Is It Pay to Win?: Legendary Game of Heroes

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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Problem with Warlords Premise

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I’ve been doing some thinking, some pondering, some soul-searching over the plot line of the new expansion… and I really don’t think I like what I know so far. In previous expansions, we fought incredibly powerful and epic enemies. In BC, we fought Illidan who was a massively powerful mage who dedicated his life to power and combat, was granted extra power by demons. He was the first of his kind – a demon hunter and was thousands of years old. We may or may not have been prepared. In WolLK, Arthas was a Paladin, who was effectively merged with a Shaman/Warlock, infused with demon power, given amazing gear and had the power over death. Come on. In Cataclysm, Deathwing was the freakin’ aspect of earth granted power by the titans and corrupted (and possibly empowered further) by old gods. In MoP… we got an orc who only a few years before was basically mopey kid in Outlands who couldn’t have fought off the average basic campfire. While the enemy in Warlords doesn’t seem to be quite as insignificant as Garrosh, I don’t expect the epicness of previous expansions. There will be spoilers below, continue at your own risk. Also, check out the end of the post for the Warlords trailer. (more…)