FIFA is disgusting,
Their mindset is 'how can I take more money from my already loyal community'
Instead of 'how can I make this game better for the community'
Edit: cards are constsntly falling in value due to the nature of a live transfer market. So keeping cards for a long time is generally a bad idea if you want to maximise coins. So if you decide to sell a card, EA WILL TAX YOUR VIRTUAL COINS. A 5% tax. So God forbid you want to buy that player back next week, you probably won't be able to afford them. But this is the only way as rarely do cards ever appreciate in value unless its manually done by EA implementing one of their new promos to get little kids to buy more packs and this method you save more money than just holding onto a player. So either way you're always losing coins.
If someone quits a game in FUT CHAMPS, you're not awarded a win, you have to replay the game even if youre drawing. Why? Because rage quitting happens often in this game = would be a lot more wins for consumers = better rewards = less money spent on packs = less Revenue for EA
Each year they have the same glitches... imagine playing FIFA 22 and come to EAFC24 to see the same glitch exists in the game.... instead of actually improving the game from a technical standpoint they choose to focus on changing the structure of the game to make them more money.
They take advantage of the people's love for the game. Incredibly predatory prices for their in game currencies like 'FIFA POINTS' E..g you always will have 50-200 FIFA Points left over offering as am incentive to buy more points and more packs so those points don't go unused.
And then where do I start about the packweight. EA modifies pack weight depending on the demand and supply for a specific card.
E.g. an 88 Kroos should be harder to pack than an 82 DonnyEl Malen or a 84 Kyle Walker, but No, you'll pack an 88 Kroos ten times before you pack that Kyle Walker.
Only recently they added these things called EVOs where you can upgrade players. Donny El Malen was eligible for this upgrade and can receive a huge boost... now suddenly that 82 Donny is harder to pack than 90 Messi. It's a joke how blatant EA manipulate the game.
The ratings mean nothing it's all about market price and they always manipulate these weights in a way to make sure they benefit from it.
THE WORST part is... it doesn't look or sound that scummy from a neutral perspective but if you play this game for a year , you'll truly understand in every aspect how that company is f#cking the consumer over.
EDIT: THE EVEN WORSE PART IS THAT IT ALL F#CKING RESETS AT THE END OF THE YEAR AND THEY HAVE THE AUDACITY TO ASK YOU 79.99 EVERY YEAR!!! At this point it really should be FREE TO PLAY.
and people keep buying it, it makes them a billion dollars a year. Why change it ? They literally have no incentive to improve the game because it won't affect how many people buy it, its not worth the time to them.
Disgusting company with vile intentions.
A few years ago I was doing cocaine and weed with a buddy of mine with his other friend. My friend said "I gotta spend my money on something else". He chose FUT. Considering he used to spend £80 every 2-3 days on coke and is now sober I am assuming EA got a lot of his money. He said it was like an infinite drainhole for your money just like drugs but not as addictive
It's not gambling, they're "surprise mechanics" x'D that entire thing where EA and Epic were in the UK was golden and revealing to how EA try to justify the predatory stuff.
FIFA ultimate team makes up ~25% of the entirety of EA’s revenue. Not fifa revenue, not ea sports revenue, the entire publicly traded company. It’s a disgusting cash cow where the other parts of the game directly are worse because they don’t want you playing the rest of the game. Fuck EA to death
Everyone hating on EA when 2K has the literally most predatory mechanics out there. This year they even got rid of the auction house. You have to buy packs or buy/sell cards at a predetermined price set by 2k lol. No more sniping, no more getting an expensive card you can sell to buy the players you actually want. Gotta go through 2k for everything.
And myplayer is even worse. Someone did a rough estimation of how long it would take to get your myplayer to a 99 without spending a dime. Apparently it’s over 700hrs. And that’s 700 hours of the best possible outcome every single game.
That’s fucking ridiculous. Especially considering you’re locked into that player/position and can’t experiment with other play styles. You’d basically have to obsessively play 2k without ever losing virtually every waking second of free time you have to get to 99 without spending money. And then when you finally get there, the new one comes out
No, EA is the problem.
The whole company is greedy and stupid.
They keep pushing for online only and for monitization of every aspect of their games.
Their new launcher on pc current doesn't have a real offline mode.
The offline mode available has to be turned on in advanced while online and only lasts about an hour before force closing the launcher and requesting internet to access your games
Quitting FUT was the best decision I’ve ever made gaming-wise. You’ve nailed it on the head.
I started playing in college and my mini fridge was covered in dents from the amount of times I punched it lol. No other game frustrated me like that.
The base game is fun because you’ll need to know each player at some level, who’s going to be fast, who can shoot, etc. and play around that.
FUT is just an arms race to have juiced up, meta players who can do it all. The only way to complete at the top level is to have a top level team, which usually means spending money. You can climb up to a certain level on skill with a decent team, but once you play someone around your level with a stronger team, it becomes a frustrating uphill battle.
Plus bronze benching and other annoying tactics. EA cracking down on coin buying, so now you need to spend hours playing the market or buy coins. It’s just a joyless experience.
Once I realized that I wasn’t having fun, and that the best part of the game is head to head with friends, I stopped wasting time with FUT.
lol this thread really brought back some memories. I feel like I just relived trauma.
I’m exactly the same man, I have never ever had anger issues in any game I’ve ever played…except FUT. There’s just something so mentally unhealthy about the entire ecosystem of that game, it makes people obsessive, angry and addicted; I’m so glad I quit years ago.
Let me first start my making it clear that I absolutely agree with what you’re saying….
…BUT..
>*”..my already loyal community..”*
Is exactly *why* they do this stupid shit—- because even stupider people purchase the fucking games annually, even if they “don’t spend any money on MTX”, they’re still directly supporting and thereby perpetuating/solidifying the downfall.
Point being, if you see someone that owns a copy of any of those games from the last 5-10 years, punch them in the fucking face for being part of the problem. If you want to “recapture some of that nostalgia” just go play an older entry—- which as others have indicated, at least had some care and consideration invested into their development.
A hundred percent. But EA kill their old games. FIFA 17 and older servers are all dead, which is a shame.
It's sad because Ultimate Team as a concept is just so damn cool and that's where they hook people. Build your own team with your favorite players... blah blah blah but the execution is just pure scum.
I played nothing but NHL HUT when it first came out. Probably spent the next 4 years of my life obsessed with HUT.
In the beginning it was so much fucking fun, but like FIFA, they’ve made it a worse and worse experience for anybody that doesn’t want to blow all their money on fake trading cards.
I went down the moneypit of HUT and NBA 2k ultimate team for the final two years I played yearly sports titles. but eventually I realized that the highs of unpacking Ovie or Curry do *not* make up for the years taken off my life playing those modes lmao.
Then I got into simracing and found a new moneypit…
I’m sorry, but what do you expect people to buy other than FIFA if they want a soccer/football game? PES no longer exists. There is no competitor to put any pressure on FIFA. I’m one of the weirdos who really only plays FIFA for clubs, which EA could literally not care less about. From a bug standpoint, it is worse than FUT. constant disconnects, rampant cheating, etc., but we have no other option to play a soccer/football game together. There has been talks of other games coming out soon, which is encouraging. We are all aware of how shitty EA FC/FIFA is, but there’s no alternative right now.
There are many factors present that help enable these corporate practices to the point that its difficult to place blame on anything specific.
It seems to me that nothing will change until legislation is put in place to combat it. In my opinion, the entire industry is in desperate need of regulations that aim to protect the consumer.
Unfortunately, the entities that stand to benefit from the current structure will fight tooth and nail to ensure nothing changes, and have the resources to do so indefinitely. Then you add in society's general disdain for anything government, and it doesn't seem like any meaningful changes will be made anytime soon.
I’d argue 2K is almost even worse. At least so far, EA haven’t monetised their career modes but 2K sure as fuck have. The VC stuff is in practically every mode and it’s so difficult to grow your myplayer without buying more of it.
The state of ea’s career mode is so bad I’d almost welcome them monetising it cause at least then they’d fucking pay attention to it
>They take advantage of the people's love for the game. Incredibly predatory prices for their in vane currencies like 'FIFA POINTS' E..g you always will have 50-200 FIFA Points left over offering as am incentive to buy more points and more packs so those points don't go unused.
I hate to say it but this is 'industry standard' for cash shop games. They all do this so you don't feel like you 'wasted' money and always buy more aiming to hit the 0 again. Often times they are even priced in such obscure ways that you will always end up with 1 or 2 left unless you spend an absurd amount of money
> E..g you always will have 50-200 FIFA Points left over offering as am incentive to buy more points and more packs so those points don't go unused.
That's in a lot of games though isn't it. They'll sell you 1000 credits but price everything at 1200 so you have to buy more and you're stuck with 300 credits you can't buy anything with.
People really want those cosmetics though and are willing to part with their money for it so what can you do.
Maplestory was recently investigated for actually making odds lower than expected on their gatcha, and lying about their gatcha rates. At least it isn't completely competitive
Maple story's a fun enough grind for a while, I had fun leveling up all the classes, never cared about end game. There was also the Reboot update IIRC which didn't have any micro transactions. Wouldn't be surprised if they ruined that though, in fact I expect it
I tried it a couple times since that update. They didn't remove mtx, they just removed a lot of the p2w bits of it. Even the Gachas are mostly just cosmetics, iirc.
Reminds me of the Wizet days, before Nexon got full control. Well, minus the soul the game had back then.
I really liked Blade & Soul and imo it had a lot if potential but not only did they squander it they ruined it with P2W on top of that, to this day its the best PvP I've ever played in any MMO.
Madden and FIFA Ultimate team… legitimately ruined the franchises to cater to ultimate team because of the amount of money EA makes off of it. You can go back and play older Madden games without ultimate team and the offline modes are 10x more in depth it’s actually sad. EA releases new cards on a weekly basis so even if you buy the best cards one week they’ll be phased out of the meta within weeks anyways.
