Pondering my Teenage Internet Spaceship Picture Blog

As some of you may recall, I actually have two active blogs. (And a few inactive ones.)  There is this one and EVE Online Pictures, both of which have been around and active for more than a decade.

The original banner for the blog back in 2008

In fact, EVE Online Pictures will hit the 13 year mark later on this month.  For some reason I thought it was today when I set out to write this… I probably mixed up May 2008 with May 8th or something… but we’re close enough for me to carry on.  And that is kind of a long time to run.  The site pre-dates DOTLAN EVE Maps by a couple months.

That blog started as an experiment in blogging, a tale I covered at the five year anniversary, and then kind of carried on for a while. Eventually it had been around long enough that it served as a vehicle to get me into the fansite program.  But the fansite program is gone, and I did not make the cut for the new program, so now it is just a place where I post some screen shots regularly.  That has led me to wonder if it is even worth the effort.

In favor of keeping it is the fact that it isn’t all that onerous of task to post three screen shots a week, my current posting tempo.  The most difficult aspect of that is just me being picky about what gets posted and trying not to post a bunch of the same thing in a row and keeping to a general philosophy of trying to find pictures of things that are cool of things or situations that maybe not everybody has seen.

The abundance of “fleet bridging off of a titan” shots is probably telling.  I have been doing that regularly for almost 10 years now and I still think it is a spectacle worth sharing.

Then again, there are more than a few screen shots of Jita 4-4, which is probably a location more people have seen than any other in the game, so clearly that philosophy might need some tuning.

Anyway, by merely lowering my standards a bit, and given all the screen shots I have taken over the years, I could probably keep posting pictures for the rest of my natural life even if I stopped playing the game today.

The downside of carrying on is that almost nobody visits the blog.

It was never as popular as this blog.  Even at its peak in late 2012 it was barely closing in on 200 page views a day, while this site was around 2,000, back during the last gasp of blogging being popular.   The peak day logged 959 page views, thanks to CCP linking to me in regards to an image they used.  This blog, for comparison, still passes that number regularly.

The peak times ended when the Google image search change came in.  Google was the source for most of the site’s traffic, though the top posts might indicate that perhaps I wasn’t always getting people who were looking for EVE Online related item.  The top five most popular posts are:

1. B-R5RB Infographic
2. Space Cockroach
3. Sansha Battle Station
4. Asteroid Mining Station
5. The Maze Complex

Three of those five aren’t even screen shots I took.

Then, in January 2013, Google changed their image search model so that kept cached versions of images and would simply display a larger version of the image you clicked on rather than sending you to the hosting site, and traffic fell off rather sharply.

Traffic is now low enough… down to about 20 page views a day during slow months, which is a step or two down from even the slow times I recorded at the 10 year anniversary… that a single person scrolling down through pictures… infinite scroll for the win… can influence the page view count.  I had a month a while back where, looking at the stats, somebody scrolled back through every picture.  That was the month with the most page views for the whole year.

Traffic is low.  Comments are almost non-existant unless I mistake a Stratios for an Astero (which I have done twice).  The most feedback I get is over on Tumblr, where all my images get re-posted automatically, where a couple of people will like a post and occasionally somebody will re-post one to their own thread.

Does traffic matter?

I have said, for this blog, that I would keep on as I have done even as traffic has fallen off, and have pretty much kept to that.  The peak of this blog, when it comes to traffic and comments and whatever, was back in 2013 as well.  It has been mostly downhill since then.  Meanwhile, I have posted for more than 400 days in a row… WP.com keeps me abreast of my posting streak… and my word count per post has continued to rise.  It is almost as if more words means fewer page views!

However, what I write here is mostly for me or a few select individuals.  Everybody else is invited along for the ride, but only my attendance is mandatory to keep going.

With screen shots… not so much.  There are some images over there that are meaningful… but generally, those same images get used over here as well, often in a post describing the context that makes them meaningful.  As much as I love to inject screen shots into my posts… and I do that do excess because they often bring back the emotions of the moment… it is the words around them that set the context that matter more.

And then there is WP.com itself, which has made having a picture blog more annoying over time.  I did finally find a way to post a screen shot that let you click on it and see a bigger version with an option to see the full size version.  You have to use the new block editor… I hate it for actual writing, but for posting a screen shot I can deal with it… then remember to dig down and set the image link correct… which I forget to do about half the time… and then it sort of works.  Otherwise it won’t let you view the image in a larger for, or constricts it into a frame that is a big ad for “start a blog!”  I miss the old days when you could just click on an image and see the full size raw if you wanted, because most of these screen shots really should be viewed in a larger frame that the blog allows.  But, then again, as noted above, almost nobody even shows up at the blog and somebody actually clicking on an image to view it’s full size form is so rare as to be almost a once a year occurrence.

