Phantron wrote: The game's designed such that money doesn't help very much to discourage you from approaching this like a P2W. Even if you spend thousands of dollars on this game, stuff like scaling/MMR would ensure you'll not get very far without devoting a ton of time. This is rather different from the generic P2W game where if you spent that kind of money you'll most definitely easily stomp over the guys who do not. The problem here is that in an effort to make the game not very P2W then the question becomes 'so why would you spend money at all?' If spending money doesn't help you win the game, why spend it at all? The game's underlying competitive model is that you simply can't always win no matter who you have, but if you can't always or even usually win, why continue playing? This is something D3 never really figured out. I remember talking to a head dev of EQ1 why they think it's okay to design a game where you can't beat content from 3 years ago and he's like 'well not everyone can win' and of course the result of that is that people stop paying them a sub when you can't even beat stuff from 3 years ago by design. While MPQ isn't quite as bad I see that they really haven't thought about why people should continue to play once they realize that the game, by design, isn't something you can always win.