Note: Yes, you could just purchase the premium for 15 dollars directly instead of having to do it via gold for 30 dollars or via silver for 16million. Either way, its still expensive as hell for just one month of premium, which is the point that I was trying to make in one of the clips.

The reason to play this game is not to beat it for 99% of people playing it. There are people grinding for being top 1 in pvp rankings who spend 0 money for it becasue solo pvp let you earn legit 50m to 150m per day as we can see on streams. There are people gathering for fun, there are people playing on low tier sets in group pvp contents, there are people roleplaying, crafters, and many more. Example you used with better gear makes also no sense because this game is all about higher risk higher rewards. You can use "pay 2 win set" but if you die on it you will lose x100 more than person who plays on 6.1 set for example. In reality most of the players use sets t8-t9 even when they have over 500m in silver on acc because thats the way they want to play and they dont want to risk on higher tiers. The truth is that someone who didnt experience all of the contents didnt play for lets say 100h+ cant say almost anything about it. You also used example of the most manipulator in albion yt community, who is hated by everyone for lying etc.

Its p2w just like EVE. You can pay money to level up and get the best gear, but you can also go into the pvp zone and lose it all 5 min later.

While i do see your points and they are legit, Whales pay for good items, we take it from them? most p2w games youcannot do that. Also you can outskill a %20 IP power dif with skill. Every MMO will have paid features to survive. ALbion feels the fairest.

Totally agreed with you. I'm a beta, legendary founder with more than 8000 hours in this game and its always been like that. I'd say it got worse with time. As people pump up gold from credit cards in the game, it cause an exponential increases of the value of silver that in-game items don't back up, which means poeple that aren't paying with gold have to work harder and harder for their subscription and gear. The biggest issue, is that there's no real item sink or season concept, and people don't lose their stuff, or reset, at each seasons, which means some guilds have massed so much resources that it now keeps snowballing into unlimited regear for its guild members. This favor only one gameplay style; get in a guild and be some meatshield for a guild that will need you to win territory over OR get ganked by other groups if you play solo and play the way you have fun. AO is a PvP game on 2 uneven grounds, first, in terms of quantity of adversaries, and then in terms of quality of gear, and there's no way to guarantee at any time that your experience will be considered fair, even if they try to do so, like in implementing corrupted dungeons, you will get those guys in 8.3/4 that credit swipe once to snowball resources so that they can play for free indefinitely. In all due respect, I can't like this game for PvP given there's too many uneven grounds, but the grind and crafting is what kept me around for more than 7 years. It as a good atmosphere, people can be nice, chat is edgy and funny like it should be in a MMO and its very socially oriented. It is a true sandbox at heart if can see it past that and there's definitely somethign for everyone there.

I'm a big MMORPG fan, I've played a bit of everything. I played albion for years without spending a single $. Recently, because I have money and less time to play spent money to speed up my progression. And while yes it can be considered pay-to-win it's not an issue due to how the game has been designed. In 4 years of playing I've never felt once "agh this is so unfair just cause they spent money" Getting silver for premium is easy if you play the game. If you can't play the game cause you're busy with a job, well get what you can now trade that time you spent IRL to save time in-game. You speak also of "beating the game" or "winning" but just like most sandbox MMOs there is no beating the game, there's simply endless progression to play the content to progress to play the content. There is no form of competitive content where you need to spend money to compete like with many asian mmos so I'm more than happy with the way they handle it.

Albion online is definitely p2w without any counter argument, but personally i dont hate it since they can easily loose almost everything that they gained

grinding for premium is kind of the point i guess, its takes around a week, but thats a week of grind for a month of premium (+ you can earn silver just playing and doing stuff), and if you join an active guild you can grind that in a day if you're lucky. P2W wallet warriors are not even that big of a problem since you can just kill them and grab their loot, but I get that this video was made from a perspective of a solo player, albion solo and albion in a group are two completely different games

And just wanna say in a lot of PVP, there is a cap for Item Power so, higher gear will not help you much.

1:03 I love when people arguments his knowledge about the game by amount of time spent on it. Personally, I can reach (or surpass) that level of knowledge by observing, analyzing and getting some gameplay of the game. You really don't need experience thousands of hours in game to understand what happens there. *smug*

Anyone who knows how to play the game or has experience can make premium on new acc in 3 days for silver, there are many examples of ppl doing it save way just with pve. You can easly get max specs in any tree (for example all swords) in under 2 weeks. You can spend 0 money on this game and get your acc to like 100m silver in less than month, any experienced player who for example play solo mists will tell you that.

