Clash royale is sad, becouse it is a extremely good game if it were not for the pay to win leveling mechanics. I used to play it alot but it became too frustrating meeting bad players with low ELO but high level cards that you essentially couldn't win over unless they messed up bad.

Edit: To level up all cards in Clash Royale you also have to spend a silly amount of money. Exponential costs.

It costs 10 gems to play a challenge and you can buy 500 gems for 5$ so that's 50 challenges, say you get at least 7 games per challenge so 350 games for 5$ where only skill matters. I'd say that's not exploitative.

Of course if you care about your rank and having a Big Number in a silly mobile game then yes you either have to play a lot or pay a lot of money.

My secondary clash account is staying as Level 1, ie with no upgraded cards at all, and I regularly beat level 10/11 players.

Far, far, quicker to get cards to tournament standard.

I played a wee bit and it didn't seem that bad. You can pay to upgrade your gear, but that seems entirely pointless in an ARPG. The whole game is a grind to get better gear! Once you actually have perfect gear, why keep playing?

My issue with the game is that it lacks depth after having spent far too much time playing Path of Exile. There aren't that many possible builds, and the game basically tells you exactly how to build if you want to do PvP or PvE. As far as I can tell, those builds are the meta ones, so the designers are forcing the meta.

But as a game to run in and kill some monsters without thinking too much, it seems fine. Which makes sense since it's a mobile game.

[0] https://www.twitch.tv/wudijo

Edit: Or right now since it's early you can out-skill other people while they're figuring it out and soon the people who spend more will have both skill and raw power and will dominate

Does it suck that you can pay to get stronger and make the game unfair? Yep, but I'm not convinced it matters if you're playing casually. None of the pay to win stuff changes the game play drastically. You're only really increasing the amount of damage you do, it's not like Path of Exile where some of the really rare items can enable a new type of build or trading card games where certain cards let you build different decks with different playstyles.

Personally, I see no incentive to buy anything. I can clear a level 12 challenge rift, grind slowly and slowly clear higher level ones. Or I could spend a bunch of money and get to do level 20 challenge rifts or whatever. At which point you hit the wall and either pay money or keep grinding. But since the game is all about grinding, why pay to skip forward and grind more?

If you're addicted to spending money online irresponsibly I doubt there is any law that will protect you, there's millions of ways to spend money to get gratification online.

These games are explicitly designed to prey on people prone to gambling-like addictions.

I'm also for legalizing all drugs but that's another discussion

If it was, do you think it would stop them?

you could argue they provided entertainment in return.

If I go against a player two levels ahead of me, I can be pretty much sure that he bought his deck and since he's going against me not some higher rank I know I have chance of winning if I can outwit materially stronger opponent.

When I'm going against someone with lower level then I can be sure that this guy has very carefully crafted deck and is a very skilled player.