Slowly becoming pay to win

I think we've gotten there, but its really been a semantics argument all along. I think everyone actually agrees on the basic premise that some of the pre-made builds confer an advantage that custom builds cannot match.  Personally I fall into P2W being a binary designation.  Are the items you can purchase strictly for aesthetic effect and offer no change to actual gameplay?  Many games stop there with their microtransactions to self-police. Once you cross the line into paying for any type of gameplay enhancement, even if its just to reduce grinding time, you are now in P2W territory.  Maybe it needs a better label, as the enhancements exist on a spectrum of slight advantage to completely unfair, but money still can now provide a leg up and for me that's P2W.

I think its a bad look, and a bad element for EA to introduce at all for EASHL as it moves the mode away from the concept of a competitive league.  Besides my distaste for the wacky garbage of lining up for a faceoff across from an alien, or a kraken, or whatnot, I really don't like the idea of not every build working under the same constraints.  It breaks part of what I enjoyed about EASHL.