It’s not a surprise that EQ Legends has a cash shop. The developers said there would be one; EverQuest and EverQuest II both have them. It’s a different revenue stream, and the devs have to make a living, so why not? It’s not pay to win, is it?
They didn’t put something in the market that, when bought, would instantly put you head and shoulders above everyone else, did they?
Well, no, actually. I don’t see anything like that, yet.
Like most games with cash shops, they don’t sell things to you directly. There’s probably a lot of legal and psychological reasons why they make you buy a fake currency — “iridium coins” — in order to then purchase something from the cash shop. 100 iridium coins can be purchased for a dollar in the US, with a discount given for spending more at once. Since they are not tradable, there’s no funny business with buying iridium coins cheap in Canada and reselling them at a premium to players in the States.
I farmed Runnyeye for a few hours one night and got lots of cool looking black armor — Blackened Iron and Blackened Alloy. My character looks sick in the outfit, but the armor just isn’t good enough to wear full time. The solution? Armor Ornamentation Tokens. Using one of those on a piece of armor creates an ornamentation exaltation that you can slot into any of your non-robe gear. Doing this for all your visible slots, if you’re not a (stinking!) robe wearer would cost… lessee… head, chest, arms, hands, legs, feet — 6 x 500 iridium — 30 buckeroos USD.
Since robe wearers have robes that cover chest, legs and arms, their token costs a little more, so transforming everything would be 1000 + 3×500 = 25 pictures of George Washington (in the US).
That’s a lot of money for what a lot of MMOs give for free. I never paid a cent to do this stuff on FFXIV.
Ah fudge, Massively was asking on the soc meds today about all the MMOs you played, and I totally forgot FFXI and FFXIV. There, fixed.
Aside from the two appearance things, what else do they have?
- Primary Class Unlock Token – allows you to change to a new primary class. You get locked into the one you have active when you reach level 11 the first time. I believe you get one of these for free when you hit level 50 for the first time.
- Bottle of Alternate Adventure — the next five alternate advancement (AA) points you get, you get a second for a buck.
- Token of Reclamation — let’s you undelete an item you have deleted. I dunno, be more careful.
- Potion of Amnesia — I used to know what this did, but I forgot.
- Race Unlock Token — you can switch to any race you have unlocked at any time. Unlocking requires a specific quest, specific to each race. You can just bypass this by buying the token, or just being more deliberate during character creation. Or be an enchanter.
- Weapon Ornamentation Token — lets you copy the appearance of that Rusty Dagger you found at level 1 over your Fiery Avenger. Stealth mode, baby.
The balance of the marketplace covers weight reducing bags with huge carrying capacity, and upgrades to the amount of storage available if the various buckets available to you.
The Race and Primary Class unlocks can be obtained for free in game. Better bags will become available with tailoring.
One of the things I really loved about classic EverQuest was how you couldn’t change the appearance of your armor. People could read the history of your character just by looking at you, especially once epic quests went live. But you could look at a warrior and see, aha, crafted armor, they did their Temple of Sol Ro quests and hurt a lot of centaurs. But they have some of that indicolite; they’ve been to the Plane of Hate. They tanked it! Much respect.
Same for the other classes.
But those days are probably gone forever. And hey, if it were a little cheaper, I would totally rock the black armor look. I look great in black.
I’m wondering if there isn’t some way of obtaining the armor appearance things in-game, since everything else seems to be in game in some capacity (well, the race / deity / class changes are at least). I get that they want a way to snag their whales, but it’s really expensive when you’re look at it per slot..