I will always say buy all the stages with FM!!! (as they dont do stage bundles)

Then when your done with that get any other content that doesn't come with the season pass with FM then wait for the season pass 3 to be on sale.

This has really worked out for me as I got the season 1 and 2 season passes on sale for real cheap and now have pretty much the most i can get out of the game to boot.

If you wanna be frugal, I'd say just get the characters wth FM and rely on online play to show you different stages.

Did you consider buying SSF4, SSF4AE and USF4 as egregious as the $30? My thought on it is that before we had to pay more for essentially more characters and balance changes; now the balance changes are free and if we want more characters and stages we can buy them.

It sounds to me a little like you may be playing for the wrong reasons. I mean, take this bit:

My goal in playing it is to earn fight money. That's pretty much it.

To what end? To complete your collection of characters? Do you intend on using the unlocked roster to lab matchups and improve as a player?

The only "goal" in playing SFV for any prolonged period of time that makes sense to me, is to experience the fighting and to become better as a player, to understand and master the dynamics of high-level play against other human players. Maybe this comes off as elitist or something, but I say this because I don't really think there's anything resembling a rewarding RPG-style progression system in this game.

With that in mind, if throwing yourself at matches is just this miserable thing you're doing so you can grind currency, then I don't get the point at all. If you were playing to get better and enjoy fights, you probably wouldn't notice you were grinding for currency.

@fnrslvr: Sorry, I should clarify: I do like playing the game, and there's that really incredible feeling you get when you play an online match and it's super tense and you learn stuff and the other person (and sometimes yourself) surprises you. And then at the end, I get 100FM and it's really disheartening because I'm not seeing my own personal progress reflected in the unlockable content, and I'd like to unlock that content because I enjoy the game. There's a real struggle, I feel, between the game in-itself (which is incredible) and the framework surrounding it, and the latter is just starting to make me angry at this point.

@belegorm: I'll definitely check out USFIV if I get the chance, thanks for the shout. I think I'd be playing that game a little more casually though.