User blog:Alfred cloutier/For Those Who Think Spending Money on the Game is Meaningless

Recently I wrote a blog post on in-app purchases, and I sort of alluded to the fact that in-app purchases create an unresolvable inequality in the game. A number of readers responded, espousing the idea that you don't need to spend money on this game. It almost sounded like a few readers where saying it would hurt you if you spent money on in-app purchases. If the game designers did their job well, then these opinions can be nothing but absurd. If the game designers are offering something for you to buy, then there should be a compelling reason for you to buy it.


 * "If someone who knew how to play this game, not a rookie, was given £76 for 14000 gold......no, make that £156 for 28000 gold, let's be generous...they would still get wiped all over the floor by a majority of high end silver/gold tier players. You can buy yourself to weapon heaven, but you still have to understand strategy and what each mech is good for. This changes as you get better. It only comes from playing, not £"

The "You Will Advance Too Quickly" argument. This argument says that if you bought all the max gold items you could, you wouldn't be good enough to compete at the highest level. This argument is deftly negated by game design via level requirements for certain equipment. The first twenty levels of the game don't even give you access to Workshop Points, and the "bigger" weapons and robots. So, you'll be limited at lower levels, *but within those lower levels, you can still use gold to be at the leading edge technologically vs non-buyers.* Gold, and by extension, real money, gets you to the highest edge of whatever tier you happen to be in, and gets you there faster. Playing with the best equipment gets you good faster, not playing on terrible equipment. This is true across almost any discipline. That's why the good stuff is behind pay / grind walls.

There are so many analogies to this idea: learning to ride a bike that doesn't fit you, or that is broken down, will take you much longer to learn. And, once you get on a proper bike, you won't be magically better or faster because  you learned on a broken bike, you'll be worse, and you'll need an adjustment period to keep up with other folks who've been riding on "good" bikes their whole lives.

This idea is essential to "social justice" and class struggles. Parents don't put their kids in "worse" schools with "worse" equipment knowing their children will somehow have an advantage from using "lesser" equipment during formative years. No, using worse equipment with less than the best training will cause you to have lower income, lower education. Yet, this is what some of the commentors of my other blog post seem to be asserting: being poor will make you better in the long run. Warren Buffet notwithstanding, being poor makes you poor longer.


 * "Well, I usually only play 1-5 games a day and was able to get gold stuff. Play the game, git gud, save up gold, buy rogathka, save wp, buy tarans, there, you're set for most of the game."

The "If You Just Grind You'll Be Fine" argument. I don't have as much a problem with this than some other arguments, but it presumes that this isn't actually retarding progress, when it is (by definition). If I spent money on gold and just bought everything, including the Rogathka and Tarans, I could be playing and being "set for most of the game" earlier than you, and when you finally caught up, you would have a definite disadvantage against my superior experience, given everything else is equal.

And that is a big thing money is buying in this game: experience with equipment that matters. If the person quoted above knows that having Rogathka and Tarans is a baseline for being "set for most of the game," then they are not "set" for all the time they are building up to that. If I simply buy these things, I'm set, and I will have more experience being set.

That's all for now. Thanks for reading!

Alfred O. Cloutier