Gemstore Item Idea: Birthdays

[Eddy.7051]

I would appreciate a gemstore item that converts a character's age to the player's account age.

 

I've played this game since beta but I've only recently been able to get the birthday blaster. I'm a fickle player who recreated mains and alts a lot. I would pay up to $20 per character to convert their ages to my account's age so that I can get all of the birthday gifts I missed out on for rerolling. This would be a low-effort and fair way for Anet to make more money, imo. Thoughts?

 

Edit: TY for the feedback on how this can be exploitable. Ideally I wish there was just 1 bday gift for account age, but Anet does want to make money off of people who buy character slots to farm bday gifts. Would a happy medium for my suggestion be to make the character age conversion bound to a character slot? Remaking characters on that slot will never refresh bday gifts. The special character slots can have a special border on the character selection screen. The high cost of a character slot and age converter bundle should be expensive enough that it would never be desirable to do this just to "farm" bday gifts. Bday gift rewards are all account bound anyways, right? So I can't imagine this being exploitable.

[Dante.1763]

Hmmm, i wouldnt mind a one time thing that did that, mainly cause i deleted my first character around 60 days after launch because Makeover kits, and name change items werent a thing at the time, nor was there any idea if they where coming. Saddly anet couldnt restore the character though they do have the information on them because another character has the same name :(

 

 

[eldrjth.7384]

Imo it should be 1 birthday gift per "account birthday" starting from registration date. So you are free to do whatever you like with your char slots while it rewards those who have played the game longer which is the general idea of them in the first place. But since its the way that it is Ive bought 25 char slots (18 from this years anniversary sale) just to get the BD gifts every year, and it would suck if they changed it now since I havent collected on them yet.

 

As for your suggestion I dont want something like that to be a paid for gem item. Infact it might not be a bad idea if 2 BD gifts were handed out every year. 1 for account age the other for chars age.

[Inculpatus cedo.9234]

Hmm...create character, get 6 (or more) years worth of gifts, delete...rinse, repeat. I don't think that would work (if it was no cost).

 

For a Gem Store item, perhaps just asking for a bundle of items that included past Birthday Gifts would be more acceptable/feasible.

 

Good luck.

[Just a flesh wound.3589]

So if someone wanted to spend the money they can make all their chars max age no matter when they were created? Even ones made that day to do a key run?

 

Might as well remove the idea of character birthdays if you can buy them in the gemstore.

[Randulf.7614]

It certainly cheapens birthdays and makes it hugely exploitable as per above posts. Maybe it could be a one time only ever purchase, but really I don't think it is something the game overly needs. Anet has done character based birthdays since the beginning of GW1 with no indication they wish to change it.

 

I wouldn't be overly bothered by such an implementation I guess, but at this stage I think it is left best as is

[Biff.5312]

I think it would be simpler to just offer the various birthday gift packages on the gem store as a limited purchase (i.e., you can only buy say 2 of each).

[Solvar.7953]

They certainly could sell birthday gives (for gems) based on the account age, eg, 6 year gifts only available if the account is 6 years old, etc. Given how underwhelming the gifts are, it is hard to imagine anyone buying a bunch of them - charge 400 gems or something - if someone wants to buy 10 of them, I can't see any issue from a play point of view of letting them buy that many. But people might very well buy 1 to get that years exclusive mini.

 

[Miellyn.6847]

> @"Brad.9730" said:

> I would appreciate a gemstore item that converts a character's age to the player's account age.

>

> I've played this game since beta but I've only recently been able to get the birthday blaster. I'm a fickle player who recreated mains and alts a lot. I would pay up to $20 per character to convert their ages to my account's age so that I can get all of the birthday gifts I missed out on for rerolling. This would be a low-effort and fair way for Anet to make more money, imo. Thoughts?

>

> Edit: TY for the feedback on how this can be exploitable. Ideally I wish there was just 1 bday gift for account age, but Anet does want to make money off of people who buy character slots to farm bday gifts. Would a happy medium for my suggestion be to make the character age conversion bound to a character slot? Remaking characters on that slot will never refresh bday gifts. The special character slots can have a special border on the character selection screen. The high cost of a character slot and age converter bundle should be expensive enough that it would never be desirable to do this just to "farm" bday gifts. Bday gift rewards are all account bound anyways, right? So I can't imagine this being exploitable.

 

It gives you dyes which results in less demand for dyes on the TP.

 

You don't know how much effort it would take.

I don't think that ArenaNet makes any money from people 'farming' those gifts. It just sounds like an entitled player that want to cover up their mistake.

[Ashantara.8731]

As mentioned before, this should only be available as a one-time-per-account item - otherwise, it will be abused for rewards.

[Illconceived Was Na.9781]

There are two issues raised by the OP:

* Is it fair that the special once-per-account birthday gifts are based on the oldest character, rather than the day the player first entered GW2?

* Is it fair that people who re-roll characters get less birthday loot than those who do not?

 

The OP's suggestion assumes the answer is "no, it's not fair" and then attempts to find a solution.

 

That's problematic since it makes a pretty big assumption about the fairness and the reasons for the current situation.

 

Let's take the second question first: it seems perfectly fair to me that people who buy 10 character slots get twice as many rewards as someone who doesn't buy any new slots, and instead deletes and starts over 5 times. I'm not against the idea of throwing a bone to those who prefer re-rolling, but I think the status quo is fine: spend more? you get more.

 

The second question is about what defines the account's age. Should it be based on the oldest character? Eh, probably not. But the fact is that the game doesn't keep track of the first time someone played; it keeps track of the age of the characters. Making that change is almost certainly going to cost more than people are prepared to pay at the gem shop. So the question is: how important is it to the community overall?