[Lawtonfogle]

>Should I sell my soul to the devil and work on freemium, coins, exploit OCD and rich-parents kids,

You can do freemium without selling your soul. Look at LoL or Path of Exile for the best examples. Others would be Bloons TD 5 or Bloons City, where coins allow you to skip ahead, but slow downs are not purposefully added. Only when you add something that basically drains the fun out of the game unless money is spent are you selling your soul.

[talles]

I never played those games you mentioned but I don't get "allow you to skip ahead, but slow downs are not purposefully added".

If you can skip ahead by putting money on it you have slowed down who didn't (right?)

[Lawtonfogle]

It is an issue of a fun gameplay mechanic. Slowing it down destroys the fun. Allowing it to be skipped doesn't destroy the fun, but does allow those not interested in it to skip it.

Consider a Mario game. Speeding up would be selling gems that let you skip a level. Slowing it down is saying you only get 3 lives ever 30 minutes unless you spend gems.

Or think of WoW. The leveling up is a fun part of the game, but after the second or third character, it gets far more boring and people are willing to pay to skip it. As more expansions came out, WoW actually made leveling easier. Then recently they added an option to skip the majority of the leveling and get straight to the end game. That is paying to speed it up.

Now consider Candy Crush. A fun game at the core, with levels that get harder and introduce new game play. All well and good. But then they added extreme cooldowns on everything. 1 life every 30 minutes with a max of 5 at a time. Periods where you have to wait 24 hours to go to the next section. Other powerups limited to once a day. That is purposefully slowing it down.

[chc]

League of Legends is not a great example IMO. That game has a huge grindwall. Gaining access to just the gameplay-affecting elements of the game — not even looking at the cosmetic items — would cost hundreds and hundreds of dollars and take huge amounts of play time on top of that.

[Lawtonfogle]

Unless it has drastically changed, I was able to boot it up and play for fun right off the bat. There were no slowdowns in any matches. While some abilities were off limit to me, these were off limit to the people I was paired with as well. The only issue I've ever noticed is that heroes aren't perfectly balanced and as such it may be possible for someone to buy access to a stronger one that the rest have, but that has not ever been a noticeable problem.

That it takes 1000 hours to unlock X does not count against it when the game is quite fun without X and where X has minimal impact on the game even when someone else has X but I do not.

Think of single player RPGs where unlocking the ultimate weapons/secret characters take dozens of hours of grinding outside of the main gameplay. That does not make the RPG a grindfest. Compare this to an RPG where 2 hours have to be spent grinding for every 45 minutes of progress through the main game. That is a grindfest.