I'm just gonna throw this in. I, like you, have literally zero cash of my own to put down to anything. You say the price of Diamonds is unfair, and nobody can afford them? That's crap. As a person who can't afford a lot of things, this game has gone above and beyond to make it possible to get items without needing to pay cash. Let me just break down my personal experience here for you.

I joined this site December 20, 2012 - a few weeks after the site itself opened to the public. Even then, I didn't really start playing until January.

Over the course of January, I played very sporadically. Played faithfully for like a week, participated in four raids a day, checked scale shops, did missions, the whole shibang. Then February hit, and somewhere in there I stopped playing for two weeks.

Come back in March. Still playing pretty sporadically, even less than in January, until Spring Break (three weeks ago). I have been playing faithfully every day since then.

Now what does this have to do with anything? Well everything! You can clearly see that I have not been a regular player throughout all my time here at Sylestia. It's clear that I slacked off and didn't do a damn thing with the site for weeks on end. But now let me tell you some of the things I've gotten that were Diamonds only purchases.

I have a second stable: 500 Diamonds
I have an Exceptional Genetic Testing Kit: 1500 Diamonds
I have the entire Demon Hunter's Set from last month's avatar items: 700 Diamonds
I bought three pieces of the exclusive Customize items: 500 Diamonds
And I'm currently sitting on another 800 Diamonds I haven't used. At all.

That's a total of 4000 Diamonds. That's equivalent to $40 worth of Diamonds that I never put into the site. Because I'm broke and can't even barely afford toiletry items for my dorm. On top of that, I'm also sitting on another 900k gold which is enough to buy 300 more Diamonds.

And that 900k gold? That was made in the last three days. Mostly off of Missions with the occasional (read: four) sales of essence and zero purchases on Sylesti I'm selling. So to say you can't buy Diamonds, and how unfair it is? Really?

About the diamonds thing, GaiaOnline does the EXACT SAME THING as Sylestia, though on a much larger scale.
You cannot afford diamond via IRL cash? Save up and work hard for the gold, or find a user with the item you want whom is willing to trade. That is how it works on just about every site that implements this system.

The only thing I can say is that as the site gets BIGGER and GROWS, getting diamond items will be easier since there will be more players working the economy for them; again look at Gaia Online.

To ask a website to remove their only way of paying for their servers and to help make the site grow is unfair. It hurts the owners, it hurts the site, and in turn it hurts the users. They provide a way to get around the cash system, all it requires is hard work and communication. Just because you can't, won't, don't, ect, participate does not warrant the right to ask them to remove a system that is proven to work. (Edit; POINT IN CASE, Shadowphyr's post! In which is wasn't actually that much work at all.)

Though, I'm sure any useful suggestions you can think of they will gladly take into account! c:
They've been doing a wonderful job so far implementing features that users and the site benefit from. <3

I really don't have anything to add to the conversation, but I do have a question. Is saving every single pet necessary? For example, if all of my un-named nursery babies were to disappear and never be saved or ever seen again, I'd be thrilled. lol Is there any way at all to code the game so that only wanted, named, pets are stored? I don't know squat about computers and coding and all that complicated mess, but it seems it would save money not to save pets that nobody wants, and that would be a good thing...right?

@Shadow,

Perma deletion is something we decided against early on in Sylestia. There's a few reasons why we made that decision. Also, released pets account for 18% of the pet population currently. Not a small number, but in the grand of things, not a significant number to really make much of a dent. (54k pets vs 72k pets isn't too big of a difference).

So while deleting released pets would save some room each month, it doesn't really outweigh the reasons we don't want to delete pets in the first place.

The reasons we don't like to delete things are that firstly we just don't like permanently deleting information, we use our pets for statistics, sometimes players accidentally release pets that we have to restore, and we would have to change the structure of some things that rely on counting stuff. For example, the last pet id is 71714, so there are 71714 pets in the game. If we deleted pets, the last pet id may be 71714, but there's only 54k pets in the game. So that would cause some complications.

Ok, makes sense. Thanks for the info!