Whats with people hating F2P?

[Ashkendor]

Actually, your average player tends to spend more on F2P games than they do on subscription-based games like WoW and FFXIV. Game quality also tends to suffer which is why the turnover rate for F2P games coming and going is so great. Going F2P also tends to start heading down the dark slippery slope of becoming P2W. Nobody likes P2W.

Exactly this. In FFXIV, we pay for purely cosmetic things like dyes and glamours and mounts. In F2P games, you do still pay for costumes, but the thing is, they aren't purely cosmetic. They usually have huge chunks of stats on them, and are significantly more expensive than anything we have. F2P games also tend to do things like put powerful items into gacha boxes, further maximizing profit. Instead of selling the items directly, they sell you the chance at the items, though they're incredibly rare. 95% of the gacha boxes contain items that range from 'utter crap' to 'marginally useful' and only a small fraction contain the powerful items you're actually after. They can even take it a step further and put (for an example) an entire set of accessories into the boxes. They're each effective on their own, but together they give you an enormous chunk of stats and you can't hope to be a "top player" without it.

F2P games usually give you minimal amounts of inventory and storage space (10-20 slots) and then make additional bag space able to be purchased for a fairly reasonable price through micro-transactions. Once they get that foot in the door by getting you to pay five bucks for inventory now and again, it's easier to get you paying upward of $30-50 for that cool costume you really want (and a lot of the gear is super dull looking, to further push you toward buying costumes) or $1 apiece for a stack of the aforementioned gacha boxes. Some F2P games even sell access to premium cash-shop only areas that are vastly superior to the open world for level grinding. Exp scrolls are another big seller, as are pets and other things that either affect your skill levels or have extra stats.

Then there's enhancement mechanics. On FFXIV, we get our gear from a raid and it has set stats on it. On other games, when an item drops it's got a fairly weak base amount of stats but can be enhanced to be stronger. Usually there's a base level of enhancement you can take it up to before you risk breaking the item (which means you lose it forever), and "protection" items can be purchased through the cash shop to prevent the item from breaking upon further enhancement. Some of them take it a step further and let you slot extra stats into your gear (cards, jewels, etc sort of like materia), which again is done through cash shop items.

It's very, very easy to spend thousands of dollars just trying to be competitive on a F2P game.

Sadly it seems like this game is slowly going towards a cash shop heavy model.

I see no basis for this claim whatsoever. Nothing in the cash shop goes beyond cosmetic items.