Alkaid

There are f2p players like Akariss that are dedicated and retain top tier in all modes despite being f2p. I wouldn't call that way of playing fun for most, but it's proven doable. And believe me, I know what bad luck is in this game, but that doesn't change that it's possible and been done. A whale could +10 units easier but never were those units simply unachievable to a f2p like resplendent-boosted units are now. As Niddo said, it does not necessarily mean you automatically win over all non-paying players. But exclusive stat advantages f2p players cannot even access and such is exactly within the realm of p2w. Really, you can argue whaling in general is p2w as well, going by a looser definition like Ice Dragon mentions. But the pass definitely fits under either way. You are literally paying to have inaccessibly better units than people who don't.

You could have equally strong units to what whales can get with enough f2p dedication and luck. Now there's an actual paid barrier to the strongest some units can be, and while you have access to 1 S support to make an effectively +15 unit paying people can have 3. And in AR where more than being score sticks matters for your units, that extra performance advantage is definitely a big deal. Paying for an exclusive advantage is exactly what paying to win is.

I don't think the pass being p2w is really up for debate when you clearly get exclusive gameplay advantages by buying it. Depending on if you use them or not, the exclusive +2 stats to certain units can be a big boost. I use Cordelia already in AR, so +2 attack and speed would make her even better, and I see 2 more S supports constantly being undervalued by people for how strong that is to have for AR and even other competitive modes. (3/4 of your arena team S supported for easier win streaks sure sounds nice) The other stuff I don't really mind, even if QoL features should have been free. Worth noting that I hadn't even thought how the auto grind setting would let people spam to the top ranks of TT extremely easily. So while that's just feathers, even TT ranking now has a paid advantage.. Really, even worse to me than the pass itself might be the implementation. Besides hijacking the anniversary celebration to try and sell it to us, the intrusive reminders for it all over in-game and the quests you can never claim which it dangles in your face forever is frankly disgusting. Rather than encourage me to help Feh's declining sales it just pushes me away from supporting this game.

Edward (the main vampire guy in Twilight) literally sparkles in the light as the main girl looks at his body. Her other guy of interest (yes there's two, that fight over her) is a werewolf that's constantly taking his shirt off to show his muscular physique, which the writer agonizingly describes in detail. (as she does everything, man her writing style was a slog to read) Both males are pretty much pieces of meat for females to fantasize over with rather blank slate self-insert female MC. A pretty stereotyped "hot guys fight over and save you" fantasy. (and there's nothing wrong with that) And it's one of the biggest selling book series, as well as the successful movie adaptations. As for Game of Thrones, just like other torture and violence, the rape scenes rarely had no purpose I can think of. I would not call them sexualization for the sake of it in most cases, and even so, that fits the setting the series takes place in. The most controversial instance I can think of was even a turning point for one of the major female characters, for which she later gets revenge for as well. Rape is a horrible thing, but horrible things happening to people is pretty much one of the big things with that show. I don't think I need to mention the hoards of female fans of the series either, which, despite the points of sexualization/abuse for said female characters, still idolized and felt empowered by them. I think your bone to pick with female sexualization in general is getting a bit slap happy at this point, and we're getting further from fanservice in FE lol. (how dare you make me remember Twilight) I'll just say I very much stand with @Wonderie's point of no double standard. I'm just fine with female sexualization and just as fine with any male equivalent, even if that's not aimed at me. And rarely does it hurt the integrity of characters to me, especially on the mild level of how FE implements it. Which is why my original comments were not to silence complaints, but just find the sensitivity and drama over it in the FE community excessive.

There's higher cut ones too. The point is, yes this is a real kind of dress and it's not just a made up fetish outfit. You can say it's not sensible for battle or whatever, but still, real. (plenty of more mild stuff from mounted girls' miniskirts to shirtless bezerkers could be called ill-fitting for battle as well on that note, so not much point when it's a light-fantasy-medieval type of series anyway. I don't think it really undermines them within the context the games' world)

Lyn's dress is literally inspired by the the real Chinese Cheongsam or Qipao styles of dress. It's real and worn in China. Being very leggy is basically their thing. I can understand your point for some FE outfits, but Lyn's not really one of the offenders. Her character's even treated as being from a Mongolian steppe-like place, so the Chinese style makes some sense.