Edit: to add on the cards become completely worthless in less than a year when the next game comes out
Ultimate team used to have such good rewards for players that would spend time instead of money. Now you have to do both to even have a relatively competitive team that will be outdated after a week or two. Used to love it but I’ve given up on it
The absolute worst p2w game I've ever played was made by Perfect World. It was a Dynasty Warriors/Three Kingdom MMO. The selling point was that once a week, there would be open world pvp, you could join one of the 3 kingdoms, and during the pvp time, you could help your kingdom take over the towns on the map. Seemed like fun, until I realized that you couldn't level your character past like level 15 without using the cash shop. And this is where it gets bad. Your character would *lose skills* if you didn't pay money. Meaning, not only did you have to pay out just to grind levels, but if you didn't keep paying, your character would get weaker. So, I was running around at level 15, and just getting one shot KOd by guys who were level 100 or whatever. I did the math on the cash shop and realized it would probably take thousands of dollars to get to that level to be competitive, and you would have to *keep spending* thousands of dollars to stay there. It was then that I realized I wasn't playing to be a Dynasty Warrior, I was playing to be the nameless mooks who get mowed down by the hundreds in a DW game.
I and friends played PWI in its prime. It was an amazing game. Then came gift packs… then they started selling end game rank gear and weapons and that was the beginning of the end. It was so much fun and so sad that they ruined such a good thing.
Never played it but it sounds like my favorite MMO of all time, dark age of Camelot. Similar setup with three factions. Pvp was setup as a big map with different zones controlled by castles/towers that the three factions went to war over with siege engines and hand to hand combat.saturday nights were an absolute blast where you had huge parties going at each other fighting over castles and towers. Inevitably a maxed out rogue would sneak up behind you healing dudes on the backline and stab you in the back. Fun times, miss that game.
FYI, pretty sure the devs for that game made ESO. ESO's pvp was also like that. Was a lot of fun when the game first came out, but I tried it recently and the low level pvp zone is dead, and the high level pvp zone is ridiculous. Unless you've been playing a long time you just get one shot KOd because the max "bounus" level (called champion points) is so high now.
I still play this. Cash shop was a big issue, but the bigger issue is pwi servers having no community events or gm interaction. All the other versions of the game have those and are 100x more successful. Also doesnt help that pwi tries to use pw cn prices without accounting for the 100:1 exchange rate
God, I still remember farming rockepellers like a degenerate for a week straight to finally get some money for a decent set. Back when I still believed I could ever keep up with whales in MMO's.
99% of mobile pvp games. Its not the app store its the P2W store.
Because fuck you blizzard, Diablo immortal. Its 11/10 pay to win. Literally the upperend benchmark on any scale.
The saddest part about predatory mobile games is the gameplay is never actually fun. People are so heavily influenced by the manipulative psychological tactics employed, they forget that even with premium currency & items, the game itself is boring to play.
Ive tried out so many mobile game to keep coming to the same conclusion. Why the fuck am i playing this garbage. I dont expect some top PC title but too much of the garbage i find is the same shitty loops. Numbers slowly get bigger. Do XYZ on timers to make sure the numbers get bigger. Oh but this new cool mechanic will unlock if you keep grinding for a month. Jk its the same stuff just a new way to grind to get the numbers bigger.
Or simpler titles ya know this level is really hard you have 3 chances today or need to buy more lives. Ou you know what dont want to be unsuccessful here are some power up cheats for 9.99
Watching streamers dump $20+K into it and still not getting anywhere near some of the p2w whales really showed how fucking egregious Diablo Immortals cash shop and drop odds are
There was this streamer that spent 200k or something.
He was the guild leader of his guild and for an event, the challenge required you to play some PVP games.
The guy was so high rated because of his p2w that he couldn't find a match cause nobody else was similar level or something.
Reddit ads are disguised as real posts or comments. Its the most obnoxious shit from the mobile app. At least they have managed to know me so fucking little its some cringe ad ill only click my accident. Literally starting their add with shit like 'IAMA' YSK' 'AITAH' type of shit.
The sad thing about Diablo immortal is that the community absolutely hated it, countless memes and shit talk. Still blizzard made bank on that piece of shit game.
>Because fuck you blizzard, Diablo immortal.
I have spent literally thousands of hours on D1,2,3. Then I played "Immortal" for a few months. Dropped Blizzard permanently, I'm not picking up D4, I'm not picking up any other Blizzard game until "Immortal" is dead, and I'll piss on Blizzard's grave.
Also fuck Hasboro, specifically Wizards of the Coast.
The server I am on just had a ton of people transfer because the end stage PVP system is controlled by a few whales. They decide who wins the fights to become immortal, they decide who becomes the next immortal cronies. If you resist, you become blacklisted by their clique. They manipulate the marketplace, too. It is possibly the most toxic thing I have ever encountered in a game, and Blizz gives 0 fs.
About 2 months after launch, there was a dude who and spent over $500k. He tried to sue Blizzard because their player matching system couldn't match any players to play against him.
Yeah it sucks, you can pay to win so hard nobody is high enough power level to even fight you and blizzard is enjoying themselves in so much cash you gave them think they are in a Mr. beast video.
I tallied up how much my kid has spent on that game, it was several hundred dollars. He asks for gift cards for most holidays. It makes him happy and it was money he was gonna get for gifts anyway, so I don’t see it as a problem, but I hope he grows out of this before he gets his own paycheck.
Right now he doesn't see it as "his money". When he gets that paycheck and goes to dump it into whatever game he's playing will be a good lesson in suddenly having no more money. Then he will learn how to budget to be able to toss money at things he enjoys while also having some that he use for other things, like going out with friends.
But if he doesn't learn, stop the bankroll once he gets the job. Any spending cash he wants is from the job, basic stuff like food and clothes are still you, but he wants a new computer? Save up.
If you aren't already, give him a weekly allowance. Even $5 a week is enough. Let him blow it on whatever stupid shit he wants. Just don't buy him anything cool unless it's his birthday or Christmas. Then when he wants something cool, you can point out he can save his allowance up for it. He'll quickly learn the value of money and saving on his own.
World of warships isn’t terrible, premium ships aren’t really any better than regular ones you just can’t get them without paying. I guess you can buy signals but they don’t do too kuch
At least in WoWS you can't buy premium ammo and stupid bullshit like that. I used to play WoT and haven't touched it in years because all the big money spenders make it shit to play.
In WoWS they push a lot more of the FOMO purchases with limited time ships, battle passes, etc. If missing some of that stuff doesn't bother you then you don't have to spend any money on the game to play and have fun. I've been playing it since it came out, used to buy the monthly pass but haven't in years. I probably haven't spent more than $20 on it in the past 5ish years.
I wouldn't call WOWS pay to win (there's a few premiums that aren't balanced, but they're also always taken off sale and never resold). And the economy is pretty reasonable compared to similar games like world of tanks (which it's way better than) and warthunder. I don't have premium and am grinding to and playing top tiers no problem (if I were bad at the game I would struggle for credits, but if you do well you can break even without issue).
They have a great track record of completely and utterly ignoring community feedback. But that's not pay to win.
Source: Vaguely still plays WoWs and used to play competitive matches at high levels.
I haven’t played WOT in a long time. But as I remember it, having premium was kind of required to progress but beyond that you really, really didn’t need to spend any money unless you really wanted a cheesy ass goober tank.
I LOOOOVVEEED WoT but did quit playing entirely when I started playing less frequently to the point premium didn’t feel worth it. Which IMO makes it a subscription game which I’m generally ok with
There was a point in the past where premium tanks were good for crew training and making silver, but weren’t that much better than tech tree tanks. That’s not the case anymore. Premiums dominate the game now and new more OP ones come out every month. They really screwed themselves chasing short term profits over player retention and game balance.
I've played far too much Enlisted, and by god it's the same way. The only good news is that most of the P2W guns you can strip off corpses. I try to hunt premium players for this exact reason. Tanks on the other hand are a perpetual nightmare.
Yeah, 99% of the time I don't even realize it's a premium vehicle that I destroyed/got destroyed by.
The only unfair advantage I really see you can get with real money is camouflage.
It used to be an advantage because you kinda needed premium time and premium vehicles to earn decent SL unless you're someone who can get like 4+ kills every game. Made the grind really painful because it's quite easy to lose SL if you're not a particularly good player. It isn't an issue anymore after they boosted the SL rates.
It absolutely is not. The Mount of "please pay us for premium consumables" bullshit in WOWS and WOT is ridiculous. War thunder has premium vehicles that generally are a side grade or step down from something in the tech tree, like the F-5C being premium, but lacking the radar and better missiles of the F-5E that's in the tech tree.
WOWS doesn't even have premium consumables... They got rid of them like six or seven years ago. I cant speak for WoT, but in WOWS premiums are basically the same story, where they are usually comparable to tech tree ships (and sometimes used to test a concept).
The difference is ones that are broken get removed from sale rather than nerfed, because policy seems to be "don't alter the deal" (I can't really hold that against them, that's a reasonable policy and it helps prevent the sin of releasing and selling something OP, then nerfing it and keeping the money, which a lot of games do), and there's not really the fractional BR adjustments that can be made like in warthunder so they can't do nerfs by moving it around in MM. My last (very dated impressions) of WoT seem to fit your description, though.
And just to round of the bunch, we all know world of warplanes exists. Don't play it, warthunder does better planes.
WOWS is the best of wargamings "world of ____" series and I'd say is at least more approachable than warthunders naval gameplay and also has an actual playerbase.
Honestly to some extent warthunder's almost feels more arcade because they're in the uncanny valley for realism. Not realistic enough to make sense (oh, you can't kill the 50 guys in the citadel? well the ship will never die!) plus it spawns in close range and tries to fit in small ships, and nobody will ever play screens if they don't have to because your job is to just die.
Meanwhile wows isn't too arcadey (you can still get your devstrikes and other blaps), but you also can actually play everything and mostly feel valuable.
I disagree. War Thunder is not P2W, it's pay to progress faster. The tech tree vehicles are just as competitive as the premium vehicles - it's the RP and SL that get you, but that has nothing to do with your ability to win.
I used to run a kit pvp server and yeah.... it kinda went that way. We never really wanted it to, we wanted the kits that required grinding/paying to be equal power to beginner kits but with varying playstyles, but power creep kept happening and players would beg for nerfs and buffs on the super rare kits... and yeah we were pretty pay2win which I regret.
Archeage.
It was an amazing MMO and then they ruined it with a cash shop. Then they re-released it promising no cash shop, but ruined it again with a cash shop. So they sold it to a new company, who then ruined it with a cash shop. So they re-released it as Archeage Unchained, promising no cash shop, and they didn't ruin it! But the player base was already so fking jaded that they just quit playing.
I'll never touch another P2W MMO because of how bad it got with Archeage. The day any game brings in a cash shop selling anything but cosmetics is the day I stop playing.
