the game, and if you do not compete, this is really not a problem.

Then why are we having this argument again. We've gone in circles on this point for many posts.

[ragnar119]

The thing is, you dont need this things to complete the game, and if you do not compete, this is really not a problem.

Then why are we having this argument again. We've gone in circles on this point for many posts.

Because in this specific case we talked here do this payed feature give benefit to the player or not. Not can you complete the game without it. Can you complete the game without paying and does paying give you benefits are two separate things. Being able to finish the game without paying doesnt mean the game is not offering in game benefits to paying customers (uhh hope I wrote this correct).

[Damiac]

Answer me this, if I was to play against another player of the same level as me, who had the same items and had played for the same time as me, but who bought every single thing PoE sold, would they have an advantage over me?

Your question has made a fundamentally flawed assumption that skips over the actual problem.  That other player who played for the same amount of time as you, but bought everything PoE sold (and took advantage of them) would be higher level, and have more (or at least better) items.  Because every time he gets back to his stash he just dumps stuff into his infinite tabs, and you have to pick and choose what to keep and throw away.  Because when he created his character he had every unique item any character of his ever found, so he could build faster, but you only have a small selection of building uniques to choose from. Because when he trades he can use those premium stash tabs to get it done faster, but you have to do it the slow way.

Saying it's not a problem if you don't compete is like saying Pay to Win isn't a problem unless you try to win.  Well... yeah...

I'm not saying this to trash the game.  It's the fake free to play model I'm trying to trash. 

[kcwong]

Answer me this, if I was to play against another player of the same level as me, who had the same items and had played for the same time as me, but who bought every single thing PoE sold, would they have an advantage over me?

Your question has made a fundamentally flawed assumption that skips over the actual problem.  That other player who played for the same amount of time as you, but bought everything PoE sold (and took advantage of them) would be higher level, and have more (or at least better) items.  Because every time he gets back to his stash he just dumps stuff into his infinite tabs, and you have to pick and choose what to keep and throw away.  Because when he created his character he had every unique item any character of his ever found, so he could build faster, but you only have a small selection of building uniques to choose from. Because when he trades he can use those premium stash tabs to get it done faster, but you have to do it the slow way.

Saying it's not a problem if you don't compete is like saying Pay to Win isn't a problem unless you try to win.  Well... yeah...

I'm not saying this to trash the game.  It's the fake free to play model I'm trying to trash.

Huh? It's just paying for convenience.

You can freely register any amount of accounts, by making new free email accounts. Each of those accounts will give you 4 pages of stash and inventory of 24 character by default. If you need storage place, you can have as many as you want if you put some effort into it.

If you want mules for orbs, you simply need to mule over a few low level unique items and rush those characters a bit so they can trade orbs.

GGG stated before that they allow two instances of PoE running on a single computer, as long as both of them are controlled by human. Alt-tab and some notes keeping (make a spreadsheet?), and you have infinite stash space.

The same goes for the indexing premium tabs; it's just a convenient way to let your items to be found by indexer. Without premium tabs you can do so with a shop thread or a 3rd-party tool (called Procurement, IIRC).

A company got to earn money, paying for bling and convenience, it's 100% fine by me.

[Damiac]

Convenience isn't aesthetic.  If one party can pay money to trade quicker and easier, and store more stuff easier (and have constant access to it), and another party doesn't, the party that doesn't is at a disadvantage. 

I get that they have to earn money.  Maybe the aesthetic upgrades only cash shop they assured us of couldn't have worked.  But if they've gone from only allowing players to buy bling, to now allowing players to buy convenience, they've betrayed their original "ethical f2p" vision. 

POE is a good game that's 95% free to play or so, in my opinion.  When you play it for free though, you certainly feel the borders of the free experience, when one character running through a single difficulty already has a full stash, and I know if I just paid 10$ or so I wouldn't have to play re-arrange the stash every time I want to store something new.  I know I'd be spending a higher % of my time doing something fun instead of something tedious.  Managing an excel spreadsheet is boring stuff I do at work, if it made no difference nobody would pay for the easier way.

