First of all there are plenty of people in the top of my arena shard that are using characters that are not behind paywalls. Me included (August 2016 shard).
People who are free to play have to remember that they are playing for free, and this game is not developed and supported for free.
With that said though, it is a very tricky formula where they want to please the spenders without alienating the free to play players too much. Overall, I think they have done a pretty good job with this. However, the panic farming with very late notices on when events are coming back (8hours for Commander Luke and R2 just last week), and the inability to maintain their cadence makes it very frustrating, and screws up people's planning. This has been one of my bigger gripes. I am a planner, and that doesn't mesh too well with this game as they throw so many curveballs. While I have spent a fair bit of money it makes it difficult to do so as I don't like panic spending, and I don't spend this way. I feel like the game has gradually been getting worse in this department.
Fleet, I have some concerns. My main concern is my fleet battles are too much of a coin flip as RNG plays too much of a role. Yesterday, lost to someone with a weaker fleet without killing a ship due to bad RNG, and then I beat him right after without losing a ship myself. Just too much variance with this in ships right now due to heavy reliance on crit (particularly under Thrawn), dodges, and target locks. Also, every single person in my top 50 runs Thrawn, and everyone has the same fleet composition minus 1 or 2 ships at most, which makes it kind of dull. Free to play players still do well in fleet as none of the ships are locked behind paywalls right now though, and almost all the ships in the meta have been there a very long time so everyone has had a chance to farm the ships in their pilots for quite some time.
Their design philosophy is to gradually rework older and weaker characters as they add new ones. I would like this more if they did a lot more than just rework 1 or 2 every couple months. There are many, many characters in this game that need a rework. Currently too many characters are just not viable for anything other than territory wars, and they have been pushing players to use their entire rosters with territory wars now.
I have heard from one of the gamechanger videos is that they want to give us more options now instead of limiting the meta so much to 1 or 2 teams like they have done in the past. I feel like they are slowly achieving this goal as there is more variety in my shard again, a level that hasn't been seen since before Commander Luke joined the game, and perhaps even since my shard was very young.
