Nice conversation on shitty pulls and gambling today. I think I fall on this side of things:
-- I can see why people would be upset if they're spending money. In this case it definitely IS gambling in that the odds are stacked against the user.
-- however I push back on this because it assumes the primary joy of the game is pulling rare units. Is it? Is that what makes us all most happy? For me I love the collecting part of it but it's such a small part of the experience, especially for FTP players.
-- My primary joy is the same as any RPG. Building unique parties, leveling them up, getting / finding sweet gear, and piecing them together in different ways to tackle different types of battles. This isn't gambling at all. It's grinding and I love it!
-- I also know that whenever PVP comes I'm probably screwed, as I am whenever I get to that certain point in ANY FTP game where paying makes you unequivocally better. Clash of Clans comes to mind. And just like CoC, the game is compelling as hell until you hit that wall.
-- thinking maybe this is the bottom line, then. If the long term goal is to build the perfect team for PVP, you're paying out the nose to compete with whales the world over who have money to burn. You'll probably never crack the top 50 without spending serious cash. But I can't believe many people in this thread see that as a long term goal.
-- so bottom bottom line? Do what brings you joy, man. I'll play until the joy is overtaken by the grind and / or it no longer feels fair. Right now it feels fair.
I can see what you're saying. However, as a F2P player getting tickets and using lapis to roll for characters is an "exciting" activity. The sad thing is, the odds of winning anything with those tickets is small. And we may not spend real money on this game, but we do spend a lot of time and in some ways time > money, so that time doesn't equate to anything meaningful and it feels bad. The pull I had last week was ridiculous and all it did was drive home the point that this game is straight up gambling with crappy odds of getting anything decent. That kind of thing makes me not want to play at all. At the end of the day, this is a game and we play games to have fun. The way their character summoning is now is just not fun at all.
I do agree that the other aspects of the game allow it to hold up beyond the summoning characters aspect and that part can be done without paying money even though it's super grindy. Still, it feel good to get that Trust Reward you worked so hard for so that now you can make one of your units just a little more badass. At least we can control that and so it's something we can work towards freely without the RNG crap. Even then, sometimes we have to deal with the fact that your group just may not be up to snuff for the content that's out. I imagine a group getting stonewalled in the Colosseum if the player couldn't pull any of the more meaningful characters at some point. Or being blocked from doing some content because their rolls were terrible and they weren't able to complete missions or beat some bosses with their group.
Luckily, the game allows us to bring other player's buffed up characters to carry us through some of these fights. Even then, it just feel bad to not be able to do on my own, so I just get frustrated with my crappy pulls and think it's not worth bothering with if I'm constantly going to be behind the eight ball. I will admit that I was fairly lucky early on and managed to get some decent characters to to things with...even got a 5* Exdeath doing a regular pull as well as Warrior of Light. That's not the case recently. I've barely gotten any of the banner characters in the last few events and my daily pulls haven't amounted to anything other than Kuja. This long stretch of bad luck just kind of sucks the fun out of it for me since my main crew is all capped and now I'm just grinding TM rewards and it's a long and boring process that I dread doing every day. I decided to level up Rydia and Kain because I didn't have anything else to really do with my time and I dread doing the TM grind. Unfortunately, they're almost capped so I'm not sure what to do next. And this brings me back to drawing another character or hoping I got something interesting with my daily pull. It's not looking good though since the last month has been largely a waste of lapis.
Anyway, that's my thought on it. I just hate the summoning aspect of it and instead of daily excitement of something cool, I dread it and reluctantly pull. It just drives home the point that I really hate gambling and that's why I don't do it in Vegas, either.