World Of Warships: Do Not Buy Into USS Misery Loot Box Scam [Opinion]

To everyone reading this who plays World of Warships, please do not buy the loot boxes for USS Missouri. There’s a reason why the community calls it “USS Misery” right now. It is nothing short of predatory gambling at this point, and Wargaming fully knows this.

USS Missouri officially went on “sale” in World of Warships on August 27, 2021. Only, you can’t buy it directly. Oh no, that isn’t enough money for Wargaming, no matter how high they raise her price to be. No, Wargaming is “selling” USS Missouri only through loot boxes called “Random Bundles”. Each Random Bundle costs 1500 Doubloons, which is the in-game currency you can purchase with real money.

1500 Doubloons works out to $6 USD in the World of Warships Premium Shop if you type in the amount in the Any Amount of Doubloons tab. Going to the Armory tab reveals that you can purchase up to a grand total of 41 Random Bundles before you have a guaranteed purchase of the Missouri. This means that the maximum amount you could end up paying for her is a whopping $246 USD.

Even LittleWhiteMouse‘s calculations that you’d need 21 pulls on average to get Missouri doesn’t make it much better. It still comes out to $126 USD. This is over twice the standard price of a AAA game title. Even within World of Warships, that’s still nearly $50 USD over the normal price of a Tier 9 premium battleship in the game’s Premium Shop. Even worse, it’s assuming even odds, which isn’t a given for those Random Bundles. The monetization here is just insane, and Wargaming knows it.

World of Warships: Now World of Wargambling

Ah, but you might counter that Wargaming has provided an “alternate” method of purchasing USS Missouri, so there’s no need to go through these predatory loot box mechanics, right? Well, yes, but actually, no. See, Wargaming’s “alternate” method involves you taking part in a web campaign on the World of Warships official website. This web campaign spans a total of 7 missions that unlock every 2 days, with the missions only being available until September 15, 2021, at 3:00 AM (PT). Each mission requires you to play a significant amount of games in World of Warships to grind them out, making them fairly tedious overall.

So what do you get when you finally grind out this web campaign? Why do you get the privilege of being able to buy USS Missouri from the Premium Shop in a “bundle”. What this means is that Wargaming includes a bunch of useless things along with what you actually want to buy in order to jack up the price. They don’t specify what the actual price is, but it’s almost certainly more than the normal price of a Tier 9 premium battleship. Oh, and you can only pay this price with real money. If you want to pay with Doubloons, you have to contact the mess that is World of Warships Player Support. Only then, can you pay 19,500 Doubloons for the ship, which equals $78 USD.

I don’t know about you, but this seems suspiciously like Wargaming wanting to make these “alternate” purchase options a lot harder than they need to be. And thus, making the Random Bundles much more tempting. I think LittleWhiteMouse is right about this.

Conclusion

Don’t buy into the USS Misery Random Bundles. They’re just a predatory loot box mechanic meant to squeeze as much money out of you as possible. 24 Community Contributors have already left the program to protest this. That should tell you how predatory and greedy Wargaming is. In the end though, World of Warships players, it’s your money. It’s up to you to decide if you really, really want to pay over twice the cost of AAA game on average to get a pixel ship from a company that sees you as nothing more than walking wallets.

Source: World of Warships Web Campaign: The Pacific War, World of Warships Premium Shop, World of Warships Armory, World of Warships forums, World of Warships Premium Shop, World of Warships forums