They don't owe me anything, but I don't want them parading around this idea that they have invented this ethical free to play model that only allows aesthetic upgrades to be purchased.  That is untrue, they engage in "fun pain", just not to the same degree as Zynga.  And every time a new type of collectible item is introduced, with a low stack size, you have to wonder, is this to make the game more fun, or is this to push people to buy more stash space?(It's probably mostly for fun, but the suspicion will always be there)

I suppose everyone has a place they draw the line.  To me, allowing 24 characters per account, and allowing you to purchase more was technically not aesthetic, but jeez, who needs more than 24 character slots?  So that didn't bother me at all.  After all, they do have to store those characters somewhere.  But to have artificially low limits on stackable currency, then introduce a $7.50 stash tab that allows them to suddenly stack up to 5000 per slot is just creating a problem, then selling the solution.  If the low stack sizes were intended somehow as a balance mechanism, then you're allowing people to buy an advantage by bypassing that limit(P2W).  If it wasn't a balance mechanism, then why was the stack size so low in the first place(Fun Pain)?

I am not attacking anyone for playing this game. I play it! If you enjoy it, great!  It's the best allegedly free game I've ever seen, as I said, it's fair to say it's 95% free to play, it's just really unfortunate that the original claim has been broken.  I hate the idea of the industry moving toward this model where I can't just pay once for a game, then I have the game and I know they've made it the best experience they can.  So I'm going to call a spade a spade, and you might say "well it's really just a tiny little spade" and I'll agree with you.

[nenjin]

To be fair "that claim was broken" on Day 1 when you could buy stash tabs. So for those that have been playing the game since Closed Beta, for people to now harp on this fact seems a little silly.

I won't disagree though that they've effectively doubled down on it with the last couple updates. But IMO, PoE has always been 95% F2P and that's still a better margin than virtually any other F2P game I've played.

[Aklyon]

When you play it for free though, you certainly feel the borders of the free experience, when one character running through a single difficulty already has a full stash, and I know if I just paid 10$ or so I wouldn't have to play re-arrange the stash every time I want to store something new.

Why are you holding on to every single non-white you pick up, thats dumb. Even small things like 'don't pick up large weapons you aren't going to use' will make stash tabs go a lot further, since the vendors give you alt and transmute shards for most anything and for the rest, more wisdom scrolls are good. By the time you want to pick up everything for chaos recipes, you either have space because you've figured out how to not suck at inventory management, or you have extra tabs to put them in.

So I'm going to call a spade a spade, and you might say "well it's really just a tiny little spade" and I'll agree with you.

Well, ok then. But you people better be finished with all the stash tab complaining now. Its not interesting to read, much less repeatedly argue about at this point. Go bother reddit about it if you want.

[Damiac]

Why are you holding on to every single non-white you pick up, thats dumb. Even small things like 'don't pick up large weapons you aren't going to use' will make stash tabs go a lot further, since the vendors give you alt and transmute shards for most anything and for the rest, more wisdom scrolls are good. By the time you want to pick up everything for chaos recipes, you either have space because you've figured out how to not suck at inventory management, or you have extra tabs to put them in.

I'm not. I'm holding on to map shards, currencies, uniques, 1 set of rares for chaos recipe, some skill gems, etc.  I don't bother trying to make sets of rares with the same name, I don't generally try to get full sets of item types, because I don't have the space.
But a player who owns more tabs doesn't have to worry about that does he? He can set up more vendor recipes, and hoard everything that might ever be useful.  What do you call that? Oh yeah, an advantage.  How do you get that advantage? By playing the game well? Oh no, you pay.  Please don't invent a strawman, and insinuate I'd have to be stupid to use up my 4 stash tabs.  I don't keep half the stuff I might someday want, because I have limited space.  Every time I could have used one of those items I didn't keep, that's a disadvantage I wouldn't have if I bought a bunch of tabs.  I've already lost out on a LOT of currency I would have had with infinite stash space.

But you people better be finished with all the stash tab complaining now. Its not interesting to read, much less repeatedly argue about at this point. Go bother reddit about it if you want.

