That's not a pay wall since he has been regularly attainable for coupons for a long time now. Roses only work with ingots, meaning only a person who recharges could actually complete it. So F2P have no chance to be #1 in the season no matter how active or hard they try, if a spender is willing to buy roses to max a season. It's only not an issue if you are on a server with no spenders at all, or you have a spender that isn't active and never tries to complete all season missions.

If they made the shuriken free, first rose = 10 coupons, 2nd rose and up = 10 ingots, then there wouldn't be any issue. If they did that people might actually compete for that title again as well.