I don't even know if that's is working, if that's what they're trying to do. You can't craft the golden series with leaf tickets and that's the long term series they added in. You still need the 1,000,000 bells. I guess you could... get a ton of bell maps and then spend money on tickets to complete them?
But it just seems silly. I'm crafting my final golden series piece now and I spent absolutely no real money on the game.
I was talking more about the fortune cookies, LT only craftable items, decreased LT rewards, new villagers locked behind trash bird maps, etc. Certainly there's still a lot for F2P players to get, but so much more is now locked behind LT.
Even then, I feel like a lot of the free events have gotten harder over the pass few months:
- Fishing events are back to only 5 days, and you pretty much have to do 7/8 cycles every day to ensure getting the last unique reward. Plus there's the change from 7 guaranteed fish each cycle to a random amount from 6-9.
- Gyroid events now have a big item that costs hundreds of gyroids (though they seemingly backed off on that a bit with the most recent event).
- Part 2 of garden events went from 7 days back to 6 days. I dunno if they changed the spawn/catch rates or if I've just gotten exceptionally bad RNG lately, but Part 2 has been taking me longer to complete than it used to. Part of that could be so many of my gardening buddies dropping the game recently.