[YoshL]

i don't really think it's pay to win at all - you get tons of materials from the surveys and the amount of keys that you can get from doing dailies is pretty astounding as well. I personally disagree with the pay to win, because it's more like "pay to win faster".

In terms of economy, you're not really supposed to be buying from the npcs, because their prices are stupid high, and your stuff sells for stupid low. However, endgame it seems like your gold income is actually fairly reasonable for how marketplace prices are. Also, given that the game literally just came out, the economy being unstable and overpriced is understandable, because prices are still fluctuating and settling all over the place.

Also, sex appeal is ??? because later on, many of the outfits that you can get from doing field bosses are like 20x better than the cash shop outfits. The outfits don't even give extra stats either, and are entirely cosmetic so /shrug/

There's never really any farming for any weapons and upgrades, because the best set of accessories/weapon is given to you, it's just a matter of feeding it enough materials until it reaches its cap, then getting the correct item to breakthrough/transform so you can continue to level it up.

L.B.D.D. or whoever said it earlier said it well - it's just time that you need to get to endgame and to start all that other stuff. They give out a lot with the daily dash and surveys so you never feel like you're stuck in progression (until you hit level 40 and find that one of the evo mats for your weapon costs like 7 gold on the marketplace fml) but even then i'm not having much trouble solo-ing out in the field.

D_C and I tackled the big end of act 1 dungeon as a duo, and encountered a hard as fuq dungeon that we somehow miraculously beat. It's one of the best experiences i've ever had playing an MMO, discovering the boss attack patterns and working around them to not keep dying. It took us around an hour to get through that, as opposed to like a 7 minute run that a party of 6 could have probably done.