Tree of Savior Forum

The "Pay-To-Win" Token Scandal

General Discussion
#1

Greetings ladies and gentlemen,

The reason for this post is because I’d love nothing more than to see this game succeed and get better over time. However, due to a few of my real life friends quitting the game, I think it’s time for change.

My friends, family and I come from a long line of MMORPG’s, such as Ragnarok, EQ, WoW, Guild Wars and many more. We’ve run our own guilds, been officers in many others, etc. so we have lots of experience and are picky about the games we decide to devote a lot of time to.

As many of you know, token prices has risen over the passed few months, from 800k-900k silver, to a whopping 2 million silver (on Orsha NA server). I know this is not a lot of silver for most of us, but for new players, it’s quite a climb. I have a necro and warlock that I make lots of silver with and know how to use the market efficiently, so don’t start with the, “farm more silver noob!” or “get gud scrub, it’s not pay-to-win!” or “work harder at McDonalds and you can buy more token!” Yes, these are actually things people have said to me in-game, when discussing the pay-to-win factor of Tokens.

My opinion is that bots, silver farmers and people who have lots of time to play, are driving the market economy up. This is very normal, as in most MMORPG’s; the longer the game/server is around, the more money people accumulate.

There are pro’s and con’s of making the Token available for a set amount of silver, but I think the pro’s heavily out-weigh the cons. The pro’s are: The game is no longer pay-to-win (yes, running faster, selling more items, gaining 30% exp, etc. are all things that make your character stronger, so myself and many others consider this unfair to be only obtained with real money). My new playing friends would have a set goal to reach, for example: Token = 2 million silver. Instead, they are constantly out of reach, only to find that there are no more tokens available, or worse, the prices are now much higher. The cons are pretty simple: Bots and silver farmers could easily buy tokens for themselves. IMC needs to be more diligent in eliminating more bots for this to work.

I’d love to hear counter-arguments for why you think this is a good or bad idea.

Thanks,
Merc

9 Likes
Market restrictions - How should they change?
#2

d145, Afk Sorc/Necros and Warlocks are the main reasons why TP items have become more expensive…the silver inflation has become more noticeable in the few months and it made the currency lose its value.

Low level players don’t have access to such high amount which has now become punishing for them.

15 Likes
#3

Not only that, expensive items like BB recipe are farmed 24/7, monster gems lost their value also due to the supply, i don’t mind the token, but the way this game is restricted, it forces the players to buy it.

I was saving money by selling little valuable stuff i found during my alt leveling or even when i was just bored playing around with my oracle or selling buffs, but the price raise faster from 1.5mil to 2.4mil in the spam of 4 days in Klaipeda, then suddenly, there wasn’t any Token in the market lol.

For leveling, i don’t find an issue, but to buy and specially to sell, it is a huge issue for me. So i am just using the money now to level my skills attributes, that is, when i feel like playing the game, since it gets freaking boring doing the same thing over and over.

5 Likes
#4

They have been doing this since day one of the server’s launch out of ICBT2. Within less than an hour the bots had Digele at about 15k for a single piece so no alchemist could profit off the markets. Then shortly after the BR’s exploited some lame online banking thing and flooded the market with enchanted hats. Then people monopolizing channels crashing competitors with their hookerino programs. And even the guilds constantly farming TP freely.

This game hasn’t exactly had a “good” economy from the start. Especially tokens where like I’ve said before they used to flood the market at about 5-25k because everyone had one from founders and there’s posts with screen shots of people having full inventories of them. The whole premise of a token is just the crappiest thing ever in an attempt for IMC to make this game into a monthly subscription game by removing content that was there in the betas.

It’s just all around a crap shoot and nothing short of DUN DUN DUN a wipe would fix it but not really since it would happen all over again.

7 Likes
#5

The Con ?
IMC makes less money.
Do I really need to say more?

huehue

7 Likes
#6

So what I got from this post is that imc should do a better job in eliminating bots so the cost for tokens go down?

I think its fine if token prices keep going up anyways, it’s easier for people to pay 2 win since its a “free”(not) mmo anyways. The game needs $ to run therefore it’s perfectly fine for these cash shop items to sky rocket.

IMC has made this game hard for new players to survive and there’s no going back on those prices, those tokens will continue to get more and more expensive as the day goes by.

What IMC should have done was get rid of all the restrictions and crap they came up with during the launch on March 2016, it’s a bit too late to undo what’s been done since it won’t bring the players back.

I personally think there is nothing wrong with pay2win schemes, mmos that aren’t pay 2 play usually operate with this kind of business, and it’s been going on since the start of mmos.

