He doesnt care if you can get the items through Cash shop and playing. His beef is that he spent X amount of hours to get something where someone else just paid cash for it.

I enjoyed PS2's payment model. I thought it was a great idea to allow those of us with jobs that sometimes require 60 hours of work a week a chance to stay competitive. And has been said, the only thing you could buy were different weapons, not the individual upgrades (which were the more important aspets).

To make it fit into the MMORPG mold I could see them adding the following for sale:
1. XP potions (obv)
2. If there are corpse runs, a "buy your corpse" feature. Which would be a HUGE win for us players that can only play 2-3 hours a night at most. One death in a dungeon and I'm out *two* days of playing.
3. Appearance items. They are the cash-cow of EQ2, so I don't see how they launch EQN without appearance slots.
4. Mounts (duh)
5. Bonuses for any other unknown EQN feature

That is SOE's kind of model when it comes to their cash shops. Have things buyable that makes things look prettier or go faster. But you can't buy a new step in a quest. You can't buy a new weapon that puts raid weapons to shame.

Also on Smedley. I'm sure at one point he did think of players as just Credit Cards, but that stance sure seemed to change with PS2. A lot of the changes/balances to the game occurred because he was in game asking players what they thought of the balances and direction of the game. Heck, they even had a poll at some point (don't know how that turned out, stopped playing after 3 months). So while it may be true that his vision hurt original EQ, I think he learned.

Selling cosmetic items, that have appearance only value I can understand.
Selling anything with even slightest effect on gameplay - I am out of here.

Agreed, though I wish they wouldn't have those appearance only items. I can't help myself and easily spent $200 on eq2 to make my chars look cool then quit a month later...

If you're able to purchase anything in EQNext that gives you an advantage, I doubt I'll be playing it. This includes runspeed increases, and mounts (unless they're really easy to get in game). I'd kinda forgotten that SOE had moved away from subscriptions and were going the microtransaction route.

This is unsettling.

On the bright side..it is a sandbox. Having a normal cash shop isn't something that can be done; it has to be tailored specifically to not effect gameplay. Really it's so easy to avoid cashshops, and if you really do like the game..put some money down. I've spent over $300 on League of Legends and don't regret it because it's a great game.

Check out the EQ 2 shop, I can only imagine that their next game will have even more stuff to buy.

Just FYI, increasing runspeed has a subtle but deep impact on the entire game flow. Being able to buy it undermines the fundamental feel of the world (the genius of the Bard in EQ is that it's a class whose core mechanic is runspeed).

If you can buy runspeed (item, mount), you *can* buy power.

The impact of runspeed is not at all subtle, lol :P

Bard class got a big nerf when mounts were introduced in Luclin.

Totally agree (and Thott had a great post pointing it out back in the day).

It's really surprised me that people have not understood the fundamental effect of movement speed, and have had to have it pointed out to them over and over again (I laboured to explain the point as a dev on other games, and those making the decisions neither understood nor agreed - so I'm left with the assumption that it must be a more subtle point than it appears to be to me).

Giving it away via ingame purchases or to everyone via mounts removes an element of RPG progression and possible class distinction that EQ got beautifully right. The same can be said for porting, healing, CC etc.