Tragically hilarious due to its well-documented truthfulness…
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You do realize this is an optional thing to buy right? You’re not forced to spend money if you don’t want too. Besides all of the “pay-walled” things you said can be earned later. I myself have payed well over $100, but I’m not getting the Elite pass because I don’t want too. That is what buying things in ANY game is meant to do; allow you to do something or get something faster, unless it is cosmetic. It would be pointless to have to spend $50 on the deathknight armor if you could get it in the game right? And even if you could, buying it is optional, and you really only buy it to help you, if you want it. You putting in $120 has nothing to do with the Elite pass 
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Well, here’s my take on the other hard “paywalls” that can’t be scaled without buying a key.
For armors, outside of deathknight, most of them are overpriced and only good for cosmetics compared to other armors. I’m fine with this as the extra 50% additive rewards on xp, gold, and souls is nice, only one becomes useful later on. Granted, the bonuses are better for lower level and guildless players who don’t get all the statue bonuses. In short, the bonuses in the long run don’t give too much of an advantage other than a coolness factor.
Weapons are a tricky bunch. All the legendary and epic weapons behind $ only walls, well, suck. Most of the good weapons are craftable or earned through play. This does make a nice comparison with crafting a weapon vs event shops. The crafting resources can be built up and earned, but can also be bought with gems and $(or gems for $). Ideally, one would help the guild in the event, so let’s assume the soulforge is for missed weapons or guildless players. Resource costs are higher than the gem costs in events, but the time is a large factor with a turnaround of over a half year of waiting.
Cosmetic pets are only useful for kingdom power, but with so many other restrictions, it’s a currently limited issue. Most relevant kingdoms have enough pets or are blocked behind other progression gates.
Now for campaign troops. To summarize what has been said before, it’s not the fact it costs $10, it’s that the only real chance for everyone else is soulforge months later. The chance to open with regular keys in a month is not a good excuse. It should be craftable in the off week, then enter rotation.
For one, if the elite pass is surely a good deal, then everyone would buy it anyways. Especially considering that I doubt $10 would take you that far to craft it even with Sunday packs.
For two, they don’t deserve the $10 imho. This update has done nothing new except giving us back previously removed features with a worse UI. They added more bugs than fixes and haven’t made any balance changes in a long while. Instead, we get time gated tasks that pay out less and are frustratingly structured in such a way that it had to be intentional.
The only positive is the world events so far have been better for scoring. The campaigns don’t necessarily make the game worse, but it could have been so much more and being the only part of 5.0 is lackluster. I like the idea, I like the lore, and I loved daily/weekly tasks. This update was like a high school reunion where these people I knew became drug addicts in dead end jobs.
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@Sphyndel - I’m afraid you’ve missed the point.
As I summarised:
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Saying you can still get everything for free may be empirically true, but it’s incredibly insulting.
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A dollar a week? That’s not the point. The point is that you are being held to ransom every 11 weeks.
In short, the publisher is playing with our minds to try and get us to pay more money by actually offering somewhat reasonable value, then trying to dismiss the paywall as “not a big deal.”
It’s dishonest and greedy.
But I think the best way to understand it is to highlight three examples:
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A Triple-A game costs US$60 at launch, and half that six months later. I got at least 300 hours of play out of Dragon Age: Origins. Is GoW of the same complexity, quality or time value?
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A standard mobile phone contract is at least $60 a month here in Australia. That price is completely arbitrary (I know: I used to work for a phone company). For $60, I can buy food for dinner for a week. My own phone contract is $15 a month. But it’s really all a con. And it is, objectively, a lot of money every month – you can fuel your car for less. Even worse if you throw in five other subscriptions for $10-60 a month.
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Microsoft GamePass offers over 200 games for US$15 a month. Why would I spend that money on a single mobile game, instead?
Anyway, I’m not really going to convince anyone.
Do I want to pay $1 a week? Maybe.
Do I want to pay $260 over 5 years (on top of the $120 I’ve already paid)? Definitely not.
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Well, it is not actually $1 per week, it is $52 per year and can be even more than that if the developers are encouraged by an increase in the income. People like this feature, so why not put in more features like that! Another argument can be something about how hard it is for new players to catch up with the veterans. So, instead of offering a 5-year-long grind to new players, we should just let them spend as much as their gambling addiction allows, and plus a little bit more, so they can catch up rapidly!
All recent GoW updates, especially massive injection of empowered cards, dumbing down all battles to simple random coin toss on turn 1 or to stats contest, introduction of utterly boring repetitive modes, etc. does not promote anything positive IMHO. It is slowly drifting from a little peculiar distraction, which it should have remained, into some giant collector’s nightmare gambling den aka EA’s Madden. It is understandable that this is business and that business wants to grow if possible. However, growth should not come at expense of quality, support and fairness.
A silly analogy might be something like a little local hamburger shop that sells absolutely nice juicy sandwiches for $5 and then grows turning into some chain that sells same stuff but made of raw meat for $20 with a candy saying, look, now you can get a penny candy here as well, isn’t it quite generous of us. Of course, it is all word of mouth = reviews in the current age, plus addiction, plus knowledge of whatever people fancy at this time, which might or might not get compensated. However, IMHO, this type of business practice is neither fair nor sustainable over time.
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The issue is when you complete a task the reward is very small so you would expect if you wanted to skip a task it would be cheap to do so. Nope it’s very expensive to skip tasks. That makes absolutely zero sense. If you skip a task for 150 gems that is more than the entire campaign is worth in total. Skipping should have been 10/20/30 tops IMHO
Essentially, this is why I’m not even bothering to work on the Campaign. If I happen to complete some of the tasks, cool, but I’m not going out of my way for 70 glory.
