This game was not designed to be pay to win.
For that you have many other alternatives, such as l2 revolution, l2 m, etc, which were designed to see who has the largest visa card.
The classic l2 is about effort, meritocracy, luck, commitment and ability, that is why the subscription model worked much better, but greed leads to not understanding the bases of a problem and therefore only to worsen the result.
That is why you have here only 20 active people fighting among themselves to see who spent the most per month and, on the other hand, there are "servers" with so much life still.
Nobody likes to play against a toon who is almost a GM.