This is one of the reason I stopped arguing with Dusty over Graal item price. There's no other incomes for iClassic to have other than promoting and producing rare shop items.
During past few years, I played many games that are free-to-play. Every game - when you are near to the top, it's like pay to win. Which made iClassic so unique, you don't have to purchase anything to become the best.
One game that's worth mentioning here is a game called Godswar on FB. It was a great game, it didn't take me long time to level up, in game auto-killing system, daily events/quest etc. My favorite event was Pk events, but you can't even kill another player without having a fully enchanted gears and to upgrade gears it costs cash that can be earned by little from a daily quest or you can purchase them with real life money. And there's no guarantee that if you spend money your armors will be like grade 10+ because it can fail get can be destroyed or downgrade. It also gets expensive (cause of the success rate going down) as your armor gets stronger.
For me, my parents never allowed me to purchase any stuff, so I had to spend straight 6 months to do the daily quest everyday and ended up getting all the gears to grade 5 and my laptop broke cause the motherboard burnt lol.
But yeah, I had two friends that spent $500 each month. They had everything over 8+ with Eternal Class. I find that pretty crazy comparing to Graal.
And other games are very similar to this. In 2012, I played a game called Pearl Heroes for few months before it got removed from the app store, because they couldn't maintain the server while having a very low income. The graphics were amazing, the pk system was pretty darn cool, it's even easy to level up till level 65, where the quest storyline ends. But it's just another game that cost you every penny to win. I made a friend that lives in Singapore. He spent $300 just to get his equipments better than mine, on top of that he spent extra $250 for the mount and cosmetic items. He was level 68 and I was level 74, but I got owned by him cause he spent real life money to upgrade gears.
iEra, same thing. At least iEra has an option to earn money. There was no f2p way to upgrade your gears on Pearl Heroes, and for Godswar it was extremely slow process.
The only thing that has to be fixed is the graphic quality. It should match with any heads, outfit and colors.