There is a LOT of loot as you kill minions and bosses. They even drop coins as well.

I was able to level up my characters to level 31 & 32 without spending any money at all.
As a matter of fact, the in-game currency has two forms:

• copper, silver, gold
• Anderments

The store requires payments of each depending on what you want. Anderments will get you a lot of nice equipment, mounts, weapons, powerup, but it will require real money.

You can get a lot of anderments by completing quests...

There is still some "grinding" to level up as well. Some of the towns (hubs) will give you a lot of quests, sometimes too many quests. Some quests are unlimited and can be done over and over to level up.

Once you get to level 29 & 30, there are less quests.
I recently found that new quests open up depending on your level. So if you level up, new quests appear.

Its a genius business model: Free to play, spend to speed things up.
I'm really patient, so I've never spent a penny.

Thanks for reporting the QT error. I just recently got the exact same error. I'm going to look into it this weekend.
Really makes me mad because Drakensang always installed and played just fine for me.
I've been playing it off and on for over a year and never had problems.

Off the top of my head... try changing Windows version to Windows XP in Wine Configuration

Yeah Windows 7 in Wine always worked for me. I've read that Origin has the same error for Windows 7, so if you set it to Window XP, Origin will not error the QT bug.
Not sure why Drakensang is doing it. Might be a Wine problem.
Feel free to download a newer or older version of Wine. Drakensang works in almost all of them.

Can you play any other games in PlayOnLinux?

I am definitely getting errors when launching Drakensang. Really SUCKS! because I've never had this problem in over a year and a half!

Drakensang thinclient.exe is erroring about QT5 libraries that can't be found. It can't find the qwindows.dll even though its there in the support folder for Drakensang.
I'll keep researching it...
Changing Wine to Windows XP removes the error, but the game still won't completely launch.
I can get to the login window, but updates aren't working and when I login, the game screen never appears.

I read the same things, specially with Hearthstone and Origin.
Unfortunately XP didn't help. I tried all kinds of Wine versions and still no success.
I'll keep researching and will probably post on the Drakensang forum to see if anyone else is having this exact same problem.

I have a feeling the devs were using an earlier version of QT and are now using QT5. There are a lot of posts online about the error I'm getting, but it for windows and other GUI uses, not Drakensang related.

Drakensang is definitely broken! I have tried it over and over with different versions of Wine and I still get the Qt5 error with Win7 and download errors with Win XP.
For now its a waiting game...
Once Wine developers have updated Wine to be compatible with Qt5 Drakensang should work again.
If not, maybe someone will patch a version of Wine to fix it for us.
I have posted in PlayOnLinux.com forums and the Drakensang forums. So far I have not heard many responses, which is strange because I'm sure 100's of gamers are playing it in Wine and PlayOnLinux.

The guide was updated and QT5 now runs in PlayOnLinux with Drakensang. Also try a newer version of Wine without the QT5 network patch and it might work fine... I haven't tried myself yet

Thats great! I'm glad Wine finally worked out the QT5 bugs
Thanks to other clients like Battle.net and Steam of course.

Wow, i'm surprised you need a plugin to get the exe
I've seen this problem before and most sites have a button for "other operating systems" or "Win"

Don't click the big "Download" button at the top
Go to www.drakensangonline.com
Click "Play Now"
Login
There is a button on the left side "Download Game"
I clicked it and got a Windows installer exe

What? No button on the left? That is really strange. What plugin did you use to get the exe?