The game in general is overpriced. As OP said I understand the game has to make money but the pricing is greedy, especially when you compare us to across the pond. I maintain that if the pricing of everything was halved they would make more more because recharging would make more sense. I can't tell you how many times I was going to recharge and then decided against it because "its not enough money to make a difference" anyway.

The way the pricing in this game is designed currently "milk every possible cent out of those that do recharge" instead of trying to encourage people that don't recharge often or don't recharge at all to do so. There is no incentive to recharge when if you want it to make a real difference you need to recharge $1000 or more.

After playing this game awhile and having spent a bit of money, I think that patience is key. We all want that new ninja when it first comes out, but after telling myself "Hey, you should just WAIT" and learning that the hard way with so much ingot and coupon spending, I've resigned myself with the fact that chipping away at frags from special events and such will inevitably get you what you want. So many ninjas seem unattainable but with these updates I'm seeing ninjas come back that I thought I would have to wait forever to see again, LOL. It's a hard pill to swallow, especially since you don't want to be kicked into the dirt by the P2Ws, but...

I don't know. I mean, when I saw Haku Edo Tensei came out (Lucky Board, though I'm unsure if he had premiered before then), I got 10 frags of him immediately with a little coupon spending. That's 1/3rd of his frags acquired right there. And as I type this, another special event has popped up where he is 65 points on one of the events, and just from throwing those shuriken at the balloons I have 45/65 points needed to get a frag, and that wasn't even all my shuriken.

Not trying to say you're whining, because I was totally in the same boat before I came into some money to spend on a game I'm playing very frequently, but now that I have I see that while the road is bumpier, it can lead you to the same results, it's just that it's much SLOWER.

While you are gathering those ninja fragments other people are spending all of their event points on power/refines and are getting faster than you which means they can beat your new fancy ninjas with some average kage teams or a blitz team. It is not realistic to be able to keep up with anyone in this game if you are going for ninja fragments, they are unbelievably overpriced and is going to result you in being as slow as a 30k who focuses on refines at your 50k power, therefore any opponent you face at your power will melt you in a second.

You either go for ninjas and fall behind so far in power you are just a punching bag or go for power to even have a slight glimmer of hope to keep up with low p2p in sage and other events.