This game's balance issues extend beyond equipment and I'm not sure if anybody knows it. I've played this game for a while now and after seeing all these balance patches and tiers go in... I need to say some things. Even though I already say a lot of things.
Not only is there no purpose to playing in the top two tiers, gate creation has just turned into people spamming minerals and dusk drops into Tier 3 so they can get the levels they want and disregard all else.
Pretty much putting the most enjoyable and rewarding areas of the game below Emberlight.
The area of the game where you effectively need to pay for Crystal Energy to get to.
It's literally impossible to:
- Craft gear higher than 3 Stars
- Get to the Core
- Buy extra equipment slots
If you play without it.
All these more recent updates have actually limited free players even more, by forcing people to either get equipment off someone else or buy Crystal Energy to play the most enjoyable part of the game.
There's a reason only 5% of players have stuck around and I would say that is the exact percentage of people who have been given Crystal Energy to get below Emberlight first day to buy more on the exchange or who have just bought it outright.
The game is never going to be balanced until this is fixed.
It's just a side-effect of a system that removes progression if you're willing to spend money.
Take Wizard101 for example. They call the free version of their game a trial. You can do whatever you want in the free areas and can only reach a maximum of level 10. It's enough to get you playing the game, but they really count on people buying the coins or just getting a subscription.
Playing this game for free is like that, except instead it's not a trial it's just the actual limitations of a system that charges you to do everything, Energy. Or forces you to spend all your Crowns on Energy on the exchange. There are no limits if you play for free except to dig to the Core you get a rusty spoon instead of a wide-bore thermal drill. So it will take you roughly three days to do what takes someone else three hours. And even then you can only reach depth 28. Provided you con't die or open anything energy related.
It's actually got a marketing term, called CSP: Come, Stay and Pay. Pretty much, the game rewards payers and big spenders, while telling free players to go screw themselves, without actually telling people to go screw themselves. Games like Evony (where you can literally skip through progression by paying money, it's also owned by WoW Gold farming Chinese Mafia) or games like Farmville (where you can also remove pay boundaries with an in-game currency) use this pay model because it generally forces people who get addicted to the game, to pay to play at the more advanced level.
And while it's entirely possible to play this game for free because of the exchange, it's not always possible to do so.
Quite honestly, this needed to be fixed well before they started balance patching and adding tiers. Or maybe this is their actual marketing plan, for whatever reason. Either way, these are just my observations as a player of this game, as well as many, many others. Make of them what you will.
Right now I have over 3000 energy and I didn't spend a penny. But that's solely because the devs injected new items into Haven without also injecting the proper recipes for them (resulting in people spending tens of thousands of crowns which lowers the cost to buy energy). However this is only temporary which is why I'm mentioning this, because someone might attack you and go "the market is fine right now" when right now is not the norm. In general I agree with you that this game normally penalizes free players more than it should. I think the best example of this is the fact that the game only gives you two weapon slots out of 4, and must spend 250 energy a month just for one of those slots to unlock (which if you want to unlock all the slots, costs 250+250+150+150 for a total of 800 energy a month just to be able to properly use your equipment).
Before when 100 energy cost 15k I pretty much only played until I was out of mist energy then stopped. It was the same for my friends. Which resulted in us trying to get on at the same time which didn't always happen and eventually drove my friends to play less and less. I really dislike it when MMOs penalize you for wanting to play their game (Vindictus does this too). What I liked about Runes of Magic when I played it awhile ago was that there was absolutely 0 content that was restricted for paying costumers (I'm looking at you, DDO) and there was also no penalty for playing the game. They pretty much just charged you for what I considered stupid stuff (like pets that don't do anything, or different permanent mounts that can't be used in combat, or fancy schmanzy costumes) which is apparently enough for them to reap the moniez in.
When it comes to encouraging people to play above emberlight, I don't think that's really an issue of energy but rather an issue of the devs not making anything below Haven or Moorcraft worth it. Everyone dusk drops what they want because nobody wants to go to Haven or Moorcraft to play. The devs haven't seem to address this issue and have instead decided to make it worse by nerfing your weapons the farther away from the core you are. When there's no reason to go back to Haven, there's no reason to mingle the population together, which pushes people away from MMOs.
I suppose, in the dev's defense, they said they haven't starting working on energy changes yet. But they really need to fix it.