So I have hit a point of malaise when it comes to EVE Online Pictures.  Thirteen years is a long time to do anything consistently and I am starting to feel tired of doing it.  I have, on occasion, tried to make it more than a screen shot blog, posting the latest videos from CCP or noting events or updates.  But I really do that here for the most part, so I tended to slip back rather that be redundant.

If I could go back in time and give myself some blogging advice, right after suggesting that I find a better name for this blog, and just forgetting about that pizza blog idea, I’d tell myself just to make screen shots a regular feature here rather than devoting a whole blog to the idea.  Better to consolidate in one location.

Then again, I wonder if I would have been so diligent about categorizing screen shots by ship faction and tagging them all by hull type. (The Avatar titan is the most tagged hull on the site, appearing 121 of the approximately two thousand screen shots there.)

Getting back to where I started, having meandered down the page, I have been thinking about the future of that blog.  I get tired just thinking about it right now, but I wonder if I will regret it later if I stop.  I suspect that habit will carry me forward for a while longer, along with a war that is still giving me plenty of material.  But the war will end some day, though I might be tired enough of New Eden at that point that I’ll want a break from there as well.

PLEX Trading and the EVE Portal Companion App

I am not a big fan of the EVE Portal App, which was rolled out to us last August.

EVE Portal App

I’ve tried it a couple of times and… well… it is kind of shit.

That probably isn’t fair.

Say rather that it does not fulfill any useful purpose for me in a world where the Neocom II app exists.  That gives me all the game info I need in a format I prefer.  This is largely because I want to run the app on my iPad (aging people like bigger screens), and the EVE Portal App is strictly designed for phone screens, so even when resized to the tablet screen it looks awkward and cramped and mis-aligned, while Neorcom II is designed for a tablet screen. (Though the EVE Portal App is a lot worse than other phone focused apps in that regard.)

Take the skill queue view, for example.

Skill queue EVE Portal App

Skill queue in the Neocom II app

That is the exact same amount of screen real estate being used or mis-used.

The EVE Portal App does have the advantage of letting you change your skill queue, along with a few other things the Neocom II app cannot do, but nothing all that important to me.

All of which doesn’t mean much because, as a general rule, I try not to go out of my way to bang on things I don’t like if they are peripheral to my game play.  But today, today I feel the need to bring it up.  Why?  Because CCP just pushed out an update that introduces a PLEX trading feature to the app.

PLEX Trading on you Phone

As briefly described in their announcement:

A new feature has come to EVE Portal, the official EVE Online companion app. Exclusively for players in Omega Clone state, the Jita PLEX Market will enable you to trade PLEX anytime and anywhere, directly from your mobile device via the EVE Portal app.

The Jita PLEX Market gives you the ability to trade PLEX for ISK and vice versa. All transactions go through the Jita 4-4 market where players can browse and create PLEX sell & buy orders. In addition, you can browse and modify/cancel outstanding PLEX orders and browse your PLEX transaction history.

CCP mentioned something about this being a plan in the past, but if we started listing out things that CCP brought up as possibilities that never quite came to pass, we might be here for a while.  But now that it is here, the question that springs to mind is, “Why?”

I know why CCP would want this.  Anything that sells more PLEX is money in the bank for them.  By is there a group of players out there who are dying to buy and sell PLEX in game to such an extent that they need access to the market on their phone?

I am also curious about this going through the Jita 4-4 station exclusively, regardless of where your clone might me.  I guess it simplifies things somewhat, just pegging it to that location, and is something of an incentive to use the app if you don’t already have a Jita alt.  It also officially cements that station as the central trade hub of New Eden, as if there were any doubt.  But it does leave out the Perimeter Trade Towers one jump over where the prices are a bit lower.

You do get an advantage selling PLEX through the app, at least if you want to sell immediately to a buy order; you get a pass on the broker’s fee, which can run around 100K ISK alone per PLEX.  I guess that is something to tempt people who just buy PLEX to sell it for ISK right away, effectively a little extra ISK in your pocket with each sale.

But was it worth the effort?

