The quick short answer: unbound Redzen (which is their purchasable virtual currency). Now the longer part.
Back during the first CBT, one of the things I was curious about was how Webzen intended to monetize MU Legend. Those initial closed betas did not include the cash shop so it was also unclear what type of items would be sold. Some of the NPC vendors like the Magic Gem one sold cosmetic items which gave a now erroneous impression that there would be a lot in-game methods to customize the looks of your character.
I purposely did not look at the cash shop (known as the Legend Shop) or the trade broker (auction house) over the past few days until I got my first character to the current level cap (65) because I didn’t want any of that to potentially taint my view of how the game itself rewarded players in terms of quest fed items and other rewards from achievements.
Backing up a bit, I managed to login before the queues began on Saturday (November 11th) and finally reached level 65 on my whisperer. I initially ran only the main line quest and stayed never really out-leveled the areas. It was only until after level 35 or so where I began to be consistently under leveled (where the quests in the area were locked). After that, I had to run a lot more of the blue area quests and pink request ones.
I also did my allotted dailies for Fabrice’s Garden, Warped Magic Gem Mine, and Luery’s Secret Vault (once I hit the appropriate levels to unlock them). The only times I ran Rift dungeons were if they were in Overdrive. As I do with most games, I soloed since it gives me a better feel for the game play and boss mechanics in dungeons.
In my case, I hit level 65 while running the Pit of Nightmares dungeon (the final leg in the current quest line). Some other players hit this part of the quest line a few levels earlier and ran out of actual main line quests to do. In other words, the main quest line isn’t exactly close to perfect in terms of the XP curve. Gear wise, the quest fed drops do a pretty decent job of providing level appropriate items. Thus there really isn’t a need to utilize the trade broker to get pre-65 questing gear.
The following is what my character was like with a mix of level 50-60 gear equipped after having completed the story. I had left my 2nd expert skill slot open, still had to run the level 65 quest to unlock the 3rd slot, nor crafted an artifact yet. My combat power also isn’t inflated by a lot of health as I focused primarily on a mix of resource and cooldown reduction, life regen, crit rate, and attack speed.
Getting back to the main topic though, I was now ready to take a look at what the Legend Shop and trade broker was like. My first impression was not what you would say was a positive one. Bound Redzen (what you can earn in-game) is virtually useless since there isn’t much you can purchase in the cash shop with it.
The few cosmetic items require unbound Redzen and aren’t permanent. They don’t disappear after the time limit expires though; there’s a 30-day Magic Feather for wings and 30-day Magic Fabric for costumes that adds time to them.
The pet boxes are probably the most blatant items in the cash shop that reek of the “pay 2 win” moniker. Normally, I prefer to use “pay 2 convenience” or “pay 2 bypass the grind” but in this case, it’s sort of blatant since pets are a huge part of a characters growth and evolving them to tier 5 represents a significant time investment since you need to level another of the same type of pet and tier to evolve them. Pets can be earned in-game but are fairly rare drops (the drop rate during the CBT’s were boosted to allow players to try out the content).
Since this is a Korean MMO, all kinds of consumables and materials are normally utilized for enchanting, refining, evolving, etc equipment. So that part of the shop is what I was interested in seeing for the first time. You could say that I had a SMH moment when I clicked that tab and saw “Unbind Scroll” for 2000 Redzen (around $20). This consumable wasn’t actually surprising since character bound items had text that said “Available Unbinding Count: 5”.
Weapons, armor, and accessories aren’t bind on pickup (they are bind on equip) so I already knew that the trade broker would have end game gear on it. The unbind scroll essentially means those with top gear now, can unbind and resell it once they get something better. This for me is the closer definition of “pay 2 win” when you can just directly purchase such gear on an auction house. Going back to Devilian, that ability was removed for Trion (at their original associate producers request) and most higher end items made bind on pickup.
So after running doing my Fabrice’s and Magic Gem Mines dailies, I quickly upgraded to level 65 legendary chest, gloves, and boots (except the heroic weapon drops I got from those runs) plus a really cheap ancient helm buying it off the broker (most had the rolls I needed) for less than a million Zen total (these prices will crash in the next week once more players start doing end game). And no, it’s nowhere near satisfying gearing up this way (at the same time, why struggle against the RNG that gets jacked up post-questing). This is a quick head start that allows one to at least experience the content that would otherwise be more of a struggle to do.
On the other side, sellers can list items in Zen or Redzen (unbound). Because unbound Redzen can be used in the Legend Shop, it’s expected that most of the top tier items will be listed for Redzen since Zen for the most part is easily acquired at level cap. Unsurprisingly, current top tier items (Mythic) are mostly listed in Redzen.
So yeah, Webzen needs to get this under control before players start bailing from this game in the first month (like what happened when Trion failed dealing with all of the initial exploits with Devilian during its launch).
