my favorite part is when the game forces you to buy the premium currency in bulk, but only in amounts that require you to make multiple purchases to buy anything in game.
The highest bundle will also be given several labels akin to "Best offer", "Most popular", "Don't miss out". Followed by any closure of the store giving a "once in a lifetime deal of buying 130 gems for $18.99 and they'll throw in 5 shitfuck powerups for free"
Clash royale adding another 0 to the end of the amount of cards needed to level up a troop so you can deal 2% more damage against the enemy (or you can give them 50 bucks and skip the grind)
I think it's unrealistic that you can get exactly 140 gems by buying 10+130
Instead the lowest package will be 15 gems so you'll always have an unusable amount left over, that you can only use by buying more gems.
How piglins feel handing me a pile of gravel, a dead baby ghast and 2 nether bricks after i gave them the contents of the US treasury (they will now attempt to kill me as ive opened a chest in the last hour)
Extra cool when they make an expensive option the most cost efficient, so you feel smart for spending more money than you intended, but the option that gives the most gems at once is horribly ineffective to make the most out of whales
(example, 10 gems for 0.5$, 50 gems for 2$, 999 gems for 55$)
I can name like 1 that dont subscribe to this bullshit practice, Yugioh Master Duel only has one main currency that unlocks all the stuffs, including battle pass, cosmetics, cards, etc... and it can obtain via playing the game, and the battle pass refunds its cost upon completion, which is usually easy since it can be completed in like 20-30 games and last 4 months.
The only problem is that you have to play the game, and the game is Yugioh.
They make up for it with the insane power creep. What's that, saving up for the pack you need to pull up to iirc 600 times from with resets if your deck needs three of an ultra rare? Well too bad, by the time you're done the deck is already irrelevant again because a new pack just came out with the PERFECT cards to counter the previous one. Too bad!
Edit: As other comment said below I confused it with another yugioh game lmao nevermind
saving up for the pack you need to pull up to iirc 600 times from with resets if your deck needs three of an ultra rare?
What resets are you talking about??? You can build decks by pulling 3-6 times, which isn't much considering the 250 gems given per day and the monthly 3100 gem events, I haven't spent an € in the game and had no problem building any deck I want (except if you are one of those people that want to build every single deck that comes out every month, bad and good decks)
Like, Master Duel has its problems, but gems aren't one of them in the slightest
I believe they are mixing master duel up with duel links, the other yugioh mobile game which has a HORRENDOUS economy and if you get to many of a rare card from a set you have to “reset” that set to get anymore basically cratering your chances of pulling it
You are absolutely correct I mixed those two up. Master duel is actually a lot more bearable and fair, if you ignore that it's a bit annoying that you gotta gamble on even being able to pull on the right pack
Unless they changed that by now in which case I said nothing
I havent played in a while but in 2022 I made a Branded deck, in 2023 and twice in 2024 I updated and piloted that Branded to Challenger, even right now I can still go back and mix Branded with me whatever the jizz they are having in that format and pilot that joint to high hell and back.
Really just F2P games because they need money somehow, but even then like Fortnite, PUBG, several of the NinjaKiwi's, really there's a lot of good games without much that's intrusive.
Then of course there are the many funded by ads rather than premium currency, or by a premium subscription that's separate from currency.
I haven't played some of the new btd games that have come out but at least in btd6 it's really easy to get the only type of currency, which is used for basically everything.
I don't know if Ninja Kiwi has changed the system for btd battles 2 but when the game came out, the way you unlocked towers and upgrades was just awful, it was a lot of grinding and the only way to actually progress was by paying a special pass or something I don't remeber very well.
what's even more bullshit is when they have free and paid versions of that premium currency. All the cool stuff can only be bought with the paid for version.
Only a handful of costumes (like 300 other more high quality costumes aren’t paid for) and ghazt on composer as a bonus for buying the separate composer app, but yeah. I love msm particularly because there’s no fomo for actual content. And even then, the paid costumes return for their events iirc.
And you complete all of the achievements and side quests that give you like, 50 gems, and you think to yourself “holy fuckshit I'm rich”. Then you become reckless with your spendings because you think there's more achievements to be completed and once you waste all of your gems on stupid shit like wait-skipping, gems are no longer obtainable and you're fucked (unless you pull out that scrumptious card)
Grinding out gold in red dead online was so absurdly tedious that when I finally got enough of it to buy my bounty hunter license I had lost all desire to play the game. I gave it another shot like a year later and every session had a hacker who would spawn infinite loot boxes that basically made it a non issue. Had a lot more fun now that I could actually play the game
This right here. I’ve had people try to deny that RDO was pay to progress and therefore also pay to win.
Listen man when a gun is locked behind a level grind and a money grind that’s so slow it’s legitimately infuriating (missions paying out like $1.50 for completion meanwhile a goddamn repeater is like $1500) and you can also pay for some premium currency to bypass that money grind, your game is pay to progress blatantly disguised as free to progress.
Same as GTA Online, at least the last time I played. Everything was getting more and more expensive but Rockstar was intentionally going around absolutely nuking all decent money grinds, no doubt to funnel people who just want to experience the new content into buying shark cards
Same issue with Helldivers ngl (Pay to Progress (to get warbonds) at an incredibly slow rate of currency acquisition by grinding that you can skip by forking over dosh.)
Yeah I had mfs talking to me like that “but you can find super credits in missions!”
Yeah but the optimal gameplay loop to progress IN A GAME YOU PAY FOR should not devolve into playing the absolute lowest difficulty and farming paltry amounts of premium currency YOU HAVE TO PAY FOR
EXACTLY THIS!
Someone also math’d it out, & the ‘optimal farm’ as of recent nets you about ¢15 an hour or something ludicrously small like that.
And without the warbonds, you LITERALLY are missing content that makes you able to engage with enemies better (AT Emplacement for Warstriders makes them trivial. Same with thermite. Don’t have the warbonds for ‘em? Congrats! You’re going to have a bad time!)