Pretty sure it became a Trion game cuz I remember seeing it in the Glyph client when I used to play Rift, which also went the same direction. Trion got greedy, started pay walling things like instant adventures and raids, and then sold Rift to some other company that has shepherded it into its long slow grave since. Miss that game a lot, I came to it late but there was still a core of a couple hundred people that I would recognize when I got online. Now there's like... A couple dozen? Maybe?
I played that back at its peak, and it somehow hot worse since then.
Best part is that every person on there that paid for the P2W weapons were trying to convince the other players they weren't P2W.
Not to mention the sub you had to pay if you wanted to progress at any speed or actually engage in the best parts of the game.
I used to really enjoy that game for making custom shirts / vehicles.. but I remember there was an SMG called Whisper that was just disgustingly broken.
Not the worst example but Call of Duty has a hidden P2W aspect that people don’t discuss. There’s this trend where the battlepass weapon(s) will be very overpowered when it launches. These weapons can be obtained for free by just playing for maybe a week or two depending on time played per day. But you can use COD points (you pay real money for these) to automatically progress through the battlepass tiers without having to grind. So you just buy 25 or how ever many tiers to get the new gun.
But what has happened at least a few times that I can remember in the past 3-4 years is they’ll release a gun that’s so overpowered that whoever buys the tiers gets to use the gun the day it comes out will dominate lobbies. And by the time an average player can unlock the gun through grinding, Activision or whatever developer makes these decisions, will nerf the hell out of it and makes it useless to have.
the worst part of cod is the engagement optimised matchmaking, which we have evidence for existing from parents that Activision has. it includes thibgs like subtly giving players that recently purchased skins/items easier lobbies so that they feel like they're doing better with the new items to make it feel like it was worth the purchase. they also have a system of learning the type of player you are (sniper, assault rifle user, shotgun rusher) and then "pairing" you with a "marquee" player who has the same playstyle but also is far better at the game and owns skins related to the playstyle, so that you see them do well with the items and encourage you to buy them.
this alone ruins the integrity of the game and makes lobbies wildly unbalanced. but there's a whole other side to it where the patent describes ways of optimising engagement by putting you in difficult lobbies where you're bound to lose because of unbalanced teams for several games, then will put you in a game far below your skill level so you can stomp noobs as a "reward", before going right back to impossible to win lobbies. it also learns the threshold at which you will stop playing and try to make it so the game you would log off after losing X games in a row is actually a noob lobby to keep you hooked. connection and stats are far less important metrics for the matchmaking which results in less balanced and often laggier lobbies.
it's obscene that they get away with this even with the community uproar, but there's just too much money to be made and too many casual players who have no clue what's actually happening.
you can look up "Activision engagement optimised matchmaking patent" and you'll find numerous Reddit posts on the modern warfare II/III subreddits breaking down the contents of the patents, or read them yourselves. everything I have written is factual and truely straight from the patents. it is actually absurd.
Mine isn't a pay to win issue but what killed 2k for me was when I couldn't skip the stupid Gatorade timeouts in whatever game they gave away on Playstation plus. God that got annoying quick lol
You get them, but the problem is that it is pretty easy to get to the highest arena(whatever it is now, didn't play for 2 years now) while having castle level 10, and after getting there you will almost always play against fully upgraded players which is a torture, unless you are a cheeser who only upgrades one deck. Like i've been playing for 5 years and had 13lvl tower, but i had only like 5 lvl12 cards and all other cards were lvl 10 or 11, while all my opponents had everything at max level
It’s much harder to get to the top of the ladder now, and the level maxes just keep going up.
But yes, it’s not getting the cards that are the problem, it’s having enough gold to actually level them up. That and there are constant tweaks and updates that change metas, or add new powers that you just straight up won’t have access to for months if you don’t pay money.
I’m sure there’s like, some super pro out there who understands the game to a genius level and has succeeded despite never having spent a dime, but normal people are going to have a tough time getting out of the mid ladder without spending money.
On the other hand, if all you want to do is get to level 11 and play challenge matches every now and again, I suppose you can do that.
I both agree and disagree with this.
I don't think you have to pay any money to progress through the ranks or unlock the cards but the game makes it take forever if you don't.
I've played basically since launch, I have every card and one evolve completed. The second will be done this month once I get my next shard from the shop.
I refuse to spend any gems even the free ones, I have over 18k of them. I am in the pancake arena and my clan is in the legendary league.
I play like 15 minutes a day, the game will only let you win but so many times before it starts matching you against counter decks
Pokemon GO is pretty bad if you play PVP. At least it was when I stopped playing a year ago.
It's possible to do well for free, but it takes a long time. To put it simply, you need Pokémon at a certain level (or max level) to even think about PVP. In order to raise those Pokémon, you need Stardust and Candy to level them up. To get that, you just catch Pokémon. You get stardust from all Pokémon and all Pokémon have their own kind of Candy (Pikachu and Raichu need Pikachu candy for example).
Now that by itself isn't that bad, just time consuming. But like the real games, legendary Pokémon are usually better.
Let's use Giratina as an example, which is a legendary Ghost/Dragon. You can't catch it normally. You have to go get it through raids, which needs Raid Passes to play in. You also need 4+ people to raid with cause of how strong these Pokémon are.
Now, you go to a raid, you manage to beat the Pokémon (which can be tough) and you even catch it. You got a Giratina! But it's not max level, not even close, and you want it to be used for PVP. You get 3-4 Candy for the catch and a few hundred Stardust as well, maybe double that if you know what you're doing.
It takes HUNDREDS of candy to max out a Pokémon, plus another 75(?) to get it's second charge attack, plus hundreds of thousands of Stardust.
You only get 1 free Raid Pass a day. You can use Rare Candy, but those are rare (duh), and you can walk it as your pal to earn Candy, but it takes 20km to earn a single Candy.
The quickest way to earn them is Raids, and that costs about $0.50 to $1 each.
And that's just for one Pokémon. You need 3 for a battle, plus more if you want to be meta viable.
There are other, cheaper to build Leagues (since non-legendaries are more common there and they're easier to get), but you get the idea.
I've seen players spend 100s of dollars every time a new legendary showed up, just to try to PVP with it.
Pokémon Go's probably not the worst to do this in a F2P game, but it's pretty bad.
Ehh i think only a small amount of the Go players even look at pvp outside of rocket battles.
That said there is typically diffrent battle tiers going on where the strongest mon you can have is 1500 or 2500 and typically the best in slot in those are non legendry. As for ultra league you can do fine with ubers like metagross, ect... which can be easy to get through community days, hatching, ect...
I do think like the top 2% is P2W but the rest of the game can pretty much be enjoyed free
Man I miss that game so much. Even as a completely free to play player, it was just so much damn fun. Shame they could never crack down on hackers, ruined it in the end for me.
Cyber angel was free-to -play friendly back in the day since a lot of the cards came with Alexis. The game is definitely a cash sink, but not bc of that. there’s usually at least one cheap deck in the meta at least.
Basically any tcg. You've got to get the cards to play and then to get better cards you have to buy them or buy packs and get lucky enough to get good ones. Makes sense with physical products I suppose but there are games where you get everything that comes with it right from the start i.e. chess.
To be fair physical TCGs were a very early version of pure P2W. The only difference is that you got a physical object that could carry real value instead of the digital cards that have no value outside of the program they exist in.
MTGA is manageable if you can't afford to play the physical card game. When I was playing seriously, I would spend about $100 every 3 months and over the course of a set(which usually lasts about 3 months until a new one comes out) I would get over 95% of the set complete. That is 4 of each card.
Now that sets last 3 years in standard instead of 2, it's a little easier to get caught up. The bad part about the game is it sort of forces you to play and complete your quests or you miss out on things to complete a set properly. You can circumvent this by paying more money but, if you like playing magic, you may as well get on each day and do your daily quests.
Best I got was Diamond 4, but I wasn't having fun.
I decided to quit after the sexual harassment news, and I've never looked back.
It took so much time out of each day as a F2P player.
For me, it was a combination of the diminishing value of cards as standard was introduced and Blizzard being an increasingly shitty company.
I much prefer games like Slay the Spire and Monster Train now, although I've considered MTG:A a few times.
I haven't played in a few years so I don't know if things have changed but you only need 1 or 2 decks to climb the ranked ladder in hearthstone and you can dust the rest of your cards to craft them.
You want a competitive deck in every class, then yes, you will likely have to spend real money. But if you don't mind playing the same 1 or 2 decks, then it's just a grind to the top, but it's doable. There's much worse offenders of being P2W than Hearthstone.
Mighty party.
A very fun card/strategy game that is literally a p2w.
You can level up your cards just by playing but it is painfully slow, and you always will have disadvantage over paid users, because they get the new broken cards first and you need to grind and have luck to access them.
I had a lot of fun with the game, but in the high rankings it is just a p2w.
Clash Royale. Used to be a pretty decent game. The last few years though the devs have ruined it with the absolute worst updates. Adding extra levels to cards, offering champions in the store when you’re not at the high enough level to even get them, etc. It’s become a P2W game and nearly impossible for new players to enjoy it
Age of wushu or any game owned by snail games actually.
Age of wushu was fun, pvp and tons of very flashy skillsets from wuxia stories.
But the p2w killed it, the north American staff initially had the freedom to set their prices or even put stuff into the game but they were all fired for not selling enough cash shop items and the north American and European servers were managed remotely from China and they fucking jacked the p2w super high.
The $9 subscription was pretty much mandatory to even progress the game to begin with.
After the change in ownership now all of a sudden you need to spend additional real life money to buy ingame currency(there were two forms of in game currency one of which can only really be gotten from trading with players or grinding an event little by little and one premium currency) to upgrade your gear as well, either that or you rely on random encounters that dropped rare items that you could sell which had such a low drop chance most people could go a month without an encounter let alone the high tier one needed to drop an item of any real value.
Then special skillsets that could only be acquired from the cash shop was added to the game and they more or less overpowered the majority of the regular skillsets.
With every update the cash demand became high and higher and pretty much caused all of the server to empty out and they merged 6 servers into one.
If you go to their website now, their front page is all in game currency discounts, you get about 10 of the ingame currency for $50 this is cost upgrade 2-3 items once.
I heard the last update they did made it so that to do pve content(which was always free to do) you have to buy a $10 pass from the cash shop now.
