Power is mostly separate from level.

You can improve your power-to-level ratio in a number of ways as a free player and gain a whole lot more stuff overall with some of these things I did.

1. Avoid all exp, if your Main Character is at 5 Stars you basically don't need any of the dailies

2.Patience, wait for rebates, conserve and save your scrolls, coupons & refines, anything that relies on chance in this game is usually not worth it so save your coupons for an event that is more or less guaranteed a return on what you spend (Lucky Board)

3. Black Market is your friend in terms of getting Fragments, Meterials for awakening & Gear that you don't have the later plot instances unlocked (You're avoiding EXP remember)

4. Elite Instances are always worth it, farm all the elites for the characters that start off at 2 stars or less (Work your way towards that Iruka in fragment refine)

5. Exams are absolutely essential, the further you get in exams the earlier on the better off you are in terms of getting Magatama. (Sweeping elites & Getting your basic characters to 5 stars will help here too when you haven't got any rare ninjas)

6. Patience, I can't stress this enough, the game tempts people with "Just maybes" all the time, don't do it, be patient, your hard work will pay off.

Most events are level based so the better your power ratio, the easier almost everything becomes, Matsuri, Sage (Cross server), Survival Trial, Strong Approaching and so on, it's slow going but you will find success if you stay on the path, and with success you start saving seal & Summon scrolls a lot easier and you can eventually get a lot of the rare ninjas you need anyway even without ever putting a cent in the game.

Absolutely anyone can do this.

In what server is 50k+ not useful in GNW? S1? and maybe like the first 5-10 servers released after that is about the only way I can see that being true, but that's a different story for the other 5-600+ servers.

But that aside, the reality for a lot of servers is that winning GNW means next to nothing whether people realize it or not. If you have a group with 25-30 Active GNW participants winning GNW every week and a group coming 3rd with 10 or less GNW Participants, everyone in that loser group is automatically better off as they guarantee themselves packs every single week while the big groups round out roughly to everyone getting maybe 1-2 packs a month if the group is fair.

It's about the bigger picture, conserving and saving for the long run, I could start focusing on leveling from where I'm at right now and jump into the 70k range in the low 80s, but what does that get me? Top 10 power? Higher standing within a group? A chance to compete in Space Time finals?

None of that matters, it's all status. What does matter is the reliable success in Matsuri I have at my level, the reliable success of getting 15 Advanced Refines from every sage, and so on, things that pay off absolutely and will continue to pay off in the long run as long as I take my time.