by Mojogrow » March 14th, 2014, 9:03 am
Is this system of Battle Pets Pay-to-win or still considered balanced?
Now I do mean this in many different ways. First off, many of the "good pets" such as Lil' Ragnaros, Neatherwhelp, Dread Hatching, and Pandaren Monk are all linked to Real Cash in one way or another. Now we all know these are great pets, but can they be considered Overpowered? They still operate on a same basis as other pets with a set pool of points allocated into Health, Power, and Speed, simply having Unique move sets and (at times) Optimized point allocation and breeds, as well as only coming in Rare Quality. On paper they seem as balanced as others, just unique, because hey, people spend real money on them and thus want something for that money. But how fair is it to other players who don't want to dish out real money to play a Side-Game of sorts. More often than not, competitive PvP teams require you to have a promotional or Cashshop Pet in there, offering only meager substitutes that end up being lackluster at best. This limits the good synergy teams you can have down considerably, especially for newer players.
Which bring me to the other way Pet battles is pay-to-win, Overprice. Say you want to do pet battles pvp but don't have any of the Promo pets or Cash pets. Many times people will say "oh that doesn't matter, there are plenty great pets you can get off of bosses and such and buy off the auction house. You don't NEED to pay to use powerful pets" So then, when you finally do check the Auction house, almost all of the recommended "good pets" are Insanely high priced. 25k gold for a Blackfuse Bombling, 8k for an S/S Death Adder, the list goes on.
To make matters worst, there seems to be a new thing going on called pet holding. Two people will camp rare spawns, Such as Minfernal, Flayers, or Unborn Val'kyr and start a fight with them, then just basically go AFK while the other person offers up a shot at catching the rare to people for 1-2K gold. It's like paying to go to a public washroom...
Bottom line, if you want end up with more wins that losses in pet battle pvp, you'd better pay up, be it with ludicrous amounts of In-game Currency or Real money.
Agree? Disagree? Please leave your feedback, as I love reading arguments for both sides, and once again, thanks for reading!
(PS. I do hope this is an acceptable section to put this in since, since the only other forums I could thing this could go in would be Off Topic.)