If you give premium players sets or items that give them advantages in FFing or in dueling and hurt the already fragile balance between premium and non-premium players - then you will hear players complaining. The point is not owning the items - it's fighting AGAINST these items. It's knowing you are going to lose when fighting against someone that BOUGHT his victory. It ruins the fun of playing this game.
I maintain that these sets are not a guaranteed "win" for anyone who owns them.
Any fort bonus provided by these sets can be completely disregarded, due to the same being able to be said of the skills themselves. Fort fighting is a team game. If all the premium players were on one side, then we might see premium altering the outcome of a fort battle. But even so, this would be more due to the character bonus premium that has existed since the beginning than the Tombola sets. Individually, you will not notice a difference between shooting at a person with full Natty's and a person with regular fort clothes in a fort battle. The only individual advantage this set provides is a couple of hundred HP.
Duelling is a little different. Here, the skills (or two of them) actually do make a difference, and the bonuses provided by these new sets (Doc's in particular) do provide an advantage to players who own them. However, even this advantage is not an overpowered one. Allow me to compare the stats of an old fashioned duel defence setup, and full Doc's set:
Old fashioned set:
43 shooting
43 aim
78 dodging
48 tactics
Doc's set:
93 shooting
88 aim
68 dodging
67 tactics
As you can see, the biggest difference here is the shooting, in which Doc's set has an advantage of 50 over the regular set. 50 shooting is only useful against resistance duellers, who aren't a problem for shooters these days anyway. 19 tactics can also be ignored, since not many duellers these days have 48 OR 67 appearance. We're left with a comparison of the two main duel skills, aim and dodge. Doc's set has an advantage of 45 aim, but is 10 dodging behind the regular set I chose. Using the setup that I've posted, Doc's set only has an advantage of 35 aim/dodge SP (ignoring the fact that you can alter this regular set and bring your aim up a little). Combine that with the bonuses to the secondary skills of shooting and tactics and you have a set that is definitely worth paying premium for, but not one that will make you invincible.
I am not trying to say that Doc's set is not powerful. It is indeed the best duelling set in the game by quite a margin, but not the margin people are making out. I haven't even mentioned the fact that duelling between two dex/aim/dodge builds is based largely on luck/stance guessing, so any advantage you have over the opponent will still count for nil 50% of the time. This is nothing to do with these sets and is irrelevant to the premium vs. non-premium debate, but it does contribute massively to the fact that no one is unbeatable, whether they pay or not.
Now allow me to touch on the fact that these sets
are obtainable to non-premium players via the market, and via free spins. I'm not sure what's going through people's heads right now when deciding on their Easter item market prices (perhaps they're basing it off the Christmas items' current values, which are not indicative of their values at the time the event was being run), but most of the Christmas set items were available for prices easily affordable by non-premium players. I really don't understand where the argument comes from that non-premium players can't obtain the items. I did a couple of 150 nugget spins at Christmas, but other than that I only did the daily free spins. I bought almost all my set items off the market. I am missing two of the shirts, one pair of pants and six of the nine weapons and guns, but I am happy with what I have and do not need any more, hence the reason it seems that players feel they need to
own all these items and feel disadvantaged simply by the fact that they have not managed to do so, regardless of what bonuses they're actually missing out on. So far on the Easter event, I have heard from quite a lot of people who have won items up to the rare tier from free spins. This gives you a shot at all the decent items. I'm yet to hear of a horse or saddle dropping from a free spin, but they're really not that useful anyway. Cartwright's horse and saddle set is the only one worth trying for if you don't care for collections, and that provides a personal bonus rather than a PvP one and therefore doesn't disadvantage non-premium players against premium players who own it.
Finally, of course premium options have evolved over time, as has the game. As the game develops, requiring more staff, upgrading to better graphics etc, more money is needed to support it. The game could not have survived this long on the four original premiums alone. I see one of the main arguments here by the anti-premium advocates is that premium formerly provided an
advantage to achieve things quicker, whereas now it provides
items that cannot be obtained otherwise. I'll ignore the point I addressed earlier about these items being available to non-premium players and address a different point. How exactly are these items different from the advantages that were available in the early days? Think of these items themselves as "advantages", they help premium players short term but ultimately do not provide anything that is out of reach of non-premium players.
In case I have been unable to get my message across using words alone, I have provided an example of the typical duel between a premium and a non-premium player in the form of a comic strip:
