Do you feel Nexon exploits it's playerbase?

Here's another example of how Nexon makes the game unplayable without NX:

As I mentioned before, people without heavily cubed gear can't really pull their weight in party training situations, and either get kicked or shy away from "leeching" situations. Nexon is heavily encouraging party-play. Now even for levels below LHC, with the "sidekick" mechanism. Note that "sidekicks" need to be equally well equipped, to maintain the level difference between them. If one can kill significantly faster than the other, and therefore level faster, the relationship will break up.

I've always found partying in MS to be biased heavily towards the individual. Aside from Priests, few classes care what damage their party members are doing - their buffs, and more recently the #players 'party areas', are the major reasons to join up with other people. Most of your exp still comes from the damage you do.

I do generally aim to party players with similar damage to mine, but that doesn't require a certain amount of money.

Granted, with the awful mastery book set-up, richer players have better skills to contribute to the party. I trained 170% today, though, with a variety of party members (Bishops 13x-17x, other attackers 11x-16x) and my own exp gain was fairly constant, other than what party buffs gave me (SE and Dark Aura are the big ones on my Paladin)

I agree the anti-botting measures are idiotic, and I'm not sure how they'll even combine with the 'sidekick' business given that they're forcing one of the players to train on a monster they're designed not to. If the 'sidekick' is 20 levels below, they'll miss half the time. If they're at the mob's level, their 'mentor' is gonna get terrible exp.