Summary
After attending Gamescom 2023, I wrote a piece about the potential at the core of Throne And Liberty–as long as Amazon was willing to learn from its mistakes with Lost Ark and New World. Now, a new update from AGS on Throne And Liberty’s business model has me convinced: I think we’re actually seeing the company learn in real time. Pay to win is being removed from T&L. Not entirely, but it’s a massive step forward from Lost Ark.
The main premium currency in Throne And Liberty is called Lucent, which can be purchased with cold-hard cash, or earned in-game by selling items you’ve grinded for at the auction house. People who pay for lots of Lucent can’t outright buy the best gear in the game from the off, because someone, somewhere, will need to have grinded for it first. As far as I can tell, the gear you purchase from the auction house is base level, meaning you still need to play and grind to upgrade it fully.
All Lucent is taxed when used at an auction house. There’s a tax system that removes a small percentage of Lucent at source, and a tax rate that is set by the local castle owners in whichever region’s auction house you’re using. Tax generated via the castle is distributed to nearby PvP events, which can be completed with a chance of earning Lucent for guilds and solo players.
So here’s where the big changes come in. There’s a key difference between the global release and the Korean release: the seasonal battle pass can be purchased with Lucent, rather than just cash. This means that even free-to-play players can earn Lucent by grinding gear to sell on the auction house to ultimately purchase the battle pass.
On the Korean servers, once you’ve completed the battle pass, you can continue earning rewards via a bonus premium tier. This has been removed from the global release. An extra subscription offering various boosts available on KR servers, known as Blessing of Solisium, has also been removed from the global release.
The full changes to the battle pass are noted below, from the official update from AGS.
Amazon Games Updates:
While all of this is great news, it doesn’t entirely remove pay for convenience in the game, and it definitely won’t stop players from whaling if they want to. There are still plenty of ways to pay for convenience, with crucial crafting items that can be purchased with Lucent directly from the in-game shop and auction house. And ultimately, a few months into the game’s life, players will be able to swipe their credit card and buy the best base gear available anyway.
That being said, it definitely feels like these initial changes are positioning Throne And Liberty to be a ‘fairer’ game for free-to-play players. If you want the best gear, you don’t have to buy it, you may just farm and grind and do all those things that MMO players love to do. If you want to speed up that process and save yourself some precious time in this mortal coil, go ahead. I’m not saying the game is fixed and that AGS are the saviours from its poor reception in KR, but we’re getting there.We’ll see how the open beta goes.
