Hi-Rez Studios’ free-to-play competitive shooter Paladins was one of the most played games on Steam last year, and has a huge fanbase. But after the latest patch, players are erupting in anger over the changes which have been described as “pay-to-win” by them.
The complaints are about the the new in-game currency known as Essence, which has been introduced in the open beta patch 44 that went live last week. It sounds suspicious in the patch notes itself: You can now purchase Radiant chests for 3000 gold, which can be earned by playing the game. Instead of awarding gold for any duplicate items these chests might contain, players now get Essence, which can be used to unlock high-end cards. In the previous system, these could be achieved using gold, so players could advance at a reasonable rate with a little grinding.
The trouble, is that the ratio does not make any sense at all. You need an exorbitant amount of Essence to able to do anything with it, and the cards have a “rarity” as well. To put things in perspective: The site states that after you’ve unlocked every card fro all the Champions, you still need still need about 36000 Essence per Champion in order to access their Legendary cards. This amounts to a staggering total of 756000 Essence. And you get only 60 Essence for a duplicate common card.
This has led to multiple complaints on the Paladins subreddit, saying that gold has effectively been made useless, and that Paladins is now a purely pay-to-win game. This is even worse for new players, as the older veterans get to keep the cards they’ve earned till now, while the newbies start with nothing. Players either need to pay for Crystals, or play at a disadvantage to those people who pay for them.
“The previous system was a winner, you could choose whichever card you wanted, for 1200 gold, and it didn’t take long to grind that much by playing, usually 3-4 matches, not counting win of the day bonuses etc. Now they have a system where you have to spend gold on chests for RNG cards, and the only way to buy a card is with a new currency, which is only given when you get duplicate cards in the chests,” user Zalamael wrote on the Blizzard Overwatch forum. Ironic, no?
He continued: “They allowed us to keep our cards, so long time players have every card available, with the exception of the new ones, but new players are screwed if they want a good deck. They can’t even spend real money to level the playing field, because all they can do with real money is buy chests (so still suffer RNG) or buy boosters, which leads to the same problem. This isn’t even a P2W system, because spending money wont get you ahead, unless you spend a fortune.”
So, even if you’re willing to pay, it doesn’t necessarily mean you will advance, it only increases your chances. But it surely means that players will have to put in a lot of money if they want to get the better cards. The complaints call to the return of the older system, or at least make the new one more feasible. Hi-Rez hasn’t commented on it yet, so players don’t see have solace. Stay tuned for further updates.
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