Random Thoughts.....What Are You Thinking?

God damn, I really need to practice drawing circles. @_@;

Atm, using the current average medals gained per argent/credit spent (there's a few data collection threads over on reddit), it would mathematically take approximately 11.25 months to get both Optimizers without using Argents, and that's 11.25 months of not being able to spend credits on Pantheon or stat progression.

Alternatively, it costs an average of 55,000 argents to get both optimizers; if you're lucky, it takes less, if you get ***, it can take even more. It's a lottery even if you pay.

***design, and it all falls down to the way the lockouts are designed to begin with: credit cap limits the amount of credits you can spend on a per week basis. EVERYTHING costs credits, including every facet (including the most efficient, i.e. Ritual Stone) of stat growth. You can circumvent this by paying Argents instead of credits. This means that a player who pays Argents will outpace a player who does not extremely rapidly, and in this game that means a lot with the way Prestige scaling works in both PvE and PvP.

And fyi, the next event's jackpot prizes are Might Efficiency+ symbols. That's huge. They are directly charging money for stats. You're either spending all of your credits for several months to get the event stat boost items, thus making it so you can't spend credits on your Atlas, Ritual Stone, etc. or you're buying Argents to either put into Atlas, Ritual Stone, etc. or to buy lottery tickets toward the event stat items. If you don't pay, you're losing stats no matter what you do, and if you do pay, you gain them above someone who doesn't pay.

You can argue that right now having the equivalent of a couple of extra epic rings worth of stats, or 10% extra Might, or whatever else they add in the future isn't gamebreaking and won't give a distinct advantage. First off, that is arguable. Second, this will all compound. The more events they add with these stat items, the more they will begin to stack up and the more paying players will be ahead of the ones who don't buy all of the Argents needed to get all of these items. It is an inevitable P2Per getting bloated stats vs F2Per or hybrid F/P2Per having a disparately low set of stats situation. It's going to spiral out of control sooner rather than later, and a case can be made that it has already begun to.

Definition of Pay to Win, pretty much. It's a sad state of affairs, because I like the gameplay and atmosphere. The model *** it too much for me to bother continuing though. Unless, of course, you're comfortable with spending $25-100 every month on stats in order to stay ahead of the curve.

tl;dr