What's the grossest example of the Pay-To-Win factor you have ever seen?

[Waffles's iconWaffles]

I don't really have much experience with this sort of thing, but I know that some games can get really out-of-hand when it comes down to this.

Please enlight me XD

 

[Clippy]

Two examples I can think of are Tibia and AdventureQuest. You were literally barred from most of the content unless you had a premium account and made regular payments. Meanwhile people who did pay could slap you around for their amusement because there was no way to match their superior character classes and gear.

 

[Tonberry]

I've been checked out of that discussion for eons, but I remember there being an NBA2K game that let you pay to completely skip the ranking system, essentially buying wins, which quite literally is Pay-to-Win.

 

[Sorion]

some ubisoft games, Like AC Valhala let you purchase better equipment in order to skip the grind, in a SINGLE PLAYER game, they could have paced their games a bit better, but no, they decided to charge you for it.

 

[SpcDaicon]

The official brazilian Ragnarok Online (bRO) was my first contact with pay-to-win.

They had a cash shop that started with some neat itens to have. Nothing really gamebreaking but would make your life way easier or had good stats. Things had a turn for the worst when they "soft relauched" the game: the 3 servers they had were merged into one with an paid subscription and debuted a new one with free access but a TON of nerfs that practically made the game unplayable without itens from the cash shop.

I think the most egregious was when they started to sell MVP and Mini-boss Cards on the cash shop. In Ragnarok every monster has a 0.01% of dropping a card that you can use in a piece of equip to add effects, raise its stats or even give you access to skill from other classes.
Boss (MVP) and Mini-boss monsters are no different, they do have their respective cards (still, 0.01% drop rate) but their effects are broken.
Immunity from magic damage, double your max HP, flat raise to your attack speed, enchanting your armor with the "Ghost" element (effectively making you immune to Neutral, the most common element on the game, and having 50% resistente to all elements except "Ghost"), etc.

So, in the end, although the server was free, you had to spend cash to buy those things because everybody was doing

 

[LiberoVulpesLiberoVulpes's icon]

Etheria Restart, is not just a gacha, is a PVP gacha, which in on itself is a taboo.

It initially sold itself as a f2p friendly PVP gacha, but, after released, it does the usual gacha thing of forcing into a meta, no biggie just reroll account, but then, they did the other gacha thing of having new characters be stronger than the older ones, AND they nerfed the ones which were strong initially.

Normally it would be the usual in a gacha, the problem comes from it being a PVP, with big spenders (whales) being the dominant ones for obvious reasons.

As, the game not only requires you to have dupes for characters to be actually usable (and getting dupes is gambling), you also need tons of materials for leveling then up, which are time gated unless you wanna spent, this is normal gacha design, and we don't mind it on PVE gachas.

But, PVP gacha is another story, with whales winning tournaments, and just flashing their cash over anyone, so, of course, most low spenders (dolphins) and f2ps went away as its imposible to engage on the PVP without forking a fortune. Can't engage on PVP... On a PVP gacha, the problem is obvious.

Didn't help that the story sucked, and it required you to invest on the account if you wanted it to be less tedious.

Edit: If memory serves, Shadowverse had similar issues, but that one is a digital TCG.