Closer to $48 since week 12 is a campaign break, but on Xbox they charge extra 
But if money is the issue, let me introduce you to the concept of ‘campaign cans’. Regardless if you have a redemption policy on aluminum cans in your locale, you can earn cash money by collecting them off the roadside for the value of the metal. Not only are you helping the environment, the recycled aluminum saves green house gasses too! You’d also be getting fresh air and exercise, a win win in my book.
free, and then starts charging for fries. And the fires are mediocre. The outrage 
Growth comes at the expense of cash, just as quality, support, and ‘fairness’ does. No cash means no growth and no support.
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If you don’t buy the elite pass don’t even bother with the campaign. If you have the elite pass you’re playing the campaign for the mythic and maybe the weapons. Believe me no one is playing the campaign either with or without the elite pass for the regular rewards.
Personally, I haven’t bought the elite pass yet. I wanna see how horribly tedious the tasks get. If I can make to close to getting the mythic I’ll buy the elite pass. If they bore me out of my skull and I don’t want to deal with them then it’s no skin off my bones as I didn’t pay for anything and at worst I wasted minimal time on the campaign. Lesson learned.
Freedom of choice is so awesome.
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Hyperbole. Is it possible to get the exclusive for free? Yes or no.
Honestly just test other F2P to see what the standard is.
No it is just time-exclusive rewards. Like weekly troops. Like doom weapons.
You take one example but a lot of AAA games is not that long. At least 60 hours for a AAA game is already good.
I have 5k hours on GoW. VIP 9 so should be 800 dollars (?). 6 hours for 1 dollar is quite good.
And how much dollars the devs from these 200 games are getting?
Do you think it is cool to make video game development even worst only for your own greed?
Rewards will change so maybe only half will be interesting for you.
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Read this the other day:
Quote:
“I probably should not tell you any numbers, but essentially Microsoft makes you an offer, they pay you a pretty good sum ahead of time, which is guaranteed, and they add the game to Game Pass. The number was high enough for us and our publisher.”
and their source was a yt podcast with the dev:
This is perhaps a tad pessimistic of me, but I’m watching to see how many weeks they include a “spend two Event Keys” task. We’re 2 for 2 so far.
Event Keys are one of the resources whose gain has been repeatedly nerfed already, so part of me is wondering if the intention is to add a slow bleed instead of another direct nerf. Ironically, this would be a bleed targeted at everyone but the top percent of resource-generating guilds for a change. Epic/Legendary Tasks can give you Event Keys at a reasonable pace, but the majority of players are in guilds who don’t get these, and for them, every key is precious. (Arguably they’re precious for those who can earn more of them too, but my point is relativity.)
They could have just as easily added a “spend X Gold Keys” task instead. Those are accumulated constantly through play.
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I agree with this. Chipping away at the meagre resources of lower level players is a bad idea. Craft a summoning stone? Spend event keys? And we don’t know what’s to come. Plus, the 60 plus treasure map task is harder for lower guilds because they have fewer turns at the start of the game. That’s plain unfair. If you haven’t got the resources but bought the pass as a lower player there may well come a time when you need to open your wallet again in the course of the 10 weeks. Yet another attack on newer players IMO
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So, let’s do the math. $10.00 for a mythic, a legendary, a epic ascended to mythic, a pet ascendance to mythic, and a legendary weapon, + resources. Compared to other GoW deals, that’s a bloody steal, mate. And they’re not pay walled. All these items will either be craftable or droppable after the campaign is over. Devs need to get paid some how to give us more of the game they made/ we play. Either have patience or money. Thats how free-to-play works.
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All that you mentioned besides the Mythic is rather useless. There isn’t a single pet that does anything useful. Legendary weapons aren’t very valuable either.
Any pets that boost +1 magic? That would be useful.
There are a few legendary weapons that do hold value, i.e Life and Death, Earth’s Fury, to name a couple. All are relatively easy to obtain when the events are around. The problem with this legendary weapon is it will just be added to the pile. It is inferior to almost any other option.
So $10 for a Mythic, even if it is just a couple weeks ahead of others and not having to spend 2 months of keys to obtain is worth $10, but it sure as hell isn’t worth $25. Even if you factor in the rewards.
Its easy to say the devs need to get paid, and I agree. If they don’t the game ends. The problem is the effort is not there. They work, don’t get me wrong, but they are clock watchers now. Just waiting for the bell to ring so they can go home. This entire campaign is regurgitated content they removed “because it wasn’t fun.” Now it is? And worth money?
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If only the players would have told the devs their other deals sucks…
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If the campaign troops/weapons were in the soulforge the week after the campaign ends I would have no problem with this update. (other that yet again adding more time required to keep up). But the fact it could be months or even a year to wait for this stuff makes completionists like me feel held to ransom over this elite pass.
And I realize that’s the whole point of course but still…
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And we are about the only two Xbox players that actuary bought all the garbage $5 weapons.
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It’s wild.
As a Game Dev myself, I understand the decision… but also reprimand you on the choice. One of the best things about this game is that, if you grind enough, there isn’t much that you can’t purchase/grind for that people that pay money can do. HOWEVER, there is always enough content, event shops, ext, that makes it very tempting to pay to get those few extra gems you need. I don’t even mind the one exception of the Deathknight Armor, since that is kinda your whale ‘cost of entry’ and if they don’t end up staying at least you got $50 from a whale.
But not having a ‘free’ gems based option even double what the shop price is for buying gems, for what is basically a season pass is a really bad call. Pretty much, saying that you are now profit focused(or desperate, either will kill a game) and not community focused.
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