Jeremy Lin, the NBA player, talked about getting his teammates to play Clash Royale with him. He was shocked that everyone had better troops than him after two days. Apparently they all dropped thousands.
Clash Royale brands their philosophy as pay-to-advance. You can upgrade faster with real money, but that doesn't mean you will win matches. At some point at the top I assume everyone is spending a lot of money, and is matched up with similar level cards.
That is an interesting point, but I think most companies incentivise whales by putting them up against people who they can crush, whether it is deliberately (as in the case of activision's patent) or by having a matchmaking system that doesn't strictly separate people by their in-game power.
Imagine a game where players only interact if they are the same level. If you can pay to gain levels, that doesn't necessarily make the game unfair. If you can pay to gain an advantage at the same level, that is unfair.
Clash Royale is, much to my surprise, a game that heavily, heavily rewards skill over money bombs.
I've played against clear whale players - several levels higher than me, troops massively over leveled for the match making strata we were in - and they were uniformly terrible players who I beat easily.
Clash Royale is a really interesting game in many ways - it's Free-2-Play path is carefully calibrated to offer a perfect opportunity to pay them £10 on a "special offer" after you've been playing for 6 months to speed you over the grind hump at level 8 ish. That's the point where your in-game currency rewards can't quite match the amount of currency you have to spend upgrading your troops. Once you are over that hump though and get to the next arena level your in game currency rewards increase again relative to upgrade costs and you are back on another F2P coast.
Their non-special offer real-money shop though is absolutely appalling value for money. Anyone who ever buys gems from them at regular prices is crazy in the coconut.
There was an article recently about someone (perhaps EA) who was looking to implement a scheme to reward players for purchasing upgrades.
Right after purchasing a new gizmo, you (in PvP matches) would be matched against players who don't have that gizmo. So you get to enjoy yourself with the purchase for a while. After that, the matchmaking system would then send you against players who have some other more awesome gizmo which you don't have yet. So you get to lose more, and are they incentivized to but the new gizmo too.
So I did play such a free-to-play game where you could pay to level up, but you just battled the same level. I grinded my way up the level tree exploring the different systems that the game had and got my fun out of it. What was interesting was I realized you could craft a "team" that the system thought was a low level team, but what actually something no one would have at that level and was actually more powerful. Think Level 1 character, but somehow was equipped with a great fire sword of the deep and level 10 strength. This was a evening of fun building up such a wacky team that could defeat everyone the system put up against them. And then I realized I had beat the game and never played after that.
Been playing it for over a year, have all cards up to tournament standard and hovering at about 4k rating. Have spent probably close to 150 dollars on it that i do not regret. It is more fun than wow and less expensive, especially in the long run. Now that i have a solid base of cards i am really not incentivised to spend any more money and probably won't except for the rare 2$ 5x value offers which come up every month or so where as in a game like wow i would have to spend 60 bucks every year on an expansion and another 100 on subscriptions, have to constantly grind so need to invest loads of time.. Ugh
In tournament mode the levels are capped so it is an even playing field where spending money doesn't get you wins. I believe other developers have a lot to learn from their model
Oh but wow would've probably demanded 3x more time which would've not been spent in the same fun way. Grinding daily quests is a distraction it is not fun. Want to play PvP? Oh you have to grind battlegrounds 20 hours per week in perpetuity to be competitive in arena. I can play clash royale for 45 minutes a day in 15 minute sessions and be happy with it, it never felt like work.
And that's yearly cost for wow, if you leave the game and come back in a year you have to pay another 60 upfront. I can leave the game and come back to play for free, I won't have any of the new cards but those are hardly essential and you can certainly make a competitive deck with the cards you have if your account is as farmed as mine.
But the "progression" doesn't really buy you anything other than "cooler" cards. You'll still win and lose at similar proportions, because you get matched against more skilled players or players with even better cards.
It means that yes, if getting to the top matters to you, you'll likely spend a lot of money, but spending money on it doesn't really alter whether or not the matches themselves are fun.
Jeremy Lin, the NBA player, talked about getting his teammates to play Clash Royale with him. He was shocked that everyone had better troops than him after two days. Apparently they all dropped thousands.