Homefront: Why Pay to Play Models Suck

So in addition to already being a pay to win game, Wargaming has decided to make the game even worse by implementing pay-to-play elements. Good lord I never thought I'd see the day. Let me explain to you why Pay to Play is a horrifically bad model:

Reason 1:

Restricting the amount of times you can play per day too much means you won't spark interest in the game mode. Even the potential four battles per day you can get for free are insufficient imo to keep players interested. I came back from a long break from this game a few weeks ago and I'm already bored with the game. All the new content is locked behind a paywall and Random Battles over and over and over again are just… boring.

Not restricting the number of battles you can play enough makes the Pay to Pay model pretty much irrelevant unless you have a very bad set of games. Of course, you can build your game mode to make it extremely easy to lose – which Wargaming has done, since one Tier III player can get put into a battle with only other Tier I players, making it quite literally impossible for you to win the match. But this again makes people lose interest in the game mode rapidly.

The only Pay to Play model I have ever played and enjoyed was the now defunct Ace Combat Infinity, which made it extremely easy to earn additional fuel for free. You were incentivized to buy additional fuel because it was impossible to obtain high-level rewards or win tournaments without purchasing a ridiculously large amount of fuel, and using purchased fuel gave you extra rewards compared to the free fuel. I didn't appreciate this and still would recommend against it, but it meant that if your goal was merely to casually enjoy the game and play as many games as you felt like without really worrying about rewards, you could play the game casually pretty much as much as you wanted and the developers still made a ton of money off the whales. And guess what? I bought things in that game because I enjoyed it. I have never spent money on any other free to play game before or since that game.

Reason 2:

Players who are already reluctant to or unwilling to spend money on the game are even less likely do so. I'm already seeing players who would normally buy content for this game mode claiming they will boycott this mode because of the Pay to Play elements. And before this event, I was considering buying a premium account. I am no longer planning to spend money on the game, purely because it's abundantly clear that making even a one-time purchase of a few months of premium account will not guarantee that I can enjoy most of the game.

Reason 3:

Paying to Play in this event in particular actually puts you at a disadvantage. Right now, most players aren't at Tier III. This means that when you jump into a Homefront battle in a Tier III (which at this point, you must have purchased because it's impossible to get to Tier III in a single day without doing so), you typically get matched with only Tier Is and you are pretty much guaranteed to lose because the entire team now has to fight at Tier III. There is absolutely no benefit to buying your way to Tier II or III unless you have a group of four other friends who also purchase the Tier III level.

Reason 4:

The rewards for the event aren't even that interesting. The camouflage is accessible at Tier II for every nation, which is very easy to achieve. That's the most interesting reward. The bond equipment is literally impossible to obtain if you don't pay to progress to subsequent tiers, and the cost to obtain it is cheaper if you just purchase it for bonds – which the only players who are really going to care about the bond equipment will have already.

So yeah, slow clap for Wargaming. You managed to make this new event disinteresting and sucked all the fun out of it by restricting access to it. At the VERY least, you could allow players to continue to play the game mode after running out of fuel, but without earning any rewards. You know, so people can have FUN. Because if you strip away all the P2P and P2W elements, it's actually a pretty fun game mode. But I think I'll go back to my newest Fallout 4 playthrough. Cheers.