A Message About the Mount Adoption License

[Ohoni.6057]

> @Devata.6589 said:

> Yeah nice try. But then you totally ignore the fact that if the game is better, people might not mind paying a higher price for an expansion.

 

Yeah, but you're not providing funding for the game being better. You're providing funding to have LESS content than is already available on the Gem Store, just for free instead of paid for separately. If you want the game to have actually been markedly *better* over the past five years than what we got, and without the gem store, then you'd be talking way more than $50 every six months, especially given that you'd have a much lower player population because of that added cost. It would likely require a $10-15 monthly fee, which would again lead to a MUCH lower population, so you'd need to charge $20 to the remaining players. . . which would *probably* drive even more players away, so, how about $50 a month? Yes, for $50 a month, *maybe* they could have provided a better game than they did, but that's probably a toss-up.

 

 

 

[Djinn.9245]

> @PopeUrban.2578 said:

> I agree, they know exactly what they're doing. What they're doing is making as little game as possible for as little money as possible to convince people that a skin has equal value to 1/3 of an entire expansion or 1/6 of a brand new game despite the actual costs involved in producing and distributing them.

>

> What they're doing is focusing a far greater portion of their art budget on these "optional luxury" items that sit at this intentionally inflated price point while cutting the budgeting for content in the base prodcut.

>

> It _has_ worked extremely well at providing the consumer less value at an increased cost and turning the gaming industry from a focus on making better games than the competition to outsell them. From a business standpoint it has been extremely successful and very generous to the business by cutting quality and gradually conning its user base in to believing it is being done for their own good.

>

> Don't believe me? Read MO's response to the outcry over the mount skin boxes. It states, quite clearly that what they regret most is the timing of an experiment in further increasing actual dollar costs on the consumer end by intentionally disappointing consumers and reminding them that the price of failing to get what they want is the opportunity to spend more money. It sent a clear message that their priority was to not invalidate the investment of those that fell for it because their happiness is more important than the happiness of people that looked at this ploy to increase costs even further than their already inflated price point and said no. It said that we were wrong and we didn't understand their intent although the intent was clear. It is a transparent effort to quiet the anger of the customer base by doing nothing, continuing to benefit from the thing they're upset about, and to tell them they should be less mad because their intentions were to make spending money more fun so you'd do it more.

>

Unfortunately this is very true. I have said a similar thing about MO's response. And it was a cleverly-worded response - I can't believe the number of players who have written on these forums: "Anet apologized" or "Anet said they would fix it" or "Anet said they would never do it again". Those statements are neither present nor implied in this message.

 

> Actions speak louder than words, and tracking the progression of the gem store, the frequency of its offerings, and the number of things earnable by playing the game over time, from launch until now paints a very clear picture that is significantly at odds with Arenanet's stated intentions. They intend to capture the lost profits of a failing business model not by creating higher value transactions to bring in new customers, but by milking their existing ones right up until the point they leave in disgust and telling them they HAVE to do it to have a game at all, by creating artificial scarcity and manipulating human nature to pay more for less.

>

> This is not the behavior of a company that values the happiness of the majority of their player base. This is the behavior of a company that values the happiness of a small percentage that are willing to pay any amount to acquire skins because they happen to have either the disposable income or the lack of personal discipline to prevent them from paying gradually more and receiving gradually less for each dollar spent.

 

I completely agree, except I would also emphasize that gamble boxes are designed to prey on people in a uniquely manipulative way that I find especially sinister compared to other marketing practices.

[Devata.6589]

> @Ohoni.6057 said:

> > @PopeUrban.2578 said:

> > Re: "Treat yo self"

> > This still segregates the majority of rewards behind a paywall, which is my problem. Not that they sell microtransactions. Not that there are some skins that can only be had through the gem store. That 10% of all avaliable cosmetics are sourced exclusively from the gem store.

>

> But my point is, you've said you're willing to pay $60 for an expansion instead of $30. Well in the case of PoF, that would entitle you to maybe two Outfits and a Mount Skin more than the guy who just pays $30. But what if that guy doesn't want those two Outfits and a Mount Skin, he just wants to play PoF, and just wants to pay $30. Why are you telling him that $60 should be the basement level price? What if that prices him out of buying PoF at all?

 

You are now using the current prices to recalculate the price of the expansion. But no, the $60 should get you about 50 of those skins in the game.

