Oh damn. I'm full on back into this fuckin game.
Lusternia that is. I barely played Hell, and while I liked Carrion Fields the population was too low for a game like that I felt. With a hundred players or so it'd probably be better. Lusternia's not a whole lot better but with strong orgs and guilds you still have plenty of people to RP with.
I'm pleasantly surprised by the spend a million dollars thing. IRE is still a fine purveyor of money holes and Lusternia is generally considered the worst as far as money goes because of the number of skills but I chose one of the easiest classes to get into as far as money goes. A lot of the real money sink seems to be in cosmetics and I'm a monk so I don't do cosmetics. Anyway they improved the spending issues, you can get 1000 credits for ten bucks, twice per character, with the credits you get for leveling and the newbie achievements and all that that should be enough to cover your baseline skills. Then there's the subscription which is a pretty hefty 25 a month but will cover 99% of what you'd probably want to do with it.
Overall it's not all that expensive for an MMO considering there's no entry purchase.
There's also artifacts but I've never even looked at them. Some of those prices are pretty absurd but one of the mods put it best, if it's overpriced and people buy it it's not overpriced. I'm sure as hell not buying that shit though.