The same thing happened in Maplestory during the time that the game was in decline (mainly because of hackers or bots) it was referred to as Reboot server.

There is no method to pay for p2w other than the cost of paying someone to farm your lost ark account.

It is not possible to trade anything. everything is only available through the game's content, farming, and even events.

Money is only used to purchase cosmetics. Yes, there will be bots, but they will only be beneficial for advancing your account.

In Maplestory There are whales on the regular servers, but it's pretty much 80percent of players are in Reboot (a speculation). Furthermore, Reboot also has whales who are obsessed with cosmetics. However, Maplestory is full of cosmetics that can be acquired through loot boxes.

It is likely that they won't do something like such to Lost Ark until the game is dead however, i'm betting it will be a lot more enjoyable and satisfying.

Edit: Typo in title I can't change

Edit2: Everyone is focused on the small details, like statistics. They can be balanced by the server. The idea behind this article is the idea of a server which cannot be p2w'd.

For those not familiar with MapleStory it was a while ago that Reboot was first launched and lasted for a long time it was plagued by bots or hackers. The reason players wanted to play Reboot was the fact that you could advance by purchasing "cubes" which re-roll your stats in mesos (like lost ark gold) instead of NX (money). Mesos can be earned by grinding mobs over the course of hours and then risk your gear's stats on cubes.

The more lucrative option was to create bots and sell accounts that had a lot of mesos (billions). A lot of people bought these accounts that had billions of mesos as they were not looking to own a farm. It wasn't until a few years ago did Nexon finally make it impossible to hack the account without being identified and banned.

If you have created an account like Reboot from Lost Ark, then botters are able to farm the infinite Chaos Dungeon for mats and accessories, and then sell the accounts. Anyone who purchases accounts are able to change their names. It is possible to pay for access to these bots, and also use them for themselves.

If you aren't able to have a working anti-cheat program functioning, your server idea won't be able to happen. Even the case however, it's a fictitious server that you can only use.