 

Also you seem to have the idea that it would not work because less people would buy it, but then you fail to notice how the current approach did result in lowers earnings over-time.

 

 

> And yet, 1. GW1 released in a very different time, with very different market expectations. Development costs were lower, and $15 subscriptions were the norm.

 

Turns out it was more expensive. See

Ofcourse GW2 was more expensive to make then GW1, but it's also a game on another scale.

 

>The same economics are very unlikely to remain true today as were in play at the time. 2. the people who made that game, who knew what were happening behind the scenes, like this system better. *Maaaaybe* they know what they're doing?

 

If they did then why where they not able to increase earnings or where not even able to keep it steady, instead have seen an decline since release?

[Devata.6589]

> @Ohoni.6057 said:

> > @Devata.6589 said:

> > Yeah nice try. But then you totally ignore the fact that if the game is better, people might not mind paying a higher price for an expansion.

>

> Yeah, but you're not providing funding for the game being better. You're providing funding to have LESS content than is already available on the Gem Store, just for free instead of paid for separately. If you want the game to have actually been markedly *better* over the past five years than what we got, and without the gem store, then you'd be talking way more than $50 every six months, especially given that you'd have a much lower player population because of that added cost. It would likely require a $10-15 monthly fee, which would again lead to a MUCH lower population, so you'd need to charge $20 to the remaining players. . . which would *probably* drive even more players away, so, how about $50 a month? Yes, for $50 a month, *maybe* they could have provided a better game than they did, but that's probably a toss-up.

>

 

"Yeah, but you're not providing funding for the game being better. "

More people buying the $60 on a more regular basis is more then having many people paying a lot in the beginning, but steadily moving away from the game (and paying nothing) because they get bored by the game because of the lower quality (because of lacking rewards).

 

"especially given that you'd have a much lower player population because of that added cost. "

How about, you had a much higher player population because of having a more fun game?

GW1 did see an increase in earning also before they even had a cash-shop.

GW2 on the other hand did see a decrease, even without having no extra required cost for over 3 years after release.

[Djinn.9245]

> @Devata.6589 said:

> > @Ohoni.6057 said:

> > > @PopeUrban.2578 said:

> > > Re: "Treat yo self"

> > > This still segregates the majority of rewards behind a paywall, which is my problem. Not that they sell microtransactions. Not that there are some skins that can only be had through the gem store. That 10% of all avaliable cosmetics are sourced exclusively from the gem store.

> >

> > But my point is, you've said you're willing to pay $60 for an expansion instead of $30. Well in the case of PoF, that would entitle you to maybe two Outfits and a Mount Skin more than the guy who just pays $30. But what if that guy doesn't want those two Outfits and a Mount Skin, he just wants to play PoF, and just wants to pay $30. Why are you telling him that $60 should be the basement level price? What if that prices him out of buying PoF at all?

>

> You are now using the current prices to recalculate the price of the expansion. But no, the $60 should get you about 50 of those skins in the game.

>

> Also you seem to have the idea that it would not work because less people would buy it, but then you fail to notice how the current approach did result in lowers earnings over-time.

>

>

> > And yet, 1. GW1 released in a very different time, with very different market expectations. Development costs were lower, and $15 subscriptions were the norm.

>

> Turns out it was more expensive. See

> Ofcourse GW2 was more expensive to make then GW1, but it's also a game on another scale.

>

> >The same economics are very unlikely to remain true today as were in play at the time. 2. the people who made that game, who knew what were happening behind the scenes, like this system better. *Maaaaybe* they know what they're doing?

>

> If they did then why where they not able to increase earnings or where not even able to keep it steady, instead have seen an increase since release?

 

Wow, thank you so much for finding and posting this video. It really sheds a lot of light on many things. And the fact that you can find all of this information in the public domain means that anyone can verify the facts.

[Ohoni.6057]

> @Devata.6589 said:

> You are now using the current prices to recalculate the price of the expansion. But no, the $60 should get you about 50 of those skins in the game.

 

No, that's an unreasonable expectation. If they could provide that many skins, they would have. Do you imagine they just spend all day playing ping-pong? How do they manage that in their Scrooge McDuck money vault filled with all the billions of dollars that they've made off the gem store and clearly have not put to any useful purpose? Wouldn't that tilt the ping-pong table?

 

>Also you seem to have the idea that it would not work because less people would buy it, but then you fail to notice how the current approach did result in lowers earnings over-time.

