One of the first things you should do is enter Promo Code: Seal7 to get an additional 7 days of Captain's Seal:

- Launch the game.
- Log in to your account.
- Press 'Escape' to pull up the Main Menu.
- Below 'Exit Game' you should see three white icons: Discord - YouTube - Present Icon
- Click the 'Present Icon'.
- Enter Seal7 in the popup window and click the button to accept it.
- Enjoy 7 more days of Captain's Seal bonuses on your account.

DISCLAIMER - The above Promo Code has expired.

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The vast majority of your time in the game will be via 3rd person view of your ship. However, the rest of it will be in various screens and menus associated with interacting with ports, lighthouses, resource nodes, your personal island, and more. Most actions you will simply execute with LMB.

When it comes to piloting your ship, here are a few things to keep in mind:

• There will almost always be a wind direction indicator. It will affect how fast you accelerate and your maximum speed depending on which direction you are moving. NOTE - Tacking does work in this game. In short, you can move against the wind faster by swapping angles than you would going directly into it. For example, when pointing directly against the wind turn 30 degrees left and then 30 degrees right to go back and forth at a speed higher than you'd achieve just going straight into it.
  
• You can only fire your cannons and guns when you are at the 2nd step of max speed. There are three speeds available, low, medium, and high if you will (and stop of course). You turn faster the slower your speed, so take that into consideration when you are maneuvering out in the sea.
  
• Your cannons will automatically show their firing arc and aiming reticles if you are going the correct speeds. However, your swivel guns will only show the reticle if you hold down 'Q'. Then you simply aim and release to fire. You can still fire without doing this but you may not know precisely where the shots will go. Combat is a skill shot system, so you may need to lead your target as well as aim higher depending on speed and range.
  
• Provided you are not in PvP, you won't collide with other player ships but you can collide with NPC ships (even causing damage).

Another useful tool is using the spyglass by holding down 'E' and moving the mouse. It will allow you to get a better view of objects at a distance and will even provide additional details when pointed at other ships. The initial zooming effect is pretty strong, but you can increase it even further by using the mouse scroll wheel:



While much of your sea interactions will be combat with other ships, here are some other things you can do:

• Fishing is just a matter of getting in range of a fishing node (highlighted green area in the sea - can also notice from the mini-map and main map if you are in range) and holding down spacebar until you've harvested all of it. Make sure you stay in range as the fish will actually move.
  
• Rescuing crew is something you can do when you see very small ships on the sea. They have a specific teal-ish color on the map and mini-map. For this mini-game you get in range and hold down spacebar until the two arrows point at the green section of the bar. Then you release spacebar an collect your free units and resources. NOTE - If you get too far away from the small ship you will lose the crew you sent to retrieve them and the ship will vanish. As you make progress toward the rescue, there's a number indicator that tells you how many of your crew are out rescuing.
  
• Whaling can also be done while out on the sea. They have their own icon on the map and mini-map as well. There are two methods of bringing in whales (damage with weapons or damage with fishing tackle - via a spear like shot at any range), but both require you to get their displayed HP down to zero and then execute a short mini-game much like fishing. Keep in mind, while fishing tackle does less damage than other weapons, it does not have a minimum range like cannons do. This comes into play when the whale tries to ram your ship after you attack it. The bigger they are the more damage they can do so don't underestimate them. I've seen some as low as 125 HP and as high as 3500 HP. Like rescuing, as the progress bar moves there will be a numerical display of how many crew are out collecting the whale. If you don't stay close enough you could lose them. NOTE - Unlike destroying ships, there is no "sharing" of the loot based on damage done when it comes to dead whales. No matter how much damage you did, the only person that gets resources is the first person to finish the progress bar for harvesting the whale!!!

In addition, there are resource harvesting nodes along the coastline of some islands you will encounter. These are indicated by shovel icons on the mini-map and when close enough you can collect them at the cost of crew satiety:

Don't be afraid to take advantage of the fact that there are ports littered across much of the map and that every time you dock at them your ship is repaired and your crew is fully fed. You'll need a lot of wood as part of finishing the main questline, so if you can avoid burning it up on repairs it helps.

It's worth the time and effort to learn how to reliably board ships even if all you are going to do is dismantle them for resources:

• When you have captured a ship, you get everything that is in their hold as well, including ammo. So when you go to port make sure you select it's hold and loot everything. Next you'll want to dismantle it for raw resources, usually beams, wood, and fabric. NOTE - The double left arrow doesn't loot ammo. So you will have to manually drag it over to get it all. Turns out you can actually do this via double LMB click instead.
  