Have you ever seen the women's romance novel section at a book store? There's tons of muscular guys all across the covers. They purposefully select those kind of male models because they tend to sell the books better. However, women have diverse tastes just like men do, but to attempt to say muscles are more for men's interest than women is some strange generalizing. And I don't think I have to explain how common it is for men to gain muscle for the sake of attracting women either. It would also be remiss to disregard the popularity of confident and sexy women among other women, big breast-ed ones included. I get your point, but I think you're generalizing too much off some preconceived notions, and the muscle one is especially questionable. And I don't see how Pent being a groom means anything special for being marketed towards women. Because he's in a nice suit and not half-naked, and you assume women prefer that? Why do the brides, also not half-naked, do well with men if they prefer less clothes in contrast? Where do shirtless summer alts of males aimed at women fit in? Sure a groom should be popular with women, but so are half-naked men as well, or nicely-clothed women with men. They're really not exclusive forms of catering to either sex, and both are widely liked.

To be fair there's female artists/writers that make plenty of fanservice as well. Men are not the only producers of that stuff just like they're not the only consumers. Just from Three Houses even we have things like but Chinatsu Kanahara probably isn't going to be scoffed at as a horny designer. I think that's one of the main issues in the fanservice debates, that people who dislike it don't just dislike it, they look down on it and belittle and dismiss people who do enjoy/create it too often. The former is fine, the latter is not.

That's very true too. The best they've done for Feh character-wise is Forging Bonds or the duo units that have their little conversation(though then that sacrifices all their normal tap lines.. so they really just cut stuff to even make those). That's basically nothing compared to what FGO and plenty of other gacha games do with their characters. If you don't already like a character from playing the main FE games, Feh itself does little to make you care about them beyond their gameplay use or if you like how they look and what very limited tap lines they have.(that works sometimes, like Reinhardt becoming "popular", but it's not the same as what actual character interaction/story could do on top of that) The attention to story and characters definitely helps keep FGO doing well and keeping people invested in the game, though it still pairs with the abysmal gacha rates to milk people trying to then get those characters too. IS has been trying harder to milk people to keep up with legendaries/mythics/BST creep/skill creep/etc., yet not done much to improve in other aspects. They mostly just focus on the gameplay value of things. Maybe they overestimate people already knowing all the characters from the main games so they think they don't have to do more?

If you read the discussion it's about the impact of the +2 stats on resplendent units. The viability of Lyn in particular to explain how even a mediocre gen 1 sword getting +2 stats is still pretty significant. (in other words how these resplendent boosts are definitely a big deal for a pay-gated feature) Xray's a ninja

