I was working all weekend so I didn't get much chance to log into the Tarisland beta. Those Noah's Heart dailies don't do themselves, you know. I mean, they almost do but you still have to be there...
I wanted to play, though, and I did manage to get a few minutes, here and there. On Saturday evening I was fiddling about with the UI because I didn't have enough time to go adventuring, when I happened across something you'd think might have come up in the tutorial but, as far as I can remember, wasn't even mentioned - the Market.
By "Market" I don't exactly mean the cash shop. I think it probably will be the cash shop, when the game goes live, but there is no cash shop in this beta.
I suppose it's an assumption to say the game will have a cash shop when it goes live but it seems a pretty safe one. It would be a weird free-to-play title if it didn't. Then again, now I come to think of it, I haven't actually seen any mention of the payment model.
Hang on - I'll check...
Hmm. It's surprisngly unclear. I can't see anything specific on the official website other than the much-touted "Say No to Pay to Win!" policy. A general search of the web finds most sites describing it as "A Free to Play Cross-Platform MMORPG" so I guess that's what it is. I imagine the payment model is something so obvious to the Chinese developers they don't even feel the need to mention it. Are there any MMORPGs in their home market that require a subscription?
Anyway, getting back to the point, I hadn't noticed until a couple of days ago that there even was a marketplace. I think it might get a mention at some point during the extended tutorial but I don't recall anything specifically directing me to open a window or buy anything, as happens in most games that rely on people spending money in the company store. I had to find the Market for myself.
What I found when I did surprised me a little. I knew the game had various factions with which you could raise your Reputation and that by doing so you could purchase crafting patterns and other useful items. I also knew there were tokens to collect for doing different activities such as running dungeons and other instances and that you could spend those tokens on gear upgrades. What I hadn't appreciated was just how intensive and wide-reaching those systems were.
The Market window has three tabs: Appearance, Market and Trade Assoc.
There's next to nothing in the Market tab, just some health and mana potions, a four-slot backpack expander a name-change token, all of which you can buy for a small amount of silver, the most common in-game currency. I'm guessing (A lot of that going on here.) that this is the tab where most of the non-cosmetic Cash Shop items are going to appear, when the time comes.
The Trade Assoc. tab breaks down into half a dozen sub-tabs, each featuring a named Association. Some of those in turn open out into more tabs, around a dozen in all. That's almost certainly just the beginning of what you'll see when the game leaves beta.
The Associations are:
- Adventurers
- Honorary
- Universal Hall
- Reputation
- Lifestyle
- Friendship.
Each of them uses a different type of token from a different type of gameplay. The Adventurers Association rewards stat gear for the tokens you get from running dungeons, whereas the Honorary Association takes tokens from PvP. Sound familiar at all?
The Universal Hall is a kind of ascending solo instance as seen in games such as Final Fantasy XIV and takes tokens earned from doing that content. Reputation is self-explanatory. So far there are only three Reps, one for each of the zones available in beta, but presumably eventually there'll be one for every zone in the game. (And again, I'm making an assumption, this time that Tarisland will launch with more than three zones...)
Lifestyle Association is for crafters. This turns out to be where you buy the kind of mats that are often vendor-sold in MMORPGs, as well as the crafting tools themselves. If that was explained in the extremely brief crafting tutorial, I must have missed it. Everything in there costs nothing but silver and in amounts that seem very reasonable, although since I have yet to do any crafting, don't take my word for it.
For the Friendship Association it looks like Tarisland has borrowed an idea from FFXIV generally reckoned to have been a good one and then expanded on it. The currency you spend in this tab is the Friendship Badge, which you earn in three ways: by doing dungeons with players who have never done them before, by completing - or in some cases just attempting - the higher difficulty Elite and Arcane instances, and by taking on the Healer or Tank role in Raids. Be a good egg and karma will reward you, in other words.
It's a wide-ranging and potentially very solid scaffold on which to build a range of platforms for character-progression. It certainly seems to back up the No Pay-to-Win claim which, of course, invites the question so what are you going to make all your money on, then?
I'm guessing that's where the third tab, Appearance, comes in.
In Appearance you can buy Mounts (Ground and Flying), Costumes, Weapon Skins and what the game calls Pendants. We'll get to Pendants later.
All of the mounts (There are only four available in the beta) have special abilities in addition to their obvious mobilities. There's a mech suit that allows you to craft a portable Warehouse, giving remote access to the storage vault to you and your "nearby allies". There's also an elegant, icy elk-like creature called a Polar Bluehorn that allows you to gather crafting materials without having to dismount. I wanted that.
I'd seen people riding the Bluehorn and wondered what you had to do to get one. You get a free mount from a quest fairly early on but it's a clunking great rhino that I found aesthetically unpleasing, not least because someone on the art team made the dubious decision to have female characters ride the thing side-saddle.
Or maybe everyone has to. It's about as wide as a VW Microbus. You'd need some thighs to straddle one of those, gender notwithstanding.
It hadn't really occurred to me I might just be able to buy a better mount and even if the possibility had crossed my mind, I certainly hadn't entertained the idea that I might be able to afford it. When I found the mounts in the Market, it came as a very pleasant surprise to discover I could do both.
In beta, that is. I'm pretty sure it'll be different in the Live game.
It's not explained anywhere I could find it but I'm guessing everything in the Appearance tab will eventually be available only for a curency purchased with real money. Oh, I'm sure there will also be a way to earn a pittance of the same currency in-game. There always is. The main route to looking good, though, is going to be through your wallet.
For the beta, however, it seems we've all been given a stipend of three thousand... I'm going to call them Gems, because that's what they look like. Mousing over the icon for once produces nothing.
I spent a good, long while examining all the ways I could spend my free money. I really wanted the Dauntless Explorer costume, a kind of catwalk version of something Indiana Jones' cooler, younger sister might wear. (That's younger when the first movie came out, obviously, not younger than Indie is now, when his hypothetical lil' sis would probably be even older than I am...)
Unfortunately, I couldn't run to both that and the Polar Bluehorn and the sheer utility of not having to get on and off my mount to gather from nodes won out. That still left me with a chunk of change to spend so I spent some of it on...
Well, I kind of blew the reveal with the picture at the top of the post. Yes, I bought a duck.
And not just any duck, either. I spent 180 Gems on a bright yellow duckling that tosses a purple ball into the air then catches it, occasionally turning somersaults, all while sitting on a fluffy white cloud that floats over my character's head. The in game logic and lore-appropriate explanation for this is anyone's guess.
Weird objects that float above the player-character's head are called Pendants in the terminology of Tarisland. It's a category that also includes back items and halo-like particle effects, a couple of which I may well also spend my remainingGems on before the beta comes to an end. I am absolutely the target market for this kind of thing, always providing it's not going to cost me anything. Well, anything other than my self-respect, but that's a ship that sailed long ago.
All things considered, the mechanics underpinning this aspect of the in-game economy seem solid enough. I personally prefer the more traditional approach to gearing up that comes from beating up monsters and taking their stuff but token systems have been with us almost as long and many people seem to prefer their predictability.
According to the website, Tarisland is also supposed to have a "Free Trading System ... committed to restoring the freedom of trade in the endgame and creating an economic system that closely resembles a real market." If that's in the beta, I haven't found any sign of it yet, but then it took me twenty levels to find the bank, so once again, don't rely on anything I tell you.
At the end of my session this morning, most of which was spent researching this post, I was asked to complete another, entirely different, lengthy survey on how I was finding things. They didn't ask me to score the Market but if they had I'd have given it an 8 out of 10, which is what I've given most aspects of the game I've been asked about so far.
I am a very generous grader, though. Always have been.
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