Before they added awakened weapons the p2w side of things felt fairly reasonable. Premium is very attainable with in-game silver and people buying silver was whatever. That said the awakened weapon traits are just now just silly to the point I don't try to defend the game. *That said*, Albion has a MUCH bigger problem with Discord/N+1 being the name of the game. Solo players are seen as nothing but filler content fodder for roaming groups and unless you go into very contrived and repetitive play spaces like mists/corrupted dungeons you simply will die to them. Until they do something to either A) encourage fights between similar group sizes. or B) add mechanics to encourage grouping with random players to push back against roaming guilds (like no doublecrossing, etc.) the open world/roads will continue to feel empty and lacking content. This is ironically the exact reason groups say they hunt solo players "we don't have any other content".

I'd say you forgot to mention that you need 20% or so reputation in a skill to lvl it up Otherwise from what I've seen you seem to be spot on, I liked your honest opinion I also liked you mentioning how much money /silver it'll take to max out everything if someone is trying to do so, I like that you're not jaded and tell us both sides of the argument

Just wanna say.. please i hope more people come and buy the best gear, bcs if you have a gear but no skill.. its soo easy to just kill you and get the money you put into this game for my self. I love people that spend a lot of money in this game they are free kills, bcs if you dont play the game and just skip everything you dont know how to play the game.

100% p2w :( i pay for the monthly premium. I get the same feeling from wow aswell. We as gamers are getting fucked in the ass

Paying can definitely speed up the game for you, aka you can skill up and buy better gear. But until you get skill you're just free money to other gankers. I kind of enjoy that tbh. Everything can be achieved without paying just not as fast. Now if they ever started making certain gear upgrades etc in the real money store to play I'd immediately quit lol

it is p2w, but on average people who p2w on this game are people who doesnt have any time to play the game and thats a good thing it makes them catch up to people who can play for more than 2 hours. the thing that balances this out is experience. ive seen f2p who plays 2 hours a day out compete a p2w player in money making. I have experiences in pvp and I beat a 8.4 master piece with tier 7 oc (that boost my economy like crazy making me somewhat p2w). if anyone is curious, I noticed the 8.4 movement is sketchy, had a feeling like he/she just p2w the gear and there I go oc dismount him/her and I win for no reason, he/she was panicking like crazy and I just get the loot, I sold it for like 250m-300m(?) for the whole gear, it was a 8.4 attuned masterpiece. the beauty of a full loot game and a player driven economy is that you can out maneuver any p2w player through experience, and with the amount of silver you could become a f2p that turned into a p2w. the hardest part is making the first silvers but when you have a capital that thing just spirals up. PS I have a friend too that his money making is through duel "scams" where he gets like easily 100m for a couple of minutes or an hour non stop asking for duels in the cities and bait the p2w palyers, ratty but it works for him Game is p2w but it has a leeway which is pretty good, the thing is this game has little to no content making the game boring for a while, been talking with my friends that albion should make like a quest system to make it fun and they (albion) actually is doing it, people should try out this game when that patch comes out.

The only difference is p2w players advance much faster that f2p. Later on the f2p can access all items the whales have but much slower

Oh I love whales who spend money in albion thinking that they can beat anyone. They are like lootboxes for us, free silver. You cant buy skill with money, a skilled player doesnt need to spend real money, because they can make millions of silver easily.

i like the fact it is p2w killed so many swipers that had no clue about pvp, theses guys made me rich lol.

its p2w but if you die you just drop all your shit so.. i cant even be super bad about it

Nice vid dude

It was pay for convenience, but the last half an year it's more like pay to play. P2w is hard, because it's a full loot game.

i respect your video and i dont defend p2w games, but in albion online it seems fine to me... i play the game for fun and not to "beat it", gathering is fun, leveling is fun, pvping is fun, if ur just buying silver and skipping the whole game, well idk congrats ur actually not even playing the game

A game that you could buy any kind of advantage is p2w

I dont think you made a great point when talking about PVP versus whales because just by plaing the game the intended way you learn how your weapons and set works, you made a great example when you bought your first set because with that you woldnt kill T6-8T players even if you had a set forth 60milion (T10-11) silvers. And thats what most of the whales do they buy a gear( usually the gear they buy is from the same skill tree for example kinght helmet knight boots and knight armor and some kind of sword to go with) and just die with it. They are at a disadvantage by not playing the game the way it was intended.

without the people that p2w the game wouldnt be in enough profit to even keep running

This boring and time consuming game is not only P2W but also FULL OF PSYCHO-RATS making fun impossible for any normal player. AVOID as plague!

"Its not about beating other players in pvp, its about beating the game". Tbh fking ablion is a silvermaking simulator. As soon as you get to midgame all you do is Fame farming and silvermaking xD. To try to beat the game is tbh just a waste of time. Most players goals are just: Spec up your favourable gear, make enough money to be able to buy bunch of t9 sets and just go with a little smallscale group and kill ppl. Or even just get yourself a 8.4 set and become a mist menace. Yes this fking game is nearly unplayable solo without premium. Thats why i recommend guilds (just dont try to get into a slavery guild which takes all your silver and time with mandatory content). And btw Premium funds itself. I grinded for 16m silver for a week, bought premium and it basecally paid itself back and i could buy premium the next month again.

