Idea: Frequent-buyer coupons

[Daddicus.6128]

Here's an idea to generate sales of gems, if that's needed by ANet: Offer coupons to accounts that buy (with real money) gems at a certain level (possibly over a period of time). For example, an account which buys 5000 gems (with real money) in a month gets 10% off purchases for a day or a week.

[Danikat.8537]

If they ever did anything like this I'd really like it to be something you can activate. It'd be extremely frustrating to get told you get a discount for a day and it's a day when you're away and can't log in...or the day _after_ you bought tons of stuff. Maybe with a time limit - give you 2 weeks or a month or whatever to use it - so you can't save them all up for big sales.

 

But IMO it's more likely they'd resume the promotions they tried before...I think it was in 2013. There was one month where anyone who had bought gems with real money got a free sun kite, and in December anyone who bought 4000 gems (or more) got a Mini Mr. Sparkles. That would be a good one to bring back actually, since I don't think that mini has been available since the promotion ended.

[Daddicus.6128]

That's a good point. Perhaps the "coupon" triggers when you use it, and works for 24 hours, or something like that.

 

Which also brings up another point they would have to think about: would it apply on top of an already reduced price? I only buy things that are price-reduced (typically), so it might not work for me unless you could apply it to anything.

[Gemnaid.4219]

How about a code for players with 200 hours a month?

[Daddicus.6128]

It's an interesting idea, Gemnaid, but it might send the wrong message.

[Ashantara.8731]

> @"Daddicus.6128" said:

> Here's an idea to generate sales of gems, if that's needed by ANet: Offer coupons to accounts that buy (with real money) gems at a certain level (possibly over a period of time). For example, an account which buys 5000 gems (with real money) in a month gets 10% off purchases for a day or a week.

 

I like that idea. A lot. :)

[Robj.6815]

Speaking as someone who spends quite a bit of RL money on gems, this is a bad idea. The reason I want (and do) buy gems is because outside of purchasing the game and expansions, it is a direct method by which I can support Anet.

 

However, introducing a coupon would only entice players who may or may not be able to afford the required amount of gems to either spend more money than they have OR lead them to believe they're being left out which may further discourage purchasing of gems, thus diminishing direct support for Anet.

 

In short, while not a direct pay-to-win scenario, it would create a similar scenario along those lines unless you were to limit the coupon to gemstore vanity items only and keep it away from the more useful items (boosters, character boosts, gold exchange, etc.).

[Biff.5312]

Basically this amounts to simply giving you more gems for the same price, so why not just discount higher denominations? Much simpler.

[starlinvf.1358]

> @"Biff.5312" said:

> Basically this amounts to simply giving you more gems for the same price, so why not just discount higher denominations? Much simpler.

 

That has its pitfalls. Most F2P games do this to incentivize over spending on "double discounts", where the player spends far more then they need/want on the fallacy of bulk discounts. The knock on effect of this in GW2 would probably lead to decreasing the drop rate of certain BL chest items to offset the increased number of keys being used, from people buying gems on discount PLUS keys in bulk discount. Its a sktechy marketing tactic that I can see NCsoft doing on their mobile side, but it would run the risk of increasing the divide between minnows and whale spending habits; which is a problem when you're trying to foster low scale spending, and increases volatility on the high end.

 

Daybreak/SOE used to run double/triple promotions for their premium currency, and ran discount sales in each game's store through out the year to get people spending. What they discovered was people would only buy substantial amounts of currency during those sales, and then would try to combine discounts on items to maximize returns. The net result was players being able to last a whole year (or more) on $100-200 investment, and that rate would decrease over time as they ran out of things to spend on. Like GW2, that game wasn't reliant on Consumable items to drive sales, so the saturation point can hit pretty quickly. I can already see this being a problem in GW2 Cosmetics on my own account, with 3 builds each on the 9 classes/characters having their own skin arrangement. Unless a new outfit is extremely good, I'm not likely to replace existing ones at this point..... and this is made worse in that older outfits no longer being used feels like a lost investment.

[Illconceived Was Na.9781]

It's unlikely to happen. It's an eminently reasonable suggestion and it works for other companies, even other gaming studios. It just doesn't fit ANet's current practices.

 

The primary reason is that ANet wants people to spend when they want stuff. They want "ooh, shiny" to grab people's attention (like it did yesterday with the Boss Portal tool, a previously popular request, as can be seen with the gold:gem conversion rate sky-rocketing from 109g/400 gems to over 140). Temporary coupons undermine this practice, by encouraging people to wait for the discount. We can see this in game sales, as the forums and moreso r/guildwars2 are full of people asking when the game will be less than US$30 — they aren't spending when they want the game; they are waiting for the sale. That's fine for the expansion, since most of the income is generated when it's new. It's bad for the cash shop, which ends up being the primary source of income most of the other 15-25 months of their release schedule.

 

tl;dr reasonable idea that undermines the cash shop income by encouraging people to wait rather than buy on impulse.

 

(spoiler alert: I encourage people to acquire gems on a consistent basis, especially if converting gold. Be thoughtful about your spending, in game and in real life.)