>Prosper is free-to-play, and Solid Clouds is going to let you spend real-world cash on speeding up production on a unit or to finish a mission faster.

That's pay-to-win, not free-to-play.

I've started to just ignore games that seem even slightly pay-to-win.

But what really pisses me off are games I bought and the then have an ingame store, I demanded a refund on steam for a game where that actually happened with no indication on the page for the game.

The only way we can deal with this is to completely ignore these games and not give them a penny.

There are not many games that get F2P right, off the top of my head I can only think of TF2, Dota 2 and Path of Exile (shoutout to https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Negitivefrags for an awesome game).

(no affiliation with any of those companies)

Path of Exile and Bloons TD 5 are both examples of F2P and P2W done right.

For Path of Exile, the pay to win nature of it is extremely small. Extra stash tabs to aid in making item combos. But the benefits are so little and they in no way make the game worse for any player who does. There is no artificial slow downs added just to be a way to take money from the player.

Bloons TD 5 is pretty much single player and everything can be unlocked just by playing it enough.

Bloons City is a bit iffy as it does introduce artificial slow downs, but the vs. other players is optional as long as you aren't agressive.

LoL might also count as P2W as their is a slight advantage between a new player who does pay and one who doesn't, but the minimal and effectively nothing compared to just skill level differences.

Why don't F2P games use in-game advertising? That seems like a simple way to chip away at the expense of running the service while not being as frustrating as pay-to-win.

Plenty do. Pay to win pays a LOT better, so you see more of it.

There's nothing new in this, and the "1.5 mio hexagons" are only in a square of roughly 1225x1225. I've played browser games with exactly the same premise (but without the whole pay-to-win aspect) back in 2001 and 2002. They might have a meta game that's interesting in the long run, but they universally lack a challenging short-term game to keep you playing and interested while you're waiting for larger plans to come to fruition. Eve gives the player that by having them do short NPC hunting missions, explore the galaxy or engage in PvP, all of which is adrenaline-packed and visually engaging.

A browser game will have a hard time duplicating that. Might be possible with WebGL, but that excludes a lot of players.

"But I think the map is emblematic of what is really interesting about Prosper: that it is perhaps history’s biggest board game."

Not really, with 1.5 million hexagons, http://www.illyriad.co.uk/ is over 5 times larger at 8.6 million squares.

This sounds an awful lot like a War of Nations clone.