Rockstar games are surprisingly easy to hack for how predatory their monetization practices are. GTA has received a new anticheat since I last played, but I remember being able to give myself infinite gold in RDO with just a Cheat Engine memory injection table lol
Solely exist to allow you to buy things for your character/items to function like weapon repairs and food for buffs.
Material Currency
Solely exist to allow you to upgrade your character/items.
You need 30 snafu gems to upgrade your STR SS4 Goku (Daima) (Ultra Poopen Farten Tier) to deal 1% more damage this is the first upgrade of 10
Credit Card Currency
Hey kid, you want to play the new Armored All Might, Lionel Messi, and Cyrene? Well too fucking bad, either grind these events for pocket change useful for 2 slot pulls or drop $100 USD.
Lost the 50/50 to Qiqi, the most dogshit DPS we refuse to buff for 5 years. Boo hoo, give us more money!
Ran out of activity points to play the game? $5 USD please!
Calling Qiqi a DPS is like saying you shouldn't pull Kokomi because she can't crit lmao
Sure you can use her as a physical dps, but her skill and burst do a great job of sustaining the team, keeping her onfield just allows her to heal everyone at once.
This exactly. I make like around 30 diamonds a day from mines and wublin/celestial island. I even started a new account on pc and I already have 4 mini mines set up in just a few days. Diamonds are really not that scarce in this game.
Plus, the game is honestly really high quality for a mobile game and the devs put a lot of time and effort into it. There’s zero shame in throwing them a bone
I know what kind of game this is referring to but I genuinely have over 200k gems™ on Cookie Run Kingdom and I do not know what to do with them anymore.
It's not even the fact that you have to pay for each one, it's the fact that not a single offer is actually worth the price. I remember when we could go several updates without an exclusive currency banner but now it's every patch nearly, and almost nothing in shop is worth buying because it's ridiculously overpriced for how shitty their gachas are.
The conversion rate for gems to banner currency is so awful. I'm over here spending 50 draws worth of gems just to get a 10 draw on a unique banner (You don't understand I NEED that new cookie)
Me and my buddy would play 2v2s together waaay back in the earlier days, we would always joke about how the best card in the game was the credit card, namely when we ran into players with overleveled cards
No not at all really. Gems only make things faster, nothing mandatory is gated behind them. And there's a ton of ways to get the standard resources (gold, elixir, DE) and also gems.
Oh i guess it’s different now then. I haven’t played in years. I remember upgrading my town hall and the build timer being a literal month or something like that lol, I think I stopped playing it around then
Yeah the game probably hasn't been in a healthier state. Many upgrade times have been reduced, the free pass gives out a ton of rewards, there frequent events with many rewards too, troops don't cost resources anymore and don't have training time so you can attack whenever, and they separated battles in ranked mode and raid mode to loot without tanking your ranking by a few leagues.
The only things that are really out of reach for F2P players is being able to upgrade and unlock everything instantly and it’s INSANELY expensive to go that route, like, $10k expensive.
It does take 3-5 years to upgrade everything in the end but that’s literally the main aspect of the game.
If you don’t spend gems on upgrade timers, you accrue plenty of them to unlock everything useful and available without spending any money. The same goes for events.
Compared to almost every mobile game I’ve played, F2P players in COC are very well catered to and taken care of in my opinion.
I don't know if I would include Arknights in that. The only metric by which Arknights is f2p friendly is that you can clear nearly all story and event content with easily accessible characters, but that isn't special. It applies to the majority of gacha games. Even the near decade old Granblue and FGO meet that metric.
No, this is a fair complaint. All gatcha games are ultimately greedy but some are definitely more free to play friendly then others. Based on factors like how many pulls can be earned, what the odds are on said pulls, if it has a pity system, how often they rerun banners, and whether or not the game needs you to have limited characters to play the endgame.
Yeah. I played Reverse 1999 for some time and had a quite competitive team with limited characters and overall a strong lineup while being f2p the whole time. Other games won't let you even look in the general direction of the strongest units without paying.
My main issue with Reverse is that it does the limited banners thing making some characters effectively unobtainable unless they happen to do a rerun in like a year. This is quite the shock coming from Limbus Company where I can literally just buy any character with 1 2 hour commitment a week*.
the asterisk is that you can't shard stuff from last season and the special event called Walpurgisnacht. Other than that, go ham.
Limbus is known for being very f2p friendly, in fact, it's the most generous game I play. It's just that without the battlepass the grind to get everything takes a very very long time. But at least you *can* get everything without paying.
My main issue with Reverse is that it does the limited banners thing making some characters effectively unobtainable unless they happen to do a rerun in like a year.
play Morimens. the dev are generous with paid currency, cause they traumatized that the game almost End of Service, twice.
problem is, the gameplay is closer 2 yu gi oh than to standard turn based
Arknights is great for being F2P friendly, not as good as what I've heard about Limbus but definitely better then most of the industry.
You get a steady supply of premium currency. There is no junk to fill out drop tables, every pull gets you a character and ~almost~ every character is useful since lower rarity operators are easier to level up and the devs design every stage to be clearable with only a well built low rarity team. Even if you own a lot of 5 and 6 stars lower ranks are still useful.
There are also a ton of straight up free units, they do a ton of events and most of them come with a free 5 or 6 star simply for clearing the 4th level of the event. Rewards from past events will come back permanently after a while so there is a huge backlog for new players to earn. There is also the headhunting system which lets you try and focus recruit units and is entirely free. if you understand how the tag system work it will get you 6 copies of every 2 star, 3 star, and the majority of 4 stars.
somehow the 1 stars are harder to get then the 6 stars
Admittedly, yeah. Uma Musume, in comparison with another gacha game with a similar system, like Blue Archive, feels greedy in comparison. They both have a gacha system with a hard pity after 200 pulls. The main difference is that Blue Archive has 120 currency per pull, while Uma Musume has 150, along with the fact that the pity does not carry over to other coinciding banners as opposed to Blue Archive. Not to mention, Blue Archive devs are WAY more generous than Uma Musume's. (Also unlike Uma Musume, Blue Archive doesn't have a weapon banner, so all your pulls are focused solely on characters)
Ans tbh Umamusume is one of the more F2P friendly ones I've seen? I have tried a few gatchas and often would drop them bc they deadass wouldn't let me progress the story without some items/currency that you need either to do gatcha for (and be lucky) or spend days mindlessly grinding by repeating non-skippable levels. Umamusume can still be enjoyed with shitty pulls, you don't need certain characters or cards to unlock more careers or anything. Honestly it only locks you out of the most competitive PvP and optional events.
