Best Of

There are 300,000 total earnable points, so yes you can reach the top milestone, even if you miss a few.

Why do you make everything p2w?

I wouldn't call it pay to win. Sure, spending could be a tie breaker for points, but if you don't do everything, especially Raids, no amount of spending is going to catch you up.

Well, technically speaking $24,000 USD might catch you up. But even among the mega whales I suspect the number of people who will actually do that is very close to zero.

Since about a third of the realm points are in Raids, and my alliance doesn't do raids (much less Nightmare Raids which seems to be required to cap out the milestones) I'm basically out of it. But the event is still giving me a ton of rewards for basically just playing the game more or less as I normally do, so I can't be too upset. I find it ... odd that there's so much emphasis on Raids given their presumptive optional nature - and the fact they are tied to alliances, meaning individual players cannot simply choose to do them just for the event - but I suppose Kabam has its reasons there.

There are ranked rewards, which will be unobtainable unless you pay
I would call that pay to win

They are unobtainable even if you do pay, unless you also basically do everything. Normally the term pay to win refers to games where either whomever pays the most wins, or spending offers an overwhelming advantage compared to everything else. But that's not really true here, except in an essentially unrealistic extreme. Spending offers an advantage between two players who otherwise are tied in all other respects, but having an advantage between two competitors who otherwise do exactly the same things equally well is not pay to win, that is literally all competitions.

I'm sorry but if there's NO way you can place #1 without having to spend, it's called a PAY TO WIN event.

The real thing I don't understand about this event is: If the game team truly intended to set up the point thresholds this way, why did they bother making it a realm event?

The "realm" aspect of an event is meaningless if an individual has no vested interest in the performance of the community, and are solely focused on their own progress. It might as well have been a solo event.

If we look back at the first (unofficial) realm event, the necropolis run, we can see that the whole community rallied around that effort. Why? My theory is:
* The barrier to entry for an individual was challenging but reachable (a single run of necropolis)
* Once that barrier to entry was passed, the individual would receive all rewards achieved by the community.

These two elements meant that you, as an individual, had an incentive to achieve that necro run for yourself, and then you had an incentive to both cheer other people on, and do your own additional runs, with knowledge that you'd be helping out the community.

With this format, where individual thresholds will always be stricter than community targets, the community aspect of this event is simply irrelevant to every individual. It's a footnote. Nobody is going to do more than necessary to help our their friends, because they can't help their friends with their individual thresholds. And they couldn't do more than necessary even if they wanted to, because each individual's contribution is strictly limited.

I just don't get why they bothered to structure this in this way. If they simply made this a solo event, they probably would have gotten a lot less frustration. The community is looking for something to rally around. This is, by construction, simply not it.