Again, it isn’t going to impact me as I am not going to use it since the app looks horrible on the iPad.  I mean, seriously bad, worse than that first screen shot might lead you to believe.

EVE Portal – not for tablets

But it might impact the EVE Online economy I suppose… if anybody uses it.

Claiming the Pets of Children’s Week

It has been quite a stretch since I have done anything with Children’s Week in WoW.  I cannot even remember when I last did one of the quests, which probably means it has been a few expansions.  But for Battle for Azeroth the added in a new set of quests with a new set of pets, and once I noticed that I was pretty sure I had to give it a look.

While getting all the achievements for Children’s Week is an annoyance with which I haven’t bothered, the actual main quest that earns you a pet generally isn’t all that tough.  As has been the case in the past, the BfA version is a tour of some locations.  Once I found Orphan Matron Westerson it was the same routine as past versions.  Having hit level 120 with my main and done all the story lines and explored all the places… or most of the places, though I may have just forgotten some I visited so long ago at this point… that I was able to run through the quests little orphan Liam doles out easily enough.  And once I returned him to the orphanage the quest line was done and I was able to claim one of the four new battle pets.

I chose one and thought about how it was going to take three more holidays… three more years… to get the rest.  It has been long enough since I did Children’s Week that I think I only had my main in position to do the quests back then, so I collected the pets slowly, over years.

But after Warlords of Draenor and Legion I have a ton of alts… well, at least six… in place and able to run around Kul Tiras.  I just got an alt to level 120 last week.  So I got him out and found that, at some point, I had done the intro quests for BfA.  So I took the portal from the fancy new portal room in Stormwind (Orgrimmar got a better room) and went to the flight master to take the ride over to close by where the orphanage was.  However, the flight master didn’t have anything for me.

When you’re new in town

I could walk to the orphanage, that was just on the other side of town.  But the rest of the locations… well, I could ride there, but it wasn’t going to be as lickety split as having the local flight point.  Then I remembered something I bought from the 7th Legion supply office after I hit exalted with them and was picking up all the things they had on offer.  It was some sort of scouting maps that said something about flight points.  I had clicked on it, but it didn’t do anything for my main, so I wasn’t sure what it might really be for.  But it was bound to account, which meant I could send it to alts.  So I sent it to my druid.

The 7th Legion comes through

And sure enough, after I clicked on that the flight path options expanded greatly.

What you get after you show them your card

That made getting through and running the quest easy enough. My druid hadn’t upgraded his gear, save to buy a weapon at the auction house, since at level 120 the artifact weapon from Legion looked puny compared to green drops available on the auction house, and upgrading just that would keep his ilevel down, avoided the bad half of the difficulty ramp.

So I had two pets.

I got my hunter out.  He was level 112 and had been in Kul Tiras since early on.  He even had a few flight points.  But once I sent him the scouting report he had them all and soon enough I had three of the new pets for Children’s Week.

But at that point I was out of easy answers.  Anybody else would have to go through the intro story to get into BfA which I recall being long and tedious after a while.  Still, I thought I would give it a shot.  I picked my Dranei death knight.  I had started him on the pet battle run to get some levels.  He recalled to Stormwind, picked up a better weapon at the auction house, stopped off at Darkmoon Faire, then went to find Mathias Shaw.

Why yes, I have been to the fair. How did you know?

Fortunately my memory of the intro includes a bunch of the pre-expansion stuff from last summer.  Instead off all that you jump straight to Siege of Lordaeron, skipping past all that tree burning build up.  It is still a group event and you have to queue up for it, but there are enough people still doing it that the queue popped pretty quickly.

Fish Head in Lordaeron

That ran pretty well and did not take as much time to get to Sylvanas as I thought it might.  She got her big monologue and escape and then it was back to Stormwind for discussions and then the task to sail with Jaina Proudmoore to Kul Tiras.  I groaned a little bit at that as, while I enjoyed the whole jail break scenario when it was new, I had done it a couple of times already.  Fortunately Jaina is a good commander and has her troops covered.

Or you can just skip all of that…

There is still a little intro quest, but the fourth stop is the flight master and I was headed there anyway.  I had sent the scouting map to my DK so he was quickly at the orphanage.

Is this were I rent an orphan?

So little Liam rode around with my DK and saw the sights of Kul Tiras.  For the fourth run it was a bit of a whirlwind tour.  I had all the trigger locations set and didn’t hang around for conversations or tours.  Sorry Liam.  But he still seemed as excited at the end.

And you have that battle pet for me, right kid?

