The Korean Cash Shop of Bless is indeed one of the fairest F2P Shops around. Unfortunately, Aeria Games has a bad reputation when it comes to Pay2Win games but they definitely made a lot of good moves in the last months by removing Pay2Win elements from some of their games. They also started communicating a lot with us by doing AMA's on reddit and answering questions on our forum. Aeria is trying hard to turn everything into the right direction and we are very sure that they will offer a fair Cash Shop for the western version.
The Korean Cash Store currently offers the usual F2P Premium Service for a monthly fee, Skins, Mounts, some smaller Pay2Progress items like Skill Books and Potions you can also buy at the NPC but no real Pay2Win Items.
What do you think? How should Aeria handle the Cash Shop question?
Official responds from Aeria so far
Q: All your games are Pay-to-win for about a decade now, what can you say to ensure us that BLESS will make a difference and not take the same wrong road ?
Aeria Games wrote:
A: I understand your and the other´s concerns. What´s happened in the past is difficult to change but I am not here to give empty promises, I think that Echo of Soul, Goal One and Dawn of Gods are good examples on how Aeria Games has changed recently and we will keep on changing, I believe that this ama is Aeria Game´s first one so.. yeah.. hey.. we are working on it.
Q: The gap between paying users and free users is always present – However in Bless KR the gap is fair (= not that wide). Will you keep an overall balanced gap or do you have a clear stance like “paying users before f2p users” or something like that.
Now about the game itself
Aeria Games wrote:
A: I don´t have such a stance. I think a non-payer, a low-payer and a high spender should enjoy playing together, or against each other. Among F2P mmorpgs there is however the time vs. money approach, how much time does a non-payer have to invest to reach a goal equal to a certain amount of real currency a payer has spent? That´s something that can be balanced, e.g. is 3 USD / hour better than 7 USD / hour? In theory yes, because it makes items cheaper, in reality it may be not, because it makes the time invested less valuable. This is just one of the dimensions we will think about in the upcoming months