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.
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