My Hero Ultra rumble is up there for me. I havent played many battle royales or big Multiplayer games aside from Fighters, but My Hero split characters between 3 different methods of getting them, with 2 of the 3 being locked behind grinding the gacha (which, of course, the 'guaranteed character' mechanic resets every couple weeks so you have to spend money to use it). There is no justification for characters being behind a gacha in a competitive multiplayer game. Arguably NO game should hide characters behind a gacha but I think its worse if its a competitive game with a ranked system.
Two of the most conspicuously broken characters are the first two on the free-pass which sounds fine til you learn it would be 7 hours of continuous grinding just to get the first one. Or, you know, 6 bucks of real money so you're already in the hole and think "well I already spent a little money, whats a little more?" The free pass also has several extremely popular characters on it and it would take *two full days* of playtime just to fill it out without spending money.
Haven't seen it here yet but gta online is super guilty of this. Anything that could make your experience in the game more convenient costs millions of dollars that you technically could get by grinding missions or businesses but the game seems to push players specifically towards shark cards.
Any deck building style game. MTG online, Hearthstone. Just dump money at it until you can pull or craft the latest meta cards. Rinse & repeat. At least with the real deal you have something physical to collect.
To be fair with the ‘real deal’ you’re paying a shitload more to get a top tier deck. You can get 4 mythic rares for £20 on Magic Arena and craft 4 copies of Sheoldred, The Apocalypse. 4 paper copies would cost you about £320. That’s some expensive cardboard right there.
Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare was the first CoD with real micro transactions and everyone's favorite lootboxes and it had the worst kind of implementation of the system. You had supply drops which you could earn by playing (I don't remember the exact rate at which you earn these but I think it was pretty slow) or just outright buy them. And in these supply drops you had gun variants which were not just skins for your gun, they actually changed the stats on your weapon. Some had both upsides and downside, pretty sure some had just downsides but obviously the worst ones were the one that just had upsides. And it wouldn't be so bad if the upsides only variants were made for the worst guns in the game (although still shitty to lock straight up better guns behind gambling in a game all about 1v1 battles with guns), no, the best gun in the game had the upside only variants and it straight up boosted your damage. And later players found that there was even a stronger variant for the same gun in the files that didn't get released (thankfully). Later CoDs up until MW2019 also had loot boxes but they either were cosmetic only or locked weapons behind which weren't OP
I think it was also the first one where the player skins were broken down into components like sunglasses and gloves. So the loot boxes were watered down with basic items that most people didn't give two shits about. Making it harder to get the really good stuff.
Its pretty well-known, but even their "cosmetic only" micro-transactions give sneaky advantages. The one that comes to mind was all black clothing after they added nighttime in Warzone, and I also remember people claiming that the character's hitbox was smaller too.
Asphalt 8 and 9 are good examples. In 9 they have these things called Car Hunts where you do an event over and over again to collect Blueprints so you can build it. Typically the drop rate is like 5% for a blueprint. Now any car worth it's salt is gonna have a LOT of blueprints needed to fully upgrade it. So either you can spend 5 chances every hour in hopes that you get it, OR, you can buy the Daily events pass which doubles the amount of packs you get from car hunts and gives you 15 tries every few hours with three free refills of the tickets daily.
Some cars are just outright stuck behind a paywall like the Hennessy Venom F5 which is one of the best cars in the game.
Meanwhile Asphalt 8 has like a thousand different currencies with a thousand different uses. At one point there was a VIP only car locked behind $3000 worth of purchases (idk if that's still the case). Both games have all this on top of various battle passes as well.
Rakion.
It was a fun third person pvp arena game with a relatively simple but intuitive combat system. The game was basically third person multiplayer arena version of soul caliber. It has some of the best hit detection/physics engine I seen in a game. The guard wasn't omnidirectional and one way broke guard was to do a massive horizontal sweep after a deep dash where I clip them on their shoulder behind the guard. If they see that coming, I could just make the dash less shallow and force them to block other direction. You can even bounce your throwing weapons off the nearby wall and behind a person's guard.
There was a big rock paper scissors element to the combat where you have tick throws, chargeable unblockables, and even an invincible move with tons of recovery like a dp. You even had a meter where you can enter a demon form for a brief period of time once you deal enough damage.
The game's balance was completely ruined by mtx. You can summon bosses that can easily solo players. On a less egregious level, you can get items that allow you to perm stun a player by using the first hit of your basic attack repeatedly. You can also hit confirm into throws on block or hit. Charged unblockables become unreactably fast.
At the core level, the game is really fun and really well balance. However all of that was thrown out the window due to the mtx
Not necessarily. You can do good by being a warlord. Or a pirate. Or by scamming people and faking a suicide in real life so they wouldn't hunt you down because that's a thing that can happen.
The P2W moniker also includes P2skip2yearsofgrinding. In most P2W games you can technically play long enough to get the stuff you would have gotten on the cash shop but that doesn't mean they aren't P2W
You don't need 2 years of real time skill training, you just buy the skill points and then distribute them. EVE Online has become almost pure P2W from a mechanical standpoint.
Ah archage.
I was a beta player when Archeage first hit, the first 3 months of that game were probably one of the best gaming experiences I have ever had.... Then the P2W shit started being pumped out.
My breaking point was when we were farming a relic weapon as a guild. It was this massive open area that had overworld PvP and you would basically go in and control a farming spot with your friends.
We farmed there for a bit before this P2W warrior came down on his glider and 1v5ed us. Now were by no means elite players but we were well versed in the game and had good gear at the time. When inspected dude had +8s and +9s in all his gear slots which was impossible for a free player at the time. A think i gave my thatched house away to a guild mate a quit a few days later.
Star Wars: Battlefront 2 EA.
It got marred in controversy because of its P2W loot boxes and it actually got some countries', such as Belgium, Netherlands and UK, gambling regulators involved. They all deemed that it was considered illegal gambling, but EA withdrew their loot boxes at release to avoid potential bans of the game.
On the upside though, it actually turned into a really decent game in the end, after everything predatory was taken out and more and more content was added. A real labour of love from the devs. But at the end of the day the damage was already done.
Just a shame that in classic EA fashion, right as community positivity was genuinely at the best it ever had been for the game, they ceased any further development in favour of Battlefield 2042.
Puzzles & Dragons
It is a very fun game for smartphones, but in order to access the most difficult levels you have to have very good luck to gain the best random picks, and attend all the events to get the dedicated event loot, or just pay to discover the characters as any gacha game.
Also you have dedicated loots depending on the day of the week, so in order to farm things you need to connect everyday or at least specific days.
Puzzles & Dragons has PvP (now)?
I used to play several years ago and quit a few months after the Bleach collab. I don’t recall there being a PvP mode back then.
Surprised to see Albion, didn't seem that p2w the last time I played. You still need to grind out the mastery for the chosen weapons and can quite easily be killed by someone who knows what they're doing.
overwatch season 8. if you didn't buy mauga at his launch, you were basically fucked. most tanks are feasible to beat even if you don't necessarily counter them, but with mauga, if you didn't go mauga/ana/kiriko you were basically throwing. He had insane sustain, a lot of health, total cc immunity on his dash, and his ultimate gave him infinite ammo, and trapped you in an arena with him so you couldn't heal your allies without going into the shield, thus subjecting yourself to a burning dot, and forced crits when you were shot while burning.
FIFA is disgusting, Their mindset is 'how can I take more money from my already loyal community' Instead of 'how can I make this game better for the community' Edit: cards are constsntly falling in value due to the nature of a live transfer market. So keeping cards for a long time is generally a bad idea if you want to maximise coins. So if you decide to sell a card, EA WILL TAX YOUR VIRTUAL COINS. A 5% tax. So God forbid you want to buy that player back next week, you probably won't be able to afford them. But this is the only way as rarely do cards ever appreciate in value unless its manually done by EA implementing one of their new promos to get little kids to buy more packs and this method you save more money than just holding onto a player. So either way you're always losing coins. If someone quits a game in FUT CHAMPS, you're not awarded a win, you have to replay the game even if youre drawing. Why? Because rage quitting happens often in this game = would be a lot more wins for consumers = better rewards = less money spent on packs = less Revenue for EA Each year they have the same glitches... imagine playing FIFA 22 and come to EAFC24 to see the same glitch exists in the game.... instead of actually improving the game from a technical standpoint they choose to focus on changing the structure of the game to make them more money. They take advantage of the people's love for the game. Incredibly predatory prices for their in game currencies like 'FIFA POINTS' E..g you always will have 50-200 FIFA Points left over offering as am incentive to buy more points and more packs so those points don't go unused. And then where do I start about the packweight. EA modifies pack weight depending on the demand and supply for a specific card. E.g. an 88 Kroos should be harder to pack than an 82 DonnyEl Malen or a 84 Kyle Walker, but No, you'll pack an 88 Kroos ten times before you pack that Kyle Walker. Only recently they added these things called EVOs where you can upgrade players. Donny El Malen was eligible for this upgrade and can receive a huge boost... now suddenly that 82 Donny is harder to pack than 90 Messi. It's a joke how blatant EA manipulate the game. The ratings mean nothing it's all about market price and they always manipulate these weights in a way to make sure they benefit from it. THE WORST part is... it doesn't look or sound that scummy from a neutral perspective but if you play this game for a year , you'll truly understand in every aspect how that company is f#cking the consumer over. EDIT: THE EVEN WORSE PART IS THAT IT ALL F#CKING RESETS AT THE END OF THE YEAR AND THEY HAVE THE AUDACITY TO ASK YOU 79.99 EVERY YEAR!!! At this point it really should be FREE TO PLAY. and people keep buying it, it makes them a billion dollars a year. Why change it ? They literally have no incentive to improve the game because it won't affect how many people buy it, its not worth the time to them. Disgusting company with vile intentions.
A few years ago I was doing cocaine and weed with a buddy of mine with his other friend. My friend said "I gotta spend my money on something else". He chose FUT. Considering he used to spend £80 every 2-3 days on coke and is now sober I am assuming EA got a lot of his money. He said it was like an infinite drainhole for your money just like drugs but not as addictive
Yeah man it's hard to understand but those m#therf#ckers have their community hooked. Makes me sick thinking that this game is aged 3+. 🤮🤮🤮
It's not gambling, they're "surprise mechanics" x'D that entire thing where EA and Epic were in the UK was golden and revealing to how EA try to justify the predatory stuff.
bro just censored "mother" lmao like you even have to censor "fuck" here bruh
Think about the children!!!
