Salem is pay to win?

[staxjax]

I assumed you were talking about the "Can you buy things such as exp boots? or items that save you time?" side.

I seriously doubt you even play[ed] salem yet you see the cash shop as 'pay to win'. Go buy a pack and start winning then.

The shop is not going to get you 200+ humours, and the shop is not going to help you in any way to build a well defended base. Yeah sure, you can buy 100s of 1000s of silver with rl cash and buy metal from people but is that really pay to win...I dont think so. The only person winning in that scenario is the person who you are buying the metal from.

[G1real]

I assumed you were talking about the "Can you buy things such as exp boots? or items that save you time?" side.

I seriously doubt you even play[ed] salem yet you see the cash shop as 'pay to win'. Go buy a pack and start winning then.

I think I played Salem before you even heard about the game, but let's not turn it into a ***** contest You're denying it's pay to win even if the opposite is obvious and true, not me.

The shop is not going to get you 200+ humours

Oh so because you can't buy everything it's not pay to win?

and the shop is not going to help you in any way to build a well defended base.

It's going to give you a time advantage that you can spend on building a well defended base instead of getting the prerequisites.

Yeah sure, you can buy 100s of 1000s of silver with rl cash and buy metal from people but is that really pay to win...I dont think so. The only person winning in that scenario is the person who you are buying the metal from.

No, more silver gets put into the economy, likely devalueing it eventually. Yes you are winning because you just got access to fast and early metal.

[staxjax]

Basically, your only argument for the game being pay to win is your diagram and more specifically the part about 'saving time'? There is a certain point in the game, where everything that is sold at the store 'to save time' becomes worthless. Depending on how much you can play, that could be anywhere from a day to a couple of weeks for a casual player.

Yes you are winning because you just got access to fast and early metal.

Dude, metal is everywhere in this game. With the new claim upkeep crap, there will be unclaimed mines already built all over the place, thousands of them. And so what if you have 'early metal', you won't be able to do anything with it anyways. By the time you have skills for brazier forging, you would already be able to produce your own metal by that time anyways.

[TeckXKnight]

No, more silver gets put into the economy, likely devalueing it eventually. Yes you are winning because you just got access to fast and early metal.

I'd make the case that you can't actually use the metal in any way without the necessary skills. On that same note, you cannot actually utilize an overabundance of metal either. What it ends up doing for you is freeing up resources. This translates to a maximum gain per character, as you only need so much metal for construction, tools, and weapons, where the gain is time not spent earning silver. The obvious truth, as you'd like to put it, is that it breaks down to saving you maybe half an hour if you're really bad at foraging or hunting.

Is this an advantage? Absolutely. It is petty enough that trying to make the case that it constitutes pay to win is rather absurd though. It's as bad as the people who demand a server reset because they joined an hour after the server started and they feel at a disadvantage.

You are buying a resource and that resource has a trade value to an extent. There is just a limit to what any one trade good can do you for and what others will be willing to trade for it.

[wildair]

it really isn't. once you get more yellow bile it you can easy kill crickets and make cricket team and u'll get 40 sliver

[Sevenless]

Honestly what everyone is thinking but not saying: Buying silver is an absolute horrible waste of real life money. The $>Silver is absolutely terrible if you look at it in the terms of how much time it actually saves you. In many games where it's truly P2W, you can save 3-4 or more hours of grinding per dollar spent. In Salem it's actually more like 2-3$/hour spent in game. There are countries with minimum wage lower than that.

I think everything in the cash shop is so overpriced, there's no way it'll ever meaningfully impact the game.

[Procne]

Buying silver in Salem is like paying someone to power-level your WoW character from level 10 to level 15. It will save you a little time, but in the end it doesn't matter anyway as it's not much time and everyone is level 90.
The only thing it does is to slightly help newbies get into the game.

The only exception are stalls, which are sold on first come, first serve basis

[Sevenless]

Buying silver in Salem is like paying someone to power-level your WoW character from level 10 to level 15. It will save you a little time, but in the end it doesn't matter anyway as it's not much time and everyone is level 90.
The only thing it does is to slightly help newbies get into the game.

The only exception are stalls, which are sold on first come, first serve basis

Yeah that mechanic needs a fix reaaaaaaally bad. Even without the cash shop it would be a horribly broken mechanic.

Let me trade pvp god dammit.

[jwhitehorn]

Just as an example as to why I absolutely LOVE this game and the way that the Cash-Shop was implimented.

Eve Online:
Probably the BEST kill your going to get SOLO is on somebodies 1 Billion Isk Machuriel or similar type battlecruiser. MAYBE you do 2 Billion Isk in damage. That person then has the opportunity to spend $30.00 U.S. (2 plexes) and they have THE EXACT SAME SHIP. So you could spend all day hunting people and at the end of it all you have set them back $30.00 out of their wallet.

Salem:
I SOLO ripped down somebodies Town bell, then ripped down their Brick House, then Killed them. Town bell = $2,500 silver. Brick house = $2,400 silver in glass panes. That person has the opportunity to spend $100.00 U.S. just to get their two most precious structures back and even then they have a good month ahead of them replacing their character.

In absolutely no way, shape, or form does this Cash shop allow players to fully "recover" from the in-game actions against them and even in the cases where it does give them a slight monetary option to rebuild the cash cost of that is absolutely astouding.

Also.... Keep in mind that now with the release of P-Claims being able to expire and killed it is only a matter of time before I scalp a player who thought it was cute to have a 20,000m3 P-Claim. Assuming he takes a break after said event I will then rip down that claim when it runs out of silver. Now the argument that he could simply come back and use the Cash Shop to reclaim is still valid. But at the cost of $400.00 to simply get back to where he was is the cash shop really allowing him to "pay to win"? And how many people can honestly say that they don't feel like THEY have won simply because they are the ones who DID NOT have to pay $400.00 ?

Best Example:
MM Tribe attacked StaxHax.

StaxHax spends 9,000 Silver declaiming our claim
StaxHax spends 3,000 silver declaiming the inactive claim we went trhough
StaxHax spends 3,000 silver claiming over hte leanto's to destroy them.
StaxHax spend XXX silver in crazy upkeep costs while he builds 100+ border stones to declaim us.

Sure Stax could have just dropped $300.00 US to undo what took the Tribe all of 30 seconds to do. But even if he did spend $300.00, considering it was for 30 seconds of my time all while ensuring that the game I enjoy playing gets further support still sounds great to me.

Just my perception on those who use the cash-shop to recover....

Chief PeePooKaKa
MM Tribe

[staxjax]

But I did pay $300 for all those monies :/

Joking aside, I built 127 boundary stones in the span of about 45 minutes, so there was hardly any upkeep cost associated with them because I just destroyed them immediately afterwards. And saying it only took you 30 seconds is not true, you had to walk to our base from somewhere with all 7 of ur little indians.

Still, nice example on how the cash shop could be used for paying to win.