2 Likes
#7

I’ve never once felt that Tokens were over-priced. You either pay real money for the token, or you spend time in game generating enough silver to buy the token.

As far as the token supply on the market goes, sellers are only looking for x amount of silver. After they earn what they need from selling tokens, you can expect them to drop off the market.

As far as the “get a job” argument goes, I think it’s completely valid. I cannot earn more than 1 million silver in a day of playing (I’m not exactly using the best methods for farming silver), but I can earn a token in an hour of labor. The only thing I’d like to change about the transaction is deciding what that money is used for (funding QA in this case).

What do bots need tokens for?(rhetorical). Bots are either run by game enthusiasts (people who want to play the game but are lazy about grinding levels or items) or they’re run by profit organizations. The botting orgs don’t need to burn their in-game silver on tokens because they have enough cash income to buy it themselves, and they’re probably using payment fraud to void any payment anyways. They would only need the token benefits to last for 1 transaction with another player before the bot gets banned.

4 Likes
#8

This is exactly why the game is going mobile. People think it’s “fine” to pay over $15 a month for a token and then even more for something which should just be easily accessed in the game. Then on top of all this they think it’s “okay” for a company to make money when they literally ripped off people with founders and supporter packs already making millions. How much does this company have to take before it gives back?

How many layers is too many for them to restrict content in the game for money?

10 Likes
#9

I thought it was a good deal.

1 Like
#10

Do you think that paying $15 for a token is a good deal compared to just having the game be monthly subscription and no cash shop or gacha cube shenanigans like a normal company does. People could say that Blizzard and Square are huge companies which can afford to do it but considering how well all those founders and supporter packs sold they’ve made more than their fair share to fund this game into 2020.

They play the best of both worlds and people eat it up having a pseudo month subscription going on with tokens, then restrict content like exp on mobs, map spawns, dungeon runs, and now add these gacha cubes with items to craft the best equipment in them. It’s fundamentally stupid and greedy as hell. Clearly stuff like this has had a hugely negative impact on the game but it’s just “okay” for it to be like this since they need to make money.

13 Likes
Token privileges or non-token punishment? Please, be nice
#11

I bet IMC had to go a few hundred grand in debt to pay it’s employees. As that’s the norm with most game companies. Unless funded by a publisher or through crowdfunding, but in the case of a publisher, guess who’s really getting that income?

#12

It was already developed in Korea and they literally just copy and pasted the same stuff here on a different server. It cost them the price of what ever AWS charges them for hosting and a physical server to run it. They also have the same 30 people as their staff in Korea for here too. It couldn’t have cost them THAT MUCH at all. Let’s say it cost them $50,000 for physical hardware and then $10,000 a month for hosting and everything else is free since they are already doing the work for kTOS.

Compare that to the over millions of dollars they have made already, then the amount of effort put into iTOS.

2 Likes
#13

Ok but how about a minimum (i’m guessing here) of 30k yearly salaries per employee over x amount of years in development.

#14

So what? It’s already been developed and this is a mirror of that development. They didn’t hire and special new people or do any different changes like they said was going to happen! Basically you’d have to say that iTOS is the only provider of money and kTOS is literally draining money out of everything since nobody spends money there otherwise they make double the amount of income from all servers.

2 Likes
#15

Well no, I’m trying to say that all income can’t be taken at face value, it doesn’t matter if it’s released in x countries. If IMC had their game published by NCSoft (or whoever, because I don’t know who published them in Korea), then all their wages were coming from the publisher, because the publisher bought their team’s project banking on the game making a good income. So all their income is going through their publisher and we don’t know what IMC is making off this game.

I’m out of here by the way, you can message me via private messaging.

#16

That’s not iToS’ problem though that they messed up in Korea and had Nexon as a publisher. There’s no publisher here to take money from them like that and unless Nexon literally owns IMC as a company they should not see a single penny of this money generated here. All those support packs bought through Steam should go straight into IMC’s pocket without any filter other than what Steam, Paypal, Banks might take for transaction fees.

The international community has paid well their dues for the project’s development, servers, and current staff. It’s just really sad and not even something you can say is right. That’s why almost everyone left.

8 Likes
#17

token should be atleast 10mil.

you should buy 100tp for your first token, then farm silver for your subsequent token

dota2 is real free game but i still spend more than 100usd on dota2 skins

token price hike/inflation because many veteran people felt imc’ed n stop buying tp…

there is atleast 100% token demand now (if itos current pop is 4k player, are u sure there are 4k token selling in market?)

token price will drop if there is more token in market than the population

but whats the chance ? do u think there will be 8000 token selling market anytime soon?

2 Likes
#18

what is this BB? :confused:

#19
#20

Dear god…not this…thing… again

2 Likes