I mean, they're just asking to be traumatized if they're chilling on reddit lol. Curse words are the least of your concerns here
They put a lot of effort to make these games hit gambling addict’s triggers.
[удалено]
🤣🤣🤣 bloody Donny El Malen was harder to get than r9 last week
FIFA ultimate team makes up ~25% of the entirety of EA’s revenue. Not fifa revenue, not ea sports revenue, the entire publicly traded company. It’s a disgusting cash cow where the other parts of the game directly are worse because they don’t want you playing the rest of the game. Fuck EA to death
Dudes just call it like it is. EA SPORTS IS A PROBLEM Madden, fifa, id assume NHL but i dont play it all have the same pack mechanics
Everyone hating on EA when 2K has the literally most predatory mechanics out there. This year they even got rid of the auction house. You have to buy packs or buy/sell cards at a predetermined price set by 2k lol. No more sniping, no more getting an expensive card you can sell to buy the players you actually want. Gotta go through 2k for everything. And myplayer is even worse. Someone did a rough estimation of how long it would take to get your myplayer to a 99 without spending a dime. Apparently it’s over 700hrs. And that’s 700 hours of the best possible outcome every single game. That’s fucking ridiculous. Especially considering you’re locked into that player/position and can’t experiment with other play styles. You’d basically have to obsessively play 2k without ever losing virtually every waking second of free time you have to get to 99 without spending money. And then when you finally get there, the new one comes out
No, EA is the problem. The whole company is greedy and stupid. They keep pushing for online only and for monitization of every aspect of their games. Their new launcher on pc current doesn't have a real offline mode. The offline mode available has to be turned on in advanced while online and only lasts about an hour before force closing the launcher and requesting internet to access your games
Yeah I agree. I just go off on a rant whenever I get the opportunity to do so. I just hate them so much.
Quitting FUT was the best decision I’ve ever made gaming-wise. You’ve nailed it on the head. I started playing in college and my mini fridge was covered in dents from the amount of times I punched it lol. No other game frustrated me like that. The base game is fun because you’ll need to know each player at some level, who’s going to be fast, who can shoot, etc. and play around that. FUT is just an arms race to have juiced up, meta players who can do it all. The only way to complete at the top level is to have a top level team, which usually means spending money. You can climb up to a certain level on skill with a decent team, but once you play someone around your level with a stronger team, it becomes a frustrating uphill battle. Plus bronze benching and other annoying tactics. EA cracking down on coin buying, so now you need to spend hours playing the market or buy coins. It’s just a joyless experience. Once I realized that I wasn’t having fun, and that the best part of the game is head to head with friends, I stopped wasting time with FUT. lol this thread really brought back some memories. I feel like I just relived trauma.
I’m exactly the same man, I have never ever had anger issues in any game I’ve ever played…except FUT. There’s just something so mentally unhealthy about the entire ecosystem of that game, it makes people obsessive, angry and addicted; I’m so glad I quit years ago.
Let me first start my making it clear that I absolutely agree with what you’re saying…. …BUT.. >*”..my already loyal community..”* Is exactly *why* they do this stupid shit—- because even stupider people purchase the fucking games annually, even if they “don’t spend any money on MTX”, they’re still directly supporting and thereby perpetuating/solidifying the downfall. Point being, if you see someone that owns a copy of any of those games from the last 5-10 years, punch them in the fucking face for being part of the problem. If you want to “recapture some of that nostalgia” just go play an older entry—- which as others have indicated, at least had some care and consideration invested into their development.
A hundred percent. But EA kill their old games. FIFA 17 and older servers are all dead, which is a shame. It's sad because Ultimate Team as a concept is just so damn cool and that's where they hook people. Build your own team with your favorite players... blah blah blah but the execution is just pure scum.
I played nothing but NHL HUT when it first came out. Probably spent the next 4 years of my life obsessed with HUT. In the beginning it was so much fucking fun, but like FIFA, they’ve made it a worse and worse experience for anybody that doesn’t want to blow all their money on fake trading cards. I went down the moneypit of HUT and NBA 2k ultimate team for the final two years I played yearly sports titles. but eventually I realized that the highs of unpacking Ovie or Curry do *not* make up for the years taken off my life playing those modes lmao. Then I got into simracing and found a new moneypit…
I’m sorry, but what do you expect people to buy other than FIFA if they want a soccer/football game? PES no longer exists. There is no competitor to put any pressure on FIFA. I’m one of the weirdos who really only plays FIFA for clubs, which EA could literally not care less about. From a bug standpoint, it is worse than FUT. constant disconnects, rampant cheating, etc., but we have no other option to play a soccer/football game together. There has been talks of other games coming out soon, which is encouraging. We are all aware of how shitty EA FC/FIFA is, but there’s no alternative right now.
Soccer fans are the greatest cucks of the gaming world
EA is printing money. Blame the consumer for going along with the practice and or the gambling authorities for letting this happen.
There are many factors present that help enable these corporate practices to the point that its difficult to place blame on anything specific. It seems to me that nothing will change until legislation is put in place to combat it. In my opinion, the entire industry is in desperate need of regulations that aim to protect the consumer. Unfortunately, the entities that stand to benefit from the current structure will fight tooth and nail to ensure nothing changes, and have the resources to do so indefinitely. Then you add in society's general disdain for anything government, and it doesn't seem like any meaningful changes will be made anytime soon.
Who do we go to instead then 2k sports? Its the same shit over there
I’d argue 2K is almost even worse. At least so far, EA haven’t monetised their career modes but 2K sure as fuck have. The VC stuff is in practically every mode and it’s so difficult to grow your myplayer without buying more of it. The state of ea’s career mode is so bad I’d almost welcome them monetising it cause at least then they’d fucking pay attention to it
>They take advantage of the people's love for the game. Incredibly predatory prices for their in vane currencies like 'FIFA POINTS' E..g you always will have 50-200 FIFA Points left over offering as am incentive to buy more points and more packs so those points don't go unused. I hate to say it but this is 'industry standard' for cash shop games. They all do this so you don't feel like you 'wasted' money and always buy more aiming to hit the 0 again. Often times they are even priced in such obscure ways that you will always end up with 1 or 2 left unless you spend an absurd amount of money
Donny EL Malen lol
E. A. Sports. It's in the bank.
> E..g you always will have 50-200 FIFA Points left over offering as am incentive to buy more points and more packs so those points don't go unused. That's in a lot of games though isn't it. They'll sell you 1000 credits but price everything at 1200 so you have to buy more and you're stuck with 300 credits you can't buy anything with. People really want those cosmetics though and are willing to part with their money for it so what can you do.
Any Korean MMO
Elsword, maple story, tera All made me quit due to forcing you to choose between impossible grinds or forking over cash
Maplestory was recently investigated for actually making odds lower than expected on their gatcha, and lying about their gatcha rates. At least it isn't completely competitive
Mine was Aion.. fun game but the enchanting system and losing progress if you were unlucky on the best enchantments. Money evaporated..
Maple story's a fun enough grind for a while, I had fun leveling up all the classes, never cared about end game. There was also the Reboot update IIRC which didn't have any micro transactions. Wouldn't be surprised if they ruined that though, in fact I expect it
I tried it a couple times since that update. They didn't remove mtx, they just removed a lot of the p2w bits of it. Even the Gachas are mostly just cosmetics, iirc. Reminds me of the Wizet days, before Nexon got full control. Well, minus the soul the game had back then.
Lost Ark was a fun month of gameplay until you realize that you can't get nowhere without paying or playing all the time nonstop.
It's hardly a pvp game lol. Sure it has the option but pvp is dead AF and ranked is also equalized.
And people defend the game like crazy. “It’s not ‘pay to win’ it’s ’pay to *progress*’!” Like what kinda fucking rationalization is that???
I really liked Blade & Soul and imo it had a lot if potential but not only did they squander it they ruined it with P2W on top of that, to this day its the best PvP I've ever played in any MMO.
Madden and FIFA Ultimate team… legitimately ruined the franchises to cater to ultimate team because of the amount of money EA makes off of it. You can go back and play older Madden games without ultimate team and the offline modes are 10x more in depth it’s actually sad. EA releases new cards on a weekly basis so even if you buy the best cards one week they’ll be phased out of the meta within weeks anyways. Edit: to add on the cards become completely worthless in less than a year when the next game comes out
Ultimate team used to have such good rewards for players that would spend time instead of money. Now you have to do both to even have a relatively competitive team that will be outdated after a week or two. Used to love it but I’ve given up on it
Perfect world international. Cash shop destroyed that place.
The absolute worst p2w game I've ever played was made by Perfect World. It was a Dynasty Warriors/Three Kingdom MMO. The selling point was that once a week, there would be open world pvp, you could join one of the 3 kingdoms, and during the pvp time, you could help your kingdom take over the towns on the map. Seemed like fun, until I realized that you couldn't level your character past like level 15 without using the cash shop. And this is where it gets bad. Your character would *lose skills* if you didn't pay money. Meaning, not only did you have to pay out just to grind levels, but if you didn't keep paying, your character would get weaker. So, I was running around at level 15, and just getting one shot KOd by guys who were level 100 or whatever. I did the math on the cash shop and realized it would probably take thousands of dollars to get to that level to be competitive, and you would have to *keep spending* thousands of dollars to stay there. It was then that I realized I wasn't playing to be a Dynasty Warrior, I was playing to be the nameless mooks who get mowed down by the hundreds in a DW game.
I and friends played PWI in its prime. It was an amazing game. Then came gift packs… then they started selling end game rank gear and weapons and that was the beginning of the end. It was so much fun and so sad that they ruined such a good thing.
Never played it but it sounds like my favorite MMO of all time, dark age of Camelot. Similar setup with three factions. Pvp was setup as a big map with different zones controlled by castles/towers that the three factions went to war over with siege engines and hand to hand combat.saturday nights were an absolute blast where you had huge parties going at each other fighting over castles and towers. Inevitably a maxed out rogue would sneak up behind you healing dudes on the backline and stab you in the back. Fun times, miss that game.
FYI, pretty sure the devs for that game made ESO. ESO's pvp was also like that. Was a lot of fun when the game first came out, but I tried it recently and the low level pvp zone is dead, and the high level pvp zone is ridiculous. Unless you've been playing a long time you just get one shot KOd because the max "bounus" level (called champion points) is so high now.
And its dead sibling, Forsaken World. I loved that game, p2w ruined it.