Otherwise you can enjoy the game and the stories completely ignoring that. And they keep giving players the currency for free for anime milestones/anniversaries/important events. As far as I know, all new characters and items can also be obtained at any time later, even after their banner event ends. Banner events just give you an extra reward for pulling this specific item.
But yeah, it's still a gatcha, its main goal is still to get people to pay for it. So yes, they will hype up certain characters/cards and make them hard to get, and make events hard so that people want to performa better in them etc etc. That's how they operate.
"The gatcha game keeps pushing me to make a purchase!!" it's like being mad a dating sim is forcing you to choose a love interest to date.
My free to play ass, with hundreds of rolls and premium currency in my Arknights account, yet almost flat broke on the normal money which even paying players never buy.
Just shows you either never played gacha or misinterprete the way premium currency works in it. In gacha the common coins are absolutely necessary for your progression as they are the main currency for level upping and depending on the game even more things. Premium currency doesn’t affect gameplay progression but with it you get new character and compared to most games gachas are pretty generous with it. The catch is the probability/pity system for character and you ar not able to get everything you want most of the time. The game also slightly pushes you with fomo on character banners and the shilled content which new characters perform better at. The post is mostly referencing the pre-gacha system of mobile games (example war robots, shitton of mobile strategies and etc.)
People will never understand gacha games. It's the same as Nintendo games where it's just mainstream to hate. People legit think every gacha game you'll need to spend hundreds of dollars monthly to play the game.
Seriously, I remember playing Cookie Run Kingdom, getting tons and tons of pulls for completely free and being able to do well in PVE and PVP. I feel like people are exagerating because they can't reach the top 1% PVP leaderboard or something. And in games without PVP, it just becomes ridiculously stupid
Ummm battle cats to a zero extent wtf are you talking about? The most free f2p game of all time. Zero ads, shit ton of free rewards and there’s not even a “real” currency like in this snafu. It’s literally just cat food which is really goddamn expensive to buy sure but it’s completely irrelevant when they give it away like candy. I will not tolerate battle cats slander when it’s objectively the least predatory gacha mobile game ever
battle cats is definitely the best here as they give you 10 cf per map beaten and from quests. And they also often give good deals in rolls, they’re generally very ftp friendly (source: i’m in UL and haven’t spend any money). but it does follow the format of have an easy to get resource (xp) and a premium purchasable resource (cf) used for most things
Ptcgp deff got to a point it felt like it was being really tight with the hour glasses compared to how fast it was pumping packs out
Pokemon go gives out gold coins at a solid rate but these days everything good costs $$$
Coins are for raid passes and that's basically it, but at 50 coins a pass if u catch the right box that's basically 1 a day and those can be saved for big events which makes it better than a lot of mobile games tbh
the premium currency is easier to obtain, the problem is that all currencies slowly turn into "gold" tier and real money becomes the real premium currency
This is why I fell off Asphalt 8 back in the day. Blueprints for higher tier cars were locked behind blue credits and I maybe ever got like 5 of them in my entire play time. Each piece of a blueprint cost like 50 and you needed like 10 blueprints to actually unlock the car. Once it’s unlocked, THEN you can buy it. It was fun for a good while but once it got to that point I was like fuck that lmao
Getting tokens is actually possible now, but it costs a lot more to get cars. If you play 10 games of online multiplayer, you'll get a minimum of 30 tokens a day, but an S-Class car will run you a few thousand
battle cats is the opposite, well there isnt a "normal" currency but xp is farmed through limited time events which i always miss but the game gives you so much catfood for gambling
I havent gone less than 30k catfood in years although to be fair i use seed tracking that basically removes most of the gambling aspect so i dont spend as much
Dragon City had this shit from the start i think, though i dint remmeber if you could buy gems with irl money at that point or not? but jfc yeah its infuriating.
I've somehow played games with the opposite problem where the game showers me with hundreds / a couple thousand of the premium currency while I'm literally running out of the standard.
Granted, those games had a third, even more premium currency that was ONLY obtainable by purchase but it was also only a supplement to the 2nd currency and not fully necessary for any part of the progression
The most lenient of these has got to be PvZ2 imo. You can get like 75-100 gems (enough to do literally everything gem-related in-game) by just playing a total of like 30 minutes to 1 hour.
In fact in PvZ 2, sometimes you need coins a lot more than you need gems with seed leveling and stuff.
Meanwhile Flight Rising: I know we're SUPPOSED to make you pay for our premium currency but you can also trade with other players and find them in chests, so half our playerbase hasn't given us a cent lol
Warframe executes tis perfectly: make a good, fun game, that is fully ftp and if you want any premium currency, you don't have to buy it: you can just trade for it on the player-run economy.
Coaxed into predatory game design which filters its playerbase for those willing to pay most, A.K.A "whales". Those who don't pay up are slowly pushed into a corner where game progression becomes so difficult that they give up. If you are not willing to keep paying more and more money, you are not the intended audience, and the game will try its best to make you stop playing, because it doesn't want you here. The scourge of modern and old mobile games alike.
Think well while playing mobile games: which mechanics are designed to annoy you into spending money? The results will frighten you.
shout-outs to skullgirls mobile for actively giving you a metric fuckload of both while making the F2P currency the most important one.
..though it is a gacha. hm.
You could buy just enough to progress for the price of 2 full-featured indie games OR, and this is the best option, spend half a month's rent on the big box.
It really is the best value. Get your calculator if you don't believe me.
