Is buying Era Pass now free to play?

Meathead wrote this a few months back:  

CG_Meathead wrote:

"Hello Holotable Heroes,

After reviewing recent Coliseum data, we noticed that the pace of progression for Free-to-Play players wasn’t where we wanted it to be. To address this, we’ll be making some adjustments to the difficulty level to make things easier. Our team will be conducting balance testing throughout the first half of next week, and we expect to release these changes soon after."

Buying the standard era pass doesn't give you anything you can't get with crystals.  So, essentially you....we are being classed as Free-to-Play.  The fact that CG are openly categorising us into classes (I'd say standard pass buyers are Economy +) is disturbing.

So the answer -  a categorical "yes".  CG are classing standard era pass buyers as F2P.

Yes, CG has proven by lack of customer service if you don't spend over $100 per month,  you are not people.

Spending money =\= free to play. If the pass no longer gives you an advantage you want to pay for that doesn’t mean it’s worthless, it just means it doesn’t have the same worth to you.

This statement was from last era so it doesn’t answer his question. They corrected that by giving a bunch of stuff out.

That is well ahead of F2P. As a F2P, I reworked how i spend crystals so i could get Rotta. It costs a lot of crystals that you dont have to spend since you get character shards from the pass. You cannot level up Rotta as a F2P without taking a hit. We are limited by resources and i cant take 2 characters above 95 which is Gear 10 and 1 at 99 which is Gear 11.  I would say thats more than 1 step above.

How active were you? I didn't spend a dime this era and only got my characters up to 4 stars including rotta (ignoring snowtrooper) but my levels are much higher. I'm pretty sure it's possible to get almost or all of the characters up to the g12 range without spending a penny.