• When you capture a ship you need to open the 'z' menu and tell it to follow you. It will keep a good distance behind you though so don't be surprised if it's not very close to you. It can actually be quite far away from you by the time to dock at a port and you can still interact with it for looting and dismantling purposes. NOTE - Unless you have the skill that repairs the ship by 50% of max HP after boarding, I'd also recommend using the 'z' menu to tell the ship to "Hold Fire" as you don't want it aggroing another ship if it fires at you and you are trying to run.
  
• If you are at a port with your captured ship and you accidentally or intentionally fast travel to another port, you won't lose the ship it'll just stay at that port until the next time you are close enough for it to try and follow.

Avoid maxing out your buildings associated with gathering resources from islands because there is a step in the main questline that wants you to build one (it's not retroactive). The max number you can build at the start is 2, but there are follow-up skills that will let you build more, with the next one increasing it from 2 to 4.

Be careful when interacting with stranded small ships or wrecks out in the open sea. Sometimes looting them will trigger aggro from nearby pirate ships. Most of the time it might just be one or two and you can just kill them or run away. But I wasn't paying attention one time and there were 4 nearby.

NOTE - The large sail consumable that boosts your movement speed is a great way to escape this kind of situation.

It's worth it to save your fish because there are specific merchants (Ferryman) out in the sea that will sell you certain resources in exchange for fish. In addition to resources, they will sometimes sell more refined ship building materials such as bulkheads, beams, and canvas.

Don't sleep on the missions you can get from Taverns. Taverns are unique to the port, so each port will have it's own set of missions you can take. Even if you only do the ones that allow the peace flag there's a good chance there's plenty of opportunities to complete them without going into dangerous areas. You can even refuse the ones you don't want to do without penalty so they don't clutter up the main map.

NOTE - There is also a chance to get a free special crew member when acquiring rumors.

The main map is a great resource for getting your bearings and seeing what's going on in your area (especially if you are looking for Ferryman or quest locations). In addition, if you click with the LMB and drag in a direction, you can even see an approximate range (in meters) and a time in minutes of how long it would take to travel it.

Not every NPC ship out there is a pirate. Some of them are just faction based merchants, so be careful going crazy blowing up any ship you see. If you kill enough of them other NPC ships will start hunting you.

While most NPC ships are neutral to you until you attack them, there are certain ships that are on the lookout for you and will attack if you stay in range long enough. Fortunately these ships show up in a red outline on the mini-map and have a large spyglass icon above them. Once it fully lights up red that means you've been spotted and they will try and hunt you down.

NOTE - The more you venture into dangerous waters, the more of these types of ships there will be.

If you see a shovel icon on the map and mini-map it's a trigger for a mini-game you can play to collect from a set of resources in exchange for lowering the satiety of your crew.

Don't sleep on applying skill points to your character. There are several that only cost skill points (and not gold) and can drastically improve your capabilities. Some of my favorites are:

• Allows a free fast travel once every 2 hours.
  
• Allows you to have up to 3 captured ships with you.
  
• Doubles the number of resource gathering buildings you can construct (2 > 4 > 6).
  
• Improves the wood and fabric gains when dismantling ships.
  
• Increases the total amount of crafting production you have at ports (goes up in steps, 300 > 600 > 1000).
  
• Repairs your ship some after you successfully board another ship.
  
• Repairs the ship you successfully captured by 50% of it's max HP.

Don't sleep on applying upgrades to your ship.

https://psteamcommunity.yuanyoumao.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3594311461
Many of them drastically boost your capabilities and the majority of them only cost 150-300 gold to apply.

NOTE - Thanks to the deep water mechanic, never get rid of all your small ships. You may need one to get back to areas where your bigger ships can no longer go!

Be very careful when using explosive barrels. If you trigger your own it can still blow you up!

When you see ships that can scout for you and aggro you if you stay in range too long, make sure you check to see if they have a buddy before you attack. Having a surprise ally show up to aid your enemy is a great way to watch the tide of battle go against you in a hurry.

Make sure you take out your ships that are docked at your Personal Island before you destroy it (i.e. if you are moving it). If you don't, those ships are lost!

Sometimes the lootable wrecks out in the sea have an explosive barrel or two mixed in with the debris. They will explode if you collide with them!

Your ship can take damage from ramming land.