 

Well of course it resulted in lower earnings over time, because that's how games work. Your proposal would follow the exact same trend, only faster because it would cost more while providing minimal practical benefits. It's like, take the movie Wonder Woman. It was a pretty good movie, and made $103m the first weekend. Then it made $58m the next, and the first weekend of November it made only $9,000. It's made $412m domestic so far. **But,** that was because they were total suckers! What if instead, they had charged *twice* as much for those movie tickets, and provided *fifteen minutes more* of mostly generic establishing shots? Then they would have made BILLIONS!

 

>Ofcourse GW2 was more expensive to make then GW1, but it's also a game on another scale.

 

Yeeesssss, and yet the market has not adjusted enough that they could get away with charging 2-3x GW1 for the base game, so they need to find that money someplace else. Couch cushions, is what your answer is, I presume.

 

>If they did then why where they not able to increase earnings or where not even able to keep it steady, instead have seen an decline since release?

 

Because of the nature of reality, time, and space.

 

>More people buying the $60 on a more regular basis is more then having many people paying a lot in the beginning, but steadily moving away from the game (and paying nothing) because they get bored by the game because of the lower quality (because of lacking rewards).

 

Sure, but it's also *less* than *"less* people buying the $60 on a more regular basis and even less and less over time because they can't keep up with the constant $60 purchases and neither can anyone else and then the servers get more and more empty so that even the whales who can keep up get bored because they're mostly alone on these ghost servers and. . . profit?

 

>"especially given that you'd have a much lower player population because of that added cost. "

>How about, you had a much higher player population because of having a more fun game?

 

Again, I refer you to "the nature of reality, time, and space. " You could not make the game appreciably better than the game we got for a reasonable increase in revenues, and demanding those increased revenues from every player would result in less players, which would result in even lower revenues than in the history we lived through.

 

>GW2 on the other hand did see a decrease, even without having no extra required cost for over 3 years after release.

 

Which stands to reason, GW1 started from nothing, nobody knew anything about it, so it gained a lot of word of mouth early on. GW2 started with an established GW1 audience plus a lot of solid pre-release marketing, so it launched much closer to "peak GW2 audience." Decline is inevitable.

 

 

[Ohoni.6057]

Also, it's worth pointing out about that video, the title is unsurprisingly clickbaity and inaccurate. The cost of developing games *is* going up, in that each game costs more to make, it's just that game publishers don't spend more *in total,* because they make less games. It's like having $100m to spend on game development and spending it on five games with $20m budgets, rather than ten games with $10m budgets. The point is, if you are a AAA publisher and want to make a game competitive in the AAA marketplace, then you need to spend a AAA budget, which is higher than an equivalent game would have cost a decade ago. Relevant to GW2, GW2 costs more to make per month than GW1 did, almost certainly, meaning it requires more per month, on average, to maintain that performance.

[thekomrade.2796]

I want to think im open minded but.. this was the first time I logged into gw2, saw this... mess... and legitimately just logged off

Purchases should never be random, and even if theyre just cosmetic, I can help but hate the idea of rng boxes in gw2 regardless of cosmetic or not. Ive always backed anet for their system, and have personally spent possibly a few hundred by now over the years .. but id be lying if i didnt say that may end. Why change the model that has been around for 5 years? why change what has been prasied for? and why add such things like "oh we stand behind our artists-* that has sweeet fuck all to do with it! WE KNOW ITS GOOD WORK.. we *want* to buy them after all,what we hate is the method of sale. We requested variety.. and you made the variety random?? what the shit? For the people who dislike 4 out of 5 mounts, this rng crap is just shit.. jesus what makes me more angry is the PR ground holding this message has.. like "you dont like it, but its good! but we'll change it"

 

This.. "apology".. is just infuriating. like.. why is it not possible to have both??? 400gems for a random or 1000 to pick a certain one or something.. or even pick a certain mount???

Theres SO many ways you couldve had *both* methods.. and thatyou -still can-

..

ugh.

[Djinn.9245]

> @Ohoni.6057 said:

> Also, it's worth pointing out about that video, the title is unsurprisingly clickbaity and inaccurate. The cost of developing games *is* going up, in that each game costs more to make, it's just that game publishers don't spend more *in total,* because they make less games. It's like having $100m to spend on game development and spending it on five games with $20m budgets, rather than ten games with $10m budgets. The point is, if you are a AAA publisher and want to make a game competitive in the AAA marketplace, then you need to spend a AAA budget, which is higher than an equivalent game would have cost a decade ago. Relevant to GW2, GW2 costs more to make per month than GW1 did, almost certainly, meaning it requires more per month, on average, to maintain that performance.

 

Luckily the title of the video isn't the whole point of the video. The point is that gamble boxes, and indeed perhaps even microtransactions altogether are not strictly necessary to keep a game afloat. I'm not saying that additional income is never necessary, and individual games and companies have their own situations. But the video shows a general trend among large gaming companies that is certainly enlightening.

[Devata.6589]

> @Ohoni.6057 said:

> No, that's an unreasonable expectation. If they could provide that many skins, they would have.

 

1,5 month after PoF was released and there are already 36 skins added. So it is getting close to the 50. You have the wrong idea about how long such a proces takes.

Here is the modeling of a face:

it's played faster, but total took 4,5 hours.

 

Making the initial model with animations and so on might take long, but making different models on top of that can be done much faster not to mention simply other skins with the same model.

 

>Do you imagine they just spend all day playing ping-pong?

 

No I imagine that before PoF hits it 1 year anniversary we will most likely have even more then 50 mount-skins in the game. The difference is that they create and release them in a way to make money from the skinss, not in a way to make money from the expansion.

 

 

> Well of course it resulted in lower earnings over time, because that's how games work. Your proposal would follow the exact same trend, only faster because it would cost more while providing minimal practical benefits.

 

That is strange because GW1 used a similar B2P model and increased it's results. Also WoW and FINAL FANTASY XIV: A Realm Reborn managed to see an increasing playerbase over multiple years.

In the end your right and population will start getting smaller. But it's not true that what we did see in GW2 was basically the expected downward trent because of age.

 

>It's like, take the movie Wonder Woman. It was a pretty good movie, and made $103m the first weekend. Then it made $58m the next, and the first weekend of November it made only $9,000. It's made $412m domestic so far. **But,** that was because they were total suckers!

 

It is indeed like Wonder Woman, only they where not suckers because in a way they did use the model as I suggested (sort of, while James Bond would have been a better example). There is not one Wonder Woman movie, there are multiple movies and Wonder Women had a TV-series in the past. They also planned to have a Wonder Woman 2. Building on their previous succes. And making some nice money, even while inbetween movies Wonder Woman was not generating alot of money.

 

>What if instead, they had charged *twice* as much for those movie tickets, and provided *fifteen minutes more* of mostly generic establishing shots? Then they would have made BILLIONS!

 

This is not even close to what is being suggested by me.

 

> Yeeesssss, and yet the market has not adjusted enough that they could get away with charging 2-3x GW1 for the base game, so they need to find that money someplace else. Couch cushions, is what your answer is, I presume.

 

And that other place is a much bigger playerbase.

 

> >If they did then why where they not able to increase earnings or where not even able to keep it steady, instead have seen an decline since release?

>

> Because of the nature of reality, time, and space.

 

Then those other games I reffered to before did / do not exist within the same reality, time, and space. Interesting.

 

> Sure, but it's also *less* than *"less* people buying the $60 on a more regular basis and even less and less over time because they can't keep up with the constant $60 purchases

 

This make even less sense. If people cannot keep up with the constant $60 purchases they can also not keep up with spending the same amound in a cash-shop.

I think most people will manage spending $60,- a year on a game.

 

> > neither can anyone else and then the servers get more and more empty so that even the whales who can keep up get bored because they're mostly alone on these ghost servers and. . . profit?

 

Interesting, because when looking at the results, this (lower and lower results over-time) is exactly what happened with the current cash-shop model in place.

 

> Which stands to reason, GW1 started from nothing, nobody knew anything about it, so it gained a lot of word of mouth early on. GW2 started with an established GW1 audience plus a lot of solid pre-release marketing, so it launched much closer to "peak GW2 audience." Decline is inevitable.

 

Your right, so GW2 managed to get it's initial results / hype / popularity thanks to GW1. But then GW2 started to lose popularity. Looks like GW1 did something good that GW2 did wrong. hmmm

 

[Ohoni.6057]

> @Djinn.9245 said:

> Luckily the title of the video isn't the whole point of the video. The point is that gamble boxes, and indeed perhaps even microtransactions altogether are not strictly necessary to keep a game afloat.

 

That's the point he was attempting, but I don't think he justified it. Again, he did establish that studios could make *smaller,* less impressive games on a smaller budget and therefore not need as much revenues, but he actually worked against the argument you propose in that he indicated that their profits were not skyrocketing as a result of microtransactions, which is what would happen if they were unnecessary to the process and just gravy. The need for revenues went up because the game they are producing are more expensive to make, and that was also the case with GW2 vs. GW1. Yes, GW2 could exist without microtransactions, but it could not exist as the same feature-rich and evolving product. It would not be a "better" and more content-filled product, it would not even be *as* content-filled as what we've seen. It would be far *less* than what we got, because it would have had to be pruned down to what would be manageable on a much lower revenue stream.

 

>Making the initial model with animations and so on might take long, but making different models on top of that can be done much faster not to mention simply other skins with the same model.

 

Yes, my degree is in digital imaging, I know how modelling works. And how it doesn't. So seriously, what do you imagine ANet devs do all day? Clearly you can't imagine them actually working for more than a few minutes a day, because by your estimation they would have produced ten times the content in the same number of man-hours over the course of the game, so what do you picture them doing with their time.

 

>No I imagine that before PoF hits it 1 year anniversary we will most likely have even more then 50 mount-skins in the game. The difference is that they create and release them in a way to make money from the skinss, not in a way to make money from the expansion.

 

We might have that many mount skins, within the first year. But they would have been paid for by selling them in the Gem Store. If you remove the Gem Store from the equation, then you remove those revenues. If you remove those revenues, then you can't pay those artists for that time. If you can't pay the artists for that time then you don't get the work they would have produced in that time.

 

>That is strange because GW1 used a similar B2P model and increased it's results. Also WoW and FINAL FANTASY XIV: A Realm Reborn managed to see an increasing playerbase over multiple years.

 

Which stands to reason, GW1 started from nothing, nobody knew anything about it, so it gained a lot of word of mouth early on. GW2 started with an established GW1 audience plus a lot of solid pre-release marketing, so it launched much closer to "peak GW2 audience." Decline is inevitable.

 

Also, WoW is WoW. Don't compare anything to WoW, that way leads only to madness.

 

>And that other place is a much bigger playerbase.

 

So basically, "cut taxes, increase the deficit based on current revenues, but pay for it by increasing economic growth?" Yeah, that sort of policy's never bit anyone in the kitten.

 

I'll reiterate that I see no reason to believe that your proposal would increase players to any significant degree, and assert that it more likely would have collapsed the playerbase sooner. It would have been a Wildstar situation.

 

>This make even less sense. If people cannot keep up with the constant $60 purchases they can also not keep up with spending the same amound in a cash-shop.

>I think most people will manage spending $60,- a year on a game.

 

This is true. And plenty of people *don't* spend $60 in the gem shop. That's the beauty of the microtransaction model, not everyone needs to participate in it. You have some people that spend more than average, because they can, but plenty of others that are still able to play the game alongside those people even if they can't. I'm sure ANet has figures for how many players spend little to nothing in the gem store, most of those players could be almost guaranteed to not buy into a game with more constant mandatory payments. Keep in mind that a $60 expansion every six months would be equivalent to a $10 monthly fee, and subscription MMOs have been a death sentence for the past five years or more.

 

>Interesting, because when looking at the results, this (lower and lower results over-time) is exacly what happened with the current cash-shop model in place.

 

Yes, nice forest fire you have there, let's throw some gasoline on it. My point is, the present under your proposal would be exactly like the present we have now, only all the downward trends would have been exponentially accelerated. Downward trends are natural, but that doesn't mean you can't speed them up.

 

>Your right, so GW2 managed to get it's initial results / hype / popularity thanks to GW1. But then GW2 started to lose popularity. Looks like GW1 did something good that GW2 did wrong. hmmm

 

No, just that they were different games, so GW2 launched with a ton of different people who wanted different things. It launched with people who liked GW1 and wanted GW1.5, it launched with people who like GW2 for everything that it is, it launched with people who'd seen the promotional material and liked what they saw but weren't hooked by the reality. They did a good job of attracting a lot of people to the project, but that also meant that a lot of people who tried it, it just wasn't their thing, at least not long term. The market was saturated, there were plenty of other distractions, it's very hard to compare GW1's launch to launches in earlier generations, because conditions were very different surrounding those products. You know what you want, and that's fine, but that doesn't mean that what you want would be best for the game as a whole.

