Question on the DLC characters and Fight Money (something in the OT piqued my curiosity).
The OT implied DLC characters can be bought with real-world money or in-game currency? Can a player make enough Fight Money (guessing that's in-game currency?) to purchase DLC characters? I guess what I'm asking is if I can avoid paying $ for the DLC characters by racking up in-game cash.
This would definitely influence my decision to buy sooner rather than later so that I can start earning dat money.
How it works:
You earn Fight Money in-game via online matches, Survival, or the Character Stories. Character Stories should give you roughly 100k in Fight Money when you complete all of them which is enough to earn one DLC character for free. They are planning to add more ways to earn FM in March with Daily Challenges
and the Trials, the former of which is said to be simple tasks like "Perform Hadouken five times" so presumably they wouldn't have to be done in an online match.
However
If you also play Survival on Easy and Normal with all characters (each character, when you beat survival, gives you a ton of FM) this number can go up to something like 256k or close to 260k in FM -- enough to earn two DLC characters.
This number can then increase even further if you try to beat Survival on
every difficulty with all the characters (Easy, Normal, Hard, and Hell). Further increasing the earnable FM.
This is all excluding character level ups which for each level you get 1k FM. So, if you level up Ryu to 15, that's 15k FM just from one character. And leveling them up can be done just by playing them -- doesn't matter if it's the Character Stories, Survival, or online matches.
So you can definitely earn half if not more than half of the DLC characters for free just by playing the game. Some people have posted in here that from playing and completing a few Survivals on Hell (also including FM accumulated from other difficulties and character stories) has pushed them up to 900k in Fight Money.
There's separate currency you can buy with real money called Zenni (or is it with a y?) This cannot be earned in-game and is separate from FM. You can either buy Zenni to then buy premium costumes or DLC characters or you can just outright buy the DLC characters with your actual money.
In addition, there are character costumes in the game you can only get with Fight Money and they are the story alternate costumes. These costumes cost 40k FM each so if you really only want characters and don't care about costumes you can ignore them otherwise keep that in mind if you want to find some balance between getting a costume you want and the characters that get released in the future. (But do note these costumes aren't available until the Shop opens in March).
Note: I do not have the game yet so some of my numbers may be inaccurate this is just based on what I have read. Someone who has the game can feel free to correct me.