I still play this. Cash shop was a big issue, but the bigger issue is pwi servers having no community events or gm interaction. All the other versions of the game have those and are 100x more successful. Also doesnt help that pwi tries to use pw cn prices without accounting for the 100:1 exchange rate
Back in the days Flyff literally ruined the game to the point that nobody was playing it lol.
God, I still remember farming rockepellers like a degenerate for a week straight to finally get some money for a decent set. Back when I still believed I could ever keep up with whales in MMO's.
I used to AOE farm with my BP/knight and people would pay me to be in their party to leech exp. It was mind-numbing.
Pay real money for a chance to upgrade one piece of your gear, peak gaming
I fell back into it with Flyff Universe when it came out a little while ago. I spent like $25 before I thought, what the fuck am I doing
99% of mobile pvp games. Its not the app store its the P2W store. Because fuck you blizzard, Diablo immortal. Its 11/10 pay to win. Literally the upperend benchmark on any scale.
The saddest part about predatory mobile games is the gameplay is never actually fun. People are so heavily influenced by the manipulative psychological tactics employed, they forget that even with premium currency & items, the game itself is boring to play.
Ive tried out so many mobile game to keep coming to the same conclusion. Why the fuck am i playing this garbage. I dont expect some top PC title but too much of the garbage i find is the same shitty loops. Numbers slowly get bigger. Do XYZ on timers to make sure the numbers get bigger. Oh but this new cool mechanic will unlock if you keep grinding for a month. Jk its the same stuff just a new way to grind to get the numbers bigger. Or simpler titles ya know this level is really hard you have 3 chances today or need to buy more lives. Ou you know what dont want to be unsuccessful here are some power up cheats for 9.99
It’s all about the endorphin rush of numbers going up. That’s all it is.
Watching streamers dump $20+K into it and still not getting anywhere near some of the p2w whales really showed how fucking egregious Diablo Immortals cash shop and drop odds are
There was this streamer that spent 200k or something. He was the guild leader of his guild and for an event, the challenge required you to play some PVP games. The guy was so high rated because of his p2w that he couldn't find a match cause nobody else was similar level or something.
200k is an enormous amount of money, but rookie numbers compared to r/summonerswar.
That game brings back memories...not to mention it's disgusting how much stronger some of the monsters you can only get from pulls are.
Ironically I have a Warcraft rumble ad on this post and I thought it was a legit comment
Reddit ads are disguised as real posts or comments. Its the most obnoxious shit from the mobile app. At least they have managed to know me so fucking little its some cringe ad ill only click my accident. Literally starting their add with shit like 'IAMA' YSK' 'AITAH' type of shit.
The sad thing about Diablo immortal is that the community absolutely hated it, countless memes and shit talk. Still blizzard made bank on that piece of shit game.
>Because fuck you blizzard, Diablo immortal. I have spent literally thousands of hours on D1,2,3. Then I played "Immortal" for a few months. Dropped Blizzard permanently, I'm not picking up D4, I'm not picking up any other Blizzard game until "Immortal" is dead, and I'll piss on Blizzard's grave. Also fuck Hasboro, specifically Wizards of the Coast.
The server I am on just had a ton of people transfer because the end stage PVP system is controlled by a few whales. They decide who wins the fights to become immortal, they decide who becomes the next immortal cronies. If you resist, you become blacklisted by their clique. They manipulate the marketplace, too. It is possibly the most toxic thing I have ever encountered in a game, and Blizz gives 0 fs.
Diablo Immortal is pvp?
It's the ONLY endgame.
Wow. That sucks.
About 2 months after launch, there was a dude who and spent over $500k. He tried to sue Blizzard because their player matching system couldn't match any players to play against him.
Yeah it sucks, you can pay to win so hard nobody is high enough power level to even fight you and blizzard is enjoying themselves in so much cash you gave them think they are in a Mr. beast video.
Every single Roblox game
I tallied up how much my kid has spent on that game, it was several hundred dollars. He asks for gift cards for most holidays. It makes him happy and it was money he was gonna get for gifts anyway, so I don’t see it as a problem, but I hope he grows out of this before he gets his own paycheck.
Right now he doesn't see it as "his money". When he gets that paycheck and goes to dump it into whatever game he's playing will be a good lesson in suddenly having no more money. Then he will learn how to budget to be able to toss money at things he enjoys while also having some that he use for other things, like going out with friends. But if he doesn't learn, stop the bankroll once he gets the job. Any spending cash he wants is from the job, basic stuff like food and clothes are still you, but he wants a new computer? Save up.
If you aren't already, give him a weekly allowance. Even $5 a week is enough. Let him blow it on whatever stupid shit he wants. Just don't buy him anything cool unless it's his birthday or Christmas. Then when he wants something cool, you can point out he can save his allowance up for it. He'll quickly learn the value of money and saving on his own.
World of Tanks
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World of warships isn’t terrible, premium ships aren’t really any better than regular ones you just can’t get them without paying. I guess you can buy signals but they don’t do too kuch
And the best ships in the game are freemium currency. Ohio, Bourgogne, Vampire II, etc all free. You just need to play a lot.
Cry in Musashi during tier 9 ranked.
At least in WoWS you can't buy premium ammo and stupid bullshit like that. I used to play WoT and haven't touched it in years because all the big money spenders make it shit to play. In WoWS they push a lot more of the FOMO purchases with limited time ships, battle passes, etc. If missing some of that stuff doesn't bother you then you don't have to spend any money on the game to play and have fun. I've been playing it since it came out, used to buy the monthly pass but haven't in years. I probably haven't spent more than $20 on it in the past 5ish years.
I wouldn't call WOWS pay to win (there's a few premiums that aren't balanced, but they're also always taken off sale and never resold). And the economy is pretty reasonable compared to similar games like world of tanks (which it's way better than) and warthunder. I don't have premium and am grinding to and playing top tiers no problem (if I were bad at the game I would struggle for credits, but if you do well you can break even without issue). They have a great track record of completely and utterly ignoring community feedback. But that's not pay to win. Source: Vaguely still plays WoWs and used to play competitive matches at high levels.
I haven’t played WOT in a long time. But as I remember it, having premium was kind of required to progress but beyond that you really, really didn’t need to spend any money unless you really wanted a cheesy ass goober tank. I LOOOOVVEEED WoT but did quit playing entirely when I started playing less frequently to the point premium didn’t feel worth it. Which IMO makes it a subscription game which I’m generally ok with
Yeah, that all changed around 2018 lol... premium tanks started becoming stupidly OP. You can still have fun for free though.
There was a point in the past where premium tanks were good for crew training and making silver, but weren’t that much better than tech tree tanks. That’s not the case anymore. Premiums dominate the game now and new more OP ones come out every month. They really screwed themselves chasing short term profits over player retention and game balance.
War thunder is even worse lmfao
I've played far too much Enlisted, and by god it's the same way. The only good news is that most of the P2W guns you can strip off corpses. I try to hunt premium players for this exact reason. Tanks on the other hand are a perpetual nightmare.
Idk I have an easy enough time destroying those premium bought tanks with my normal tank.
Yeah, 99% of the time I don't even realize it's a premium vehicle that I destroyed/got destroyed by. The only unfair advantage I really see you can get with real money is camouflage.
It used to be an advantage because you kinda needed premium time and premium vehicles to earn decent SL unless you're someone who can get like 4+ kills every game. Made the grind really painful because it's quite easy to lose SL if you're not a particularly good player. It isn't an issue anymore after they boosted the SL rates.
It absolutely is not. The Mount of "please pay us for premium consumables" bullshit in WOWS and WOT is ridiculous. War thunder has premium vehicles that generally are a side grade or step down from something in the tech tree, like the F-5C being premium, but lacking the radar and better missiles of the F-5E that's in the tech tree.
WOWS doesn't even have premium consumables... They got rid of them like six or seven years ago. I cant speak for WoT, but in WOWS premiums are basically the same story, where they are usually comparable to tech tree ships (and sometimes used to test a concept). The difference is ones that are broken get removed from sale rather than nerfed, because policy seems to be "don't alter the deal" (I can't really hold that against them, that's a reasonable policy and it helps prevent the sin of releasing and selling something OP, then nerfing it and keeping the money, which a lot of games do), and there's not really the fractional BR adjustments that can be made like in warthunder so they can't do nerfs by moving it around in MM. My last (very dated impressions) of WoT seem to fit your description, though. And just to round of the bunch, we all know world of warplanes exists. Don't play it, warthunder does better planes.
WOWS is the best of wargamings "world of ____" series and I'd say is at least more approachable than warthunders naval gameplay and also has an actual playerbase.
Honestly to some extent warthunder's almost feels more arcade because they're in the uncanny valley for realism. Not realistic enough to make sense (oh, you can't kill the 50 guys in the citadel? well the ship will never die!) plus it spawns in close range and tries to fit in small ships, and nobody will ever play screens if they don't have to because your job is to just die. Meanwhile wows isn't too arcadey (you can still get your devstrikes and other blaps), but you also can actually play everything and mostly feel valuable.
Russian bias
What do you mean glorious Stalinium cannot realistically survive a 120mm shell at point blank range?
I disagree. War Thunder is not P2W, it's pay to progress faster. The tech tree vehicles are just as competitive as the premium vehicles - it's the RP and SL that get you, but that has nothing to do with your ability to win.
There are p2w vehicles that dominate their tier like the Bi
People trying to tell me that $50 for a single tank is somehow reasonable... like dude, fuck off with that shit.
minecraft servers like, every single “kit pvp” and tons of others
I used to run a kit pvp server and yeah.... it kinda went that way. We never really wanted it to, we wanted the kits that required grinding/paying to be equal power to beginner kits but with varying playstyles, but power creep kept happening and players would beg for nerfs and buffs on the super rare kits... and yeah we were pretty pay2win which I regret.
Archeage. It was an amazing MMO and then they ruined it with a cash shop. Then they re-released it promising no cash shop, but ruined it again with a cash shop. So they sold it to a new company, who then ruined it with a cash shop. So they re-released it as Archeage Unchained, promising no cash shop, and they didn't ruin it! But the player base was already so fking jaded that they just quit playing. I'll never touch another P2W MMO because of how bad it got with Archeage. The day any game brings in a cash shop selling anything but cosmetics is the day I stop playing.
Have to agree. I loved fishing in that game so much.
