Common Skills Rank Pool
------------- ------------ ------------
Combat Transcendent Melee
Resilience Transcendent Fitness
Discernment Virtuoso Intellect
Magic Virtuoso Arcana
Planar Transcendent Mysticism
Discipline Transcendent Willpower
Environment Virtuoso Communion
Influence Transcendent Magnetism
Riding Adept Magnetism
Arts Capable Finearts
Highmagic Transcendent Arcana
Dramatics Mythical Performance
Aethercraft Fabled Mysticism
Combateer

Trade Skills Rank Pool
------------- ------------ ------------
Forging Transcendent Melee

Guild Skills Rank Pool
------------- ------------ ------------
Knighthood Transcendent Melee
Bonecrusher
Athletics Mythical Fitness
Totems Transcendent Arcana
Moon

Haven't bought a single OOC credit. Also have 850 credits worth of artifact runes.

I hate you

I love the Shiri! Yep it's a me.

I disagree with the essay's opinions. Earned roughly 23,000 credits in Lusternia so far without buying them from the web site. (That doesn't include the thousands of credits I earned in Achaea first, either.) Iasmos is "omnitrans" and has nearly every artifact he can use.

I would say that you and the map-maker over there sit in a rather unique position for making credits. Just sayin!

I should write my own essay, called "Victim of My Own Success."

One thing you can do (which I did as a player) is to buy a certain amount of credits each month if you are worried about spending a ton of money (ie, $15 worth - how much a WoW subscription would cost).

At any rate, a ton of players play without ever spending a dime on credits, so I disagree with the essay too. It is true that you can spend a lot of money, but examining only the outliers (either those that spend a lot or those that spend nothing) is pretty misleading about the average Lusternian player.

Or the average IRE player in general, I'd imagine.

I've dumped a large amount of money on credits. I've made two big purchases, actually. The first missed a 30% credit sale by a day (go me) and I never thought to ask at the time. The second, I put aside spending money and waited for the next large credit sale, this current one.

While of course I buy credits to get skills and artifacts and such, its also important to me that Lusternia remains a worthwhile buisness activity for IRE. It is a business at the end of the day, and I never get the feeling that our playerbase here is so huge that money just pours in. It is wonderful that payment is ultimately voluntary, but ultimately in game gold won't cover real world costs of operations. So while I know it is a badge of pride for some people not to pay a dime of real money on their beloved hobby (which I can't fault), someone has to pay ultimately, or the game will go away!

And Rika, sheesh, pay $10 or whatever it is and make yourself immune to deletion. I don't know how you stand it, though that's probably my own paranoia showing!

Everyone wants the chance to pull a Fazlee, come on.

I suspect so as well, but I am not privy to other games' player demographics so can't answer definitively.

ZOMG! MORGFYRE KNOWS MY DEMOGRAPHICS! FLEEEEEEE!!!!

Considering he almost singlehandedly crashed the credit market in Imperian (granted, I had a big hand in that too), his suiciding to waste all the credits was a bit aggravating.

Emo raging and suiciding was fantastic, come on.

Not after I bribed him with 100 credits to go Aryana.

I rationalize my activities by the fact that without systems to purchase (with credits, mind you), many of the paying customers would get frustrated and leave. Same goes for maps or anything like that. Us "outliers" who make credits by scripting, mapping, and what-not will keep the customers coming back for longer.



I was worried about this myself, which is why I actually have that one credit purchase on my record. I think it was $20, but it might've been $15. Can't remember.

At this point, I'm just wondering who's earned/bought the most credits in the game.

Elaborate?

I think I made this argument for you, some time ago.

He suicided a character worth thousands of credits, then remade it shortly after.

I find this analysis interesting.

On the one hand, I think it is correct that if you spend money on an IRE game, you are likely to spend more money then you would a subscription.

On the other hand, there are many games I refuse to play because of subscriptions, since I know that I will often be paying for time I'm not playing. (where as in IRE games, the amount of money I spend it directly correlated to the amount of time I play and feel addicted to the game)

So personally, I think it should be advertised more that people spend Waaay too much money on a single game, when they have a credit system, as I would like to play more games that use this model of business rather than subscription based model.

I.e. it would be better for us consumers overall, if more games existed because they needed less commited players to stay in business. (i.e. they only need 1,000 credit buying customers instead instead of 20,000 subscriptions)