This article was updated on December 8, 2017 primarily to reflect changes made to Rift that have impacted my analysis on Trion Worlds as a whole.
Trion Worlds has acquired a bit of a reputation as a pay to win company. For every game they launch, I see questions on forums and social media asking if the game is pay to win. Some don’t even get that far. Angry gamers scream, “it’s Trion, not gonna play that p2w trash!” Are these feelings justified? Surely some of it must be. Where there’s smoke there’s fire, after all. But are people just falling in line with the hive mind? Could anonymous gamers, known primarily for their thoughtful and rational analysis, be overreacting?
Welcome to the internet, where anything is possible.
I’m going to break down the most commonly faulted cash shopss in each of Trion Worlds free to play games. I’ll judge just how pay to win it makes each of these MMOs based on the criteria at the bottom of this article. The answer may surprise you (though perhaps not in the way you think).
ArcheAge
This is where the biggest pay to win talk stems from for Trion. People are filled with such hatred for how ArcheAge has been handled, they’ll twist words to infer Trion even admits running a p2w game. If you follow that link, read some comments too. People hate Trion Worlds. For all of the talk about how pay to win Archeage is though, people rarely cite any specific examples. As any good bro would do, I’ll set you down with the cold, hard truth.
The cash shop doesn’t sell a magic “win” button. There’s no one item that will super power your character, but there are items that are absolutely necessary to progress in the endgame. One of the best real money purchases are high quality upgrades. These items can in turn be sold on the general auction house for large sums of gold. In ArcheAge, gold can be used to obtain pretty much all of the best gear, vehicles, housing, etc. The endgame is fairly time insensitive (nice speak for grindy) so paying real money and converting to gold through the public market is not an insignificant boost. Additionally, crafting is pretty much a disaster without paying for a subscription. Players are restricted by labor points for crafting type activities, which not only generate twice as fast for subscribers but also generate while offline.
Yes – it’s an advantage for a subscription. I’m not going to call that pay to win though, especially because it can be purchased with in game gold. Subscriptions are limiting and not as open for abuse. The problem lies in the relationship between ArcheAge’s cash shop and it’s auction house. Players can literally become as powerful as the cash they spend. $1,000 is way more valuable than a year of average play time. It’s simply unrealistic to survive a grind to the top without real money help. The combination of selling both cash shop items for gold and endgame gear for gold is another serious concern. ArcheAge has a lot of cool things going for it, but if you expect to seriously compete in PvP, don’t expect to do it for free.
Verdict: Pay to Win
Atlas Reactor
This is the game Trion haters don’t want you to know about. The publisher took a while deciding how to monetize their best in house product since Rift. Fortunately, the solution they chose was the right one.
Atlas Reactor is free simultaneous turn based game with a weekly rotation of free characters. The freelancers (characters) are like League of Legends champions in terms of unique abilities. Instead of a 30 minute real time MOBA, Atlas Reactor is a 10 minute turn based tactical team death match. The weekly rotation can include any freelancer, and they’re fairly well balanced. Free players can also acquire cosmetic rewards by playing. Purchasing the game gets you every character, faster cosmetic rewards, and ranked play. At $30, it’s also a lot cheaper than buying the full roster for League of Legends or Heroes of the Storm. However, there is no way for free players to acquire new freelancers without paying that one time fee. Still, it’d be nuts to call Atlas Reactor pay to win. There’s absolutely zero vertical scaling of power to buy.
Verdict: Not Pay to Win
Defiance
Trion Worlds really wanted Defiance to succeed as a pure subscription game, possibly to get away from the pay to win moniker. Unfortunately, it didn’t work. For a time, everything was going well. Then it seemed like Trion wanted to milk Defiance for everything they could.
Defiance’s pay to win structure doesn’t jump out at you initially. The game is fun at first, with a good deal of steady progression. Eventually the grind will set in, and you’ll look for how to speed up progression outside of events. The fastest and easiest way is turning to the cash shop …maybe. You see, the cash shop in Defiance includes the chance to acquire legendary guns on par with top tier free items. Buying the best gear in the game is pretty crappy, but gambling for it is even worse. At least there isn’t a ton more than that in the pay to win department.
Verdict: Kinda Pay to Win
Devilian
Trion’s free Diablo clone felt like a winner when I first played it. The intro mission starts off with a bang, and there’s a nice slew of quests to run through. Combat isn’t special but felt solid for a hack and slash. Then the high level grind reared it’s ugly head with only one legitimate means to combat it: spending money. It’s technically possible to get everything in the game for free and catch up to older/paid players. It’s just that in practice it’s absurd to dedicate your entire life to it. And that’s exactly what it would take.
The marketing speak says paying for gem refinements to advance gear is paying for convenience. It’s not. It’s paying to stand a chance and play with the big boys. Devilian is one of those games that gets you hooked on a fun 10-20 hours and slowly tests your resolve to continue progressing without spending money on cash shop advances. Do you throw away a character you spent hours on without seeing the endgame? Or do you pay some money to make a boring grindfest somewhat more palatable? Devilian does everything they can to steer you to the latter.
Verdict: Pay to Win
Rift
This is the MMORPG that started it all. Rift was one of those heralded “WoW Killers” back in the day. It turned out to be more of a “WoW deviation”, copying a lot of WoW’s gameplay with it’s own twists. It played uniquely enough with its multiclass soul system to be worthwhile on that alone. For a long time after it went free to play, many viewed it as the MMO doing it right. Then ArcheAge came along and people were clamoring for heads to roll. Did Rift actually get worse or was this simply ArcheAge hate spilling over?