[Kirin.7306]

all RNG based MTX should be removed.

[IndigoSundown.5419]

> @GreyWolf.8670 said:

 

> You're not trading with ArenaNet. You're trading your gold for other players' gems they already bought. Gems are currency with a fixed real money value. I highly doubt the just create new ones for the exchange. It's just the exchange rate that's based on what's on hand.

 

Nvm i see my mistake. I misspoke in the first of my posts you commented on.

[Crystal Master.4169]

This is so bad wth is this RNG on skins anet cmon... So if i just spent 30$ and still didnt get the skin i wanted should i not feel stupid or dumb? why not make the _RNG_ mount adoption licence droppable in some new hardcore instanced content??? But still have the _GUARANTEED_ skin of choice unlockables buyable from gemstore??? i mean what the....

[Ohoni.6057]

So just for future reference, [this](

) is how you handle it when you have a massive microtransactions SNAFU.

[Jasmine.8195]

They can and should still change these skins to be sell-able on the trading post. This way those who want to gamble can continue to do so and then drop the ones they don't like on the TP for big gold while keeping the ones they do (or selling them for even more gold if they're highly desired).

[Djinn.9245]

> @"Crystal Master.4169" said:

> This is so bad wth is this RNG on skins anet cmon... So if i just spent 30$ and still didnt get the skin i wanted should i not feel stupid or kitten? why not make the _RNG_ mount adoption licence droppable in some new hardcore instanced content??? But still have the _GUARANTEED_ skin of choice unlockables buyable from gemstore??? i mean what the....

 

They don't care how you feel. They care that some players will continue to buy licenses if they didn't get what they want.

[PopeUrban.2578]

> @Ohoni.6057 said:

> So just for future reference, [this](

) is how you handle it when you have a massive microtransactions SNAFU.

 

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

 

*breath*

 

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAA

 

Dude, EA is turning of microtransactions until after the holidays so their shareholders stop panicking and they can show them a sales bump over the holidays from all the idiots that believe this is an act of contrition rather than desparation. That's literally all this is. There is no reason to suspect a company that has gone out of its way to obfuscate its refund process, shaft its customers, and add literally every shitty mobile game mechanic to its new AAA shooter because they thought they could coast on the star wars license is operating with anything resembling good faith.

 

I'll tell you how this if going to go down:

They're going to leave these purchases off until after the holiday sales rush.

Once initial sales start to slow down they'll turn them back on, with minimal underlying chages to the core system.

They'll throw the people that already bought the game a low-effot "thank you" item like a taunt or hat.

They'll claim they fixed it while having done nothing to fix the underlying problem with the game's progression model, and in stead having minimally fucked with the prices.

[Kargos.9051]

My take away form this is, we aren't paying a sub so we should shut up and be grateful, even though we only recently paid out a lot of money for an expansion that, and let us be honest here, aside for a short story (and up coming living story) and mounts, there wasn't much in it... yeah um no, stick you (unregulated) GAMBLING.

 

it is time gaming companies start to not screw over their patrons... Learn the lesson Arenanet / NC soft before you land up in the same pickle other companies have

[wolfyrik.2017]

> @Kamui.3150 said:

> > @"Mike O Brien.4613" said:

> > * You get a brand-new, unique mount skin every time, for a substantial discount versus an individual purchase price.

>

> I'd dispute this point. The Halloween skins came out at a price of 1600 gems for 5 skins, one per mount. These were stated as having a 20% discount due to being a bundle, so would have been 2000 gems normally. Thus, they would have had a price of 400 gems per skin, which is the exact same price that is being charged for the random skins from the adoption licenses. This alone is the big reason I'm not willing to buy any of the licenses. If the price were lowered to ~200 gems to account for the RNG factor OR if we were allowed to select a mount of our choice for 400 gems (even up to 600-800 for the ones which use particle effects or the like), then I would be willing to drop $20 or more on getting some cool new skins. After all, I bought the Halloween mounts pack with no qualms about the price. But in its current state, I will not be purchasing any of the mount adoption licenses. Thanks for your time.

 

There are several skins in the loot box that I would happily have bought seperately for 400 gems. Anet would have had a 1600 gem purchase purchase from me.

Instead they get nothing. Good job, anet.

