Not so. I, and quite a few other people, bought nuggets every 14 days for YEARS to obtain the exact same items that the F2P players could obtain. I was simply paying for the opportunity to acquire them faster. Or to minimize the idle time my character had while I was actually at work earning the money that I was handing over to Inno when I got home.
Again, if you're going to run a game with a Free 2 Play option, you have to give a decent incentive for those F2P players to stick around and potentially either bring in other players (who could pay) or eventually decide to pay themselves. Without balance, there's no incentive for the F2P players to stick around or spread the word about the game.
Looking back at the gap between premium and non premium users when the game was less dynamic than the version we play today and taking into consideration two of the basic four premiums available there were still advantages and items that a non premium could not achieve.
By activating the
'Character Bonus' premium the advantages held by premium users over non premium users were:
• Soldiers doubled their tactics and with the pre v1.36 dueling system this was massive, in no way could a non premium user be as effective while defending, fact.
• Workers gained 10% additional experience through working jobs, is it any wonder Cringe from world one became the first player to reach level 99?
Even the most savvy non premium user could not compete against such a disadvantage.
By activating the
'Higher Income' premium the main advantage held by premium users over non premium users was:
• The ability to raise the value range by 50% in relation to items found when performing jobs. This resulted in premium users being able to find weapons that non premium users could never attain, granted these items may not seem like much now as they were only a selection of 'Granmont's Pistols' and 'Bowie's Knifes' but back then these items were looked upon with great awe.
If it was too long ago for you to remember then check out the excitement between the folk finding the items and the non premium users raising their concerns on the
'W1 Items Found' thread.
Here are a few short snippets displaying early concerns about the gap between premium and non premium users, dating back to the beginning of May 2009:
Are you using premium???? That is some nice stuff and it seems impossible to get if you don't use premium.
I am using premium, for whoever asked
I feel like I need premium..
New items are for premium items only
Can't find anything worth more then 900$.
Sure enough as the game has progressed more and more of these items were made available to non premium users through additional quests developed and implemented and through the introduction of the market feature but there was a period of a year or two when non premium users were at a massive disadvantage in respect to the points I have made here.
Given enough time who is to say there will not be another development that closes the gap now as it did then?
Instead of pointing out only the negatives please take a few moments to remember the positives, everybody has a right to complain but a complaint without an idea of how to resolve the issue will be just another complaint that falls into the archives of this forum.