Darktide. And it’s somehow worse than a mobile game despite being a full priced game, there’s literally no way to consistently earn Aquilas without spending money
The normal currency you actually run out of frequently because everything needs it
The special one, you can get by trading, you don't need to use money, i know of a friend that has a lot of it without spending anything in the game. And it only buys you cosmetics and characters without having to build them, everything is accessible in that game, so you're not too dependant on the special currency
another one is a mobile game called "Skull girls"
Normal currency, i never have infinite of it, as leveling up characters takes a lot of it, and the special currency the game just.. gives you, like, a lot, ofc, it gives you little but in a week of playing i go from 20 to 1000 because of how many events they do that give them
See, normal WT has two main currencies: Silver Lions (SL) and Golden Eagles (GE). There’s also the Battle Pass-related Warbonds, but those work differently so I’ll ignore them here. See, SL comes mainly from battles and sometimes loot crate rewards (often from challenges, etc.), while GE are 99% of the time paid (ignoring wagers and theoretically big crates, however these are so unlikely they can be ignored) and used for Premium vehicles, Premium accounts (more battle rewards and a few other bonuses), more crew slots (this is a vehicle game, if you weren’t aware), or assisted progression by converting Convertible Research Points into Research on vehicles or modifications (at a ratio of 1 GE - about $0.01 - to 45 RP, where a vehicle will commonly take hundreds of thousands to research not even counting modifications - this is clearly not actually expected to be used in any major capacity).
In War Thunder mobile, a substantially shittier game, GE are thrown at you constantly through flashy spinning whatevers ft. Military waifu and another currency, something Platinum something (can’t remember the name) is the real Premium currency.
Or worse. The in game coins are needed for ingame mechanics but are difficult and slow to earn even with a premium pass and battlepass but the store sells both ingame coins and the premium currency. Forcing you to buy both. (World of Tanks and it's kin)
Oh, there’s also EGGS, MEDALS, and, for no particular reason, PINEAPPLES, they all work the exact same way as gems but you can’t swap between them and each one will become the sole way to reasonably progress or unlock something massively important, at some point. The amount needed will be just a smidge higher than what the game gives you, as if it KNEW you were going to save every single one, despite the massive hassle of unnecessarily grinding through things when there was technically a cheap shortcut.
literally any mobile game
my favorite part is when the game forces you to buy the premium currency in bulk, but only in amounts that require you to make multiple purchases to buy anything in game.
Thing you need: 140 gems
Prices:
10 gems - $4.99
45 gems - $9.99
130 gems - $19.99
440 gems - $49.99
2,100 gems - $124.99
22,290 gems + ULTRA RARE bobble!!! - $999.99
The highest bundle will also be given several labels akin to "Best offer", "Most popular", "Don't miss out". Followed by any closure of the store giving a "once in a lifetime deal of buying 130 gems for $18.99 and they'll throw in 5 shitfuck powerups for free"
Clash royale with the “21x value” packs
Clash royale adding another 0 to the end of the amount of cards needed to level up a troop so you can deal 2% more damage against the enemy (or you can give them 50 bucks and skip the grind)
and if you don't pay then you get destroyed by someone who did because somehow that 2% health increase means they can survive 3 extra nukes
Coaxed into LVL 15 musketeer vs LVL 16 musketeer vs fireball
I think it's unrealistic that you can get exactly 140 gems by buying 10+130 Instead the lowest package will be 15 gems so you'll always have an unusable amount left over, that you can only use by buying more gems.
As an avid puzzles & survival player, yeah 😭
but they would also write the 130 as 100+30 and 2100 as 2000+100 to make it look like a special deal
and also the crossed out 69.99 before the 49.99
How piglins feel after giving me 7 nether bricks so can’t even do anything with them
How piglins feel handing me a pile of gravel, a dead baby ghast and 2 nether bricks after i gave them the contents of the US treasury (they will now attempt to kill me as ive opened a chest in the last hour)
4 nether bricks makes a block
Extra cool when they make an expensive option the most cost efficient, so you feel smart for spending more money than you intended, but the option that gives the most gems at once is horribly ineffective to make the most out of whales
(example, 10 gems for 0.5$, 50 gems for 2$, 999 gems for 55$)
Fun fact, looks like they might actually make that illegal in the EU soon.
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_831
https://www.beuc.eu/position-papers/monetising-play-regulating-game-and-app-premium-currencies
Classic dark design.
They do that on purpose
No shit
https://preview.redd.it/qrp4t372k57g1.png?width=258&format=png&auto=webp&s=a2991f684fb8e88f8fa8719c1ba4f2840e7cfdf0
I can name like 1 that dont subscribe to this bullshit practice, Yugioh Master Duel only has one main currency that unlocks all the stuffs, including battle pass, cosmetics, cards, etc... and it can obtain via playing the game, and the battle pass refunds its cost upon completion, which is usually easy since it can be completed in like 20-30 games and last 4 months.
The only problem is that you have to play the game, and the game is Yugioh.
Where winds meet only has customisations and qol in the cash shop, and the ingame top up options match the cheapest ones (qol mounts/outfits)
They make up for it with the insane power creep. What's that, saving up for the pack you need to pull up to iirc 600 times from with resets if your deck needs three of an ultra rare? Well too bad, by the time you're done the deck is already irrelevant again because a new pack just came out with the PERFECT cards to counter the previous one. Too bad!
Edit: As other comment said below I confused it with another yugioh game lmao nevermind
What resets are you talking about??? You can build decks by pulling 3-6 times, which isn't much considering the 250 gems given per day and the monthly 3100 gem events, I haven't spent an € in the game and had no problem building any deck I want (except if you are one of those people that want to build every single deck that comes out every month, bad and good decks)
Like, Master Duel has its problems, but gems aren't one of them in the slightest
I believe they are mixing master duel up with duel links, the other yugioh mobile game which has a HORRENDOUS economy and if you get to many of a rare card from a set you have to “reset” that set to get anymore basically cratering your chances of pulling it
You are absolutely correct I mixed those two up. Master duel is actually a lot more bearable and fair, if you ignore that it's a bit annoying that you gotta gamble on even being able to pull on the right pack
Unless they changed that by now in which case I said nothingYou are thinking of Duel Links.
