deadscreensky
Member
In Conclusion:
If you don't want to do any of this stuff, that's fine. That's completely fine. I'm not here to tell you how to spend your time, the aim of this thread is to dispel the notion that if you happen to buy SFV without the season passes, you're completely screwed out of earning FM without online play.
The real problem has always been that most FM in the game is an extremely limited resource, and none of what you've posted negates that. Sure, SF5 is generous if all you want to unlock is a few DLC characters. But maybe like a lot of us you want some more stages or costumes. The default game is really light on both of those categories, so luckily (?) there's plenty in the shop!
Stages:
3 that shipped in the game but are locked, 40K each
7 extra releases, 70K
2 seasonal stages, also 40k?
Story Costumes (these shipped with the game day one): 40K each
This starts at 'only' 16 characters, but with each new character that count grows and it will eat up some of the new FM that character can earn you. (Can I point out how strange it is to have a non-2D fighter with no included-free-with-purchase secondary outfits? Namco, Sega, and Tecmo have been including tons of additional costumes for their fighting games for literally decades now.)
And obviously there's tons of extra colors, titles, etc. We'll ignore them for this comparison, but a lot of players are going to want those rare colors!
So you're looking at 1,330,000 Fight Money for all of this, with only some of the stages being actual new, post-release content. Let's be gentle and say you only want around half of this content. That's simply not possible with the ~500,000 your approach gives us, and obviously you're not going to be able to afford a single additional character on top of that. Just the story costumes alone -- which were in the game the moment it launched, and cannot be bought with anything but Fight Money -- are going to cost you 640,000 FM.
Again, if all you want to unlock in SF5 is a few DLC characters then yes, Fight Money is great. But I'd wager the vast majority of fighting game players are interested in some of that other content, and it's hard enough to grab that even without considering DLC characters. That's why we complain, and our criticisms are entirely justified.
(Another obnoxious factor: if you buy a character with Fight Money then you won't get any of that back if you decide to buy the Season Pass down the road. A lot of games do this with DLC, not just SF5, but it's still unnecessary and consumer unfriendly. I'd personally love to pick up Kolin with FM and then maybe grab the pass when the whole thing is actually released, but that would only be depleting an extremely finite source. Giving an automatic refund would encourage me to engage more with the game, which probably gives Capcom more potential revenue sources.)
This really gets to the heart of the matter. If the genuinely fun content in SF5 gave reasonable amounts of Fight Money then nobody would be complaining. But actually fighting against other players is an incredibly slow grind. Hell, fighting against friends gives you basically nothing! Try to have fun playing SF5 and Capcom punishes you with minuscule Fight Money earnings. This isn't how practically any F2P (!) game functions. If I play with friends in Heroes of the Storm, Awesomenauts, League of Legends, Smite, whatever, I get their Fight Money equivalent and can buy more content doing so.How much of that was actually fun to play though?
Looks like a busy list you have to take care of from how I read it.
But it's cool for people who don't want to pay to have the option not to.