And so I ended up with all four of the Kul Tiras Children’s Week battle pets.

All in my leveling queue

Now I am trying to remember if I did claim all the pets for the earlier versions.  It might be time to go check before the event ends tomorrow.

Addendum:

I was missing one pet from the Burning Crusade version of the event.

Legs acquired

That has been taken care of now.

EVE Online Third Party Apocalypse Day

The deadline in question is May 8th, 2018. On this date, we’ll be shutting down the XML and CREST APIs.

–Announcement, Third Party Developer Blog

Today is the day.  It was announced back in January that the old XML and CREST APIs interfaces into EVE Online would be turned off.  The new ESI API has replaced them both.

Those APIs were how many of us got our data into various utilities over the years.  CCP was fairly forward thinking in giving us that access which has allowed third parties to make our lives in New Eden much easier.

Theses APIs have, I suppose, even been a crutch for CCP.  By allowing things like the old EVE Fitting Tool application to be viable let CCP work on other things while leaving the very rudimentary fitting interface in the game to stay as it was for many years.  It allowed third parties to fill in the many gaps in their product.

Of course, it isn’t the end of all of that today.  Plenty of projects have made the transition from XML or CREST to the new ESI API.

Everybody’s favorite zKillboard made the transition a while back.  Likewise, the essetial DOTLAN EVE Maps site made the transition as well, though cut it a bit closer to the wire.

I'm beginning with the switchover to the esi backend for @dotlan EveMaps. Please take a seat and relax in case of turbulence. #LongLiveESI @EveOnline

— Daniel (@Wollari) May 7, 2018

The null sec influence maps have some issues, but are reported to be mostly working.

In the Imperium our character validations swapped over to the ESI API back in March with a deadline to get all players and corporations on it by the middle of last month.  Those who did not make the cut got kicked.  GSF saw a drop of thousands of accounts as a byproduct.

TNT, my own alliance, made the transition more recently.  I am up on the new API there and in our new forums.  I am not sure how reimbursement will work now though.  To submit a loss you have to include the in-game CREST API link.  Did that get updated?  I guess I will find out next time I lose a ship.

Basically, essential things and actively supported projects seem to have made the transition and are mostly running today the way they were yesterday.

The apocalypse has come in the form of languishing projects, things no longer fully supported because the original developer has given up or moved on.  There are many older utilities and sites that were still humming along, able to do their thing mostly okay up until today.

The biggest hit for me on that front is EVEMon.

The familiar logo

The death of EVEMon is a serious blow.  This was the first utility for EVE Online I discovered and it has remained a staple of my time with the game ever since.  I remember when the EVEMon site was hosted over at Battle Clinic, itself a couple years gone.  I launch this application almost every single day when I log into my computer.

And now it is dead.

I am not sure how I am going to replace it.

Sure, there are other utilities that do bits and pieces of what EVEMon did, and the interface within the game has gotten much, much better over the years.  But I have grown so used to EVEMon as a one stop shop to check things across multiple characters over the years that I suspect that I am going to need to hide the icon for it lest I continue to open it up out of habit.

This might be the end of my post every 10 million skill points.  I use EVEMon to collect that data because it was the easiest way to get at it.

So say good-bye to EVE Mon.

My backup plan for doing that post was EVEboard Character Sheets.  However that seems to have been a victim of today’s shut down as well.

Pretty sure those API errors are not temporary…

The site is run by Chribba, and the news section on the front page still points to the now dead API pages, all of which return a 404 if you attempt to visit them.  There is no time stamp on when he did the last update, but it was probably a while back and there is no mention of the new ESI API.  So this could be the end for that site as well.

I also looked into EVE HQ, another utility app, but the current version there still wants you to enter the old API information, so no joy on that front.

These are not the APIs you’re looking for…

There is talk of a future version using the ESI API, but nothing concrete.  Third party developers have lives outside of their utilities.

Today is probably also the final nail in the coffin for the languishing EVE Fitting Tool (EFT).  It hasn’t seen a full update since 2016, but somebody was providing new data files for it to keep it useful.  With the end of access to character data to see if you can fly your spiffy new fit, it feels like it might be time to let that go as well.

There is better news on the Pyfa front, the other ship fitting app.  There was a beta version of the 2.0 release of it made available last week that has the ESI API integrated.

Anyway, there are probably more casualties in the API shut down out there that I haven’t seen.  I didn’t make any sort of detailed survey other than looking for something to replace EVEMon.

