“But we’ve also come to this understanding that there are players out there that who deeply care about this game and want to invest more into this game, and we want to give them that value to invest in.”

This reads so disingenuous as to sound willfully ignorant. When you hook a whale on FOMO and they blow $200 on a single event, that’s not an investment. The average person has NO desire to spend this money, but a certain kind of person can be fooled into it. There’s no value add, it doesn’t improve the experience, you’re simply given chores and then an option to pay real world money to skip them.

There’s no longevity in paying to not play the game.

Any amount is the same abuse, just gentler or rougher. Nothing inside a video game should cost real money.