Any p2w mechanic. The most egregious examples being gacha games where you need like a 6* star diamond hero from the latest release that costs like $500 on rng spins to compete on certain content.

Where do I start?

On an mmo I played for a decade.. the game started out where lucky people had good equipment.

As time went on, people bought the best gear, and the advantage was fine, the non buyers could still kill the buyers.

At some point they added in a system, where you could add stats to your gear..

The main stats causing the problem are as follows.

Crit - double damage dealt if it goes off Anti-crit - blocks crit Breakthrough - do full damage on stronger opponents (a power difference of 1 leads to this being required) Anti-breakthrough - blocks breakthrough.

So you had buyers doing full damage on non buyers with a chance of double damage, and running Anti breakthrough.

And you had non buyers doing 10%? Damage unless they broke through, and had Anti crit on their armour.

So let's say a buyer did 20k damage, crit 40k (10% chance) A non buyer only does 2k damage vs stronger chars (1 power difference).. and has a 10% chance to break through.

Then put this further into perspective.

People had 15-20k hp.

So buyers 1 hit you.. and you 5-10+ hit buyers.

In a game where you could heal instantly around half your health, it took 4 or 5 non buyers working together to take down a buyer.

Regarding buyers btw...

When game first started I got lucky, and within 6 months I had people offering me $500 per item, for like 3 of my items.

By the time this breakthrough system was existing.. one woman sold her truck irl, got $60,000, and spent it buying 5 sets of gear that, at that time were maxed out started gear. Basically bought near on invincibility for 5 people.

So that's 12k for a full set of gear.. gear was like 8 pieces max.. so my old items offered 500, probably went down in value as they became more common, but because of how much stats increased, and the removal of luck from the game... they still went from like 500-> 100-> 1.5K PER ITEM.

so yeah enjoy my tale of wallet warriors xD

Im just not going to play a game where a core mechanic is payments or paying as a way to avoid artificial grinding.

Cosmetics? Fine. Dlc? Depends on whats in it. Battlepass? Within the realm of possibility. But real solid gameplay content is always best.

Randomized packs? Thats getting silly. A name change or server transfer "service" in an MMO? Pass. In-game currency to skip 3 days of grinding/waiting thats only there to drive in-game currency payments? Im going to play something else.

Card games are the clearest example of this. Do I want to spend $100 on several copies of one card? Or would I rather get several whole games?

Pay to win mechanics will prevent me from even considering a game. I don’t like it when the paid items are “just cosmetic” either. But I tend to tolerate that because it’s in damn near everything. But if that’s too egregious I won’t play that either. Looking at you, Overwatch 2.

For me, I look at each situation on a case by case basis. For some games I will buy in-game items, for others, I won't.

Games like World of Warships and War Thunder and even GTA Online, I will not spend the extra money.

god the worst part is reading this and thinking

“Only 500?”

That's if you get lucky of course, you'll be adding an extra 0 if you're unlucky.

I never heard of the term Wallet Warrior before until now but looking at the comments I get the general gist.

I'm in a similar boat, I'll only pay for extra microtransactions in a game that I genuinely enjoy and want to support the developer. Like Rocket League for example.

If the game has P2W mechanics or is just simply unfun, then no, I won't pay an additional amount on top of both the initial asking price and the time I've already put into the product.

God people still use this catch phrase?

Gotta ask, what game??

Gives me strong BDO vibes, loved the game but the relative stat buff from cosmetics was a big turnoff.

It's my favourite thing to day