The article mentions that you can get the best gear for free but it will take you about 10 years. So I'm sure you can play it and have fun. If you try PVP however then you would be at a great advantage if you pay money for upgrades.

But these games are explicitly designed to be frustrating and not fun when played for free.

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.

The free aspect is like your heroin dealer going “the first dose is free”. That is exactly what they want you to do.

It's not like you can get the "best" seasonal gear in D3 (which is paid upfront) without a ridiculous amount of grind. Well, not as ridiculous as 10 years, but still.

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.

Time is money. Paying for progress or items provides accessibility to that experience for people who just dont have the time to grind.

Don’t play the “accessibility” nonsense argument with us old-time gamers. You know what I could have done in D3 to skip the grind, if I wanted to? Use cheats or trainers or a save file from the internets, in a single player game, for which I paid for. Not this nonsense today, where even single player games are gated behind “sErViCeS” backend to prevent cheating, aka DRM for the payed DLC stuff, that is already on disk downloaded, in a single player games. Please stop.

D3 is in fact not very single player for all but the most casual players who stop at finishing the story solo.

Really? I did plenty of pushing into high-tier rifts solo in D3. It's definitely more stable and reliable with multiple people, but I did plenty of grinding solo and have a good time.

How?

The article is really quite confusing. Early on it says F2P can't get the best gear, then later says they can. Then they say even for paid players it's random so I'm not even sure how they come up with 100k figure.

It's just hard for me to get upset about a game that's always been a pretty skin over a blatant Skinner box.

The way those games are designed most of time there is a way to get good gear for free, but its usually behind hundreds of hours of same monotous gameplay.

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.

I mean, it's been like this since the first Diablo. Even the sounds and animations when killing major bosses sounded and looked like a slot machine. It's nice that people are upset about it as they should, but this is not a new phenomenon and I'm puzzled why the hate is directed at DI specifically. At the end of the day a grizzled old-school gamer could not play multiplayer, ignore all paid options, and end up with the exact same experience as Diablo 2.

DI is high profile release, which is why the uproar is large enough to reach the mainstream. But its nothing new and happens in every fandom when favorite brand enters the mobile gaming.

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.

Yeah I mean the game is intentionally confusing.

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.

> Yeah I mean the game is intentionally confusing.

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.

People are mad as hell for no reason about this one. It's honestly decent monetization and the free game is great.