Be careful when matching speed with your target ship as you try to get in position to board. If you are moving too fast when you trigger it with spacebar the hooks that get shot out from the side of your ship can still miss the target. The cooldown on trying again is pretty significant, something like 20+ seconds, which is more than enough time for you to take a good chunk of extra damage from broadside shots.

The upgrades that you can install on your ship have an effective durability specific to the type of upgrade it is. Make sure you periodically check the durability and repair it before it breaks (typically just a little bit of gold), otherwise the repair cost is significantly higher.



Letting your crew run out of satiety in southern waters of the sea just lowers their effectiveness. Running out in the northern waters of the sea will result in their death.

NOTE - You'll get a prompt on the screen when passing into northern waters.

As with most online MMO games with an auction house of some sort, take the time to do a little research on what the value of things are. The game allows players to set Buy Orders and Sell Orders that are way out of bounds of what things are really worth. For example, it's not uncommon to see players put up Buy Orders for ship building materials (beams, bulkheads, canvas, etc) for a value that's less than what the raw materials are that went into those materials. When thinking about pricing your own Sell Orders for crafted items, make sure to take into consideration the value of any production/manpower you spent making them at ports or your personal island (since it's limited, it's functionally a currency as well).

NOTE - Each port has it's own auction house, but you can still see the prices for some of the nearby port auction houses as well.

While ships themselves aren't overly complicated, there are a variety of considerations worth taking into account as you work towards getting the most out of each one you command as well as engage in strategic planning for acquiring the ones you want in the future.

The upgrades you can apply to ships can drastically affect weapons, speed, handling and a variety of defense and utility capabilities. Since there are only a max of 6 possible upgrade slots, it's worth taking a moment to review all of the upgrades (and their costs!) to determine which ones are appropriate for the playstyle you're going for in the ship as well as how long it will take to meet the requirements. For example, if you are going for a general PvE style beginner approach:

• Slot 1 - Sail Only - This slot is required to be a type of sail. Ideally you want to go for the fastest one, but in addition to gold it requires a special resource that you might have to play a while to get (Voodoo Skull). Personally I went with the Stitched Sails (+45%) first and then when I got the Voodoo Skull I applied the Tarpulin Sails (+70%).
  
• Slot 2 - 'Combat Crow's Nest' for visibility range and aim speed increase. Visibility range is excellent for spotting aggressive spyglass ships as far away as possible.
  
• Slot 3 - 'Cellars' for additional cargo hold space and prevention of goods perishing. Great for the early game when you're most likely sailing in the South where perishing is an issue.
  
• Slot 4 - 'Small Hooks' to increase boarding range, item collection speed and fishing speed.
  
• Slot 5 - 'Advanced Gun Carriages' to increase weapon angle and aiming speed.
  
• Slot 6 - Locked - The amount of grinding you have to do to 'unlock' this slot makes it practically unavailable to most players for a while. See the "Ship Research" section below for more details.

Slots 1-3 are unlocked and available by default. Slots 4 and 5 need to be unlocked individually by accumulating the appropriate amount of experience while commanding the ship and then having enough Battle Marks as indicated by the specific slot. Once you have both, go into a port and open the Upgrade screen to complete the unlock.

Keep in mind that the experience cost is separate for each slot. So if Slot 4 requires X amount of experience and Slot 5 requires Y experience, you need X + Y in total. However, the experience you gain doesn't start getting credited until you unlock the previous slot. So if you have the experience for Slot 4 but not the Battle Marks, all the experience you get in 'excess' of the Slot 4 requirement is not carried over to Slot 5.

NOTE - The cost to apply upgrades drastically increases as you move up the rates. For example, an upgrade that might just cost 300-600 gold on a rate VII ship will be roughly the same gold in addition to requiring a few Voodoo Skulls (3), a good chunk of Battle Marks (20-30) and quite a bit of rum (150-250) for a rate IV ship.

Early on this is a fairly straightforward process that mostly just costs gold. There are a handful of weapon types as well as their size category (light, medium, etc) which is intended to govern which rate ships can equip which weapons. For each of these there are also crafted and drop only variants that are incrementally more powerful.

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The general categories are cannon, bombard and mortar. Within cannons you have ones that are general purpose when it comes to range, penetration, weapon angle and accuracy spread, then a sniper and high damage shorter range variants.

NOTE - Crafting guns requires a significant amount of resource investment, especially when you start outfitting ships that have more and more gun ports.

