Talk:Asphalt 9: Legends/@comment-31544835-20180228205856/@comment-31544835-20180301144620

The “Shop” tab contains all in-game purchases, split into five sections:

Card Packs: three card pack offers where the contents of said packs improve as you level up and gain higher GARAGE LEVELS, through playing career and probably events. The first card pack offer is purchasable with 65 tokens, the second is a free card pack every 4 hours or so, and the last card pack offer is watching ads for one card.

Legend Store: Basically Exclusive Deals from A8. Selling for credits or tokens various car Blueprints and/or Import Parts Cards for fine tuning your Speed Acceleration Handling and Nitro (seems to be the PRO section from A8.) This section also introduces a new in-game currency: red trade coins, which you receive from trading in your unwanted cards. There’s a small section of offers that can only be purchased with these new red trade coins. You can refresh the Legend Store’s offers for 20 tokens up to three times before refresh most be reset.

Special Offers: which seems to be the section for buying featured cars outright with CASH ONLY. Two cars are offered at the moment. For a currency I don’t recognise because I’m not from that country, but there’s a lot of zeros.

Tokens: Buy various bundles of tokens with real money.

Credits: But various bundles of credits with real money.

To answer your question: it wasn’t really a hard paywall, but I couldn’t readily upgrade the car I needed to complete the season I was working on. You can dive into multiple seasons at once, but your success at each season is all based on what cars you have in your garage and how upgraded they are. The game does a clear job of easily displaying how effective each car in your garage will be at passing whatever challenge, by color coding your rank with either green yellow or red.

I specifically needed more credits to upgrade the cars in my garage, as well as specific blueprints cards to unlock higher tiered upgrade levels. The number of tiered upgrade levels is based on how many stars a car has. Three stars = three tiers of upgrades, the last two levels need an increasingly crazy ammount of additional blueprints to unlock. The Bugatti Chiron has 6 stars, so 5 unlockable upgrade tiers. The higher the class the more stars they’ll likely to have.

What I ended up doing is playing the Events a lot more, and repeating them as I familiarise myself with these insane track locations. Repeating Events after completing their goals has an okay credit payout, better than the payout for repeating Career races once you’ve completed the specific goals for any given challenge.

If you’ve played Asphalt Xtreme it’s a very similar progression system based mostly on you luck with card drops and buying the right offers when they pop up.

I’ve spent zero tokens so far.