That's the whale philosophy. Reliance on a few heavily paying customers out of the thousands of free players. Whales is a term from the casino business, where a big spender is worth millions. That same term has carried over to the virtual gaming business and is used to describe players who spend big. However we see different pricing philosophies out in the online gaming world, such as the famous Steam game sales. And games where you buy something and your team gets something too. Or we could take a step sideways and look at songs being sold online for 99 cents, that's entertainment content too, but maybe they have better payments systems that cost less to operate.
Elvenar has tournaments though, where you can only do one province and yet still share in all the prizes at the end of the tournament. That's the game design that encourages team play towards a goal. I thought perhaps that design could work for payments too.
I've played Elvenar for over a year, and had good value out of it, but when I do think about buying something in Elvenar the prices put me right off.
So, at least for me, they probably need a more graduated payments system, and probably a more stable one, I never really like seeing special offers pop up on my screen. Perhaps because I'm too old and have seen tens of thousands of special offers, so none of them are special any longer.