There was a time not so long ago when only paid players could use earring. Yep – an entire equipment slot blocked off from use without paying money. That’s pretty inexcusable and reeks of greed. That’s been fixed, and Trion Worlds has reverted to the same system as always – charging for content. The three things paid players will want are a subscription (increases money gains), expansions (needed to level up past a certain point), and souls/callings (classes). None of these grant instant, unearned power and most importantly, none of it is scalable. Players can’t skip to godly levels of strength without putting in the time. To me, that’s the most important qualification to avoid pay to win.
Now, I wouldn’t necessarily say Rift is truly free to play. To hit max level, players will eventually need need to spend money for high level content. It might make Rift’s free mode more of a demo, but it doesn’t make it pay to win. However, over the past year Trion has been adding more and more content that lets paying players surpass what free players can reasonably accomplish. As such, I’ve bumped Rift from its initial scoring of “Kinda Not Pay to Win” to “Kinda Pay to Win”.
Verdict: Kinda Pay to Win
Trove
Trove is sort of Minecraft meets standard MMORPG. Not being a big fan of builders, I’ve only played for a bit. Rest assured that during my short span there was plenty of pay to win discussion. Those clamoring to proclaim “pay to win” seemed to be resting on the laurels that everything should be free. The way Trove makes money isn’t perfect, but is it pay to win?
Players can purchase classes, cosmetics, and faster progression. No class is inherently better so that’s no big deal. Cosmetics are always fine for free to play monetization. Faster progression is the concern, and it is noticeable. However, it’s a subscription fee and thus isn’t scalable. Free players won’t ever hit a paywall in Trove, but paid players get to bypass the mindless high level grinding. No matter what though, players at the top have to work to get there. The best items in the game aren’t purchasable like in ArcheAge so even if somebody had some monetary assistance, at least you know they earned it.
Verdict: Kinda Not Pay to Win
Final Verdict
All in all, Trion Worlds trends towards pay to win. Let’s take a step back and look at the developers of the game, rather than the publisher.
Kinda Pay to Win or Worse:
- AcheAge – developed by XL Games
- Devilian – developed by Bluehole Ginno Games
- Defiance – developed by Trion Worlds and Human Head
- Rift – developed by Trion Worlds
Kinda Not Pay to Win or Better
- Trove – developed by Trion Worlds
- Atlas Reactor – developed by Trion Worlds
Notice a pattern? If not, I’ll spell it out. The games where Trion Worlds is fully in control are the games that lean towards a fairer system. Trion certainly isn’t perfect with their own IPs (Rift’s earrings), but they certainly respond better. Why is this? Maybe Trion Worlds takes on deals other publishers don’t want and so are beholden to third party developers’ greedy demands. Maybe they are at bad at negotiating with developers when adding cash shop items. Maybe they simply don’t care and get greedy with their third party games games. All I know is that I’m going to feel a lot better about diving into Trion Worlds games made solely by Trion themselves.
Unfortunately, since initially writing this article it seems that Rift has started diving into more and more p2w indulgences. The above paragraph still has some merit. Rift went a long time without succumbing to pay for gear indulgences, so I wouldn’t rule out playing a future Trion MMORPG. I’d just keep a stringent eye on developer practices to keep them honest.
With regards to Rift, you forget to mention that you can buy raid gear with real money, the grind in Starfall Prophecy expansion is so severe that it takes a long time to gear up… my max level toons are still sitting in Vostigar Peaks quest gear because, frankly, I am not going to waste all day every day on such a repetitive grind of minimal content. I have given up on PvP because it’s simply not fun going up against players sporting PvE raid gear when my toons are stuck with massively inferior quest gear/pvp gear. A wealthy player can buy a whole set of raid gear with a few clicks in the cash shop while it would take you months and months to get a full set of raid gear grinding raid currency(which is the way many players go), you don’t think that’s p2w?
While not strictly pay-to-win, Trion has realized that a lot of Rift’s remaining players have stuck around because they love building dimensions. So now, guess what? yep, nearly every new cool and nifty dimension item(ie* not a rock or tree) that gets released is behind a paywall…. sometimes not just a paywall, but an RNG paywall, that’s right you buy a gamble-box with real money and pray that you get the item you want when you open it, probably you wont so tough keep throwing money at Trion until you get it!
When you consider whether a game is f2p or p2w you need to look at more than just “is all the content available without paying a dime?”. The real question is “is it humanly possible to repetitively grind enough to reach and enjoy all of this ‘free’ content?”. Even with patron status(same cost as a subscription) which gives various benefits such as bonus xp and bonus currencies the game is still extremely grindy.
From what you say, I agree that Rift has moved into a p2w direction. It sounds like it started trending that way a little before Starfall Prophecy and from what I’ve read, it has only gotten worse in the 8 months since I wrote this article. Buying top end gear for straight cash is pretty ridiculous. The gambling aspect is frustrating too but not as bad as expressly buying buyer. With everything else, it feels like AAA companies who tread the waters of how far they can go before the player base rebels.
And the market has certainly changed to force us to ask “whether content is humanly possible to acquire” vs. “possible at all”. There’s subjectivity in that, whereas before we had a clear cut line. I’m still more conservative with my p2w definitions than a lot of MMO bloggers, but my opinion on it has certainly changed in 2017 as developer tactics change (and get increasingly more shady/sneaky).
Hmm so shouldn’t you update the article to indicate RIFT as pay 2 win then?
Also, based on your list, the pattern that I see are games that have a bigger population becomes pay2win for obvious reasons (ie more $ for trion). The “kinda not pay to win” games are probably left there because the player base is not big enough for them to switch to pay2win.
4 out of 6 games being pay2win does indicate the company leaning towards that model for obvious reasons again. So my opinion is that Trion World does favour a pay2win model and likely to adopt that strategy for all future games they manage, regardless of whether are they developing or publishing.
Yep – I updated the article just now (Rift section and conclusion).