Going to the Store
Rift, being a free to play game, has an in-game store. In Warcraft you had the in-game store where you could pay cash for mounts, pets, tokens, and a level boost. That was the maximum interaction with the store you ever had. In Rift, the store is much more prevalent and has many more features and uses.Being free to play, it's not surprising that Trion put a ton of effort into making the in-game store useful and helpful.
First off, it acts like a regular merchant. You can sell useless gray items to the store and clear out your inventory of unwanted goods anytime you want, anywhere you want. There is no price difference on selling goods to the store versus a regular merchant. You can also buy drinks from the store anytime with in-game currency (gold, tokens, ect.). That means if you're running a DPS spec out in the world and you don't have any healing abilities on you, you can just open the store up and spend some gold on drinks there instead of going back to a hub.
There are a ton of goods on the in-game store that you can buy for in-game currency (no money out of your real life wallet), however, before you start just buying everything up off the in-game store for in-game currency, I would strongly suggest you check the auction house for the same item. In many different situations you can buy the same goods from the auction house for a fraction of the price. This isn't always true for every item on the store, but it is the majority of the time.
Credits are the other currency used on the store. A credit cost is going to be indicated by a small green gem. There is a wide variety of goods for sale on the in-game store for credits. Some of these items are digital collector's editions, character creation extensions, soul (spec) packs, faction changing, cosmetics for your characters, emotes, player portraits, boost potions, armor skins, mounts, character inventory, and even gear with stats on them.
An important note about combat gear being sold on the store. You cannot buy any best in slot gear; the most recently released tier gear has to be earned through in-game activities and currencies. Furthermore, any kind of raiding gear sets (tier gear in Warcraft) that is behind the gear curve is going to cost hundreds of dollars. Even your five man gear is going to cost you almost $100, and that's only filling half of your equipment slots. Trion has done a very good job at discouraging people from buying combat gear from the store with real money.
While I cannot speak for the whole population for Rift, I have yet to meet anyone that bought their higher end gear. It's too expensive, and the community also knows when you've bought your gear versus earned it. There are also gating factors in place to prevent people from buying up their gear with credits as well.
One of the biggest strengths of the store is that you can pay someone gold to give you a REX. REX are consumable tokens in-game that when used will grant 1,250 Credits. You can buy credits for in-game money, meaning you do not have to spend a dollar on Rift if you do not want to. Players can also send items from the store as gifts to other players. Many players will accumulate an excess of credits and then offer to sell you items from the store as a gift for a certain amount of gold per credit spent.
If you are still having some doubts about the in-game store, or if you're worried about the game going pay to win, I have written a more in-depth look at what it means to Trion to be free to play and how they use the cash shop to earn revenue while making sure that the players have to play instead of pay.