Well, this is the first time I've brought it up here, and once the conversation peters out, I don't intend on bringing it up again.  It wouldn't have gone on this long except people are trying to redefine words like aesthetic, free, and advantage. 

Now... back to the game.  Is it just me, or is the tooltip DPS for ball lightning just not even close?  It's like it assumes it will only hit once per cast or something. I know tooltip DPS isn't usually terribly accurate, but ball lightning in particular just seems wildly incorrect, it seems to do at least 15 times what the tooltip says.

[kcwong]

I bought the currency tab and it revealed how poor I am... before I organized my orbs in five tabs and that felt like a lot. The mirror slot will be empty forever.

I hope GGG would consider more tabs like that... e.g. for cards and white maps. The map tab should have a scroll bar and visually show you how the maps upgrade.

[Sinistar]

use utility flasks like Jade or Stibnite if you want to keep your buffs up.

*facepalm*
Of course. So obvious. And here I was musing about using life/mana flasks.

Pathfinder-

This helps too, thanks. I'm not the one to bother too much about trading for uniques or having a unique-centered build but who knows, maybe one day I'll dabble in that.


So as to not bump this thread just for the sake of replying to post I should reply to ages ago, here's a question - is it just me or is the sound  in PoE ever since last few big patches a bit off in some cases? Specifically, when you create a new character, there's a guy in the background jelling at you ("Attention prisoners!...") and he used to sound, like, hundred times louder. Normal, NPC-speech like. Nowadays I really have to listen carefully to catch what he's saying. I'm guessing this is intentional, something that happened during last few patches when they also added a few extra dialogues to him (because I don't remember him saying different stuff before, but that could just be me)?
But what also bothers me I can't hear for shit your characters dialogue/taunt whenever you kill Malachai. So I'm starting to wonder if this is the game or if the problems are actually on my end, even though all the other sounds seem ok?

[aristabulus]

...
But what also bothers me I can't hear for shit your characters dialogue/taunt whenever you kill Malachai. So I'm starting to wonder if this is the game or if the problems are actually on my end, even though all the other sounds seem ok?

In the sound options, there is a separate slider for dialogue.  You should fiddle with that and do some tests before you go searching for a malfunction.

[Aklyon]

You forgot this point about the trials:

In this update, we're also streamlining the Trials of Ascendancy so that you only have to complete them once on each difficulty level per league.

But yeah. Two extra ascendancy points if you beat map-laby Izaro. That'll probably make some things more OP.

[ragnar119]

The two week  flashback league was extremely fun. I love the perandus league. For the first time in PoE you can play as self found and actually get uniques and items while you level and not need to trade. Its sucks that they are removing it because of the impact it has on the economy.

The new league looks ok. Shame that the lab will stay the same, and they didnt change it. Fucking hate that part of the game, so will probably skip this league and see will they fix it for the next expansion.

[ragnar119]

I'unno man, what's so bad about the league? For all purposes, the game was balanced without ascendancies in mind- you could do okay even without. The trials are being streamlined, and it doesn't even hurt to get a rush through the lab or to do it later than you need to.

It might still suck if you're an ES character, but I think that's being addressed pretty hard. You really don't have to spend a lot of time in it, and it'd be a shame to pass on the entire league just because it's still there.

Nothing bad about the league. Really like both the old one and the new one. The thing that is bad for me is the lab and that they put the core new part of character customization behind it. As was said by chris they will be balancing the game around it in future, and its already getting some balance passes for the expansion because with the ascendancies  some build become very broken, so they will be nerfing some of the mechanics and skills.

Trials are same, you still need to do them all. It only matter if you play with more character per league, and as I play one character per league it still sucks, as still need to do them every new league. But the worst part is the lab, and the trap gameplay that I can not stand. Including the problems that you can not leave the zone, even if you want to sell items. I need to invest around 30 to 50 min to finish the lab from one go. Hack even stopped playing HC because of it.

I can try to ignore the lab, but than, it will be very hard to try out the build I would like to play, so in a way I need to do this part of the game few times, and it just burnes me out, as that part is really not fun to me  .