It's worth trying I suppose but I found the gameplay to be really generic and not fulfilling :( Graphically it is nice though, if you don't mind the cartooniness.
Also the first cup since this closed beta session started just happened yesterday. Here's the twitch vod of the grand finals if you want to see how competitive plays out.
how do people's LG/Rail skills transfer over to splash damage games? i wonder if my hitscan is improving all that much or maybe it's just too different.
F2P is ruining this game. It is supposed to have 20 mercs (characters) eventually. Given each is $6-10 you'll need to be a whale to buy them all. Grinding isn't much of an option either given you earn on average 200 credits a match (100 loss, 300 win) and some character cost as much as 50,000. I wish they'd switch to a CS:GO type model where you buy the game for a reasonable price and get all content then try to make money on cases/cosmetics/etc.
You forgot missions that give you an additional 1800 credits each day. Let's say you play around 5 games a day (not that much really, I currently play around 10 on a good day) which is totally enough to get the 3 missions done and you win 3 of them (not that hard either). You'll get around 800-1400 credits for the actual matches (depending on how well you play as an inidvidual) and another 1800 from missions, that's 2600-3200 cerdits a day. Do that for a week and you have at least 18200 credits in your bank (best case around 22400). So you could potentially unlock a merc every 2-3 weeks of playtime (not that far of from what you would do in LoL or other games where you have to unlock stuff).
Sure the cash prices for some of the mercs are a bit too high (something like 3.00 EUR for basic mercs and 6.00 EUR for the "new" ones would be more appropriate imo), but I am sure that over time mercs will get cheaper and there will be bundles that make the whole thing a bit more fair.
Also right now you really only need 3 mercs aside from the two base ones to be really competitive and those are Proxy (30k/5 EUR), Sawbones (30k/5 EUR) and Fragger (50k/10 EUR). Those three are the most played ones, two of them you should be able to buy just by the credit amount you get when you start out and play a couple of games. Fragger is a bit tougher to get to but still doable. Also if you buy the starter pack for 20 EUR you get all 3 important comp mercs plus a bunch of others and even 35k cerdits so you can unlock at least one of the ones not included in the starter pack. Pretty fair imo.
I think you are forgetting the history of other F2P games even if all your analysis is correct. Doing missions does help you make more credits but you'll need to play a lot to guarantee you get them done each day. What is to stop them from re-balancing the economy to be even more grindy? Given the little bit I've read it seems to be getting worse. Do you think genuinely think 2-3 weeks of play time is fair for a character? Most players will not play every day and certainly won't get all missions done daily.
They are selling power already. What will ensure they will stop selling power? What is going to stop them from releasing 30 characters in the future? What happens if they heavily change a character I bought? When a company has incentives (sales) to make content they end up making a lot of that content with power creep. Look at MOBAs and how they have massive amounts of characters. Even drawing on FPS; Tribes Ascend had a patch where it released something like 30 weapon variants. MWO now has 100+ mechs and a handful of maps and only two game modes! Selling characters while being F2P is a terrible business model that will corrupt the gameplay and force them to sell characters to make money.
They are currently planing on upping the amount of credits you get from missions as well as including new ones. Also who said, that the system will stay the same when the game launches? They already reworked the Loadout system two times so why wouldn't they change something like the prices of mercs?
Look at LoL the most popular F2P game of all time. 110+ characters of which you can get two for free and get a 3rd one when you reach level 30 (which takes you at best a couple of days, mostly several weeks to months). All others have to be bought either through cash or ingame currency. Price distribution for all champions is:
450 IP/260 RP - 12 champions
1350 IP/585 RP - 21 champions
3150 IP/790 RP - 24 champions (some in this tier have different IP price)
4800 IP/880 RP - 35 champions (some in this tier have different IP price)
6300 IP/975 RP - 32 champions
If we go by Riot's official numbers you earn on average 100 IP for a 37 minute win and 68 IP for a loss with the same game length. This means that you would need need 63 37 minute wins (I am disregarding the 1st win of the day bonus here because it does not really matter) to unlock a 6300 IP champion just by playing (the tier where most of the top tier competition champions are located). That's almost 39 hours of playing the game (or roughly 19 days of playing 2 hours a day each day). Mind you it is absolutely impossible to go on a 63 game winning streak and finish all games in 37 minutes! So grinding out characters in DB is actually a lot faster than it is in LoL, especially since most games do not take 37 minutes to complete in DB (I'd say 20 minutes on average if not less).
If we go by the RP prices the smallest amount you can buy is 260 RP over here in Germany which will set you back by 2.50 EUR. This means that you pay 1.04 Cents per RP. This means that you'll pay 10.14 EUR for a 975 RP champion. Not too different from the most expensive mercs in DB eh?
What I am trying to say here is not that Riot's F2P system is the most fair one, or that DB's is for that matter. What I want to say is, that it obviously works (everybody who argues against that: Riot Games's revenue for 2013). People are willing to pay those money prices or grind excessive amounts of hours to get the stuff they want without paying real cash.
What's most important in my eyes is, that all of the "original" classes from ET (Proxy [Engineer], Skyhammer/Arty [Field Ops], Sawbones [Medic]) are either available from the start in DB or cost a fair price (except for Fragger [Soldier] and probably Red Eye [Covert Ops]). The other mercs are nice to have and might be fun in public but they will never be a real threat to the ones mentioned above in both competitive and public play as they are essentially just more gimmicky and wacky copies of the original classes.