Talk:Desert Dreams/@comment-70.71.230.47-20160212091154/@comment-2098192-20160213002333

The one thing I'd like to point out though is you really don't need to rank. Most of the time the ranking rewards aren't even worth it. VC's a good game for collecting art and skills, becuase so much is available for free. If you ignore ranking you can build a deck that is otherwise comparable to any p2w deck. p2w may have very slight advantages (5% advantage on unleashers lol?, Nadeshiko makes you more consistent?) but they're in the grand scheme of things pretty small.

On the other hand, if you DO want to rank...

In addition to getting to around level 70, as someone mentioned, the other thing I'd like to add is it may take you between 4-8 months before you get up to speed, depending on the events and what cards are offered and your alliance. You'll have to play pretty frequently (4+? hours) a day plus be on call to respond to sent LAWs, and have some luck in the right events. You'll also need to find an active and powerful alliance to get a shot at the LAWs (or in cases like hiraga, very active alliances to get multiple GUR copies to put together the adv EH teams that make ranking much easier; my alliance has a couple of LAW farmers and hiraga's drop rate was just terrible all around, we only found maybe a total of 400?  just not enough.  Ideally you'd want 2 GUR copies for each Adv EH team.)

It's a rather heafty investment all around, but it is perfectly doable as free.

Sometimes people lose perspective on how long it takes to acutally get up to sufficient speed, I think. Having a HH/gil/machine gun team means you'll struggle a bit to get to 1k, and can possibly do 300 with sword/shoe, but now that salvos like hiraga are opening up EH ranking, it'll be harder to 300 without secondary teams for that or some grinding; again extending the time before you can rank effectively.

Ranking 'totaly free' in the 300 range is perfectly possible if you have all teh right teams, but I'd bet that no free player who has played for 6 months or less can do it, unless they got some really, really great carry from one of the top alliances when they were 'young'.

So it's doable, but not easy. certainly not easy.

All that said, from the f2p <-> p2w scale, I'd say VC as a whole is much more f2p friendly than many I've played. Paying is more 'pay to accelerate', where you can cut that 4-8 month time frame down to 2-3, and only if you want to rank. Ranking is certainly not required to stay competitive in this game (the ranking rewards cards are often inferior), and you can get everything you need to otherwise play well (even against LAWs, as long as you don't want optimal scoring teams).