I havent played in a while but in 2022 I made a Branded deck, in 2023 and twice in 2024 I updated and piloted that Branded to Challenger, even right now I can still go back and mix Branded with me whatever the jizz they are having in that format and pilot that joint to high hell and back.
This is why the mobile industry is significantly bigger than pc or console markets combined
In every conceivable metric
Whales are big animals
And they need to be milked
No they don’t
Please do not the cetacean
And they need to be milked
Nah, NinjaKiwi games, Ironhide games, Balatro, Arcade games.
Really just F2P games because they need money somehow, but even then like Fortnite, PUBG, several of the NinjaKiwi's, really there's a lot of good games without much that's intrusive.
Then of course there are the many funded by ads rather than premium currency, or by a premium subscription that's separate from currency.
okay well tbf balatro isnt free in the first place (its a banger game so i dont mind but still)
neither is bloons ... i mean, you can BUY in game currency but it is by no means necessary nor efficient
Oh yeah i forgot bloons was payed because there was a small period where bloons was free, so i misremembered.
I wouldn't say the BTD series have the "coins"
Sure, they have the "gems"
Or maybe I am not that familular with Ninja Kiwi games, so corect me if I am wrong
I haven't played some of the new btd games that have come out but at least in btd6 it's really easy to get the only type of currency, which is used for basically everything.
I don't know if Ninja Kiwi has changed the system for btd battles 2 but when the game came out, the way you unlocked towers and upgrades was just awful, it was a lot of grinding and the only way to actually progress was by paying a special pass or something I don't remeber very well.
what's even more bullshit is when they have free and paid versions of that premium currency. All the cool stuff can only be bought with the paid for version.
Counter point: skull girls
Their special currency is too abundant
There are quite a few good ones without such shit, but Google makes more profit promoting those that demands transactions.
You'll have to find out good ones through external means and then look them up by name in the playstore.
My Singing Monsters used to be like this, but now you can get like 200 fuckin diamonds a day. They just charge real money for cosmetics now.
Only a handful of costumes (like 300 other more high quality costumes aren’t paid for) and ghazt on composer as a bonus for buying the separate composer app, but yeah. I love msm particularly because there’s no fomo for actual content. And even then, the paid costumes return for their events iirc.
except skullgirls which is why it is so peak
You can also get like 5 gems for an achievement
But any random thing costs 200 gems
And if you want to skip the waiting time or cooldown on something then it always costs gems but never coins
which you will eventually run out
Enough obtainable gems to get you hooked on the progression, not enough to sustain end game content
And you complete all of the achievements and side quests that give you like, 50 gems, and you think to yourself “holy fuckshit I'm rich”. Then you become reckless with your spendings because you think there's more achievements to be completed and once you waste all of your gems on stupid shit like wait-skipping, gems are no longer obtainable and you're fucked (unless you pull out that scrumptious card)
Grinding out gold in red dead online was so absurdly tedious that when I finally got enough of it to buy my bounty hunter license I had lost all desire to play the game. I gave it another shot like a year later and every session had a hacker who would spawn infinite loot boxes that basically made it a non issue. Had a lot more fun now that I could actually play the game
Based hacker tbh
60 bucks to play on top of pay to win is nasty nasty nasty (pay to progress is basically the same thing)
This right here. I’ve had people try to deny that RDO was pay to progress and therefore also pay to win.
Listen man when a gun is locked behind a level grind and a money grind that’s so slow it’s legitimately infuriating (missions paying out like $1.50 for completion meanwhile a goddamn repeater is like $1500) and you can also pay for some premium currency to bypass that money grind, your game is pay to progress blatantly disguised as free to progress.
Same as GTA Online, at least the last time I played. Everything was getting more and more expensive but Rockstar was intentionally going around absolutely nuking all decent money grinds, no doubt to funnel people who just want to experience the new content into buying shark cards
Same issue with Helldivers ngl (Pay to Progress (to get warbonds) at an incredibly slow rate of currency acquisition by grinding that you can skip by forking over dosh.)
Yeah I had mfs talking to me like that “but you can find super credits in missions!”
Yeah but the optimal gameplay loop to progress IN A GAME YOU PAY FOR should not devolve into playing the absolute lowest difficulty and farming paltry amounts of premium currency YOU HAVE TO PAY FOR
EXACTLY THIS! Someone also math’d it out, & the ‘optimal farm’ as of recent nets you about ¢15 an hour or something ludicrously small like that.
And without the warbonds, you LITERALLY are missing content that makes you able to engage with enemies better (AT Emplacement for Warstriders makes them trivial. Same with thermite. Don’t have the warbonds for ‘em? Congrats! You’re going to have a bad time!)
Hacker W
I really wanted to try red dead online. But it was so boring because you couldn’t simply play without paying extra money. Such a shame.
Rockstar games are surprisingly easy to hack for how predatory their monetization practices are. GTA has received a new anticheat since I last played, but I remember being able to give myself infinite gold in RDO with just a Cheat Engine memory injection table lol
GTA:O got fun for me once I figured out duping and could actually buy the stuff I wanted. No way I'd even look at it today if it wasn't for that.
Gold currency
Material Currency
Credit Card Currency
Blood points, iridescent shards, and auric cells
Death by morrow
Calling Qiqi a DPS is like saying you shouldn't pull Kokomi because she can't crit lmao
Sure you can use her as a physical dps, but her skill and burst do a great job of sustaining the team, keeping her onfield just allows her to heal everyone at once.
my coaxing monsters
yeah but the good thing is like most of that stuff is unnecessary
Nuu uh, just build the mines and you're set
This exactly. I make like around 30 diamonds a day from mines and wublin/celestial island. I even started a new account on pc and I already have 4 mini mines set up in just a few days. Diamonds are really not that scarce in this game.
the premium currency is actually pretty easy to collect a lot of if you don't have impulsive spending habits and/or are patient enough
it's possible to progress normally without any difficulties without paying money aside from some minor inconveniences
Plus, the game is honestly really high quality for a mobile game and the devs put a lot of time and effort into it. There’s zero shame in throwing them a bone
seriously just build the mines after you roll a big chest in the daily and you're set for life after a month or so.
