Is it worth to spend real money?

I mainly meant that the front page of this forum is extremely slow.

The response to my admittedly exaggerated prior post makes this thread about the most active one on the front page aside from the G17 one.

Maintenance threads are pretty much gone the last few months, even the wall of stickied threads has gotten down to an admittedly appropriate amount compared to it taking up over half the front page like before.

I'll admit people probably don't spend 100k every month, but I do know that some have spent thousands over the years.

While the game may not be closing soon, it isn't really thriving either.

We VERY rarely get any kind of patches, not just expansions but ANY updates at all. If it breaks it says broken, if a key feature of an expansion is missing you might see it 7 months later. The time it took between them adding a NS flier page to the event shop and ACTUALLY PUTTING ANYTHING IN IT was disgraceful by any standard. The same goes with faction icons, and everything in that thread about things that never get addressed.

The state of cross server events is abysmal, and even if you don't bother with them either they sadly DO make up the majority of the new content we get. The remaining things we are to look forward to are farming the next few YEARS for the next iteration of power creep for g17 stuff. Because cards and charts are all maxed and squared away already..

Since actually going out and killing mobs provides very little incentive due to repeated crippling of drops, the entire economy is being held together by Jolly Jones for a lot of the player base. Some people still run Warsong constantly, and some people still buy the drops. I assume TT still happens but I rarely see anyone doing it. The rest sell gold for 2-3 times what I'd pay for it, but they must be making a lot doing it.

Perhaps I should have said they put all the new mounts in packs instead of fash. I know they DO sometimes put fash in the shop, I meant broadly speaking it usually ends up in packs. Fash and fliers are about the only things I've actually bought over the years. The game gets real damn cheap if you ignore pvp and know where all the free stuff comes from.

koudelkamorgan wrote: »

Maintenance threads are pretty much gone the last few months, even the wall of stickied threads has gotten down to an admittedly appropriate amount compared to it taking up over half the front page like before.

If you had any idea what Domino is doing lately, you would understand why the maintenance threads are missed sometimes. As it sits, they are still posted like 90% of the time.

For the wall of sticky threads, the reason it isn't a huge wall is largely because of both Domino, and myself, un-stickying the out-dated threads and re-locating the others into their appropriate locations. (For example, the event stickies go into the Archive forum, and threads like the NW Information sticky is now in the NW sub-forum where it belongs.)

koudelkamorgan wrote: »

We VERY rarely get any kind of patches, not just expansions but ANY updates at all. If it breaks it says broken, if a key feature of an expansion is missing you might see it 7 months later. The time it took between them adding a NS flier page to the event shop and ACTUALLY PUTTING ANYTHING IN IT was disgraceful by any standard. The same goes with faction icons, and everything in that thread about things that never get addressed.

There are multiple layers here, and some of it I don't have an answer for. I will address what I am able.

Updates come from China. The developers are in China.
PWE has rushed the last few expansions well ahead of when they are due. I would imagine the majority of the reason for doing this is a combination of marketing tactics, the overall impatience of the players, and the constant whining about "when will we get the next update that released in China two months ago".
As a result, we get things that are either incomplete, or incredibly broken. Add to that, we have had a huge number of holidays recently, which slows things down even more. Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years, and the Chinese New Year, just to name a few. This slows down the development process, and said bug fixes.
Even with that aside, most of the bugs are resolved in a relatively reasonable period of time.

Now, I did say most. There have been more than a couple of threads with issues that have largely gone un-answered by management. I have just about given up hope for most of them, most particularly those since the servers were merged. In the majority of them though, there are viable workarounds. Factions like TimeLords have their transparent icon back after the merge. (even in the last patch, new icons were shipped to the client.)

koudelkamorgan wrote: »

The state of cross server events is abysmal, and even if you don't bother with them either they sadly DO make up the majority of the new content we get. The remaining things we are to look forward to are farming the next few YEARS for the next iteration of power creep for g17 stuff. Because cards and charts are all maxed and squared away already..

The main problem with this, is that our version spans from GMT-8 to GMT+1. The original version (China) does not.
The other issue to this is again specific to our version. PWE's marketing prowess put R9 in the boutique. They made the top tier gear easily attainable just by opening your wallet. In China, this is not so much the case. Hell, they don't even have our version of R9 because we have special gear requested by PWE.
China didn't have the pill babies we do. China didn't have hyper babies from FCC.
Hell, China enjoys the grind. You guys want instant gratification. The game was designed with the grind in mind. So you either pony up the cash for the instant gratification PWE has provided you in our version, or you spend forever farming it as they designed it. At least you have the choice.
Personally, things would be a lot better off if we had mirrored the original version of the game from the beginning, but now the precedent is set.

koudelkamorgan wrote: »

Since actually going out and killing mobs provides very little incentive due to repeated crippling of drops, the entire economy is being held together by Jolly Jones for a lot of the player base. Some people still run Warsong constantly, and some people still buy the drops. I assume TT still happens but I rarely see anyone doing it. The rest sell gold for 2-3 times what I'd pay for it, but they must be making a lot doing it.

Do some research on the botting issue in China, and you'll understand why this is.

koudelkamorgan wrote: »

Perhaps I should have said they put all the new mounts in packs instead of fash. I know they DO sometimes put fash in the shop, I meant broadly speaking it usually ends up in packs. Fash and fliers are about the only things I've actually bought over the years. The game gets real damn cheap if you ignore pvp and know where all the free stuff comes from.

Again, it's marketing. They make more from the packs because people will buy them to get the mounts/fash/whatever, than they would if they just put them in the boutique.
Also, there is a limit to the number of items that can be in the boutique. We're pretty much at that limit. I mean hell, the boutique runs on it's own server just so it doesn't lag the map every time you're changing instance servers.​​

I actually edited out that Sylen has become our defacto CM from my last post lol. I'm glad they are around to corral us surly types

I can always at least expect measured responses here. In the PoE forums its utter chaos and vitriol if you say literally anything pr ask any questions.

It's worth it to spend money you can afford to lose, it's not worth it obviously when you spend your entire savings.

The one thing I hate in PW game is the value inconsistency, and sometimes its not only because of the market but because of new patches as well, what you just bought/spent for like $1000 now might go as low as half or even a quarter later on or even almost free.

R8 was originally cost like $4000 for anyone who wanted it in one night on the server where I play but decreased over time and the last time before it went almost free with primal world update was $200. Warsoul weapon was more or less $10,000 using packs, then later around $1000-2000 using mc from people doing BH and much later being sold by the publisher in real life game festival for $1000, now it's around $400-$500 with NW furnace. I believe the price will hit rock bottom some time after heavenfall with the mats cost no fee unlike getting them by exchanging mysterious chips. It happened to R9 too, though it's still expensive.

Think twice before you start spending, this game is like quicksand, the more you spend, the more likely you'll be sucked too deep into the game, and by the time you want to quit, you've spent too much time and money already to quit for good.

freygin said:

Think twice before you start spending, this game is like quicksand, the more you spend, the more likely you'll be sucked too deep into the game, and by the time you want to quit, you've spent too much time and money already to quit for good.

This is sooooooo true. Its the most vicious of cycles. I think trying to break a gambling habit that has made you re-mortgage your house 11 times is easier than stopping playing this game once you've spent so much money on it xD