Guild Wars 2

See the title.

Holiday event, hooray! It’s a shame the thing you just added to the gem store, the collections expander, can’t be gifted. I would actually buy three of them for myself with my real money and gift a few to a friend if I could, but they’re just not worth it without the ability to gift them.

Can you please turn the flag “on” for allowing them to be gifted? If people overbuy them for their friends, they can just open a support ticket. Most would look into this ahead of time anyway to make sure they’re not wasting it.

Seconded. I was about to buy one for a friend when I realized that they can’t be gifted. Why are some things giftable and some things not? It makes no sense.

i was just coming here to post about this issue. it seems lame that you can’t buy account upgrades for friends. i just wanted to buy the “Collection Expander” upgrade for a friend that does a lot of gathering, but then was disappointed when i found out i couldn’t. Especially since i only realised this after i spent the RL money to buy the gems to do it >.<

So yes, please give us the option to gift friends the “upgrade” gem store items.

The devs have said before why they won’t allow this. They don’t want go give people the ability to gift stuff to people and in the process possibly learn about their accounts. Something about potential hackers being able to gift upgrades to people to try and “fish” for people who have more upgrades on their account, or something. Send out a bunch of bank upgrades, find the people who can’t receive any more, and target those accounts with your hack attempts, something like that.

Sounds kind of silly to me, but it is what it is and for that reason it’ll probably never happen.

I really, really want to gift upgrades also!

Electro.4173:

The devs have said before why they won’t allow this. They don’t want go give people the ability to gift stuff to people and in the process possibly learn about their accounts. Something about potential hackers being able to gift upgrades to people to try and “fish” for people who have more upgrades on their account, or something. Send out a bunch of bank upgrades, find the people who can’t receive any more, and target those accounts with your hack attempts, something like that.

Sounds kind of silly to me, but it is what it is and for that reason it’ll probably never happen.

Most idiotic excuse.

Dear hackers. I have no account upgrades, but 600 gold, many skins, resources etc! Please send me any gifts from BLTC and then hack me, thank you.

P.S. They just don’t want to let us use 40% sale price for collection expander

Electro.4173:

The devs have said before why they won’t allow this. They don’t want go give people the ability to gift stuff to people and in the process possibly learn about their accounts. Something about potential hackers being able to gift upgrades to people to try and “fish” for people who have more upgrades on their account, or something. Send out a bunch of bank upgrades, find the people who can’t receive any more, and target those accounts with your hack attempts, something like that.

Sounds kind of silly to me, but it is what it is and for that reason it’ll probably never happen.

I knew that, but just reading it again made me think that it could be very “simple”. Forgive me, I don’t know exactly how the process works atm – but basically I envision a process like this, the present is wrapped and thus there is no check on the account. Once the receiver get’s it – then the system checks if the present is applicable, if not the receiver will be able to exchange it back for the gems spent.

That way it is up to the receiver to disclose whether or not he could use it and he can still spend it on something nice or opt to “gift” something back etc.

Did I just make some coding people cringe and having nightmares?

Anyways, more potential sales for Anet, all happy.

Actually, the problem is more basic than this: if you send someone too many account-based upgrades, or if multiple people send the same person too many, then you wasted your gems/money and support gets flooded with demands for refunds. A small convenience for you, but a huge expense for Anet.

tolunart.2095:

Actually, the problem is more basic than this: if you send someone too many account-based upgrades, or if multiple people send the same person too many, then you wasted your gems/money and support gets flooded with demands for refunds. A small convenience for you, but a huge expense for Anet.

I don’t know, if I am sending someone a gift and he cannot use it, but he is able to exchange it for something he can use … why would I demand a refund? It’s not like we are talking about a unique collectors item or something of sentimental value.

He is not able to exchange it for something else. When you try to apply a bank upgrade, for example, to a bank that has all its slots open, the upgrade fails and you have to contact support to get the gems refunded. It doesn’t automatically turn into gems into your account.

They would either have to program this, taking a lot of time to implement and test and bugfix, which would not be ready until next December anyway, or hire more customer support in anticipation of a flood of refund requests. Both options cost Anet a lot of money, vs. the choice they went with, to disable gifting for finite use items like account upgrades which costs them nothing.

The devs can’t snap their fingers and make it happen, you can open fifty threads about it and get a thousand people to demand it but it just isn’t going to happen.

Rouven.7409:

I knew that, but just reading it again made me think that it could be very “simple”. Forgive me, I don’t know exactly how the process works atm – but basically I envision a process like this, the present is wrapped and thus there is no check on the account. Once the receiver get’s it – then the system checks if the present is applicable, if not the receiver will be able to exchange it back for the gems spent.

That way it is up to the receiver to disclose whether or not he could use it and he can still spend it on something nice or opt to “gift” something back etc.

Did I just make some coding people cringe and having nightmares?

Anyways, more potential sales for Anet, all happy.

Ah, I see. My first post was a general response to the thread, not to you personally.

To answer your rhetorical question, yes this is the kind of thing that gives coders nightmares. It’s not in any way simple, and if implemented incorrectly will cost customers a lot of time and Anet a huge amount of money.

There is a particular process the devs go through when adding things to the game, they don’t discuss it but it involves proposals, approvals, coding, testing, bugfixes and more approvals before it is scheduled to be added to the live game.

You’re looking at a minimum of four months development time for anything that is not an emergency bugfix, and something like this probably more along the lines of eight months, so it’s not going to be something they can implement in time for this season’s “gifting.”

And this is assuming that the devs can change the minds of those who already discussed the possibility when gifting was introduced and decided to go the way they did because automating the refund process would be too time consuming, too difficult to program properly, or too unpopular to devote that amount of resources to developing.

Oh I agree, all we can do is give our input and ideas however crazy they might be. There have been quite a threads about “please allow better/more gifting options” so that’s the only reason why it popped into my head.

It’s like, sometimes you change billing platforms, not fun and involves a lot of people and overtime most often than not – maybe, I’m not saying that is the same process.

However, it seems to me that Anet often likes to roll out certain features in stages, starting smallish and then rounding up the repertoire so I would not lose all hope.

Agreed that it would be nice to be able to gift account upgrades. Hopefully in the future we’ll be able to do this.

ezd.6359:

P.S. They just don’t want to let us use 40% sale price for collection expander

I think so too.

If I’m right few month ago when there was sale on upgrading to Digital Deluxe there was an option to send it as a gift.
So now they blocked it because account upgrades cost the most. Thats basically it.

That means this promotion is kinda cheating but still it’s great promotion for skins and such.

The store is not smart enough to prevent you from gifting a limited use item like an upgrade, bank slot, collection expansion, etc to someone who has already hit that limit (or have them waiting in their mail already). That’s why you are not allowed to.