In Apex Legends, there is a rarity tier known as heirloom items that have less than a 1% chance of dropping. These heirloom items all currently belong to the character Wraith and include a unique intro quip, banner, and melee weapon skin commonly referred to as Wraith's Knife. Despite this rarity, developer Respawn Entertainment does guarantee that this item will drop within 500 Apex Crates (the Apex equivalent of loot boxes), with one player finding out the hard way that this is indeed true.

Redditor BAE339 posted his story to the official Apex Legends Reddit, where he reveals that he spent $500 trying to get the Wraith heirloom items to eventually unlock the items on box #500. He begins by saying how he was never really into loot boxes, because he knew the mathematical probability behind them.

Nevertheless, the attraction of the Wraith items and the "pity timer" guarantee of finding heirloom items on box #500 caught his eye. As a Wraith main, he reconciled how the heirloom items were less guaranteed to be received when the developers add more heirloom items for other characters, so he decided to go for it.

Apex Crate after Apex Crate, BAE339 tried to luck out and get the special Wraith items, which he eventually did on the 500th box. Bae339 also communicated that he hopes no one repeats his mistake because "it wasn’t worth it." He also went on to reveal that he now owns every single blue rarity item in Apex Legends and a high number of legendary skins as well, but most of them he didn't really want.

Apex Legends is not the first game to include microtransactions by far, but considering it is a free-to-play game, many are okay with this cosmetic spending facet. That said, there are also those who are completely against this type of business practice in general. So, it remains to be determined if BAE339's case will be seen as a rallying call against the practice or just another heavy spending incident.

All things considered, the incredible growth of this battle royale game likely means that a lot of players, even if a small percentage, are purchasing these microtransactions. No official reports detail exactly how much has been made so far, but given the success of competitor Fortnite and the launch of Apex Legends season one next month, Respawn stands to make a killing.

Apex Legends is out now for PC, PS4, and Xbox One.

Source: Reddit