Addressing Pay to Win and Factions

DISCLAIMER

I'm going under the assumption that in this community I am voicing an unpopular opinion and that I could see backlash from this. However I honestly think that what I am writing about truly needs to be a topic that is brought into light. When voicing your own opinion on this topic please ensure you are educated and aware of the topic at hand and avoid what is called cognitive dissonance. This means that even if you don't agree with what I am saying here please ensure your own views on the subject do not inflict bias on your response.

Main thread

As the 23rd season of factions draws near and players are getting prepared for the reset I think this topic is now more than ever something that should be brought up. I have been observing factions long enough to know that the community is one of the highest spending in all of MCC with many Immortals dominating the leaderboards.

So what is "Pay to Win"

Pay to win is a style of game monetization that allows developers to offer flashy lootboxes or in-game titles that allow players to essentially pay their way to the top. I believe in many ways MCC is a prime example of this. At the beginning of every Factions season Immortal players straight out of the gate come with high tier loot that unranked players would take days to acquire. This basically means that if you do not have a rank, you are immediately screwed from the start. Unless you know somebody or have a certain reputation built up in the community you for sure as hell could bet Rookie isn't getting you anywhere. This in itself is the exact definition of pay to win. Now there is no law against this as of now and honestly this is how many servers have worked for years, so why now is it a problem? Well this problem was taken to a whole new level when cash prizes were introduced.

So I need you to just picture in your mind the morality of this. In game ranks that cost exorbitant amounts of money only to be influence by cash reward. That in itself has some questionable aspects to it. It was honestly okay until this happened and I would have no problem with MCC trying to monetize it's servers if it wasn't for this. You have to think about the fact that the game and even the server itself is targeted at younger audiences, maybe not directly, but it has these implications. You are influencing your monetization system with cash prizes that came directly off of the system itself. This is not quite a pyramid scheme but it is pretty damn close.

To reiterate this is (technically) not illegal. However targeting children is. MCC would not qualify as targeting children however. This is because there is no clear intent that can be identified, and honestly I don't think there really is any true intent to target children. There is however bills that are still be processed that could potentially eliminate pay to win systems in games. You can read more about this at the link below:

https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/1629/text

Another important thing to mention is that what MCC is doing is technically in direct violation to the Minecraft EULA. You can read this here: https://account.mojang.com/documents/minecraft_eula . I could argue that what MCC is doing is "Making money off of anything we've made" ("We've" as in Mojang). Yes, this could be applied to basically every other Minecraft server, so what's the difference? Money given to servers such as Hypixel for ranks like VIP or MVP is to be considered a "donation". Donations are not Payments. When you donate you should not expect to receive anything in return that has monetary value. ranks on Hypixel do not give you anything that directly impacts your Gameplay and the ranks are mostly for cosmetic features. The ranks are not considered products or goods that the server makes and distributes. This is the same in MCC, except the difference is that the Ranks give you a direct advantage in Gameplay therefor they are considered as distributed content which could be argued; has monetary value.


Now I want to open this to discussion. I want to hear what the community thinks about this because it is a serious topic that has some serious implications. Please respond and share your thoughts!

 

I have looked into factions a bit more extensively and have considered the points you brought up. I think that everything you said is correct and I do agree with your stance. However I'm curious to hear your opinions on some of the other topics addressed, such as cash prizes. To add on to my thread, It is my opinion that players themselves should not be able to profit off the server at all and that adding cash rewards to your Factions prize pools seems a little wrong in that it not only can be seen as perhaps a 2 step pyramid scheme where you are just reinvesting money from your investors to get more investors but I also think it denatures spirit of the game. I think that prizes should be exclusively buycraft coupons. I also want to bring up another crucial topic that I neglected to bring up in the main thread and that is Keys. You mentioned perks and how you can grind for them, but can't you just pay to unlock all of them via keys? I understand you can grind to get these perks but that's still providing a system where you can pay to get the same perks, which is P2W. It's also important to mention; yes, you can grind for everything and anything you want (as long as it only takes at max 30 days since that's how often the seasons reset) but that's not throwing the P2W aspect out the window in any way. P2W doesn't necessary mean winning, it's shortcuts to the (in this case potential) winnings.