My only other concern is reliability.  My experience with ESI so far has been a bit problematic.  As I noted above we have to register our characters with the coalition or get kicked.  That is fine, I did that as soon as it was an option.  However, in going back to check every so often, I have found a couple of my characters unregistered.  Once it was even my main.  I don’t know if this is a problem with the ESI API or the GSF end of things, but now I feel like I have to check on it weekly just to be sure I don’t end up getting kicked.

Life in a null sec coalition.

There is a final eulogy post for the all APIs up on the third party developer site to remember their origin and mark their demise.  In a final ironic twist, there is a link to the “curated” list of third party apps which includes more than a few dead ones, EVEMon included.

And so it goes.

The Cash Shop, Diamonds, and that Ten Dollar Horse

One of the things about my return to Runes of Magic has been the complete lack of monetary expense to me so far.  I have not spent any money on the game.

However, no game survives without getting paid and, while Runes of Magic operates under the banner of “Free to Play,” and more so than some games, there are clearly ways to spend money on the game and incentives, both subtle and overt, to get you to do so.

There are two RMT currencies in the game, diamonds and rubies.

And while I have not spent any money during my current adventures, back when the game launched and it seemed like the instance group might take a serious go at it I took up one of their special offers… they have sales and bonus events for diamonds frequently… and bought some just in case I needed to get myself a ten dollar horse or something.

140% bonus diamond offer again this weekend

However, back when I did that the game was suffering from some sort of credit card fraud binge so diamonds you purchased had to sit in a special escrow account for a while and you couldn’t trade or sell them to other players for 30 days.  Since we ended up not giving the game a go, those diamonds just stayed where they were.  I had stopped playing by the time I had free access to them.

This is part of why I was happy to get my original account back.  There were about a thousand diamonds waiting for me.  My characters were gone… they probably got purged during the server merges… but my diamonds remained.

And, given the RMT history of the game and the reaction in our little circle of blogs, one of the first things I had to do was find out the price of a permanent horse.

Base models…

As it turns out, the standard single person mount in the game is still about ten dollars, depending on what diamond package you purchase.  207 diamonds for $9.99 makes the horse about $9.60.  If you bought the biggest diamond package during the current sale it would be about $2.60.

There are other mounts in the shop.  There are more expensive, more exclusive single mounts as well as multi-person mounts.  But that is the base price to get yourself a permanent mount.

Now, you don’t have to buy the horse.  Mounts are obtainable in the game with gold, the in-game currency.  They are just not permanent.  You have to rent them for a short duration.  And that is not riding time, or logged in time, but clock running duration.  The rate is 300 gold for 15 minutes or 3,000 gold for two hours.

Not exactly what I would call long term…

But if you want to keep the horse, it is time for diamonds.

a permanent horse

The horse might cost you five to ten dollars… an amount that seems quaint to fret over in the current state of the genre… but at least you can keep it.  Inventory space should be so fortunate.

You start out in Runes of Magic with two 30 slot bags and one tab in the bank.  If you want more space, you need diamonds.  The rub here for me is that you cannot buy them outright.  I couldn’t find a way to buy more bag space.  Instead, you must rent it.

For how long would you like this bag?

Bank slots and bags both rent at the same rate.  For 3 days it is seven diamonds, but the time/diamond ratio gets better the longer the duration of your rental.  Thirty days, for example, is 31 diamonds.  And the bags themselves are not physical items in the game, as with EverQuest or WoW, but permanent in size and association to you, as with LOTRO.  You will never have more than six bags, and each bag will be 30 slots.

Two bags, at 30 slots per bag, doesn’t seem too bad.  However, if you’re lazy like me and turn on auto-loot so you don’t have to click through each corpse to pick out the good stuff, you will find your bags filling up fast.  The game drops a decent amount of gear, lots of items that are part of the daily quests, occasional recipes or other crafting related items, and runes, lots and lots of runes.

After all, the game is called Runes of Magic.  Runes are items that go in equipment sockets in order to enhance them.  If that sounds a lot like gems from WoW we can go back to the came coming into being as very much something of an Asian WoW clone during The Burning Crusade era when gems and sockets first became a thing in Azeroth.  The cash shop has plenty of items that allow you to add sockets to current items, since runes seem to be a big deal, but gear seems to drop with zero or one socket.

