I’ll have to look more into Warframe systems. My question is can you buy prime stuff at level 1-5 and wreck everything in sight until you hit level 30? Or skip the progression/rng aspects by purchasing it instead? Because that’s still somewhat P2W, you’re skipping activities and still reaping the benefits of the activities. Or you’re making the activities a joke until you hit a wall that actually requires effort, that’s like paying $30 at level 1 for a god roll 750 falling Guillotine at light lvl 750. You’re gonna shit on every campaign because of that purchase.

There really is no winning in Warframe. You can pay for stuff to skip waiting or grinding, but you can also sell stuff to make platinum to buy that stuff. You never have to spend a single cent in Warframe. Destiny is better looking and the gunplay is great. I used to alternate between the two games, but I no longer play D2, only Warframe. Warframe is a grindy, collection game. The end game is planitum and rivens. Nothing stressful about Warframe other than host migrations.

I don’t mean winning in the sense of actually winning the game. But being about to progress faster or skip content those who otherwise don’t spend money, can’t. Yes you can earn the currency in game, but you can just as easily buy the currency and have a leg up on players who spend the same time playing as you without spending money, right? Theoretically if I threw $1000 into Warframe after like 30-40 hours of gameplay and be close to your collection?

You would have a lot of items yes. But you can’t buy credits or endo to the degree you need. Which are the items to level up mods. Yes you can buy endo, but it’s absurdly expensive to the point no one buys it, like ever. You can buy the mods from other players but most of the core ones will drop as you play and very few sell those ones. Others you have to grind for very specificity. Or get from Barro with a special currency. The xur of that game before destiny was a thing. So even if you do spend real money you still have to sink in a lot of time to get the power potential. Which you don’t need like you think in most cases. Very few players actually engage in high level content. For those familiar with the game sorties or kuva flood etc are not high level content. Especially after the armor and elemental changes in the last year the game is easier than ever now. You can have all the gear in the world but the real skill in that game is correct modding and builds. You could have everything you need but if you don’t understand the game mechanics you’ll fall flat everywhere you go. Many players stick with the game because the devs are overall much better. They engage with the community a lot. Do streams almost weekly. Give out items in game after most streams. And if they screw up, like servers shit the bed, they give you resources or a rare riven mod for your trouble. They have also re-worked Warframes or other game mechanics and instead of shitting on your time they give you rare resources as compensation or all your focus back (a unique mechanic you can not buy period) so you can then apply it as you see fit. So they respect you and your time.

Mobile games work the same way. You can buy and buy and buy but to progress you still have to put in some form of effort into understanding mechanics. It’s still pay to win because if you start 2 players out with nothing, let them put in the same amount of playtime but give you an infinite amount of money to spend, and the other nothing. 100% of the time, the one with infinite cash will have a distinct advantage over the player without cash.

I understand your argument. But no one spends money like that in the game. If you bought all the resources to level one primed mod it would cost you around $90. There’s dozens of them. Regular mods would be roughly half that. So while possible, it’s entirely unrealistic. I promise you WF is a much deeper game than Destiny. Layers on layers for the grind( I know that’s not for everyone) as well as play. For almost everyone that ever plays it I would wager almost all players have spent much less on WF than Destiny overall. I know I have. It is also much larger. Last the journey is where the fun is at. That goes for both games.

If no one spent money on the game, it would’ve died years ago. I’ve played Warframe. Not my cup of tea. I don’t doubt that it has a deeper grind, it’s a 7 year old game with no sequel, compared to D2 a 3, almost 4 year old game with regressed the depth of it’s grind from D1 a lot in Y1 (which almost killed the game) and has been reverting that change ever sense.