The math and game design are expertly crafted to make you play compulsively. They most certainly have been designed to cause psychological pain when you don’t play it you don’t pay. They are not designed to cause fun or joy.
It's just hard for me to get upset about a game that's always been a pretty skin over a blatant Skinner box.
You have these things called eternal crests which cost 160 “gems” (the real money currency). These let you run a special dungeon that guarantees a drop of a legendary gem rated between 1 and 5 stars. In fact if you fail the dungeon somehow it’ll refund the crest and let you try again.
Apparently the drop rate for the 5 star gems is 4.5%, so my napkin math works out to around $50 per 5 star legendary gem.
I can’t go back and check my math because I uninstalled the game.
I agree there.
I think my char is ~38 and I have 4 legendary gems mixed levels 2-3. I haven't and won't pay any money, but so far the game has been fun. I haven't been limited at all in my progression, in fact the game has felt too easy. Will I ever have 5x5star gems? Probably not, but I would have gotten bored way prior anyway.
I dislike F2P/micro tx games as much as anyone, but so far I haven't been limited in any way. When it does (or I get bored) I'll stop playing.
I’ve played Homeworld mobile recently. The progress is great for first 15 hours but then game drops at you timegates. Wanna spaceship strong enough for later content? You can do god know how many missions hoping you get ship design, or you can do god knows how many missions to earn money to buy that from one of factions for cash. Or you can buy credits for cash. But only on Android because game is in public beta and Apple forbids monetization in those.
And once you get the ship design, you need to mine resources for it (this is manageable) but then you need to refine those, which takes around 70h of wait, but if you have other premium currency named „adamantium”, you can cut that wait in half for 100 adamantium, then another half by another adamantium and half of that.
And then you need to build ship in shipyard which takes between 10 to 15 days, but with adamantium you can slice that time down like for refining.
Every day you can collect 100 adamantium for free and buy 1000 extra for $9.99.
It’s rumored that EA lost exclusivity on Star Wars games because of their mishandling of license and time-gating legendary Star Wars characters behind hours of gameplay (it took 42h of grind to unlock Darth Vader, but you could just pay extra on in-game roulette to unlock him sooner). This also caused uproar that reached mainstream media and commentary from members of state governments.
Without knowing how money scales in this game it's very hard to judge the 10 years / 110k figure. In D3 sometimes you're grinding exponentially for 1% or even 0.1% improvements at a time, and you don't have to.