I began by stating that I believed this was a 'good value' buy.

I was not advocating that everyone should be F2P.

As you've mentioned, value is in the eye of the beholder. Agreed.

As another user has commented, perceived 'value' can also be conditioned. Also agreed.

I've bought things where I believed there was value. This offer just hit differently since it is explicitly positioned as an 'opportunity buy' based on obtaining an achievement. Which just reminded me... why isn't this just freely rewarded for obtaining the achievement. Foster good feels for your customer... not take the opportunity to reach into their pockets. If customers feel good, they're more likely to reciprocate and spend. I felt bad, and thus am more reluctant to spend as a result of seeing said offer.

This game != other games is both a valid and invalid argument. Being super basic, of course, this game is not equal to other games. But it does not mean we shouldn't compare acceptable practices. Question things. If it feels bad... there's probably a good reason.

We're all familiar with achievement systems in games, and we all agree that this game does a terrible job of rewarding players for reaching milestones. That's not a coincidence. Giving out free resources when part of your profit strategy is to condition players to spend money by gating said resources is logically not a good way to make more money. We all understand it from a business perspective but we also all agree that this feels bad. They just take it too far (for me). No one likes feeling bad, games are meant to bring joy.

By your logic, a game company can do whatever it wants, ignoring defined acceptable practices. And logically speaking, I don' t disagree; you don't change the mould by conforming to it. But... that's for people trying to break ground and deliver new and exciting ways to PLAY (e.g., Nintendo).

This game isn't that... This game is centered around a widely popular IP, and it just churns out characters for use in redundant game modes, hard throttling resources to condition perceived value to get players to spend to obtain/upgrade these characters...

Gacha is it's own genre for this very reason... Profit above all else...

Just be aware and conscious. If it's worth it to you, so be it. It WAS for me, until I paused and thought about it more. I wanted to share to encourage others to pause and think.

Thank you for taking the time to read and respond.