Real $$$ cost of Archeage - good, bad and ugly

For those of you who don't know, let me give you some figures about the archeage economy.

At the present time, Apex, the tradable item you can buy from the Trion cash shop for $10 is selling at the AH for somewhere around 40 - 50 gold depending on server cluster... Let's call it 50 gold to simplify the math.

You can also trade in one Apex @ the cash shop for 1200 credits and it takes 2400 credits to get 1 month of Patron status. So... 2 Apex will get you one month.

The good:

If you're one of the lucky ones to have land, and that is actually quite a lot of players, it's trivial to earn 100 gold... You can even do it in a day running trade packs. Or if you're lucky and have one of your trees struck by lightning producing one Thunderstruck tree that makes 4 thunderstruck logs, each log going for ~ 250 gold at the AH, that alone can be turned into 20 Apex.... That's 10 month's patron status from just one lightning strike. How rare are thunderstruck trees? I was the first in my guild to get one and I got it in week one. I kept one log for myself and built my tractor that let's me carry 3 trade packs at once with it. I sold the rest for ~ 800 gold.

Since then just about everyone in my guild has had one and some two. So the good news: if you ever pay for patron status with cash again, it's because you want to - once a patron you can continue to be one for free with in game earnings for as long as you wish... That's about as free as F2P ever gets.

The bad:

Many in game items and level 50 crafted gear are very expensive... 300, 500 or even 1000 gold are not uncommon for the very best weapons or armor. A whale who just wants to spend his way to the top without bothering to farm, trade or craft could easily spend $1000 real world money or more just gearing up. It can get really expensive in a hurry.

The ugly:

The landless. If you have no land, you're screwed. Yes, you can get creative and grow things in hidden areas in the wild which may not be stolen by others or come up with other ways of making gold, but it's much, much harder to turn a profit without land.