"My opinion is invalid"

P2W means you pay real money and you obtain certain skills which is over powered and F2P players can never achieve. To speed up process is for people who are working and still want to enjoy the game. Eventually so called P2W players are paying for F2P to enjoy the game. F2P if they are good at the game have good chance of succeeding as you talking about a person who plays the game religiously (professionally) with people so called P2W who are casual players. It also involves economy. If people don't grind for materials, crafting and so on.. where does the equipment come from ? So this is real life period. Some other laborers, some are kings and some are heroes and obviously there are feeders thieves and so on. Time is money very well said. But if someone have money why can't they progress faster. And someone who wants F2P and not do grinding. why play mmorpg?

Honestly well made video but what you say in the video seems a little bit off to me, might aswell say games like warframe are p2win too. Just a few things I DISAGREE with in this video as someone who's recently spent a lot of time in albion and hasnt spent money at all. Gathering isnt definitly the best way to start as a new player, even for more experienced players and whales gathering is a slow process that requires you to farm a lot and unless you are gathering epic and legendary items you'll barely make a living, gathering and craftin is used as a passive income for those who want to log in every once in a while play a bit and then log off while everything sells. In my case I started in black zone (martlock) with tier 4.1 weapons and then got into a guild that accepted new players and then moved to one that would only do Ava Dungeons. Buying tomes isnt really worth it at all and is actually quite stupid, people dont really do it besides to just get t4 unlock on a new branch, and those you dont buy with money, when playing in black zone you earn a reputation token that can be used to purchase tier 8 tomes that give you up to 200k fame, or buy energy which can be sold for a lot of money really quick. the worse part of albion is the start and setting off a foundation, afterwards its just quicker if you know what your doing and make friends along the way, albion even though sells as a game where you can purely play PVE does puts you in situations where PVP CONTENT is the one that'll make you rich. Also, you cant just "buy spec", matter of fact what everyone does is go ahead and just lvl up one weapon to lvl 100, then you do some content with that weapon to get yellow fame and that way you can easily get more levels by using the yellow fame to purchase levels, yellow fame cannot be bought with real money, leaving aside gathering tomes, experience tomes dont really give you that much experience, 4mm in albion is literally barely to nothing and people who often spend money in albion sit with around 200mm to 1billion+ silver, those are the ones we call whales and often are less than the 3% playerbase, you cant just "Buy damage" neither, weapon tiers doesnt really matter if you dont have spec since most of the damage come from weapon and armor spec. Usually the problem comes on the fact that the content in black zones (pvp zones) is owned by guilds and groups of more advanced players, so often new players stick to yellow and blue zones capping themselves to receiving low ammounts of fame and experience, The only grind to do in the game really is just getting a weapon to the lvl 100 (general branch) and then getting spec for each branch of the general one, thats pretty much it and its something that cannot be bought for money. To give an example, I usually play 1 or 2 hours a week and make around 10mm silver by just doing ava roads or ava dungeons or any other content like ganking without putting much of a grind, it really is about finding the way to make the type of content you like and make the money with it, also your idea of mounts is flawed. There are different type of mounts, combats mounts, normal mounts and ZvZ mounts (Juggernaut and the Turtle which are insanely expensive), combat mounts often are faster and a little bit more expensive than your normal mount but tend to have less health, carrying mounts have more health and are slower but carry more weight, basic mounts like horses are the most cheap but also the ones with avg hp and movement speed, combat/ganking mounts like owls, panters, bats, etc, often have more mobility and 1 ability BUT have wayy less HP. Now as I said earlier, of cours you cant compare a tier 4 weapon to a tier 8 weapon, obviously tier 8 will deal a little bit more damage, the thing is even if you buy a t8 weapon it wont matter if you have spec, in albion there's the equivalents. Tier 6: 4.2 5.1 Tier 7: 4.3 5.2 6.1 Tier 8: 5.3 6.2 7.1 and so which often are cheaper, .4 weapons or awakened weapons are a bit more complex to get into but doesnt require you to spend money in it I believe the main problem to be that people see the huge ammounts of money in albion and get scared not knowing how fast you actually make that money For you to acurately buy everything you want with silver and well do like your video you'd have to buy around 100mm of silver and it still wouldnt be that useful because you'd still need spec and experience but hey that's just my opinion