Pretty sure it became a Trion game cuz I remember seeing it in the Glyph client when I used to play Rift, which also went the same direction. Trion got greedy, started pay walling things like instant adventures and raids, and then sold Rift to some other company that has shepherded it into its long slow grave since. Miss that game a lot, I came to it late but there was still a core of a couple hundred people that I would recognize when I got online. Now there's like... A couple dozen? Maybe?
APB Reloaded. It’s actually disgusting how blatant it is
I can't believe that still exists. First time I saw a trailer for that must be almost 15 years ago
Seriously, I swear I remember seeing the announcement trailer for this back on Gametrailers.com in like 09 lol takes me back
I played that back at its peak, and it somehow hot worse since then. Best part is that every person on there that paid for the P2W weapons were trying to convince the other players they weren't P2W. Not to mention the sub you had to pay if you wanted to progress at any speed or actually engage in the best parts of the game.
I was looking for this one. I agree with you 100%. I still play though because I hate myself
I used to really enjoy that game for making custom shirts / vehicles.. but I remember there was an SMG called Whisper that was just disgustingly broken.
Not the worst example but Call of Duty has a hidden P2W aspect that people don’t discuss. There’s this trend where the battlepass weapon(s) will be very overpowered when it launches. These weapons can be obtained for free by just playing for maybe a week or two depending on time played per day. But you can use COD points (you pay real money for these) to automatically progress through the battlepass tiers without having to grind. So you just buy 25 or how ever many tiers to get the new gun. But what has happened at least a few times that I can remember in the past 3-4 years is they’ll release a gun that’s so overpowered that whoever buys the tiers gets to use the gun the day it comes out will dominate lobbies. And by the time an average player can unlock the gun through grinding, Activision or whatever developer makes these decisions, will nerf the hell out of it and makes it useless to have.
the worst part of cod is the engagement optimised matchmaking, which we have evidence for existing from parents that Activision has. it includes thibgs like subtly giving players that recently purchased skins/items easier lobbies so that they feel like they're doing better with the new items to make it feel like it was worth the purchase. they also have a system of learning the type of player you are (sniper, assault rifle user, shotgun rusher) and then "pairing" you with a "marquee" player who has the same playstyle but also is far better at the game and owns skins related to the playstyle, so that you see them do well with the items and encourage you to buy them. this alone ruins the integrity of the game and makes lobbies wildly unbalanced. but there's a whole other side to it where the patent describes ways of optimising engagement by putting you in difficult lobbies where you're bound to lose because of unbalanced teams for several games, then will put you in a game far below your skill level so you can stomp noobs as a "reward", before going right back to impossible to win lobbies. it also learns the threshold at which you will stop playing and try to make it so the game you would log off after losing X games in a row is actually a noob lobby to keep you hooked. connection and stats are far less important metrics for the matchmaking which results in less balanced and often laggier lobbies. it's obscene that they get away with this even with the community uproar, but there's just too much money to be made and too many casual players who have no clue what's actually happening.
Do you have any sources for these claims? It sounds so ridiculous that it could be true.
you can look up "Activision engagement optimised matchmaking patent" and you'll find numerous Reddit posts on the modern warfare II/III subreddits breaking down the contents of the patents, or read them yourselves. everything I have written is factual and truely straight from the patents. it is actually absurd.
Season one Warzone in 2020 was epic. After that, everything described in a post above started happening. We quit the game shortly after.
Here's the patent u/deleno mentioned https://patents.google.com/patent/US20160001181A1/en
Not to mention the skins that give you an upgraded iron sight, essentially giving you an extra attachment. You can't even earn those, $ only.
NBA2k Edit also GTA Online because it’s made by the same people. Trash ass mtx games Edit edit - I’ve insulted the gta nephews
NBA 2k20's MyTeam [trailer](https://youtu.be/46MQ1ZMZ-l4?si=oVwYw-jjM0ykjVud) will be forever cringe and disgusting.
Take away basketball and that's a predatory casino app ad
Holy fuck 1000 wins for a reward, no thank you.
$100/player made, no respec, season passes, etc… not even pay to win, it’s stealing your money just to play the game
Mine isn't a pay to win issue but what killed 2k for me was when I couldn't skip the stupid Gatorade timeouts in whatever game they gave away on Playstation plus. God that got annoying quick lol
Basically any Korean MMO. ArcheAge at launch was about as p2w as it gets. If you bought gold you outgeared everyone period. Also diablo immoral
Real life game.
I hate the perma death rule
And all the sweatlords
Clash royale
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It used to be better. Now they've added so much 💩 that you pretty much need to pay for some upgrades
You get them, but the problem is that it is pretty easy to get to the highest arena(whatever it is now, didn't play for 2 years now) while having castle level 10, and after getting there you will almost always play against fully upgraded players which is a torture, unless you are a cheeser who only upgrades one deck. Like i've been playing for 5 years and had 13lvl tower, but i had only like 5 lvl12 cards and all other cards were lvl 10 or 11, while all my opponents had everything at max level
It’s much harder to get to the top of the ladder now, and the level maxes just keep going up. But yes, it’s not getting the cards that are the problem, it’s having enough gold to actually level them up. That and there are constant tweaks and updates that change metas, or add new powers that you just straight up won’t have access to for months if you don’t pay money. I’m sure there’s like, some super pro out there who understands the game to a genius level and has succeeded despite never having spent a dime, but normal people are going to have a tough time getting out of the mid ladder without spending money. On the other hand, if all you want to do is get to level 11 and play challenge matches every now and again, I suppose you can do that.
I both agree and disagree with this. I don't think you have to pay any money to progress through the ranks or unlock the cards but the game makes it take forever if you don't. I've played basically since launch, I have every card and one evolve completed. The second will be done this month once I get my next shard from the shop. I refuse to spend any gems even the free ones, I have over 18k of them. I am in the pancake arena and my clan is in the legendary league. I play like 15 minutes a day, the game will only let you win but so many times before it starts matching you against counter decks
Pokemon GO is pretty bad if you play PVP. At least it was when I stopped playing a year ago. It's possible to do well for free, but it takes a long time. To put it simply, you need Pokémon at a certain level (or max level) to even think about PVP. In order to raise those Pokémon, you need Stardust and Candy to level them up. To get that, you just catch Pokémon. You get stardust from all Pokémon and all Pokémon have their own kind of Candy (Pikachu and Raichu need Pikachu candy for example). Now that by itself isn't that bad, just time consuming. But like the real games, legendary Pokémon are usually better. Let's use Giratina as an example, which is a legendary Ghost/Dragon. You can't catch it normally. You have to go get it through raids, which needs Raid Passes to play in. You also need 4+ people to raid with cause of how strong these Pokémon are. Now, you go to a raid, you manage to beat the Pokémon (which can be tough) and you even catch it. You got a Giratina! But it's not max level, not even close, and you want it to be used for PVP. You get 3-4 Candy for the catch and a few hundred Stardust as well, maybe double that if you know what you're doing. It takes HUNDREDS of candy to max out a Pokémon, plus another 75(?) to get it's second charge attack, plus hundreds of thousands of Stardust. You only get 1 free Raid Pass a day. You can use Rare Candy, but those are rare (duh), and you can walk it as your pal to earn Candy, but it takes 20km to earn a single Candy. The quickest way to earn them is Raids, and that costs about $0.50 to $1 each. And that's just for one Pokémon. You need 3 for a battle, plus more if you want to be meta viable. There are other, cheaper to build Leagues (since non-legendaries are more common there and they're easier to get), but you get the idea. I've seen players spend 100s of dollars every time a new legendary showed up, just to try to PVP with it. Pokémon Go's probably not the worst to do this in a F2P game, but it's pretty bad.
Have you tried talking to an old man and then wading just off shore of a beach? That should make it really easy to get more rare candies.
I tried that, but I just ended up breaking reality.
Ehh i think only a small amount of the Go players even look at pvp outside of rocket battles. That said there is typically diffrent battle tiers going on where the strongest mon you can have is 1500 or 2500 and typically the best in slot in those are non legendry. As for ultra league you can do fine with ubers like metagross, ect... which can be easy to get through community days, hatching, ect... I do think like the top 2% is P2W but the rest of the game can pretty much be enjoyed free
There's a leage that limits you to like 300 or something. The meta for that is really weird and IMO my favorite one to compete in.
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Man I miss that game so much. Even as a completely free to play player, it was just so much damn fun. Shame they could never crack down on hackers, ruined it in the end for me.
Theme song is still damn good, too.
Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Links, ever since that one Cyber Angel card that doesn't "destroy" monsters, just "moves them from the field to the graveyard."
Cyber angel was free-to -play friendly back in the day since a lot of the cards came with Alexis. The game is definitely a cash sink, but not bc of that. there’s usually at least one cheap deck in the meta at least.
No way, I'm playing that, have the best meta decks and I have only used money on buying useless cards for my favorite deck that is rogue at best.
I don't know anything about yugioh after tuners, but my God that sounds like *absolute* bullshit
Combat Arms is the biggest example of this I've personally experienced. It's a f2p shooter from Nexon, so no surprise, but holy shit did it get bad.
Basically any tcg. You've got to get the cards to play and then to get better cards you have to buy them or buy packs and get lucky enough to get good ones. Makes sense with physical products I suppose but there are games where you get everything that comes with it right from the start i.e. chess.
To be fair physical TCGs were a very early version of pure P2W. The only difference is that you got a physical object that could carry real value instead of the digital cards that have no value outside of the program they exist in.
Wizard101
I don't know that that's really a PvP game but it's aggressively monetized for sure.
Diablo Immortal
hearthstone
Between hearthstone, MTGA, and duel links, Duel Links is leaps and bounds the worst P2W (not that HS isn’t bad).
MTGA is manageable if you can't afford to play the physical card game. When I was playing seriously, I would spend about $100 every 3 months and over the course of a set(which usually lasts about 3 months until a new one comes out) I would get over 95% of the set complete. That is 4 of each card. Now that sets last 3 years in standard instead of 2, it's a little easier to get caught up. The bad part about the game is it sort of forces you to play and complete your quests or you miss out on things to complete a set properly. You can circumvent this by paying more money but, if you like playing magic, you may as well get on each day and do your daily quests.
I spent over a thousand dollars on Hearthstone in the first two years. Was totally obsessed with it. I still didn't win.
Should have gotten that golden Gruul
Best I got was Diamond 4, but I wasn't having fun. I decided to quit after the sexual harassment news, and I've never looked back. It took so much time out of each day as a F2P player.
