Sharden, Author at Alternate Image Gaming

Is It Pay to Win?

Is it Pay to Win?: League of Legends

November 16, 2020November 16, 2020

Welcome to ‘Is it Pay to Win’ – a column where we examine a game and decide if that game is has aspects of pay to win and to what extent. Check out Is it Pay to Win?: Defined to see how we break down the components of pay to win (p2w), such as pay for advantage, pay for convenience, and cosmetics.

League of Legends is one of the most popular MOBA games of all time. It is free to play with an earnable currency and a purchasable currency that is used to buy their premium items.

Scoring:

Pay for Power: 0/5
Pay for Advantage: 1/5
Pay for Convenience: 3/5
Pay for Cosmetics: 5/5
Pay to Win: 1.6/5*

Keep reading to see a rough game description, our basis for these scores and our overall verdict.

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In Search of Fortune

In Search of Fortune: Long Boi Victory and Shadowlands Goals

November 8, 2020November 8, 2020

Welcome to ‘In Search of Fortune’, a new monthly series where I discuss my gold goals and in-game money making strategies.

In my first In Search of Fortune post, I declared my goal to get the bruto mount before the prepatch hit. At the time, the true date was unknown and I expected to need to fulfill the 500k quota (I had 4.5m) in about 10 days from the time of the post. The picture above is a big ol’ spoiler regarding that quest. I managed to average ~75k profit per day for that week and finished a couple of days before (what I believed) was the last day. Of course, pre-patch got pushed back weeks more and I’d have had plenty of time to get the 500k. However, I was still pretty happy with getting it done then. For the rest of this post, I’ll go over my gold goals for Shadowlands. This will be something you can come back in a year or two and yell at me if I didn’t get it done. Make sure to subscribe or bookmark or whatever so you can do that then.

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Editorial

Twitch Ads (and other Revenue)

November 3, 2020November 3, 2020

Recently Twitch.TV (also now known as Prime Gaming) has been making changes to how ads run on their service. They have found a way (and then another way and so forth) to stop ad blockers from letting people avoid their ads. Now, this has been on ongoing battle between adblocks and Twitch but it seems the tides are turning in favor of the streaming giant and the users are left unable to circumvent the series of sponsored videos. This has led to a slew of rage-filled posts on the Twitch subreddit and elsewhere as people feel bombarded with unwanted ads. While I’m no fan of ads interrupting my viewing experience, I seem to have the unpopular opinion that Twitch attempting to ensure their ads get seen is… okay.

In this post, I’m going to discuss the if Twitch forcing ads is okay (and what would be okay if not what they are doing), their other means of revenue, and what the options mean to the end user.

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Gamer Art

Gamer Art: October 2020

October 28, 2020October 28, 2020

Check out October’s Featured Gamer Art, a monthly column of art that I’ve found found in the past few weeks.

Old Paladin (WoW) by @Caiomonteiroart. Art Source.

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Editorial

How Much Time Played is Enough to get an Impression?

October 21, 2020

Recently I made a post regarding Amazon’s New World preview event and my experiences there. I got a lot of push back because having only played five and a half hours is apparently not enough time to give a first impression. I didn’t hit max level and do every single piece of content, so how can I have any opinions about the game? Part of me thought that it might be fanboy rage because I dared to say anything critical (despite saying overall that the game looks good), but it still seems worth while to examine the criticism.

In this post, I’m going to discuss the differences between a review and a first impression as well as what is a fair amount of time to experience a game before making some sort of judgement about the game or it’s systems.

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Is It Pay to Win?

Is It Pay to Win?: Legendary Game of Heroes

October 13, 2020October 14, 2020

Welcome to ‘Is it Pay to Win’ – a column where we examine a game and decide if that game is has aspects of pay to win and to what extent. Check out Is it Pay to Win?: Defined to see how we break down the components of pay to win, such as pay for advantage, pay for convenience, and cosmetics.

Legendary: Game of Heroes marketed as a free to play, match-3, card collecting, RPG for Android and iOS. Right away, you’ll probably notice some of those details indicate purchases. Mobile games are notoriously heavy-handed with their cash shops and card collection games are essentially pay to win by default in that, since their physical ancestors such as Magic: The Gathering, you spend cash to buy packs of cards. LGOH is no exception.

Scoring:

Pay for Power: 5/5
Pay for Advantage: 5/5
Pay for Convenience: 4/5
Pay for Cosmetics: 3/5
Pay to Win: 4.6/5*

Keep reading to see a rough game description and our basis for these scores.

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