[Ohoni.6057]

> @PopeUrban.2578 said:

>Dude, EA is turning of microtransactions until after the holidays so their shareholders stop panicking and they can show them a sales bump over the holidays from all the idiots that believe this is an act of contrition rather than desparation.

 

Yeah, maybe, but they are at least taking action. At bare minimum this removes the "head start" aspect of having the microtransactions, that on day one a whale could build a very strong character and lay waste to the other players, thus earning him more "natural" progression than they had, and ending the month at a much higher level of progression. Even just a delay in that scheme means that hard working "F2P-esc" players can get to a reasonably strong level before the whales can even get their blowholes on. They've also promised to "change the system," and we'll have to see how much that will entail. It will certainly still be a "pay to speed up" system, to some extent, but it might be a more thoughtful design than the original implementation. It's unlikely to just be *exactly* what was originally planned. I don't trust them but I do have a new hope.

 

Relevant to GW2, what MO did NOT do is actually FIX anything. I think that they *should* have immediately locked the mount acquisition system, so that players would not keep buying them until they figured out how they would make them available to everyone else while still fairly compensating those that bought into it. It's been, what now, a week and a half, and they STILL haven't actually DONE anything about this. I was willing to give them some time, but they've burnt that trust already.

 

It's a sad day when EA is doing a better job than you.

 

> @Kargos.9051 said:

> My take away form this is, we aren't paying a sub so we should shut up and be grateful, even though we only recently paid out a lot of money for an expansion that, and let us be honest here, aside for a short story (and up coming living story) and mounts, there wasn't much in it... yeah um no, stick you (unregulated) GAMBLING.

>

> it is time gaming companies start to not screw over their patrons... Learn the lesson Arenanet / NC soft before you land up in the same pickle other companies have

 

The point may be lost in my more recent posts, as **I am in no way and never would be defending the Mount Skins fiasco,** or their abysmal handling of it, however, I do recognize the absolutely vital nature of the Gem Store in the ongoing development of the game, and some of the other participants in this thread dispute that reality and seek to substitute their own. I fully accept that most, if not all Mount Skins *will* be coming from the Gem Store, I only insist that they must always (including the existing 30) be made available as individual purchases at a consumer-justifiable price.

 

 

[Martin.4860]

> @Kargos.9051 said:

> My take away form this is, we aren't paying a sub so we should shut up and be grateful, even though we only recently paid out a lot of money for an expansion that, and let us be honest here, aside for a short story (and up coming living story) and mounts, there wasn't much in it... yeah um no, stick you (unregulated) GAMBLING.

>

> it is time gaming companies start to not screw over their patrons... Learn the lesson Arenanet / NC soft before you land up in the same pickle other companies have

 

a lot of money ($30!?), speak for yourself, if that is alot for other people my advice is to please check your priorities, for $30, and the content of PoF added to the Base game, thats very cheap compared, and the time playing PoF(stories/event), and using the new features to older contents (elite spec/mounts), I'm sorry, I just can't comprehend how that wasn't too much for $30.

[Lilo.8230]

I never realised there was such an uproar over these. I'm not in the best position to argue anything. All I can say is shut up and take my money. Guess I should be glad some people have opinions that they share.

 

I'm just super happy with no subscription fee. I'll pay for anything as long as I don't have to pay to play to be honest.

[JackOfAllGames.2409]

Thanks for the response! For what it's worth, I kind of like the random but cheap model. My biggest concern was that more and more mounts would get added to that pool and my goal of getting around 6 of those skins would slowly get harder and harder if I don't dump a ton of money into it at once. Hearing that the pool will not be expanded helps a lot! I've already bought several mount skins and plan to get more in the future.

 

The time for suggestions is probably done, but I'd like to see mounts come in sets kind of like some of the minis, but also rotate through the gem store individually at the higher standard price - hopefully making everyone happy. Also, please do not make 2000 gems the standard. That warforged mount skin looks awesome, but charging over $20 for a single skin is A LOT to ask.

[Goettel.4389]

I've found this answer sufficient: _"You’ve requested variety, and this is a way to support variety. Individual sale is a mechanic that works with a few, flashy skins. Using a grab bag mechanic gives us leeway to create skins to suit a wide range of player tastes while offering a lower price per skin."_

 

Personally, I didn't even check what I might get before gambling 2x 400 gems: got a sweet Raptor and a nice Skimmer (even though the difference with the vanilla one is not that big).