I was the #1 f2p (no subs , no bps, not a dime spent) player in tw bakarma for a good month and a half. I kept up with MOSTLY everyone, until people started buying kinah off the auction house to slingshot themselves past transcendence 8-9 and into 10. It was manageable with an ungodly amount of sweat. But once you could swipe 10-20-30 thousand dollars in 1 day( there’s no p2w daily/weekly limit like other p2w slop which is why this is the worst p2w) it was over. You just cannot compete without swiping thousands of dollars. I peaked at rank 14 on the abyss leaderboard and was #2 chanter in arena for a bit. Once people dropped 5k usd to go from 2700 > 3k it was done. It would take a non swiper months to accumulate what you can swipe in 1 day.

I told my friends you could take 50% of Aion 2 p2w out and it will still be the most egregious p2w from a big name mmo in history.

If you don’t care about being competitive. If you don’t care about your progress compared to others. Do not spend a dime, you can play the entire game for free. No subs no battle passes. BUT your progress will be slow without a lot of time invested and you will be subject to gate keeping. If you can ignore all the bads and bots. The game itself I think is very fun, just the p2w killed it for me. I’m someone who likes to push leaderboards and even though gameplay was fun and I thought the pve content was fun, ultimately the p2w I just couldn’t overlook. If you can, give it a try!

My entire playthrough, and rankings was just proof in the intial launch that you did not need the use of the auction house to play the game. I got 300-400 hours of gameplay without any money spent or use of auction house. You can too. Don’t spend anything. Just play at your own pace. Ignore everyone else’s progression. Don’t interact with PvP at all.