Anyway, runes drop a lot.  Your bag will fill up with them.  And then there are quest items.  When you accept a quest that is more than “kill ten rats,” one that wants you to, say, kill ten rats and bring back their ears or tails or some such as proof or for a potion or whatever, those item need space in your bags.  And, as an added bonus, if you abandon a quest… say you were on a solo quest chain and it ended with a group requirement that you could no solo… whatever related quest items remain in your bag.  And you cannot delete them either.  As far as I can tell, they live in your bag forever.

I realize that the devs were trying to keep people from basically deleting their hearthstone when it came to quests, but dude, my bags!   Also, it is often possible to get more items for a quest than it requires, so when you turn it in you have leftovers that you cannot delete.

So unless you are extremely diligent… or more so than I am… you’re going to need a bigger bag… erm, more bags, which means diamonds.

Now, you can buy diamonds from other players with the in-game currency.  That was part of the game’s pitch, that those with more time than money could grind gold and buy diamonds from other players, while those with more money than time could buy diamonds for real world money and trade them to other players for gold.  Everybody is happy and nobody needs to go deal with illicit gold sellers, or such was the theory.

That my diamonds of six years ago got stuck in escrow and were restricted for a stretch of time seems to indicate that all was not working quite as planned.  And, as noted previously, gold sellers were thick on the ground in public spaces and on the world channel.

Back in the day

As part of this post I went to go check at the auction house to see how the gold/diamond market was going.  I saw people on the world channel asking to buy or offering to sell diamonds, but figured that main market would be in the auction house.

However, when I looked, I didn’t see a single auction for diamonds.  That section of the auction house was mostly taken up with experience orbs.  Runes of Magic has experience orbs that seem to work along the lines of the XP Vials in EverQuest II, where you can buy them and they siphon off XP from your efforts and, once they are full, you can sell them to other players.

I was a bit confused by that.  And then I found a vendor outside the auction house that offered to sell me gold for diamonds.

Gold for Diamonds exchange

I expect that there is another NPC around that will do the same only exchanging gold for diamonds.  I suspect that unfettered exchanges in an unbalanced economy led to rampant inflation and that the solution was to create a dev regulated currency exchange.  Anyway, if I need gold I know where to go now.

Meanwhile, in going through the cash shop, I found that the devs will also sell you experience orbs.  Full orbs, that is.

Experience orbs in the cash shop… full ones

Again, I expect that this was done in an effort to put some sort of cap on inflation, but it still seems odd.  This is akin to CCP simply selling you skill points in EVE Online.

I am also not sure how useful such an orb would really be.  You could boost up your secondary class easily (more on secondary classes in another post) but what about the training points you need to boost up your combat skills?  It wouldn’t be much use to have a high level character with skills still in the weeds.  Or do training points come with levels when you use an experience orb?

And that screen shot above brings me to the second currency I mentioned, rubies.  It took me a bit to figure out where rubies come from.  You get them as part of buying something from the cash shop with diamonds.  I noticed that I had 40 rubies, then ran back through what I did and came to where I bought a perm mount.

Wilhelm on his mount

Buying the mount ran 199 diamonds, but also earned me 40 rubies.  So they are sort of like S&H Green Stamps or Blue Chip Stamps, if you are old enough to remember such things, rewards for purchasing things that can be used as currency to buy other items.

And the cash shop has a selection of items that can only be bought with rubies, and they are a damn sight better than what you get for diamonds.  The screen shot above shows a rubies-only “High Quality” experience potion and its diamonds equivalent next to it.

I am not sure how I feel about that sort of thing.  I get loyalty programs, and things like trading stamps simply gave way to things like club cards and the like, but in a cash shop with no competitors it feels off, less in the realm of a reward for loyalty and more in the zone of “naked cash grab.”  Not all the way there, but in that area.

The cash shop otherwise has a lot of the things you might expect.  I mentioned writs to add sockets to gear.  There are also the usual boosters for experience and training points, speed increases you can buy for you mount if you want to go faster, an array of cosmetic gear, lock-box grab-bags for things like runes, and the Wheel of Destiny, a straight up gamble to get something special for 99 diamonds.

Do you feel lucky?

So that is the state of the cash shop, such as I have observed it.  The usual stuff is there.  The odd parts… experience orbs and direct diamonds to gold via a vendor… seem likely to have come about as a reaction to what happens to an MMORPG economy over time.

Meanwhile, the strong push to get players to buy diamond… especially when it comes to bag and bank space… is part of what comes from not having any sort of subscription option.  Runes of Magic is strictly cash shop supported.  You cannot sign up for a $15 a month plan to bypass the annoyances.