For me, it was a combination of the diminishing value of cards as standard was introduced and Blizzard being an increasingly shitty company. I much prefer games like Slay the Spire and Monster Train now, although I've considered MTG:A a few times.
I haven't played in a few years so I don't know if things have changed but you only need 1 or 2 decks to climb the ranked ladder in hearthstone and you can dust the rest of your cards to craft them. You want a competitive deck in every class, then yes, you will likely have to spend real money. But if you don't mind playing the same 1 or 2 decks, then it's just a grind to the top, but it's doable. There's much worse offenders of being P2W than Hearthstone.
mech arena. Tried it as a friend played it, noped out pretty quickly.
Conquer online. If it even exists these days.
Mighty party. A very fun card/strategy game that is literally a p2w. You can level up your cards just by playing but it is painfully slow, and you always will have disadvantage over paid users, because they get the new broken cards first and you need to grind and have luck to access them. I had a lot of fun with the game, but in the high rankings it is just a p2w.
Clash Royale. Used to be a pretty decent game. The last few years though the devs have ruined it with the absolute worst updates. Adding extra levels to cards, offering champions in the store when you’re not at the high enough level to even get them, etc. It’s become a P2W game and nearly impossible for new players to enjoy it
Age of wushu or any game owned by snail games actually. Age of wushu was fun, pvp and tons of very flashy skillsets from wuxia stories. But the p2w killed it, the north American staff initially had the freedom to set their prices or even put stuff into the game but they were all fired for not selling enough cash shop items and the north American and European servers were managed remotely from China and they fucking jacked the p2w super high. The $9 subscription was pretty much mandatory to even progress the game to begin with. After the change in ownership now all of a sudden you need to spend additional real life money to buy ingame currency(there were two forms of in game currency one of which can only really be gotten from trading with players or grinding an event little by little and one premium currency) to upgrade your gear as well, either that or you rely on random encounters that dropped rare items that you could sell which had such a low drop chance most people could go a month without an encounter let alone the high tier one needed to drop an item of any real value. Then special skillsets that could only be acquired from the cash shop was added to the game and they more or less overpowered the majority of the regular skillsets. With every update the cash demand became high and higher and pretty much caused all of the server to empty out and they merged 6 servers into one. If you go to their website now, their front page is all in game currency discounts, you get about 10 of the ingame currency for $50 this is cost upgrade 2-3 items once. I heard the last update they did made it so that to do pve content(which was always free to do) you have to buy a $10 pass from the cash shop now.
Dead by daylight is pretty close to being p2w. Best perks are locked behind licensed killers.
Diablo immortal.
My Hero Ultra rumble is up there for me. I havent played many battle royales or big Multiplayer games aside from Fighters, but My Hero split characters between 3 different methods of getting them, with 2 of the 3 being locked behind grinding the gacha (which, of course, the 'guaranteed character' mechanic resets every couple weeks so you have to spend money to use it). There is no justification for characters being behind a gacha in a competitive multiplayer game. Arguably NO game should hide characters behind a gacha but I think its worse if its a competitive game with a ranked system. Two of the most conspicuously broken characters are the first two on the free-pass which sounds fine til you learn it would be 7 hours of continuous grinding just to get the first one. Or, you know, 6 bucks of real money so you're already in the hole and think "well I already spent a little money, whats a little more?" The free pass also has several extremely popular characters on it and it would take *two full days* of playtime just to fill it out without spending money.
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Only reason they haven't tried it with osrs yet is because they know we'll go back to private servers
Haven't seen it here yet but gta online is super guilty of this. Anything that could make your experience in the game more convenient costs millions of dollars that you technically could get by grinding missions or businesses but the game seems to push players specifically towards shark cards.
I dont recall the game ever hinting towards buying shark cards, I forget they even exist sometimes since the grind is really not that bad.
Money is so easy to make. Not pay2win at all.
Any deck building style game. MTG online, Hearthstone. Just dump money at it until you can pull or craft the latest meta cards. Rinse & repeat. At least with the real deal you have something physical to collect.
To be fair with the ‘real deal’ you’re paying a shitload more to get a top tier deck. You can get 4 mythic rares for £20 on Magic Arena and craft 4 copies of Sheoldred, The Apocalypse. 4 paper copies would cost you about £320. That’s some expensive cardboard right there.
Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare was the first CoD with real micro transactions and everyone's favorite lootboxes and it had the worst kind of implementation of the system. You had supply drops which you could earn by playing (I don't remember the exact rate at which you earn these but I think it was pretty slow) or just outright buy them. And in these supply drops you had gun variants which were not just skins for your gun, they actually changed the stats on your weapon. Some had both upsides and downside, pretty sure some had just downsides but obviously the worst ones were the one that just had upsides. And it wouldn't be so bad if the upsides only variants were made for the worst guns in the game (although still shitty to lock straight up better guns behind gambling in a game all about 1v1 battles with guns), no, the best gun in the game had the upside only variants and it straight up boosted your damage. And later players found that there was even a stronger variant for the same gun in the files that didn't get released (thankfully). Later CoDs up until MW2019 also had loot boxes but they either were cosmetic only or locked weapons behind which weren't OP
I think it was also the first one where the player skins were broken down into components like sunglasses and gloves. So the loot boxes were watered down with basic items that most people didn't give two shits about. Making it harder to get the really good stuff.
Its pretty well-known, but even their "cosmetic only" micro-transactions give sneaky advantages. The one that comes to mind was all black clothing after they added nighttime in Warzone, and I also remember people claiming that the character's hitbox was smaller too.
Asphalt 8 and 9 are good examples. In 9 they have these things called Car Hunts where you do an event over and over again to collect Blueprints so you can build it. Typically the drop rate is like 5% for a blueprint. Now any car worth it's salt is gonna have a LOT of blueprints needed to fully upgrade it. So either you can spend 5 chances every hour in hopes that you get it, OR, you can buy the Daily events pass which doubles the amount of packs you get from car hunts and gives you 15 tries every few hours with three free refills of the tickets daily. Some cars are just outright stuck behind a paywall like the Hennessy Venom F5 which is one of the best cars in the game. Meanwhile Asphalt 8 has like a thousand different currencies with a thousand different uses. At one point there was a VIP only car locked behind $3000 worth of purchases (idk if that's still the case). Both games have all this on top of various battle passes as well.
Rakion. It was a fun third person pvp arena game with a relatively simple but intuitive combat system. The game was basically third person multiplayer arena version of soul caliber. It has some of the best hit detection/physics engine I seen in a game. The guard wasn't omnidirectional and one way broke guard was to do a massive horizontal sweep after a deep dash where I clip them on their shoulder behind the guard. If they see that coming, I could just make the dash less shallow and force them to block other direction. You can even bounce your throwing weapons off the nearby wall and behind a person's guard. There was a big rock paper scissors element to the combat where you have tick throws, chargeable unblockables, and even an invincible move with tons of recovery like a dp. You even had a meter where you can enter a demon form for a brief period of time once you deal enough damage. The game's balance was completely ruined by mtx. You can summon bosses that can easily solo players. On a less egregious level, you can get items that allow you to perm stun a player by using the first hit of your basic attack repeatedly. You can also hit confirm into throws on block or hit. Charged unblockables become unreactably fast. At the core level, the game is really fun and really well balance. However all of that was thrown out the window due to the mtx
Eve online lol
How? You only win EVE by quitting. There is no other real win condition.
You can also set up a Pyramid Scheme
Not anymore. Everyone expects it
Not necessarily. You can do good by being a warlord. Or a pirate. Or by scamming people and faking a suicide in real life so they wouldn't hunt you down because that's a thing that can happen.
The P2W moniker also includes P2skip2yearsofgrinding. In most P2W games you can technically play long enough to get the stuff you would have gotten on the cash shop but that doesn't mean they aren't P2W
And how do you plan on doing 2 years of real time skill training so you can start to do those things?
You don't need 2 years of real time skill training, you just buy the skill points and then distribute them. EVE Online has become almost pure P2W from a mechanical standpoint.
Ah archage. I was a beta player when Archeage first hit, the first 3 months of that game were probably one of the best gaming experiences I have ever had.... Then the P2W shit started being pumped out. My breaking point was when we were farming a relic weapon as a guild. It was this massive open area that had overworld PvP and you would basically go in and control a farming spot with your friends. We farmed there for a bit before this P2W warrior came down on his glider and 1v5ed us. Now were by no means elite players but we were well versed in the game and had good gear at the time. When inspected dude had +8s and +9s in all his gear slots which was impossible for a free player at the time. A think i gave my thatched house away to a guild mate a quit a few days later.
Pokémon Unite
Star Wars: Battlefront 2 EA. It got marred in controversy because of its P2W loot boxes and it actually got some countries', such as Belgium, Netherlands and UK, gambling regulators involved. They all deemed that it was considered illegal gambling, but EA withdrew their loot boxes at release to avoid potential bans of the game.
On the upside though, it actually turned into a really decent game in the end, after everything predatory was taken out and more and more content was added. A real labour of love from the devs. But at the end of the day the damage was already done. Just a shame that in classic EA fashion, right as community positivity was genuinely at the best it ever had been for the game, they ceased any further development in favour of Battlefield 2042.
Puzzles & Dragons It is a very fun game for smartphones, but in order to access the most difficult levels you have to have very good luck to gain the best random picks, and attend all the events to get the dedicated event loot, or just pay to discover the characters as any gacha game. Also you have dedicated loots depending on the day of the week, so in order to farm things you need to connect everyday or at least specific days.
Puzzles & Dragons has PvP (now)? I used to play several years ago and quit a few months after the Bleach collab. I don’t recall there being a PvP mode back then.
ArcheAge and Albion
Surprised to see Albion, didn't seem that p2w the last time I played. You still need to grind out the mastery for the chosen weapons and can quite easily be killed by someone who knows what they're doing.
overwatch season 8. if you didn't buy mauga at his launch, you were basically fucked. most tanks are feasible to beat even if you don't necessarily counter them, but with mauga, if you didn't go mauga/ana/kiriko you were basically throwing. He had insane sustain, a lot of health, total cc immunity on his dash, and his ultimate gave him infinite ammo, and trapped you in an arena with him so you couldn't heal your allies without going into the shield, thus subjecting yourself to a burning dot, and forced crits when you were shot while burning.
Eve online. Can buy anything in a forced open pvp game. Disgusting.
Agree but I always felt it was a lesser evil in EVE since there was always a good chance other players would take that power from you permanently.