MSM is like the one mobile game this meme doesn’t apply to.
Hell nah, i got load of gems but i cant do batshit with them cuz i ran out of shards for mech islet
No msm actually lets you build like 2 mines i think? Per island so you can get loads of them daily.
1 per island but Plant lets you build an upgraded mine that gets you 2 diamonds per 12 hours.
I know what kind of game this is referring to but I genuinely have over 200k gems™ on Cookie Run Kingdom and I do not know what to do with them anymore.
gems in cookie run games are actually classified as coins 2.0- The real gems are the banner unique currencies
It's not even the fact that you have to pay for each one, it's the fact that not a single offer is actually worth the price. I remember when we could go several updates without an exclusive currency banner but now it's every patch nearly, and almost nothing in shop is worth buying because it's ridiculously overpriced for how shitty their gachas are.
The conversion rate for gems to banner currency is so awful. I'm over here spending 50 draws worth of gems just to get a 10 draw on a unique banner (You don't understand I NEED that new cookie)
Coax of clans
Coax of Clans are more free from this shit
Nowadays Coax Royale fits this snafu more 😭
Me and my buddy would play 2v2s together waaay back in the earlier days, we would always joke about how the best card in the game was the credit card, namely when we ran into players with overleveled cards
No not at all really. Gems only make things faster, nothing mandatory is gated behind them. And there's a ton of ways to get the standard resources (gold, elixir, DE) and also gems.
Oh i guess it’s different now then. I haven’t played in years. I remember upgrading my town hall and the build timer being a literal month or something like that lol, I think I stopped playing it around then
Yeah the game probably hasn't been in a healthier state. Many upgrade times have been reduced, the free pass gives out a ton of rewards, there frequent events with many rewards too, troops don't cost resources anymore and don't have training time so you can attack whenever, and they separated battles in ranked mode and raid mode to loot without tanking your ranking by a few leagues.
There are actually many more ways to get gems now than there was before
The only things that are really out of reach for F2P players is being able to upgrade and unlock everything instantly and it’s INSANELY expensive to go that route, like, $10k expensive.
It does take 3-5 years to upgrade everything in the end but that’s literally the main aspect of the game.
If you don’t spend gems on upgrade timers, you accrue plenty of them to unlock everything useful and available without spending any money. The same goes for events.
Compared to almost every mobile game I’ve played, F2P players in COC are very well catered to and taken care of in my opinion.
Gacha games be like.
and not just gacha games, pretty much all games nowadays have this kind of model
Limbus company don't do this so it's pretty much the only gacha i play. There is only one currency and the dev likes to give them out for free.
The CEO btw has a vtuber avatar of the company dig to make announcements with
these announcements are barely functional and very comical
Limbus and Arknights are genuinely the most F2P friendly gacha games ever made.
PS: did you get the collab Egos?
I don't know if I would include Arknights in that. The only metric by which Arknights is f2p friendly is that you can clear nearly all story and event content with easily accessible characters, but that isn't special. It applies to the majority of gacha games. Even the near decade old Granblue and FGO meet that metric.
I got all of them in 230 pull, all of them are free pull.
I saw a post getting mad at...Umamusume(?) for making it really hard for F2P to do well in a event
Like, yes, shocking, I know
No, this is a fair complaint. All gatcha games are ultimately greedy but some are definitely more free to play friendly then others. Based on factors like how many pulls can be earned, what the odds are on said pulls, if it has a pity system, how often they rerun banners, and whether or not the game needs you to have limited characters to play the endgame.
Yeah. I played Reverse 1999 for some time and had a quite competitive team with limited characters and overall a strong lineup while being f2p the whole time. Other games won't let you even look in the general direction of the strongest units without paying.
My main issue with Reverse is that it does the limited banners thing making some characters effectively unobtainable unless they happen to do a rerun in like a year. This is quite the shock coming from Limbus Company where I can literally just buy any character with 1 2 hour commitment a week*.
the asterisk is that you can't shard stuff from last season and the special event called Walpurgisnacht. Other than that, go ham.
Limbus is known for being very f2p friendly, in fact, it's the most generous game I play. It's just that without the battlepass the grind to get everything takes a very very long time. But at least you *can* get everything without paying.
play Morimens. the dev are generous with paid currency, cause they traumatized that the game almost End of Service, twice.
problem is, the gameplay is closer 2 yu gi oh than to standard turn based
Arknights is great for being F2P friendly, not as good as what I've heard about Limbus but definitely better then most of the industry.
You get a steady supply of premium currency. There is no junk to fill out drop tables, every pull gets you a character and ~almost~ every character is useful since lower rarity operators are easier to level up and the devs design every stage to be clearable with only a well built low rarity team. Even if you own a lot of 5 and 6 stars lower ranks are still useful.
There are also a ton of straight up free units, they do a ton of events and most of them come with a free 5 or 6 star simply for clearing the 4th level of the event. Rewards from past events will come back permanently after a while so there is a huge backlog for new players to earn. There is also the headhunting system which lets you try and focus recruit units and is entirely free. if you understand how the tag system work it will get you 6 copies of every 2 star, 3 star, and the majority of 4 stars.
somehow the 1 stars are harder to get then the 6 starsAdmittedly, yeah. Uma Musume, in comparison with another gacha game with a similar system, like Blue Archive, feels greedy in comparison. They both have a gacha system with a hard pity after 200 pulls. The main difference is that Blue Archive has 120 currency per pull, while Uma Musume has 150, along with the fact that the pity does not carry over to other coinciding banners as opposed to Blue Archive. Not to mention, Blue Archive devs are WAY more generous than Uma Musume's. (Also unlike Uma Musume, Blue Archive doesn't have a weapon banner, so all your pulls are focused solely on characters)
Also Blue Archive has more children to lust over.
uma also doesn't have seia swimsuit so there is a clear winner here
Ans tbh Umamusume is one of the more F2P friendly ones I've seen? I have tried a few gatchas and often would drop them bc they deadass wouldn't let me progress the story without some items/currency that you need either to do gatcha for (and be lucky) or spend days mindlessly grinding by repeating non-skippable levels. Umamusume can still be enjoyed with shitty pulls, you don't need certain characters or cards to unlock more careers or anything. Honestly it only locks you out of the most competitive PvP and optional events.
