this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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FFXIV.
Not sure about ESO and SWTOR. I know WoW has the token market that technically counts as turning money into power by selling tokens and buying clears.
SWTOR definitely has purchasable power, since you can sell cosmetics from the real money store on the ingame auction house for ingame currency. With that, you’ll be able to buy gear enhancements on the auction house, that are required for endgame (VM operations, etc.)
Some of the best gear in ESO come from their paid DLCs and Chapters. Technically locked behind a paywall, but you'll still have to farm the gear yourself.
The microtransactions themselves only offer cosmetics, consumables (that aren't more powerful than the craftable options), and utility stuff (race-change tokens, and skipping some of the skillpoint grind).
There is a player market for exchanging Crowns (microtransaction currency) for gold, and another player market for buying raid clears with gold. Raiding (called Trials) offer some of the best PvE gear. You don't need to buy clears if you're skilled enough to run those Trials and can find groups to do it with you.
If you just want to enjoy the game without worrying about min-maxing your build, all the base-game and craftable options will do you just fine.
Hmm these look sus:
https://store.finalfantasyxiv.com/ffxivstore/en-us/product/804 https://store.finalfantasyxiv.com/ffxivstore/en-us/product/822 https://store.finalfantasyxiv.com/ffxivstore/en-us/product/809
Maybe they’re not so popular, or in context not worth that much, but levels and money usually are no-nos for me.
As others have said, the story skips are kinda awful.
Plus, I gotta say that it doesn’t really make a difference. They don’t give anyone an advantage over anyone else and don’t impact the way you experience the game at all. If you don’t like them, just don’t buy them.
At worst, you’ll run into some guys who are really bad because they skipped a huge portion of the game to get to modern content. But it doesn’t give them any edge over you by any means.
Again, I can’t stress enough how these affect other players 0%.
Replying 19 hours later but...
Yes, FF14 does have options to skip story or (most) character levels. They are, like others have stated, primarily targeted towards players who are levelling alts (which the game by nature doesn't really need as much).
FF14's story is amazing, but it's long and not necessarily something you want to repeat.
And while this is effectively buying levels, FF14 is not designed as a pay-to-win game. The amount of experience required to reach maximum level is balanced for someone who is playing the game legitimately -- unlike P2W games where requirements are artificially inflated to encourage you to spend money. You will get most or all of the experience you need to hit max level just from following the storyline and a moderate amount of side quests (on one class anyways.)
That said, many FF14 players say that fashion is the true endgame... and there are a lot of nice-looking items on the store. So I suppose it depends on what your definition of "winning" is. 🙃