It breaks my heart to see a game with fantastic gameplay and story. It is just wonderful. And all of that is being killed by the following:
1) Not being able to play all the characters immediately. For the first 30+ levels you are only allowed to play a certain amount of characters and the others are very expensive. So you are unsure if you even want to risk buying them.
If some one chooses a character you've used your time building up, then you are forced to play a different character you don't connect with.
2) Users have to grind through 30+ levels to experience more of the game. Obviously this is how many games work. But the question is, Do players care to grind through all of this while there are "Other" free games out there? It gets boring.
3) Grinding content leads to empty servers if its not fun I get grinding and I get paying for gold to keep the game going. That's fine. But I truly believe that if you are going to do a free game, the life of it is a populated game. The more people are playing, the more investment they have, easier it is to spend money. Keeping the freeloading player happy is just as important as the spenders. But trying to buy characters that are so expensive, just isn't worth the time. It as I said before, is boring.
This game is pretty amazing, and it's losing out to the mass amount of other games people could be playing because this game is asking too much from players that don't want to dedicate all of their time, just to find out if it can be fun.
Other games already are fun.