i see the p2w elements especially in gathering professions, where u would essentially grind for eons, but as a player with 5000+hours, albion is about the grind, we do zvz's to win and get rewards, everything revolves around silver. there are some errors in you video i would like to point out firstly you can buy 1 month of premium for 15$ directly from albion shop, which is half the price you have stated, secondly, atm if you make use of premium bonuses, its pays for itself, if you do complain that it takes silver to earn with premium ur right, but solo dungeons (the worst content in albion) themselves reward 50% more. so essentially it jsut speeds up the grind, i have played both on and of premium, and i can tell you that for a fact that 90% of ALL endgame players have premium, yes the start is rough but its smooth sailing ahead. thirdly, you are describing the game as a solo game, when i started as a new player , my guild took me to static dungeons, and for a fact every other mob drops a tome, if you dont wanna play with other people you want to play alone its 100% pay to win, additionally each mob gives 2tomes worth of fame. So in theory the question you would be raising is whether you want to play alone get meager rewards or play with a group and have fun, p.s. after moving to eu, i can tell you for a fact that killing open world mobs in the black zone in t4 flat sets, gives insane silver and fame,and if you play around daily event its even better. Additionally i didnt see and reference to the new upcomming update (journal), where you cant buy your progress you gotta still work on it. YES, you can skip some grind with tomes and silver, but the amount required to SKIP 75% of the grind is more than 150$+ and at that point the game gets boring, I can also tell you i have never EVER SPENT MONEY on albion, and specs and progress isnt everything, there is fun to be had, playing to have fun is ok,spending money to play with friends is ok, but saying albion is COMPLETELY pay to win is not something i can ever agree with. If you want to go solo, its 100% p2w but with friends not so much .

i hope you'll lose all your progress in games cus you didn't show the loot at 12:00

This isn't even the reason I stopped playing this game, all the end game stuff is pushing you towards full loot pvp zones otherwise you're farming and doing dungeons in safe zones for months to buy the stuff of the auction house. The toxic environment of running into a full loot pvp zone and getting 5 people at the least running towards you while you're in t4.5 gear is fucking wild 😂 these savages are the reason why I just stopped going into pvp zones.

You didn't mention the worst p2w feature. Awakened weapons. A gatcha mechanic where you can put in millions of silver in order to get a weapon better than without it. Horrible concept that brought a lot of toxic gameplay due to unbalanced weapons that can be made with it.

Only 28 subs? Nah man get my sub, this video deserves much more, hope you reach 1k About Albion being a pay to win game, well yeah, it is, you basically pay for save a LOT of time farming/PVE/PVP etc... But i feel the devs did it well giving us, the normal players, a chance to get premium at a high silver cost, that way we all have one thing in common to reach at: The premium. Btw this is leaving a hyper-inflated economy where the premium cost escalates each day devaluateing the main coin on the game, but that is content for other video i guess XD

The worst? no, pay to win? more like pay to progress, U cant just buy 8.4 then going rampage in BZ, there are always bunch of skillfull gankers who gonna kill u, lol. You can get premium for free, just use free 3 day premium to get silver, easy, can`t be said with other mmorpg that sell VIP status or premium with real money. In the end, the developer need to make money, and it is just Free To play game, crying pay to win at F2P game is just like childish behavior.

i would say its pay to progress rather then pay to win cause the 8.4 brimstone clip can be bought by a solo player very easily if they know what they are doing which they learn by not skipping that part by swiping & most of the time the swipers who swipe can swipe fames silver gold and everything else but experience of playing the game and if they just swipe past the blue / yellow zone area of the game and go out to blackzone/mist in there 8.3/8.4 build its 99% chance that they will die to someone less geared then them but with more experience. Anyways nice vid

Actually, you don't even know what you're talking about because the actual dictionary definition of pay to win is when you pay real money, this is in-game gold.

is the game p2w? yes. but its one of the most free to play friendly games at the same time, this video is super biased, its like trying to fool outsiders by making this look like a gacha 😂. nice try to milk content but being disingenuous wont get you subs in the long run

So my takeaway is that it's just a matter of definition if it's pay to win. With some definitions of the term it's not, with yours it is. 🤷‍♂

If buying progression in the game is considered pay to win, then pls tell me of a mmo that is not pay to win.

Played this game for 2 years and i can wholeheartedly say that it's a piece of shit, the new server and them not allowing to transfer anything was the final nail in the coffin for me

you section on premium is flawed beyond the point of stupid. if you are spending real money on premium you buy the premium directly not via buying gold. that way the most expensive version of premium is only 14.95 USD the ingame valuation in silver is so that if you make enough ingame money via your gameplay you can get premium status without having to use real money. so at best you are wrong - at worst you chose to misrepresent this in order for your video stick to stay on your chosen point.

oh my god I have never seen so much nonsense in a video, I love whales, you allow the developers to live and me to loot your shiny stuff in ZvZ the gold on Albion is a market, if there are more people who swipe their credit card the more the Gold will go down and if there are less people who swipe the more it goes up, This allows developers to have more or less the same income each month and to pay their fees, server and salary...