When you're using rate VI and VII ships repairs are largely just a gold sink. However, once you start using rate V and above, you'll notice they have a "Ship Integrity" value. You'll lose integrity every time your ship is destroyed and when all the integrity units are depleted you'll have to complete a "Major Repair" before you can continue using the ship. I haven't been destroyed enough in my rate IV Essex to test out exactly what this means.

Research is essentially how the game refers to experience gain specifically for a ship or ship category (Fast, Combat, Heavy, Transport, and Siege). Each category has it's own specialty and general stat characteristics (i.e. transports obviously have high cargo capacity). You gain research toward a specific ship/line by simply gaining experience while commanding that ship.

For me, since I've spent 80% of my playtime using the Horizont (rate VII Combat ship), by the time I had collected enough resources to build an Essex (rate IV Combat ship), I also had gained enough research in the Combat line to have it fully researched. As a side note, the game won't tell you the construction cost or let you build a ship that you haven't researched yet.

NOTE - Because you can buy ships on the Auction House, a player can still command a ship they have not yet researched, however they will incur a stat penalty if they do so.

Now lets pause for a moment and revisit something I mentioned above in "Ship Upgrades". The last ship upgrade (Slot 6) is locked behind a requirement that the player have all five ship lines (i.e. branches) maxed out in terms of research. As you can imagine, that's going to be a good bit of time spent grinding experience in at least 5 or more different ships.

Another key aspect of using ships is understanding the limitations based on ship rate in terms of where a ship can sail and where a ship can dock/undock.

When you open the world map you'll notice these markings that appear like boundaries around certain ports. Within those boundaries is the ship rate, which indicates which ships can dock at ports in this area and if the player will get a "shallow waters" warning when going there.

For example, if you attempt to dock at South Bastion in a rate IV ship it won't work because that area is marked as rate V, meaning that only V - VII rate ships can dock or undock in those waters. This means that you can't try and be clever and dock at South Bastion with a rate V ship and then undock with a rate IV. If you try it, the game will display a popup indicating you can't do it without a different rate ship.

Fortunately these boundaries are localized around ports, which means that most of the map can still be accessed by rate I - V ships. There's also usually at least one NPC port in each region of the map that can be docked at by any rate ship.

One of the best ways to immediately boost your gains from dealing with other ships is to board them rather than destroy them. The boarding process is relatively simple, however there are plenty of things that can go wrong which may make the process frustrating from time to time. See below for information on the crew that participates in the boarding mini-game:

https://psteamcommunity.yuanyoumao.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3594345592

This is probably the most important step of all because winning the boarding fight is largely a combat crew vs. combat crew numbers game. For example, if the total crew on your ship is 75 and 40 of them are sailors, offensively you only have 35 left to do the real work. So attacking a ship with a current crew of 100 will be fairly risky unless you deplete their numbers in advance using grapeshot (or collateral kills from other ammunition hitting the deck).

NOTE - Unfortunately there's no way in the UI to see the crew breakdown of the target ship.

Alternatively, you could chose to lower your sailor count and take the penalty to "work speed" which will affect reload speed and maneuverability in exchange for extra musketeers which would provide a much more deadly boarding offense.

The challenge with reducing crew numbers is that while you are taking the time to drop the target ship's crew, unless they are a player they aren't trying to drop your crew back, they are trying to blow you up. As you might imagine, it's a lot easier to do hull damage than it is to reduce a crew's numbers significantly for the purposes of boarding.

Another technique that can be used to stack the deck in your favor is overloading your boarding party by bringing reserves. You can do this two ways:

• Load up extra crew at a port.
  
• Collect extra crew by rescuing them from small boats.

You can only overload by a certain amount though, for example the most I could get on a Horizont was 98/78 crew. This can either help you tackle a much larger crew ship, or significantly reduce your losses against matching or smaller crews.

In summary, choose a ship you could easily outright kill and who has a crew size at or below your own at first. Once you get comfortable and skilled at the process you can go for ships with larger crew sizes.

If you don't need to drop the crew numbers on the target, then your first move should be to drop its HP to 50% as soon as possible so you can position your ship parallel alongside it to start the boarding process while minimizing the damage you sustain from the target.

If you do need to drop crew numbers, you'll probably want to open up with one or two bar shots to do some initial sail damage while you can. Once the fight starts the AI is pretty good at simply pulling up their sails the moment you load bar shot making it incredible difficult for you to do any significant sail damage. Therefore after a couple bar shots, you'll want to go full grapeshot until their crew numbers match whatever threshold you are comfortable with boarding at.

