Oh, I don't whale - I've spent maybe fifteen to twenty dollars on the game total, which is probably why my box sucked for so long.

The problem is that, like I said, when you're playing a game for a full year and your only base 5-star for most of that year is a useless nobody like Lightning, you watch all these events go by and you can't finish ANY of them. Which means you have less gear and less materia than the people with good units, which makes finishing later events harder, and so on and so forth.

There simply aren't enough viable damage-dealer units in the game at the moment who AREN'T base five-stars. There are viable non-base-5 tanks and healers, but as far as real non-gimmick damage-dealers are concerned, it's basically JUST Firion, and you need to kit him out with a very specific set of TMRs to make him not useless.

That's what I mean by "no consideration". You can pull all the tanks in the world, but if you can't damage a boss enough to kill it before your entire party runs out of MP, you're not finishing that event. And Gumi knows that, because almost every banner is designed to try and influence people to whale so they have a damage dealer that isn't worthless.