You're making me feel bad. Stop it! 😉

As you said, for fun and for some others, to feel superior as you crush their accounts under the might of your fully maxed, fully booked top meta legendaries.

As for me, I calculated what I need to pay to be on the top side of the game, ad just decided to save the money and buy a switch for my on-the-go gaming... I honestly am planning to get back to Raid, but damn the game has gone full P2W.

But does fun not have some sort of limitation. Arent there other fun things you can do with 1000 dollars per month (travel, Nice food, electronics, housing). Ofc we all have a different approach on fun.

That is not my intention. Iam maybe looking for a way to feel myself better when spending on a game like this.

Back on the day (iam getting old :'( ) you bought a game for 50 dollar and you own the game for ever. Now people are spending way way more on games that are way way less extensive. It is a good model for some companies that want to rake in the money it seems. But as long as people somehow justify this... How :D

There are tonnes of articles on why people whale on freemium games, for some it is a combo of good jobs with too much spare time and a desire to 'win' the game at any cost. Unfortunately for some others it is apparently an addiction and they sometimes get themselves into financial difficulty as a result.

The freemium model often earns more than the traditional model but i know what you are saying about games prices.  In the last year or so i have bought the latest civ series and the pass that gives me expansions for a year... total cost under 100 and i own it forever, and there is massive depth and thousands of hours of unique gameplay

Here, that 100 would get what... some books for one champ? or the 'chance' at pulling 1 good champ? personally it just seems crazy and i cant get my head around people thinking it is value for money, however it really is up to people how they spend their money and if no-one whaled would these games exist? ...i am not sure.  Of course you could argue that if people didnt whale then companies would have to build games with enough depth to get people to shell out up front.

If there were no whales, games would certainly still exist because there's money to be had anyway. Would Raid in particular exist? I don't know, maybe. Or maybe there'd be something similar but better. Or worse. It wouldn't exist in its current form at any rate. Instead you'd probably see the traditional one-time purchase model, subscription fees and/or prices more adjusted around many small transactions than few big ones. I've heard people, mostly the whales I suspect, claim that whales are what keeps the game alive, but they are wrong. Whales keep this particular business model alive, but that's about it. Games have existed long before whaling in games did, and they'd be just fine without them.

The winner of the recent champion chase had 30,000 points. That's 60 legionaries worth more or less I beleive at 500 points a time -  so that's probably thousands of pounds worth of shards in that event alone. Madness.

The bulk of those points would be coming from epics. Statistically speaking, for every 100 ancients, they'd get 1 lego, 16 epics and 83 ancients on average, worth 500 points, 4000 points and 830 respectively, so 5330 points total. To get to 30 000 points would take a bit less than 600 ancient shards then - depending on when they bought them and in what kind of deals, that  could be done at less than 1000 pounds. Of course, that's still a crazy amount of money even so, but nothing like what you'd need to spend to get 60 legendaries. ;) 

Who cares what other people decide to spend in a game as long as they are not spending money they cannot afford.  If they are, Plarium might be at legal risk since using someone's addiction can lead to liability, but those cases would take ages even if somone filed one.  If someone wants to spend $40k on Genshin, $10k on Clash, and $15k on Raid and they can afford it, let them do it.  I don't think buying a Bugatti Veyron or an 80 foot boat makes sense but it isn't my money.  I spend decent money on food because I enjoy good quality food.  In terms of clothing I go a bit cheaper.  If someone feels good buying their Air Jordans, they don't have to justify it to me no matter how stupid I think the purchase is.

Time is money, so spending $ to save time grinding is worth it to a lot of people.

When's the last time you enjoyed farming for 40 hours for one item in WoW?  Turns into a job, not fun at all, and you lose 40 hours of your life.  Could've made a lot of cash in that 40 hours, spent some of it on that item, and came out ahead since you didn't burn yourself out on the game.

Bah, upgrading items in Raid is a shitty solution, a total waste of time. It could be done differently so ppl could actually play the game - fight in dungeons and in the arena. Manualy upgrading item after item is a tedious task, not worthy of the rest of the game.

Yes, I used to see that that way, but look at this:

My Galek's gear was mega weak and he could barely pass stage 12 normal alone. Now, that I have upgraded everything to 8+ and his boots to 12+, he can clap HARD Tilshire solo

Kind of missing the point

Yes upgrading gear helps, but when upgrading a piece of gear to 16, why exactly do we have to watch the animation for 5+ minutes and watch our silver slowly dissapear... on every single piece of gear we upgrade. If gearing an entire character its a lot of sitting there watching an animation.

Yeah, lol XD cant u just skip it??