I used to spend a fair amount on the game during the first 2 years, dropping an orb pack or two on banners every now and then. I stopped mostly just because luck dictated that money still wouldn't be enough for me to get what I wanted, so wasn't worth spending so much to keep getting junk every banner anyway. However, the way powercreep has been going and the shift to more older games' in the past year or more has also been a turn off as well. I find myself pulling for reruns of older seasonal banners and just skipping a lot of the newer stuff entirely. Same goes for legendary/mythic banners which are supposed to be a big draw, but they're almost always just old lords loaded with copious amounts of powercreep and I have no interest. The bad taste is pushed further by how "required" IS tries to make them too, so you can score worth a damn in the competitive modes. I'm even a competitive type of player, but I don't like that's how they want the game to be played to keep up with it now. It puts me off both in the sense of it's just plain stuff I don't want and also practice I don't want to support. I'm not sure how Nintendo could improve with the game, since something like FGO is very unlikely to be emulated. It managed to cultivate a community of whales who'd suffer the abuse of such abysmal rates and just keep shelling out cash for 0.5% waifus and husbandos anyway. Feh started off seeming more "generous" and so the playerbase expects a more generous behavior. Then throwing attempts to scrounge money like with this feh pass just throws a whole lot of people off, though I have a feeling it'll manage to be successful in the short term anyway. Long term it might just hurt the game's reputation, especially to new people looking in and seeing a premium pass gating QoL features and exclusive unit buffs. I don't think this game has that big of a whale community going by the competitive modes' rankings(feels like only a few thousand people), so they have to target low spenders more often too, like they're trying to right now. But it seems the way they're going about it isn't the best. Hard to say if lack of fanservice is impactful on this game's sales or not.(and yes it does have a massive lack of it compared to most gacha, this game is very conservative in that regard) The core FE audience(or at least the older portion of it) isn't as keen on fanservice, but to attract more of the average gacha player then yes, fanservice might have drawn more spenders in. One of the bigger issues is I'm not sure how well this game really does to reach and keep people playing who don't already like FE in the first place. Why would somebody looking at this game on the appstore who never played some old GBA and DS games care to stick around with characters they have no existing attachment to? And very few would give a damn to play and then go explore the source material. There's still plenty of FGO players who have never read the original VN that started the series or even watch the anime for it. Then there's little fanservice to keep the ones who play gacha for eye candy around either. Nintendo could also stand to just plain market the game better(they barely seem to) and other efforts. I remember when Feh used to have the occasional commercial, or like the CYL1 ad, but they never did stuff like that again. And now this is getting to be a wall of text, but additionally I think that the game's not doing much to entice new players period anymore. Stuff like how almost all the competitive modes work with AR's fort level system, AB's bonus score added every week, the crowns/thrones you can never catch up on, etc. really don't encourage new people, let alone whales who want to jump in and show off, to join this game at this point. That's not good if they want to facilitate replacing lost players.

I think there's a genuine concern for botting affecting the votes this time, if not previous years too. It's known that Jorge was being botted by someone both last year and this year. And after testing last year they supposedly upped the voting this time and sure enough he ended up with a big surge of votes and high placing. If that's true, I wouldn't be too surprised if there were a few other people doing the same thing with other characters, which could contribute to why the vote totals got so high for some. Even last years' votes surpassed that of the original CYL, despite the playerbase decline. That or we got a lot more dedicated multi-device spammers as well...

Well specifying "my big-boobed friends" out of them seemed rather ridiculous so I didn't. And I used an anecdote to reflect your own, that was the point. You just did exactly that to @thanny, and with a bit of cheekiness at the end so maybe you didn't realize it. Indeed, it's fine to criticize things, and everyone's welcome to. I just find some of the more intense reactions like disgust or embarrassment odd for how mild the game's content is.

Not to butt in, but I have a number of female friends that play FE, and only one dislikes fanservicy designs in most cases(at least for women, she's all for the male fanservice instead). A couple of the ones playing Feh even actively pull for Camillas and enjoy her design, and same for Loki or others. If you want to use anecdotal evidence to dismiss his point, I could just as well confirm it the same way. Both kinds of people exist and should be taken into account, either way. Your ending sentence there sounds like you assume he'd just confirm your point if he actually asked a woman, but that's a narrow assumption. Really, I find some of the fanservice criticism and sensitivity a bit much in the community, when Feh is an extremely mild game in that regard for the most part. There's only a few outliers like Loki, and if that's enough to make some people's head spin they might pass out at the majority of gacha games.

It's definitely far from useless. You don't need to have all 3 S supported units on the same team, and not everyone just uses a single tanking strategy. Like in light season I have a tanking team, a vantage team and a galeforce team with different units, and I use them all regularly. If I had the pass then that lets me S support my tank for the first team, which is what I already do, but also S support my vantage mage for the second team which would be very helpful. Then I can also have both my Eirs rolling with extra stats so they can contribute even more, or S support a galeforce unit to get even more atk/spd to do their job. It could definitely mean the difference between more wins and losses for a lot of people one way or the other. And you won't necessarily get more defense losses and see people rocking 3 S supports on the teams to make it obvious, but you could also get losses you otherwise may not have because the person's alternate teams were now able to beat your map with the extra help. And this just about AR, leaving aside the benefit of breezing through arena easier with 3/4 of your team S-boosted and whatnot.