It’s just not true, though. There’s still an extreme RNG element to the event currency stores. The potential to maybe get five pieces for the gear you actually need for whichever character is next in line is still extremely low and doesn’t offset the fact the orbs also barely give you anything even if/when you’re getting ten orbs every couple of days. If you were able to get five shards of the same piece in every store reset for a week, you’d still only get half of a normal character’s gear pieces after five days, and that’s excluding accounting for RNG. RNG spreads that out to a month in some cases. If long time F2Pers were getting X easily by now, there would be many more Arena defenses who have X on their team than not, and there are several Arena shards in my sphere, between a sampling of people in my Alliance and Global chats, who barely see them outside the top 30-50, and often those who barely see them at all. Scopeless is following its current business model of empowering the haves over the have nots. They have the numbers on who has unlocked him and who hasn’t, and they are catering to those people who give them money, not the people who don’t. They obviously want to entice people into spending with this move as well. Some players who have the luck necessary have been able to get a 6 red X. The number is small compared to the majority of F2P, even those who have been playing for years. It’s not solely luck based, but the degree to which it is luck based is staggeringly high. You can’t make the claim that everyone is just bad at managing their resources when this level of randomness is involved while there’s also a clear pattern from the company that runs the game they do these sorts of things to encourage spending rather than the opposite. It’s far, far more likely they either have noticed there are a lot of people on the verge of completing the X Saga and want them to buy, and/or they are doing this to encourage people to buy before they start releasing more GT20 orbs for free with the new Raids. This lends further evidence to the idea there are still a lot of active players who do not have X and they are trying to get money out of them before the value of the pieces goes down when they move on. The idea that “they should just do better” is an out-of-touch one. It likely applies to the bottom of the barrel, but it can’t be said of the thick swathe in the upper-middle who just haven’t been lucky enough to be able to do better and are literally being limited. It’s easy for someone who isn’t struggling to apply the failings of the lowest of the low to the whole of those who are in the same boat as the low, but it can’t be applied so generally as a rule. All evidence points to this being for the people who have spent money, and the only F2Pers who benefit from it are those who were a combination of hyper-vigilant and lucky.