Okay. I am once again going to make a futile attempt to explain why I believe E&P’s current pricing model is flawed and blatantly PTW.
I used to play a few different MMORPGs. Mix of BTP (buy to play) and FTP with microtransactions.
Microtransactions??? Yes. That evil, evil word. Except that I think they were mostly handled fairly in those games. And I’ll tell you why.
I was working full time (oftentimes overtime too) at the time that I was playing these games. I only had maybe 2-3 hours a day to play.
Others who were playing these games were able to play for 12+ hours a day.
Those games offered a few purchasable perks, such as “Elite” status, costume skins, faster mounts (a mount being an animal or something that allowed you to travel across the game world at a faster rate compared to just running on foot).
Now, in many cases, the “Elite” status would offer perks such as double XP and a faster mount. For say, $5 a month. I was happy to pay that, because it wasn’t an insane amount of money.
Other players called me “pay to win”. Because I was earning twice as much XP and my faster mount allowed me to get to my quest objectives quicker.
But in the grand scheme of things? All that those perks were allowing me to do was to complete the same amount of content in 2 hours that would take a FTP player 4 hours to complete. I didn’t have 4 hours a day to play like they did. Majority of them in fact had much stronger teams than I did, even though we had started playing on the same day. Because I was only playing 2-3 hours a day, and they were playing all day.
Their argument was that they deserved to be better, because they were playing more than I was. I mostly agreed with them. But since I was not physically able to invest the same amount of time as they were, I made up for it by helping to support the game financially (again - in a small way - $5 a month… not talking the hundreds or thousands of dollars a month that they expect us to spend in this game)…
My “spending” in those games only gave me a small advantage. And it wasn’t really even an “advantage”. They had all the same heroes and skills that I did, they were all just as strong as me (if not stronger) when it came to PvP type stuffs, the only difference is that they had to grind a few more hours for it.
A few more hours.
Compare that to E&P.
The difference between a FTP, or even a CTP here vs. a big spender… we are not talking about a few hours worth of grinding. We are talking years. So many years in fact, that it’s not even remotely feasible for any low or non spender to ever catch up to a high spender, because (1) none of us will live that long, (2) the bar keeps getting pushed higher and higher every year so that lower spenders are actually moving backwards in progress, and (3) it’s unlikely that the game will even still be running by the time the average FTP manages to pull their first Gravemaker (or whatever, [insert hero here]).
No staggering them out. And make sure a costume is actually an improvement, all the way around, a strong get hero.
My only luck in getting 5* heroes has been through Tc20. And I have summoned all but Dom from there. But they do Not help you to stay very competitive for long. Because of my health, this game is like a job as far as the amount of time I spend playing. It would be nice to be able to continue to grow, without spending $100s & $100’s more dollars. (I turned mostly F2P over the summer)