I won't be able to fire it up until I get in from work this evening but hearing the p2w stuff is really discouraging. Im not sure why I expected any different, but I guess Ill see how bad it is before deciding how much time to sink into a game I cant read.
I haven't seen a good list of what is offered in the shop yet, not sure if it's deactivated during the open beta? They have a website but it's only a preview of the shop.
Things it has atm: Avatars(costumes) with stats, unique mounts, system where you spend x and get rewards for each tier, consumables that increase xp rate, other types of materials/consumables, launch packages(just a bunch of stuff for cheaper in a big package, usual for F2P games, highest is 60$ I believe). Sadly their website is getting fucked and it's timing out even though it's the middle of the night in korea so can't check exactly what the items are, just seeing the page on a stream.
Anyway avatars is definitely the main issue, but it's unclear if you can get similar quality avatars ingame or if you have to go through the cash shop, and if they can be sold to other players(which is still kinda meh since it lets players buy gold basically). The main complaint I see is that the avatars come with charisma, which lets you do sidequests without progressing your relationship with the NPCs(I think similar to BDO stuff, some other kMMOs do that too) so you can do them right away at lvl 1. It's unclear wether those sidequests actually matter at all though.
Consumables and shit was expected, but again it's unclear just what they affect and how good they are. Almost every korean mmo has these, but in some cases they're just like retarded casual package stuff, like "I can't fucking dodge anything and I don't have money ingame so I buy potions on the cash shop" kind of thing. In some others, they give a tangible advantage over ingame consumables, by giving you self rez options without penalties for example. There's also some sort of powder/crystal shit that might be crafting/upgrading materials, which as anyone who's played a korean mmo before knows, is probably not a good thing since you'll be failling upgrades a lot and being able to just credit card your way through the RNG for gear upgrades is a big nono.
Anyway, so far it looks pretty bad, but I haven't seen a good detailed explanation, just some guy showing the website which doesn't let you see exact stats, partly because people are probably not high level enough to know exactly how much of an impact things have, and partly because I think the cash shop might not be open until launch.
Anyway I think for this type of game what matters is the F2P experience, once they bring it in the west. If you can say, spend 60bucks and then not have to spend more and not feel like a 3rd class citizen, it's fine in my book. If you have to spend 60bucks a month to stay competitive, they can go fuck themselves. Hitting that sweetspot between P2W and "P2W but playable" is what matters for western releases of this type of game I think. Obviously some people are still completely against the 2nd category, but I don't mind so much if the game is fun, I don't have an aversion to spending "some" money on games, just I'm never going to spend 200bucks on a game, unless it's over a very long period of time(sub based mmos, or path of exile for example).