I’m not f2p but it’s a founders pack only for me.
With good investment decisions / selling mats and consistent gameplay, I am 1460 with more than enough in assets and future investments to hit 1490 a long time ago, I just choose not to sell them for useless ilvl and trivialize my content.
I’m no market or investment genius or 10h/day player and wouldn’t be so full of myself to believe I’m just a gaming god.
Although probably very uncommon, I can absolutely see how 1490 is possible f2p.
It’s not even necessary to be 1490 right now. There is no content in the game that requires an ilevel that high.
Nice story
Your investments would have needed about 10000% return rate/
I’m not saying you’re wrong, but it is technically possiible to hit the jackpot 100 times in a row.
I started with selling mats to whales in t3 for 100g on blues and 180g on reds for a bit, and all the way down to 50/80 on blues and reds.
If I had that return rate I would own everything in the market right now and would push all my alts to 1490 for fun 
I just make 5-20% returns over and over compounding. If you had any knowledge of finance you’d know how quickly that grows.
saying its impossible is a bit disingenuous.
the proper way of saying it is that its not likely for the average player, but is still technically possible.
if you buy a lottery ticket, you have a chance at winning. that doesnt mean everyone that buys the ticket wins.
in this case, its a matter of things lining up really really well. like being one of the first tier 3s, sellin mats for a bit to the whales, and then pushing to 1370 by day 1 argos.
then selling the legendary accessories, ability stones and tripod gear too whales for hilarious amounts of gold.
with that start up cash, if you invested heavily in fish you’d see a 6x profit (one time) when the fish prices went from 5g to 30g in a single day (and hovered around that for a week)
someone who did that, could make literal millions of gold. and with that gold they could fund several 1370 alts, that then feed materials too the main and slowly but surely (while also using the gold) pushing themselves to 1490.
even with this, there is still a matter of luck required.
but the fact is, it is possible.
its all about how well a person played, and truthfully the vast majority of us played poorly.
we didnt make alts quickly enough, we didnt push them too 1370 and we didnt push fast enough early on to benefit from the RMT whales.
that doesnt mean someone couldnt of done it, it just means very few people could of. you cant have hundreds of f2p 1490 players. but you could certainly have maybe 1 to 2 per server right now.
but odds are if you see someone over 1430~ rn they probably are a spender. (yes obv a 1430 could also be f2p, but again not nearly as likely as them being a spender.)
I never seen a single person at 1490 as a f2p o3o im pretty sure it’s not possible and if someone managed to do it he must be super lucky
I will never understand people spending lots of money then claiming they didn’t support the game at all…why would you think that refusing to support the game is a good thing?
I may have been very close to what you’re describing. Although I don’t touch fish but flip for 5-20% gains over and over.
Looking into my groups on discord, I have to say I’m definitely not alone. I’m not f2p though, I did get a head start on founders.
I absolutely think f2p 1490 is possible. Just not likely and also they probably don’t want to waste their gold on it even when they could.
First rule of fish club!!!
it is possible.
There was a point in the game before argos release where literally mats were insane and you could stock pile gold in the 200k+ or more. People like stoopzz and saintone did it.
so if you had held the gold and just kept selling mats and listened to their advice and waited for prices to drop to like how it is now you could easily… EASILY hit 1490.
Prices have more than doubled in the last 3 days. Now is when you should be selling not buying
It is definitely possible and you don’t even need super luck for that.
It’s not like I reached 1490 myself but being 1452.5 with +20 weapon and hundreds of thousand of gold worth investments/items I am not too far from it.
1452 with one +20 item is about 25% of the way there.
Weapon is much more expensive than a single armor gear to upgrade.
Unfortunately 200k isn’t quite enough, my estimate is around 700 for 1490 in the current economy on average luck.
Usually yes. However I can tell you that my weapon was way cheaper than my armor piece.
I would estimate if I wanted to go from 1460 to 1490 it would be about 500K
which is why I am leveling alts instead
some people play the market every day, for those its for sure possible but not if you play the game " normal " yeah
no shit sherlock…