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Buying an item from the store also automatically upgrades your account to Premium, giving you more character slots on each server and increasing the limit on the amount of gold you can carry. It is possible to play through the high level areas for the story missions alone, grinding the wildlife to gain levels between each quest, but it's a miserable alternative, and if you're invested enough to reach level 20, five or six quid every now and then feels worthwhile. Once a quest pack has been purchased, the areas are available to explore at your leisure, removing the pressure to play enough each month to justify the subscription cost.

While this initially seemed unfair, I came to prefer it to the traditional monthly subscription approach of most MMOs.
