Hi Purity,
I am glad that you have been enjoying the game through beta, you have offered a lot of suggestions and input to the game. Both criteria for receiving a free premium account upgrade (So rest assured you and many other BETA testers will receive your free account upgrade, this was stated on the front page)... Housing was implemented back in November so I hope you are not still waiting for that :-)
Now lets get to the meat of the discussion...
The reason we are implementing basic and premium accounts is to help recoup some of the investment that has been made over the last couple of years and so we can continue to develop the game in the coming future, I personally have thousands of hours of my life invested in the game and 10s of thousands of dollars invested.
The reason we choose housing as an upgrade feature is that housing places additional demand on the server in terms of memory, storage and cpu so this is the most logical place to recoup costs. Not owning a house or property also does not take away from the core game or concepts of the game.
We are also not asking players to make any kind of significant investment or commitment... May I remind you it is a one time fee of 5.00 US dollars. There is no monthly fees or costs. While I wish we could recoup are costs just by advertising we cannot, at least right now. Most advertising agencies pay by volume, and it is unlikely to get that kind of volume at our site.
We hope that you stay and play in Moon Haven. We have put much into building the world and will continue to do so and as much as we enjoy doing it, it is important we start to make some of the costs back.
Thank You
Chris The Avatar