Leaderboard: Are you up in arms over Black Desert’s cash shop?

Since the Black Desert beta opened up, the cash shop has been at the center of a gathering storm. While the game is ostensibly a buy-to-play MMO with an upfront box price, the cash shop looks a lot more like one for a purely free-to-play game, completely with storage for sale and costumes that run over $30.

Some players have argued that the cash shop isn’t particularly pay-to-win at all and that other games have expensive cash-shop items (consider Marvel Heroes’ bundles or Path of Exile’s $1000 custom weapon skin), never mind the trinkets you can pick up in a standard game Kickstarter campaign or the gambleboxes that nearly every MMO now vends.

Others say that the box price is a virtual rip-off that provides few benefits — and worse, that even if you don’t mind personally paying upwards of $32 for a costume, Daum may be shooting itself in the foot by running the game as an apparent pump and dump that will struggle once players wise up, tarnishing the game as well as the genre (consider Allods Online’s early cash-shop struggles and ArcheAge’s frequent debacles).

Daum told MMORPG.com that it is “closely monitoring the Closed Beta to ensure that each member of our community has a fair experience” in the game. “This begins with gameplay mechanics and reaches as far as our new monetization systems,” it says. “When we decided on a ‘Buy to Play’ model for Black Desert Online, it was with the players in mind. At Daum Games, we put players first and it’s our mission to ensure that players are given the value they expect when playing our games. We will continue to monitor and analyze the response from the community and thank you all for your participation and feedback.”

Let’s give ’em some feedback, then. What do you think? Where do you stand on Black Desert’s cash shop? (You can pick multiple responses to this poll.)

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With thanks to Lewis ‘PersistentWorlder’ Burnell.