Keep in mind that though grapeshot reloads faster than other ammunition it has a lower effective range and a much smaller optimal target area. For example, there is a sweet spot where you want to aim your grapeshot such that it hits crew standing on the deck without shooting too high and without hitting the deck or the hull itself. If you are dropping the crew by 3-5 with every volley you're doing good. Less than that, and you need to adjust where you're trying to hit.

This is the part that probably sounds easy, but in practice it can get complicated in a hurry because of the following:

• The other ship baits you into coming up on one side and then quickly maneuvers away.
  
• The other ship shoots fire ammunition (or drops an explosive keg) causing you to have to reposition to avoid significant damage.
  
• Wind direction affects your maneuvering approach more than you anticipated.
  
• Another NPC or human player gets involved in the middle of the engagement.
  
• The other ship collides with you during positioning in such a away that it is able to get away before you can adjust accordingly.

What I've found to be helpful (though it sounds counter-intuitive) is to sometimes let the target ship hit your ship (especially in the middle) to sort of "stun" or lock it in a stationary position for a few moments while you slowly rotate left or right such that the moment the target ship tries to move forward or backwards it has no choice but to be parallel to your ship allowing you to immediately trigger boarding.

NOTE - As you can imagine, this is also extremely dangerous if the other ship decides to shoot fire ammunition at point blank range in this situation. However, I found that 90% of the time AI ships won't shoot fire ammunition on you this close up. I've also not seen them use explosive barrels in this situation.

Other than positioning, the key to a successful boarding action is relative speed both before and after the boarding hooks are fired.

• If you are moving too fast when you get the prompt to press spacebar to shoot the hooks, one or more of them are going to miss the target ship and the boarding mini-game won't be triggered. You'll have to wait 20 seconds before doing it again.
  
• Even if all the hooks hit the target ship, if for some reason you or the other ship have too much momentum afterwards, they can still separate enough to cancel the boarding mini-game and you'll have to try again in 20 seconds. This is usually only a problem when you get in the parallel position in the opposite direction of your target.

The hooks ship upgrade can allow you to shoot the hooks from a further distance and increases the total number of situations where you can trigger boarding.

This part is fairly straightforward but I'm still not 100% sure what happens in the background. Once the boarding hooks land and the mini-game starts you have 5 seconds where all you can do is watch. After the 5 seconds are up you can choose to hold down ctrl and then left click on one of your own crew squads to apply a shield icon to them as well as choose which enemy crew squads to attack (usually it starts out targeting multiple units so you are essentially unselecting the others).

Once the 5 seconds are up you have 30 seconds to win the fight. I think that whoever has the most crew at the end of 30 seconds wins, however, I've rarely seen a fight go longer than 15 seconds. Usually 2-3 seconds after I've killed their musketeer squad the fight is over. Also at that point they usually still display as having some crew left, so maybe there's a threshold or something such that if their total crew drops to X% the fight is over even if it hasn't been 30 seconds.

Personally I "feel" like shielding your highest damage unit (usually musketeers) and single targeting the enemy's highest damage unit (usually musketeers) results in a faster and more successful outcome.

Regardless of what approach they use for calculating damage output, based on the crew member stats I provided at the start of this section, I would consider single targeting the highest damage output units in order the best plan.

Upon successful boarding the target ship will be under your control and should automatically start following you, but it will also be in an aggressive stance. You can issue commands by holding down the 'z' key and clicking on a command with LMB. The moment boarding is finished I issue the "Hold Fire" and "Everyone Follow Me" commands and then move on to the next target or the nearest port.

The Personal Island is essentially how a player is able to establish their own "base" in World of Sea Battle. Here are some basic facts about them:

• Personal Islands can only be established at specific locations along the coastal areas of certain land masses. They are clearly marked on the map as a tent looking icon. At the start the player can only have one. At significant cost they can have another one via a skill that costs 1 skill point and 300k gold.
  
• Only a single workshop type can be established on a Personal Island at a time. Though you can switch them, it would be a resource intensive decision.
  
• Personal Islands use a separate pool of "crafting production" called "manpower" which comes from the the number of buildings you have constructed and can be replenished through the deployment of "captives".
  
• Every time you construct a building on a Personal Island the subsequent building cost increases significantly. For example, the first building costs X Plates Y Wreckage Z Resin and a certain amount of gold. The next one costs X+12 Plates and so on. So make sure you prioritize your first few buildings accordingly. Personally I went with Pub and Plate Construction for my first two, and planning for the third to be Mission. Fourth will probably be the building that lets you manufacture trade goods.
  
