I do agree with a lot of your sentiments - I spend about $1500~ per month.

I'll also say, however, that most of the stuff in the video shouldn't be a surprise. Honestly - they had mapped out everything about how the changes to Sage world would work - that should make it clear that it was the intention of the devs to roll it out. They wouldnt have put much thought into a preliminary vote that they honestly figured could have gone either way - they also said (when the vote lost) that they will 'delay' the changes. No one should have been surprised by this.

All that I really hope the dev's learn from this is - listen to your players, make the game fun. Don't try to cram events down everyone's throats and don't give away exclusive * because you're desperate for more money (thats a jab to your high spenders). If you focus on making the game fun and enjoyable from the ground up, you'll be successful - if you focus on making money first, you'll fail. It's simple - this is a game, people play it to enjoy it - you have to focus on why we play, not what you hope to gain from us playing for the game to succeed.

I liked the fact that certain ninjas were extremely rare - some people who spend $30~ a month can get their hands on Tendo for example - everyone knows how to get him and what it takes, so as a pseudo free to pay player you spend 3~ months putting everything you acquire into Tendo draws to get him. Then a few days later he is being sold for $100 in a shop. It's a slap in the face to the hard work put into getting him for those people more than the pay to wins.

Also, isn't the game more fun when the ninjas come from where they're meant to? Tobirama used to be so rare - it was shocking and exciting to see him in a fight. Now it's nothing special really - any moderate payer will have him if they want him at all. It takes something away from the feeling of the game. Every pay to win has almost every ninja if that's what they want, and that seems dumb. Can anyone honestly say any ninja out is truly rare to come by other than Susano/Ay - but that seems to be changing soon as well.

The mentality behind these types of events is that people who recharge $50 a week regularly will actually recharge $100 this week if we offer them a $1000 ninja for $100... The problem is that the players eventually catch on - around the time they've fed us enough exclusive ninjas at huge discounts, they'll add new ones at huge prices and steadily drop them into events for 50-75% off as well - it's a cycle. :)

I don't think that it's the most horrible thing that has been done to the human species but I think it appears that Oasis focuses on the money before the game itself. Even though I'm P2W - I would much rather see some cool F2P content (like group raid type content or something) than any P2W event with any prize. I would have more fun doing new content than spending money or another loot wheel and by way of that I would probably spend more money on this game in the long run.