This is why for the most part I'm not a massive mobile gamer, but the model itself is like that. The whole mobile game industry is shifting towards free-to-play, so where are developers supposed to make their money? In-app purchases are how. The situation you encountered is common on a huge amount of big games - Candy Crush, Clash of Clans, Boom Beach. You can play them all for free but if you get itchy feet then you pay money... it's just the way of things. I'd much rather have a situation like this than a pay-to-win model that completely ruins the experience for non-paying gamers.

Whilst at E3 this June I tried out a MOBA for mobile that genuinely worked, and I'm not talking just for tablet, but for phones too. The way the controls were done meant screen size wasn't an issue. The game still wasn't out at the time, but I've been following it on Facebook since. It's called Ace of Arenas if you want to check it out.
It leads me to something I've been wondering about for a while: Is there going to be a rise in the world of mid-core and hardcore games that are truly compatible with mobiles? Touch screens bring about entirely new methods of gameplay that have so much potential - I'm psyched to see what the next couple of years bring in terms of this kind of stuff.
Anybody think mobile mid/hardcore games are going to blow up?

@LuminousAether: Crikey! Seems I touched a nerve! After your ferocious response I went back and looked and it seems I remembered Skyrim's levelling system wrong. I thought it was on of those generic JRPG style systems where you just get points and allocate them on one of those God awful children's dot-to-dot drawings (forgive me, it's been a couple of years since I played Skyrim). But I never had that much of an issue playing in Oblivion and I wasn't half as thorough as you about how I levelled...

I hope the levelling system is still solid and true to the Fallout ancestry. That's the one thing I much preferred about Oblivion to Skyrim - they made a messy complex levelling system for Skyrim that I felt detracted from Gameplay a little.

Personally I'd say try out a couple of MOBAs like League of Legends or DOTA 2. Something a bit different! Otherwise maybe Elder Scrolls online as Xanatos said.

Sad to hear this. It seems so sudden...