AJ UPDATE: HELLO PAY STORE! NO ONE REALLY WANTS YOU

Hello everyone!

Well, sorry for the somewhat delayed update... but this update was huge.

Thing is, it wasn't the good kind of huge.

See, the thing is, AJ added a new currency to Jamaa - Diamonds. Hooray, it's a big feature for once in forever!

Wait a second, though. A new currency means that there are items that can be bought with that currency.

So what can be bought with Diamonds? Well, as the name suggests, Diamonds are rarer than Gems, just as in the real world.

So, thus, cool stuff.

But wait a second! If Diamonds are rare and they buy cool stuff... well, all the cool stuff is members only!

Well, not quite. You see, Diamonds are AJ's new equivalent of any sort of real-money currency. For instance, in Free Realms, there's Station Cash; Wizard101 has Crowns. I was actually expecting something like this for a long time, starting to truly suspect shortly after the first Monthly Gift came out, and even before that, too.

The thing with all of these real-money currencies is that nonmembers in all three games I've mentioned can get it elsewhere - in AJ you can get diamonds on the Daily Spin (based on the appearance of the wheel, it's got equal chance as getting 500 gems, but each of the wedges is probably 'weighted' differently (weighted in terms of probability) such that there's actually an extremely low probability of getting a diamond); in Free Realms you used to start with 250 SC (after a while it decreased to an allowance of 99, and now I'm pretty sure you don't start with any); in Wizard101 and its sister games (Pirate101) you start with a total of 75 crowns connected with your account, if I've done it right, that is.

So what's wrong with AJ's Diamonds?

Well, let's compare the currencies.

	Diamonds (AJ)	SC (SOE Games)	Crowns (101 Games)
How to Obtain?	Card, Daily Spin, Weekly (Members)	Card, Account allowance, Weekly (Members)	Card, Account allowance
Obtainable Without Paying?	Yes; Daily Spin	Yes; Allowance at account creation	Yes; Allowance at account creation
What Nonmembers Can Buy?	Diamond/Gem currency conversion	Everything not marked explicitly for members	Everything not marked explicitly for members

See that? If AJ is going to truly be successful with this new currency, they have to even the market first. Yes, they are allowing non-members to obtain Diamonds for free with the Daily Spin, but they could still even the market a bit and add a few things there that can be bought by non-members.

Then again, of course, the Diamonds were supposed to be a replacement for the Monthly Gift... so perhaps we should be thankful that non-members can now get in on the extra gems every now and then.

Well, bye for now!