Otherwise you can enjoy the game and the stories completely ignoring that. And they keep giving players the currency for free for anime milestones/anniversaries/important events. As far as I know, all new characters and items can also be obtained at any time later, even after their banner event ends. Banner events just give you an extra reward for pulling this specific item.
But yeah, it's still a gatcha, its main goal is still to get people to pay for it. So yes, they will hype up certain characters/cards and make them hard to get, and make events hard so that people want to performa better in them etc etc. That's how they operate.
"The gatcha game keeps pushing me to make a purchase!!" it's like being mad a dating sim is forcing you to choose a love interest to date.
you're telling me the anime horse betting game promotes gambling? color me shocked! /s
Dragonball legends
My free to play ass, with hundreds of rolls and premium currency in my Arknights account, yet almost flat broke on the normal money which even paying players never buy.
Just shows you either never played gacha or misinterprete the way premium currency works in it. In gacha the common coins are absolutely necessary for your progression as they are the main currency for level upping and depending on the game even more things. Premium currency doesn’t affect gameplay progression but with it you get new character and compared to most games gachas are pretty generous with it. The catch is the probability/pity system for character and you ar not able to get everything you want most of the time. The game also slightly pushes you with fomo on character banners and the shilled content which new characters perform better at. The post is mostly referencing the pre-gacha system of mobile games (example war robots, shitton of mobile strategies and etc.)
People will never understand gacha games. It's the same as Nintendo games where it's just mainstream to hate. People legit think every gacha game you'll need to spend hundreds of dollars monthly to play the game.
Seriously, I remember playing Cookie Run Kingdom, getting tons and tons of pulls for completely free and being able to do well in PVE and PVP. I feel like people are exagerating because they can't reach the top 1% PVP leaderboard or something. And in games without PVP, it just becomes ridiculously stupid
Isn't that the point of a Gacha game?
He doesn't know about the warframe progression model
off the top of my head: newer pvz mobile games, clash royale, clash of clans, battle cats (to a lesser extent), and ptcgp
Ummm battle cats to a zero extent wtf are you talking about? The most free f2p game of all time. Zero ads, shit ton of free rewards and there’s not even a “real” currency like in this snafu. It’s literally just cat food which is really goddamn expensive to buy sure but it’s completely irrelevant when they give it away like candy. I will not tolerate battle cats slander when it’s objectively the least predatory gacha mobile game ever
battle cats is definitely the best here as they give you 10 cf per map beaten and from quests. And they also often give good deals in rolls, they’re generally very ftp friendly (source: i’m in UL and haven’t spend any money). but it does follow the format of have an easy to get resource (xp) and a premium purchasable resource (cf) used for most things
Ptcgp deff got to a point it felt like it was being really tight with the hour glasses compared to how fast it was pumping packs out
Pokemon go gives out gold coins at a solid rate but these days everything good costs $$$
Coins are for raid passes and that's basically it, but at 50 coins a pass if u catch the right box that's basically 1 a day and those can be saved for big events which makes it better than a lot of mobile games tbh
Iirc in PvZ Heroes you can always get more gems by ascending the ranks in the ranked multiplayer though
Coaxel Gun 3D
the premium currency is easier to obtain, the problem is that all currencies slowly turn into "gold" tier and real money becomes the real premium currency
I remember many, many years ago that this was called out by Jim Sterling. She called them “Bullshit Currency” and “Real Currency”.
Jim Sterling transitioned i think
Really? Dang I haven’t watched any of her videos in ages. Thanks
Coax Royale reference
Brawl stars is the opposite lol
Play limbus company we only have the gem currency and we get like a bunch each 2 weeks and even more if the producer said “um” on his stream
"Worst stream in game development history" but it's the 5th one this week lmao
https://preview.redd.it/i6yxa58jo47g1.jpeg?width=851&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6d06e433a37b4ec785251812d3ece96890ecf9ba
I mean kinda? Managed to get to the final map without paying, but dammit it was a grind
Coin Inflation
This is why I fell off Asphalt 8 back in the day. Blueprints for higher tier cars were locked behind blue credits and I maybe ever got like 5 of them in my entire play time. Each piece of a blueprint cost like 50 and you needed like 10 blueprints to actually unlock the car. Once it’s unlocked, THEN you can buy it. It was fun for a good while but once it got to that point I was like fuck that lmao
Getting tokens is actually possible now, but it costs a lot more to get cars. If you play 10 games of online multiplayer, you'll get a minimum of 30 tokens a day, but an S-Class car will run you a few thousand
War Thunder
Basically every mobile game
battle cats is the opposite, well there isnt a "normal" currency but xp is farmed through limited time events which i always miss but the game gives you so much catfood for gambling
I havent gone less than 30k catfood in years although to be fair i use seed tracking that basically removes most of the gambling aspect so i dont spend as much
surprisingly NOT battle cats, the goat of mobile gatcha games keeps winning
https://preview.redd.it/reujec4g4b7g1.jpeg?width=799&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=be52cde92ae8b18b388bfc57a123d96bdb09ec22
I love my favorite cat/racing company
tbf i play a few games where the coins are scarce and EVERYONE complains about it.
Muahahahaha, you must be new to this
Dragon City had this shit from the start i think, though i dint remmeber if you could buy gems with irl money at that point or not? but jfc yeah its infuriating.
