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I played Fire Emblem Heroes and Dragalia (Nintendo games). I considered spending money once or twice, but did the math and concluded that the value was too low.

I played Fire Emblem Heroes and Dragalia (Nintendo games). I considered spending money once or twice, but did the math and concluded that the value was too low. And that seems to be the case for a lot of these games. If you think about the probability of the lotteries, it takes some serious cash to get marginal returns valuable enough to matter. A slight boost is going to cost $100 and it doesn’t really matter. The top tier players are an order of magnitude more powerful, but that costs thousands of dollars. And, on top of that, this gap can be crossed with about a year of play, which seems perfectly reasonable to me. I’m fine being top 95% rather than top 99%. In both games I have reached a point where I not only am fully capable, but am fully capable with tons of resources that would otherwise cost lots of money and I simply haven’t used because the value props of events people are lured into are deceptively low. I like these games, because they offer a small amount of tasks to do and a super long term scale sense of progression to plan out. It’s not pay to win, it’s pay to win quickly. You can beat everything freely without much trouble (or course other games won’t be so generous perhaps. I would guess idle heroes to be more of a financial grind)

jbattle 7y ago
I never got the idea of paying more money to get the experience over with faster. Seems backwards
- ngold 7y ago
  Seems like a broken game.
  - b_tterc_p 7y ago
    For something like Fire Emblem I don’t think so as spending was neither required nor especially important for clearing all of the game’s content. Although one observation I had was that money was used as a crutch by bad players who incorrectly assumed it was necessary. It’s a turn based strategy game with relatively little entropy so a lot of it is skill. A smart player would think about positioning and how to safely take out enemies. Dumber players were fond of saying how they favored defensive builds, or in other words, creating units that were strong enough to stand there and win on counter attacks. The issue with this was that as the game ramped up in difficulty this would gradually get more difficult to accomplish. So if you refuse to play the game intelligently you have to try to upgrade your characters with cash. But then after a while you hit a wall where your characters are maximally strong (which is less than 10% better stats no matter how much you spend), you’re _still_ not going to be strong enough to handle the hardest content without playing smart. So... money can help you get through the first 80% of content, but it won’t be enough and is not required for the last 20%... but then is required again for the side bit of absolute top tier pvp. From a game design, I actually think this looks pretty healthy for the game’s integrity. Not the gambling habits it induces.
- b_tterc_p 7y ago
  I agree. And again, if you spend serious cash, you can make your characters top tier. FEH has a vague PVP leaderboard so naturally those with the top tier units take the top tier slots on it. But if you’re not interested in invisible status seeking it’s pretty pointless
- wmf 7y ago
  The experience is intentionally boring (grindy) to encourage you to pay. And the infinitely-replayable endgame is never over.

jbattle 7y ago

I never got the idea of paying more money to get the experience over with faster. Seems backwards

ngold 7y ago
Seems like a broken game.
- b_tterc_p 7y ago
  For something like Fire Emblem I don’t think so as spending was neither required nor especially important for clearing all of the game’s content. Although one observation I had was that money was used as a crutch by bad players who incorrectly assumed it was necessary. It’s a turn based strategy game with relatively little entropy so a lot of it is skill. A smart player would think about positioning and how to safely take out enemies. Dumber players were fond of saying how they favored defensive builds, or in other words, creating units that were strong enough to stand there and win on counter attacks. The issue with this was that as the game ramped up in difficulty this would gradually get more difficult to accomplish. So if you refuse to play the game intelligently you have to try to upgrade your characters with cash. But then after a while you hit a wall where your characters are maximally strong (which is less than 10% better stats no matter how much you spend), you’re _still_ not going to be strong enough to handle the hardest content without playing smart. So... money can help you get through the first 80% of content, but it won’t be enough and is not required for the last 20%... but then is required again for the side bit of absolute top tier pvp. From a game design, I actually think this looks pretty healthy for the game’s integrity. Not the gambling habits it induces.
b_tterc_p 7y ago
I agree. And again, if you spend serious cash, you can make your characters top tier. FEH has a vague PVP leaderboard so naturally those with the top tier units take the top tier slots on it. But if you’re not interested in invisible status seeking it’s pretty pointless
wmf 7y ago
The experience is intentionally boring (grindy) to encourage you to pay. And the infinitely-replayable endgame is never over.