25 Gold for Bucks Exchange? 250% increase.
60 Gold for Stamina Purchase? 150% increase.
I never bought skill points (other than by accident) so it doesn’t affect me.
Yeager 2599 gold? Jarek was 1999. (25% increase).
PVP tournament gold reward tiers - dropped between 50% to 75% for the top 3 eligible gold reward tiers, to none at all for tiers 4 and below.
PVP tournaments:
- With the 30x point advantage for the featured hero of the month it is safe to say that serious PVP players HAVE TO buy the hero to be competitive for the first couple of pvp tournaments until the hero is commonly available via coop unlocking.
- This is in addition to already needing to spend gold on revives.
- PVP has become pay to win (or will surely become pay to win on the current model).
Bounty.
- Purchasing of recharges is now necessary to be competitive on the top end of the scale. It didn’t use to be the case but the last 3 bounties have featured 2 stamina pack offers. Prior to that, there was only 1 stamina pack release in late 2018.
- Look at the points scored by VRIJ and OWN in the last bounty, over a million points which would have been impossible without recharges (Kudos to both teams and congrats to all my friends in VRIJ and OWN, you guys are seriously amazing)
- However, as much as the top alliances are to be admired for their absolute dedication to the event and their consequent domination over the rest of the player base, bounty has now become pay to win.
It sure looks like we will need alot more gold to play this game to win/be competitive. From where I am standing and looking at things on the above analysis, it looks like this game is purely pay to win from here on in relation towards the 2 major game modes.
To be clear, I am NOT saying that it is impossible for freemium or low spending players to play or enjoy this game. There is a difference between Pay to Win, and Pay to Play.
For me, it looks like this game is going the direction of Pay to Win.
For PVP, I believe that low spending / freemium players will have ZERO chance of making it into top 50 PVP without spending gold. You can be an exceptional pvp player, but there is no way you are clocking 30 million pvp points (or 100 wins on 3 hearts) in 1 cycle without revives and without the bonus hero.
As for bounty, since it is a team game there is a possibility that a low-spending/freemium player can be in a great alliance, but with recharges becoming more common it is very likely that low-scorers without the benefit of recharges are gonna be pushed out by those who want to get into the top alliances and who are willing to pay for that to push their bounty scores up. There will be exceptions and definitely, for an alliance to retain top rankings within top 5 or top 10, a number of their major bounty hunters (not just 1 or 2) will have to be on recharges, carrying the rest. There will be no such thing as free to win for bounty. If you’re a low-spending/freemium player in a great bounty alliance, consider yourself very lucky and make sure you hold on to your place!
I understand the commercial need for HHG to bring in money and get players to spend money on the game. I personally have supported the game more than the average player (VIP 14). This post is NOT about that. (Please spare me your robotic answers about that if you wanna reply along those lines, you’re preaching to the choir).
What this post IS about, is the transition into the Pay to Win model. I believe that for every successful game, regard must be given to make it possible for low spending/freemium players to succeed at the very top of the playing field, provided they put in the effort and the grind and all that. However, I am not convinced that the recent changes take this sufficiently into account.