Yeah I never said it was new. It was used on W19 of .net which I played on. I was just saying it is unique because you don't see it all that often.
As far as pay to win goes I'm a fan. I won't ever have to buy premium again thanks to people that pay to win. Not to mention if you are an active farmer you can easily sell resources on one world, get a couple thousand pp, then throw it all away the next world by paying to win.
It doesn't seem to be a huge problem here on .us yet. It is pretty terrible on the .net servers though. Its amazing how much pp people spend on pay to win worlds there.