TERA Introduces A Way To Pay Real Money For Random Amounts Of In-Game Currency

World of Warcraft, WildStar, Eve Online, Guild Wars 2, and many other games all have ways to (effectively) buy in-game currency with real money. Typically, that involves some sort of "cash exchange" where you decide to pony up, say, $15, and you get 20,000 gold or whatever that another player has accumulated and wants to sell for subscription time or cash shop currency. It's maybe a little pay-to-winnish, but it's been more or less accepted by MMO gamers.

What would make that kind of system better, you might ask? How about removing the "exchange" part that involves another player and adding randomized loot boxes to the mix? Brilliant!

That would seem to be the mindset of En Masse Entertainment, which added Federation Gem Crates to the TERA cash shop. The loot boxes give one of four packages of gems, which can then be sold to vendors in the game for gold.

As one Redditor has pointed out, that's not such a great deal. He opened 60 boxes -- about $100 worth -- and only got the two lowest tiers of gems. He summarized the amount of gold redeemed for his efforts as "TL;DR not worth."

Federation Gem Crates are only available for sale until 11:00 PST on Feb. 27, so act quickly if you want to get ... well, something.

Hat tip to Massively OP for the news.