So I am of two minds when it comes to this game so far. One one hand $15 for a power pass 3x a year plus $50 for character slots and shit really isn't much money hell it comes out to less than most MMORPG subscriptions. However this game offers less than let's say a $15 a month for WoW as far as I am concerned. I really don't care if they want to charge ass loads for cosmetics like mounts and wallpapers for the ultra deep dick faggot pass but it really irks me that I am going to be somewhat forced into the premium pass if I want to keep up given the amount of materials they apparently give. I honestly wouldn't care if they were at least purchasable with blue crystals but as this game progresses it seems like there are new stages of shit sandwiches you are expected to eat.
Again any game that wants to charge for cosmetics go right the fuck ahead, if Amazon wanted to add a Rolls Royce mount for $72,000 and an NFT scam to sucker dipshit out of their cash please by all means milk those faggots for all they are worth, sell spinning rims and rent to own TV's for all I care, shit add payday cash advance loans for gold the sky is the limit on deep dicking retards out of cash.
But if I am expected to fork over money to access characters and keep up by getting basic gearing rewards than these American Inventor faggot dipshits better step up the customer service side of things and pull their stupid fucking heads out of their assholes and address the goddamn botting plague of this shithole game. I'll pay money if you service your fucking game but while American Inventors are teleporting all over the goddamn screen, Chinese American Inventor faggots are twitch streaming their bots and laughing about it, and bots are hacking the in game pvp systems I don't see why anyone would fork over a single penny to these soulless dick nuggets.
The game is fun but shallow as shit, as we are spoon fed content there is a constant grind that just isn't going to be worth doing months at a time for the very limited raiding that is offered. For a couple of months I have been knocking out Una's and shit doing weeklys, and dailies, and chaos shit, and guardians and really most of it is mindless and fun enough. Even across a few characters I can knock out a good chuck of this stuff and not think twice. Like many of you we're used to grinding, grinded EQ, grinded D2, D3, WoW, Final Fantasy, grinded old school SNES RPGs, so I don't mind that aspect until it feels like these dick sneezes are purposefully wasting your fucking time. Shit like the Guardian raid ass aids feel like a purposeful waste of time, some of the shittier Una's feel like a purposeful waste of time.
Nothing really feels out of reach in the game but much of it does feel like a repeated slog, some of the things I appreciate is how much progress is simply roster wide and honestly games like WoW should learn from this and unfuck their reputation systems and other things. Certain changes like the map fix is positive but it also begs the question if you already improved basic quality of life things in Korea and Russia and you know full god damn fucking well that these changes such (someone mentioned in the korean versions they don't deep dick your shithole letting you trade your own items to your alts for pheons) or the front and back attack indicators, the UI updates, who is the moron who decided you know what lets just release a shittier version for no goddamn fucking reason. It's one thing to delay content I don't even have a real complaint about the pacing but holy shit why would you intentionally release a shitty version of basic QOL changes you made to keep people playing this shit?
Foolishly I will probably drop $50 or $100 on this buying the royal crystal bundle of 5750 or 1200 and I feel like I will have gotten my moneys worth out of it for the next year of content but am I going to find out in another 2 months there is another avenue of shit in your mouth pass to buy? There is already the crystalline aura to maintain monthly again not a big deal really didn't bat an eye at that but if just seems like we're slowly being drip fed a sewage pipe with zero in game support. This isn't Korea people aren't signing up with their social credit system so they need to do more than some EZ anticheat garbage.
Just want to clarify a few things as the complaint is legitimate but there are a few caveats worth noting;
1) This update is more aligned with the cadence that we see in KR in terms of casual versus whale play. Argos was the outlier, so it's possible that AGS fucks things up again but really, the added premium mats are completely unnecessary to progress your character. This update is aimed at a gear of score 1340 and, I'm sorry, if you're not able to be 1340 by this stage with the most recent addition of methods to earn materials without having spent a dime, you are pants on head retarded at MMO play (or play 1 hour a week). You can easily be 1340 without a single alt, AH play, or anything but logging in for 20 minutes a day doing only chaos dungeons. If you opt not to spend on the pass, you will still be capable of being
well ahead of future updates, provided you're not an idiot. Legion raids will traditionally require you to keep 2-3 alts to feed your main but, fuck, if you want to raid in an MMO on day #1 of the launch of the aforementioned raids, you're going to need to put in some extra time. There is an example of a KR player who has never paid a cent and has something like 18 alts on multiple accounts at a ridiculously high GS. Yes, buying the cheapo pass lets you have the ability to, for instance, transition to a new main and catch back up quicker. It isn't a make or break thing though, nor should it ever be required for you to progress on content at day #1 of a patch. I've legitimately said this a million times but anyone who is whaling on this game is a fucking retard who wants attention. This update is aligned with that thought process and the future equalized content will continue that trend.
2) Unlocking additional slots is sort of there bread & butter. The game, as you stated, is shallow. They know that the most attractive feature is that, when these new classes come out, it's really, really fun to play. Thus they make unlocking additional slots cost money, which is fine for me. They've gotta make some cash somewhere and, frankly, each time a class gets released from here on out, you'll be hard pressed to find a better value for your money than an extra character slot. $8.00 for getting to build a new character and run some chaos dungeons, learn the engraving builds, play around in some raids will easily net you 50-100 hours even if you end up hating the alt (and likely a lot more). If that time isn't worth it to you then well, we have very, very different notions of the value of $8.00, especially if they do the (correct) thing and provide you a free pass to get you close to the current tier of content. You've used WoW as a comparison and I'm fine with that debate: I do think it's more aligned with WoW's pricing on character boosts though, which is still at like $60 for a boost that's still further away from being able to run M+ or heroic raiding than a Feiton boost is. They're giving you the boost for free but baiting you with the Glaiver release (it's no coincidence they upped the character limit with the patch as well). I'm sure lots of people will talk about how the WoW boosts were fucking stupid and a sign of the end of the game but, really, they're here to stay at this point and every game does it -- I just care that the pricing isn't AIDS, which I don't feel it is in this case. It would have been retarded but they could have 100% simply released the class without the boost being made available (I'm sure some retard suggested this) and forced folks to have hoarded mats and been pressured into the shop to skip on all the BS of getting a character to Feiton but thankfully they didn't.
3) There won't be anymore avenues of shit to buy that I am aware of. Just be aware that you didn't factor in the cost of the Crystalline Aura, which is something I earnestly view as being far more QOL required than the premium pass.
