You must not play MMOs. Gaming is almost always a chore in them.
I wonder how much of this finding against EA is because the time limit is a completely artificial game mechanic. E.g. Everquest is free to play now, but you can also use real money to buy points to instantly level a character to 85. However, the act of leveling up a character is pretty much set in stone for RPGs for 40 years now.
In original Everquest, leveling was definitely a rough chore. But what is too chore-like? Back then it took me like 20 days of playing time to hit max level for the first time. A lot of people played through it, but most didn't. It was slow and painful. Back then, you couldn't pay to bypass it (it also wasn't free to play, but if it were) - does it become a problem the minute you allow people to buy things? Whose bar for too chore-like are we using?
I've played some MMOs where there were some very highly set limits you could only bypass via buying things with real money. However, they were transferrable, and players created their own market. All the most powerful players never paid real money. Instead, they could collect resources so fast they exchanged those resources for these items. Can we call this game free?
I think the big difference is you must play the game in those MMOs to complete those chores. In these F2P mobile games, you have to simply wait some amount of time without playing the game to complete the chore.
Presumably, the MMO gameplay mechanics are sufficiently fun and engaging to keep you playing. The F2P game just wants to keep you paying.
I'm a big mmo player, fwiw. And it's part of what got me to the conclusion that gaming has become a chore.
The devs behind World of Warcraft have spent a lot of time trying to balance "grind" with "skipping grind". Making it easier to skip the "un-fun" parts of the game; all that assuming that the un-fun parts of the game are necessary to begin with.
However, here we're just talking about game design. In the case of P2W moneygrabs, we're talking about evil behaviour.
I wonder how much of this finding against EA is because the time limit is a completely artificial game mechanic. E.g. Everquest is free to play now, but you can also use real money to buy points to instantly level a character to 85. However, the act of leveling up a character is pretty much set in stone for RPGs for 40 years now.
In original Everquest, leveling was definitely a rough chore. But what is too chore-like? Back then it took me like 20 days of playing time to hit max level for the first time. A lot of people played through it, but most didn't. It was slow and painful. Back then, you couldn't pay to bypass it (it also wasn't free to play, but if it were) - does it become a problem the minute you allow people to buy things? Whose bar for too chore-like are we using?
I've played some MMOs where there were some very highly set limits you could only bypass via buying things with real money. However, they were transferrable, and players created their own market. All the most powerful players never paid real money. Instead, they could collect resources so fast they exchanged those resources for these items. Can we call this game free?