Runes of Magic’s Item Shop

I very well know that free to play game aren’t getting a lot of love, but bear with me here.

I’ve been playing Runes of Magic for quite a while now, as you may have noticed. RoM is a free to play game with an item shop where you spend real money to get ingame items, like mounts, jewel to upgrade your armor and weapons, cosmetic features, et cetera. To some people that’s the devil himself, for some other, like me, it’s just another way to make some money for the companies behind the game.

I’ve been playing Runes of Magic for the last 8 months. I started out last february and up until now I’ve spent a grand total of 15$, yep 15$. Quite often Frogster America will give us some discount on diamonds and items in the shop. Usually they go for the double diamonds weekend. The mounts, exp and tp potions, daily quest reset ticket are hits each time they go on sale.

What I like about the items shop in RoM is that you don’t absolutely have to buy from it to keep on moving on in the game. Sure, as you get to the higher levels you’ll have a harder time leveling and advancing, but with a little patience you can get enough diamonds for free to upgrade your gear even more. Between level 1 and 40 (since that’s the highest I’ve got) the only necessary things in the shop are the permanent mounts, that’s an absolute must.

For your information, 395 is about 20$ at normal price. I agree with you that’s wayyyy too much for a mount. But if you can wait a couple days you’ll be able to get one for about 200 diamonds. You just have to buy them when they’re at +100%.

Also, you can fill some poll to get free diamonds everyday at a rate of 16 per poll, that’s just another way to get more diamonds. Every week day there’s the Daily Offer and during the weekend it’s the weekend deal. Every week there’s a week long special too.

So there you have it, a basic run down of the item shop in Runes of Magic.

I think they did a pretty good job with the shop, but like anything else it could use a little tweaking with the prices, but as for now, I’m quite happy with the way I play the game. If you’re a casual player with a little money to invest it’s a pretty good game to go for.

Guild Wars

This week I’ve been trying Guild Wars. I never played before and thought it was about time to try it out, so I downloaded the trial and off I went. The game looks great for being such and “old” game. I loved the scenery and the way my Dervish looks. There’s also a lot of quest to do and I like the fact that you can add a Hero to your party to help you finish some quest that you would otherwise not be able to finish alone, that’s a nice feature that more MMO should have.

At first I was surprised at how many people still play the game. But the more I play and the more I learn about the game I can understand why so many people still play and why the community is still very active. I’m still a little bit disappointed about the lack of auction house, player shop and mounts. With the time the game has been online and the number of expansions I can’t understand why there’s nothing like that. I hope they “fix” that in GW2.

Guild Wars isn’t very solo friendly. I would like to be able to solo some content without that hero or the henchmen you can hire. I play with my friends and everyone are not always online at the same time, so if I want to adventure out alone I have to hier some henchmen to come with me in case I need a little help, or try to find someone who plays like me and likes adventuring out in the wild without really doing anything, and that’s hard to find. Also, there’s almost no gathering, and the crafting is really, really basic, which is another disappointment for me.

In Guild Wars the world is instanced, and I hate it, I absolutely hate going in portal to change zone or go back to the city, I never liked it and probably will never like it. I want a persistent world. That’s my biggest complaint about the game up until now. I haven’t tried the PvP yet, but I plan on doing that in the next few days.

So for now, here’s some screenshot I took earlier.

Aika Online

I just logged out from my first taste of Aika Online. It’s a fairly new free to play with item shop MMO in the west brought to us by gPotato and HanbiSoft.

I haven’t read much about the game so the following impression is based purely from my experience with the game.

The first thing you notice is that you can’t choose the sex of your character, it sucks, but it’s not the end of the world, I can live with that. Then I realize I can only create three characters.. okay… Nevertheless I create my warlock and log in!

The graphics looks really nice and the town I’m in looks lively with people running around and lively npc. So I decided to get some quests and go discover the land of Aika. Once outdoors the landscape looks nice but small, and I see a lot of Boars running around. I decide to launch my one and only attack, Fireball level 1. after 3 fireball the boar is history. Quite effective. At first glance my warlock looks like he can be pretty good at PvE.

After some quest I manage to get to level 7 and get my Pran, which strangely looks like a little fairy flying around my Warlock. Right now I don’t really know what it does, but I saw some people with what looked like older versions of my fairy, nice. Between my level 8 and 10 my fairy, who I named Acidalia, manage to hit level 2, again I don’t know what it does, but yay!

The quest were mostly the kind of quest you get in every standard MMO: “get me x of this“, “go kill x of this“, “go kill their boss“. But it’s still fun. I also noticed that you get 1 skill point per level, and the level cap is at 50, so that gives you 49 skill points. Just like my first mmo, Kal Online, I’m used to that.

Aika is supposed to be the WAR of F2P games, with a really big and nice RvR, but since I’m only level 10 I couldn’t test it out, and I didn’t have the time to check out the different factions of the game, that’ll have to wait.

Overall I liked my experience with the game, and I’ll probably log back in from time to time.