Pay to not play
2
By Treycubed
I’m late to this game, having started play in September 2024. However, I will say the core game play of “tactical combat” is extremely clunky and not very fun/engaging. To remedy this, the game allows the “players” to fast-forward through the battles at 2x speed. Also, you can have the game operate your units, so you become a spectator. Ultimately, that becomes a pointless grind, so you can spend money to buy tickets that will auto resolve battles, without you having to watch. Pay to not play.
That leaves army management as the only “play” in the game. Unfortunately, that functionality seems to have been tacked on, or at least not well thought out. The only universal way to identify your units is my portrait, not name. So, with an army of 85+ units, you have a lot of memorization to do.
Final *FAN*tasy
3
By merereviewbot
WOTV is an excellent game that is unfortunately maintained on the backs of dedicated fans for this beloved series. From a pure gameplay mechanics perspective, this game is easily 4.5 or more, which is accurately reflected by this game’s rating in the App Store. However, the monetization decisions and time investment required to progress/maintain will scare away all but the most dedicated of players.
To help newcomers understand, let’s examine the value of the most expensive (variations and discounts exist) paid content in the game: the $99 pack in-game currency called “Visiores”. For $99, you get a total of 12,000 Visiores (this is a simplified example ignoring the bonuses from the “paid” aspect). With this in game currency, you will primarily buy (also called “pulling”) banners, which are the current event unit advertisement. Each pull of any standard banner will cost 2,000 Visiores, and each gives you 10 random characters. In this simplified view: $99 gets you 6 banner pulls, or 60 chances for the character you want.
Here is the kicker: the abysmal relative appearance rate means for each of your 60 chances, the banner character is advertised at 0.5% to 0.8% (character dependent), but your chance of getting a lower tier character instead is 5%. Meaning, for EACH of your 60 characters, you are 10x times more likely to pull a less desired character than the character you actually want.
If you have followed this far and comprehend everything, I am about to drop 2 more bombs on you, both are, again, massively SIMPLIFIED for ease of understanding:
1. If you beat all odds and pull the character you wanted, you still have to repeat the process 70 times (to get the 2780x required character “shards” to maximize a character’s stats, as of September 2024). That is roughly 70 successful pulls at 2,000 Visiores a pop (totaling 140,000 Visiores). At $99 per 12,000 Visiores rate, this will cost you about $1155, if EVERY one of your pulls get you the desired character at least once. However, given the low appearance rates, you are 10x more likely to NOT get the character you want. This means in reality, the majority of your pulls will end up with 10x characters you don’t want, making the $1155 price tag per max stat character a low estimate.
2. Having surpassed bullet 1 above, Your character, now at max level and max stats, is effectively USELESS until you also invest in their (various) equipment and skills (heavy time investment) AND invest in stat boosting cards (2 can be equipped per character, which offers SIGNIFICANT party stat buffs, so you NEED them), which, you guessed it, also comes from banners that costs 2,000 Visiores per 10x pull.
Realistically, you can generally get the best current banner character and raise them to the “max” level of 140 (as of now) with about 40,000 Visiores or less, because of all the additional game mechanics and bonuses. However, this is only for reaching level 140. You will still need to invest 83,000 additional Visiores (plus other costly materials) to truly maximize a character’s stats (this can be done with SIGNIFICANT time investment in lieu of Visiores), not to mention additional time needed for equipment farming and even more Visiores for the 2 stat boosting cards (which you need many of, depending on team composition). Remember, all this is just for 1 character.
At the end of the day, you can definitely play this game as F2P. Many of the Visiore costs I listed above can be bypassed by other mechanics, but most of them requires time instead (slow build of characters in this game is measured in months and years). As a F2P, disciplined investment of your free Visiores will allow you some degree of success, however you will have significant difficulties with high difficulty PVE levels, breaking into top 1,000 in the player arena (which is a very easy feat for those who has the correct bonus units and cards for the week), or maintaining competitiveness within top 100 guilds. Even if you are a disciplined F2P player, you will NOT be able to maintain pace with all of the latest banners once you burn through your initial allotment of new-player “bonus” Visiores and free summoning tickets. This is because power creep will render your current units useless in a few months and the event/daily/monthly/yearly login “bonus” Visiores are laughable: about 300 per day (remember a standard 10x pull will cost you 2,000), not to mention there are all manners of other necessary shop items and game mechanics, to include refilling the energy necessary to continue playing, all of which CAN costs Visiore.
Back to my original point. In the end, the only ones who sticks around playing this game after a while are fans like myself. The game mechanics are solid, but the business model for this game is outdated and places a heavy emphasis on charging its own base. The newer games in the industry realize that PLAYER BASE is what drives a game’s success (and sales), and to do that you need to give the F2P players enough incentives to stick around, so their presence in turn boosts incentive for the spenders to spend more. Instead, this excellent game charges too much, gives back too little, and relies solely on the goodwill of its longtime fans to continue its existence.