• Using the workshop on your Personal Island will reduce the cost of crafting via resources by 20% (except the gold cost). The manpower cost per unit is also significantly lower than if you were using a Port.
  
• Only the Personal Island can allow the player to "dock" their captured NPC ships so that they disappear from the world (and therefore can't be attacked by other players or NPC ships).
  
• When a Mission is constructed on a Personal Island the player can spend manpower to collect resources from established resource collection structures that are within 7km range. You can check this from the map by placing the mouse cursor at your Personal Island and then holding the CTRL key and dragging to each potential resource collection structure. That way you can position your Personal Island accordingly to ensure the Mission can collect from the maximum number of nodes.

You can acquire iron from a variety of sources, it's up to you to decide the best way to stock up on it based on how you'd like to play:

• Merchant Villages on the coast of islands. If you are lucky you can find 200-300 available for sale for 2 or 3 gold each.
  
• The Ferryman NPC ships that you can see labeled on the main map. They sometimes sell iron (as well as other useful supplies) in exchange for fish.
  
• Iron Mines you construct on specific island nodes that you can see from the map.
  
• From destroying (and perhaps capturing?) ships that have iron in their hold. I believe you can see this when you scope them.
  
• Auction Market sell orders from other players.
  
• Smelting iron ore or volcanic ore (has higher iron yield) using coal. You acquire this ore from shovel nodes on the coast of islands. NOTE - Nice thing about using the Smelting tab from the workshop is that it doesn't use "production".
  
• Smelting canons that you can purchase for gold through the Smelting tab of the workshop. NOTE - Would only do this if you are desparate. It's pretty expensive relative to other methods.

Open the main map and mouseover the port you want to check. Press the left or right arrow button on your keyboard to flip through the pages which will show the contents of your warehouse there.

Single tap the appropriate number key on the keyboard for loading it into a single side. Double tap the appropriate key to load the ammo on all sides.

As with most online F2P MMOs, yes it is. From the moment you start you'll be grinding for the following:

• Experience so you can level up and apply skill points to improve the capabilities of your ships and structures.
  
• Gold so you can afford fees associated with purchasing crew, ammunition, keeping special crew paid, repairing your ship, paying mooring fees set by player guilds, applying certain skill points, purchasing certain goods from Fishing Villages, building on your Personal Island, building resource gathering structures, constructing workshops at NPC ports, purchasing from NPC markets, and from the player driven Auction House.
  
• Research (via gaining experience based on the ship being used) so you can construct higher rate ships.
  
• Faction reputation (partly via completing rumors from taverns) so you can get discounts on building ships.
  
• Battle Marks so you can build new ships, unlock upgrade slots on ships, and in some cases outright build certain ships (yes, some ships' only construction cost is Battle Marks!).
  
• Fish so that you can use it as currency for certain Ferrymen and Fishing Village purchases.

However, the more you play the game there are many opportunities to enhance and optimize key grinds through skill points and structure construction such that it feels less like a chore or at least ends up being worth the time you spent doing it. The economic infrastructure that you can ultimately get setup can be pretty impressive when compared to what you're capable of in your first 10 hours of play.

On the surface it's pretty straightforward to make a case for the fact that the game is P2W. It doesn't take very long after glancing at the in-game store to determine that there isn't much that you can't buy or make easier with the expenditure of real life currency.

However, typically the rationale is more complicated than that, as over the years people tend to break down P2W into two camps:

• If you can purchase anything relevant to gameplay with real life currency then the game is P2W. Personally I tend to consider this more of a purist view. There's not many F2P games in 2025 that don't fall into this category.
  
• The game is only P2W if there are things you can purchase with real life currency that you can't get over time by grinding in the game that provide a gameplay advantage. This viewpoint is sometimes referred to as "Pay to Progress" or "Pay for Convenience". Personally I consider this to be more of a practical view, as it's usually this type of monetization that some people are still comfortable dealing with as a F2P or low spend account.

Another relevant consideration is: "How does the monetization model impact your playstyle?" After all, you can literally play much off the game with your Peace Flag up 24/7 and experience a significant amount of the game at your own pace. Not only that, but even when you do want to venture into the PvP scene it's not that difficult to look for battles where you're not vastly outclassed simply because the other player threw their wallet at the game.