I've somehow played games with the opposite problem where the game showers me with hundreds / a couple thousand of the premium currency while I'm literally running out of the standard.
Granted, those games had a third, even more premium currency that was ONLY obtainable by purchase but it was also only a supplement to the 2nd currency and not fully necessary for any part of the progression
i feel like warframe can be described like this, but only if you are very good at getting plat
Grinding plat isn't too hard, just really fucking tedious and boring after a while
Coaxed into Artix Entertainment Games
The most lenient of these has got to be PvZ2 imo. You can get like 75-100 gems (enough to do literally everything gem-related in-game) by just playing a total of like 30 minutes to 1 hour. In fact in PvZ 2, sometimes you need coins a lot more than you need gems with seed leveling and stuff.
you're not gonna believe this but nearly all games are just making numbers go up and down
Does Chinese gacha games count?
Meanwhile Flight Rising: I know we're SUPPOSED to make you pay for our premium currency but you can also trade with other players and find them in chests, so half our playerbase hasn't given us a cent lol
I love non-money hungry F2P games.
Warframe executes tis perfectly: make a good, fun game, that is fully ftp and if you want any premium currency, you don't have to buy it: you can just trade for it on the player-run economy.
Nah the coins are important sometimes
also currency for events, currency for skins, currency for new characters, currency to upgrades, currency for playing, etc
Coaxed into predatory game design which filters its playerbase for those willing to pay most, A.K.A "whales". Those who don't pay up are slowly pushed into a corner where game progression becomes so difficult that they give up. If you are not willing to keep paying more and more money, you are not the intended audience, and the game will try its best to make you stop playing, because it doesn't want you here. The scourge of modern and old mobile games alike.
Think well while playing mobile games: which mechanics are designed to annoy you into spending money? The results will frighten you.
Coaxed into me trying really hard to save them
shout-outs to skullgirls mobile for actively giving you a metric fuckload of both while making the F2P currency the most important one.
..though it is a gacha. hm.
The mobile games that do this make more money than any other part of the gaming industry if I am not mistaken.
Snafu Impact
Star rail credits
I blame clash of clans
Literally nothing is locked behind gems. Your just dead wrong
You could buy just enough to progress for the price of 2 full-featured indie games OR, and this is the best option, spend half a month's rent on the big box.
It really is the best value. Get your calculator if you don't believe me.
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Not a free to play game but this is literally dead by daylight
Or you get them through the little auto battler campaign that exists even if it doesn't fit in the context of the game
Duel links exactly...
I can think of a few that don't follow this format
Coaxie Run Snafudom
You know, when I used to play the devs were really generous with rewards, I could progress normally but idk how endgame was
Warframe?
Edit: nvm
War Thunder 99% of the time until they introduced the lootboxes for the free currency
You all should try idle obelisk miner. You can farm diamonds.
What y'all know about brawlhalla.
Darktide. And it’s somehow worse than a mobile game despite being a full priced game, there’s literally no way to consistently earn Aquilas without spending money
COAXED INTO PIXELGUN AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
Smuggievale
Coaxframe could never
Smuggie City and Snafu Legends (unfortunately):
Soul Knight fish chips.
Snafu run
Coaxed into cookie run kingdom
Warframe has an interesting take on this ngl
The normal currency you actually run out of frequently because everything needs it
The special one, you can get by trading, you don't need to use money, i know of a friend that has a lot of it without spending anything in the game. And it only buys you cosmetics and characters without having to build them, everything is accessible in that game, so you're not too dependant on the special currency
another one is a mobile game called "Skull girls"
Normal currency, i never have infinite of it, as leveling up characters takes a lot of it, and the special currency the game just.. gives you, like, a lot, ofc, it gives you little but in a week of playing i go from 20 to 1000 because of how many events they do that give them
Yugioh duel links
War Thunder Mobile did a funny thing with this.
See, normal WT has two main currencies: Silver Lions (SL) and Golden Eagles (GE). There’s also the Battle Pass-related Warbonds, but those work differently so I’ll ignore them here. See, SL comes mainly from battles and sometimes loot crate rewards (often from challenges, etc.), while GE are 99% of the time paid (ignoring wagers and theoretically big crates, however these are so unlikely they can be ignored) and used for Premium vehicles, Premium accounts (more battle rewards and a few other bonuses), more crew slots (this is a vehicle game, if you weren’t aware), or assisted progression by converting Convertible Research Points into Research on vehicles or modifications (at a ratio of 1 GE - about $0.01 - to 45 RP, where a vehicle will commonly take hundreds of thousands to research not even counting modifications - this is clearly not actually expected to be used in any major capacity).
In War Thunder mobile, a substantially shittier game, GE are thrown at you constantly through flashy spinning whatevers ft. Military waifu and another currency, something Platinum something (can’t remember the name) is the real Premium currency.
So yeah. GE are a lie in WTM.
So glad msm isnt like this
Or worse. The in game coins are needed for ingame mechanics but are difficult and slow to earn even with a premium pass and battlepass but the store sells both ingame coins and the premium currency. Forcing you to buy both. (World of Tanks and it's kin)
Tapped Out
Oh, there’s also EGGS, MEDALS, and, for no particular reason, PINEAPPLES, they all work the exact same way as gems but you can’t swap between them and each one will become the sole way to reasonably progress or unlock something massively important, at some point. The amount needed will be just a smidge higher than what the game gives you, as if it KNEW you were going to save every single one, despite the massive hassle of unnecessarily grinding through things when there was technically a cheap shortcut.
Some games try to balance this out by making the late-game upgrade so expensive that you will run out of coins no matter how many you get.
Magic the Gathering Arena is a nutshell
Any Asphalt game from 8 onwards
Not my goat Warframe. You can trade some items with players to get those type of currencies
Warframe win number 3 million
my singing monsters would never, we remain on top
"No guys, you can totally play the game without spending money, you can earn gems just by playing!"
Coaxing and Survival
I can't afford free to play games.