Guild Wars 2

If I had to take a guess, the Gem Store team is nearly completely separate from the regular development team. They have at least one dedicated armor artist, are fed the update notes by the main dev team, and produce both LS-related and unrelated content.

This is a debacle, to be sure, but I’m guessing it’s a goof-up by the Gem Store team, a decision made without any coordination with the overall principles of gear acquisition in the “PLAY-to-win” game.

Something like:
“Oh, the armor artist is on vacation/busy with something else, but we’d like to put an armor release out because our metrics suggest that we should release a new set every XX weeks for optimal market demand.”
“Well, we can make it work by doing a recolor or something… but a recolor is pretty boring, so lets add some cool particle effects to it.”
“Hmm, fire effects are easy, let’s do those.”
“Ok, let’s pick a few existing sets to use… oh, that one with the cleavage window looks good, lets do that.”

Totbot.4583:

Glenstorm.4059:

Totbot.4583:

This seems like such a non issue.

People will still see your super special T3 armor and know you paid 119g for it. Nothing changed there. Hell, the gem store version even gives you less flexibility in looks since you have to go with the flame motif with it. The t3 doesn’t.

Maybe get gear you think looks good and stop worrying about other people?

If it was any other type of armor or weapon (heck, even Legendaries), it wouldn’t bother me.

But the whole point, the WHOLE blessed point of Cultural armor was that is was exclusive to each race.

Making it (T3, no less!) available to every other race is just wrong, and unfair.

It still looks different. Your T3 doesn’t have stupid fire particle effects.

Use what YOU think looks good. If you’re worried that other people won’t be drooling over your T3 anymore then don’t worry. T3 has been pretty common for a long time.

Believe me, I didn’t get my T3 light armor because I want people to drool over it…in fact, it was already pretty commonplace when I bought my set. I bought it simply because it was the highest tier exclusively human armor set available. I’m not begrudging other people having the same T3 looks, I’m begrudging non-humans wearing human-exclusive armor sets. Doubly so because no other race’s cultural sets got the same treatment.

Totbot.4583:

Glenstorm.4059:

Totbot.4583:

This seems like such a non issue.

People will still see your super special T3 armor and know you paid 119g for it. Nothing changed there. Hell, the gem store version even gives you less flexibility in looks since you have to go with the flame motif with it. The t3 doesn’t.

Maybe get gear you think looks good and stop worrying about other people?

If it was any other type of armor or weapon (heck, even Legendaries), it wouldn’t bother me.

But the whole point, the WHOLE blessed point of Cultural armor was that is was exclusive to each race.

Making it (T3, no less!) available to every other race is just wrong, and unfair.

It still looks different. Your T3 doesn’t have stupid fire particle effects.

Use what YOU think looks good. If you’re worried that other people won’t be drooling over your T3 anymore then don’t worry. T3 has been pretty common for a long time.

The difference, a little bit of flames(it doesnt really look that different). and he is upset about the cultural aspect ruined not the t3 factor.

sylvari boobs!!! revolutionary idea anet

IMO this was poor judgement, and they should have known how many people it would make pretty angry. Its kind of lame to have players pay an insane amount of money for a skin they thought was UNIQUE to their race, and then IMPROVE it with particle effects for LESS money. Not the smartest move, IMO. Im very disappointed.

This really saddens me. I don’t understand why they would do this. It comes off as disrespectful to the people playing humans. Like we aren’t as important. : /

Great medium armor gets another ugly set.

It’s obvious they did this for money, living story was a mistake for their business model they should have stick to expansions.

“Great medium armor gets another ugly set.”

Correction: Another ugly, trench coat, re-skin, just add fire set. :P

I like the effects, but light is the only good one imo.

Flame Kissed Norn Cultural T3 Heavy Please. My human warrior has been waiting.

Onderon.7564:

sylvari boobs!!! revolutionary idea anet

What?

It just feels like they are trying to drive players away from GW2 now.

An interesting story that could of had a great ending, and they ruined it with Scarlet yet again. A complete reset of everyone’s ranks in Fractals, just so they could have Leaderboards that no one asked for. Ascended back items still not available in PvP, yet they added them to the mystic toilet instead.

And now this. Reskins in the gem store for the price of a new skin, and then they had the nerve to make one of them T3 Human Cultural armor. An armor that was supposed to be exclusive and rare to humans. Now available for everyone in the gem store. Seriously?

Are you just trying to anger your players and force them to quit your game? Because it feels like you are constantly doing exactly that. You keep doing all these things that players are complaining about and you ignore everything we say. It is obvious you just care about ways to con money out of us, and not about us as actual players.

Vixena.3821:

Can anyone give a logical reason why ArenaNet decided to put human t3 light cultural armor in the Gem Store that has special effects and cost LESS than the 119g you would have to pay in the game for regular human t3 light cultural armor?

Who in their right mind said this would be a good idea?

Why is my 119g human t3 cultural armor worth 67g on the Gem Store (with added effects)?

I would give you a logical reason to why this has happened, but frankly I fail to see it. This is a stupid marketing decision made simply to please lazy kitten people that fail to understand the purpose of cultural armors.

How could they do this? What is next? legendary skins for 10 bucks?

SpyderArachnid.5619:

It just feels like they are trying to drive players away from GW2 now.

An interesting story that could of had a great ending, and they ruined it with Scarlet yet again. A complete reset of everyone’s ranks in Fractals, just so they could have Leaderboards that no one asked for. Ascended back items still not available in PvP, yet they added them to the mystic toilet instead.

And now this. Reskins in the gem store for the price of a new skin, and then they had the nerve to make one of them T3 Human Cultural armor. An armor that was supposed to be exclusive and rare to humans. Now available for everyone in the gem store. Seriously?

Are you just trying to anger your players and force them to quit your game? Because it feels like you are constantly doing exactly that. You keep doing all these things that players are complaining about and you ignore everything we say. It is obvious you just care about ways to con money out of us, and not about us as actual players.

It sure feels that way and its stupid and here I was thinking that I could save up money for that armor when I’ll make a human caster and guess what, it just popped on the black lion with some unoriginal fire effects so that any race can buy something that was intended only for humans, congrats. clap clap clap

As for Scarlet, I still tell myself that she’s not in this game, that cheap Harley Quinn copy belongs in the trash can and not in this game.

GuNNeR.9475:

How could they do this? What is next? legendary skins for 10 bucks?

Don’t give them ideas, you know that may happen as well.

Vex.3021:

It’s obvious they did this for money, living story was a mistake for their business model they should have stick to expansions.

Or add some dragons to kill.

I’m hoping that one day we will be able to see Cantha or Elona again, Tyria is so lame nowadays.

Jabberwock.9014:

God I didn’t even think about that. Now I’m going to have to watch sylvari and norns charading in my cultural armor while theirs is still off limits.

Since you can’t take this back now, you better go all the way and give us humans heavy t3 norn armor. Or give us a new t3 light armor. Or give our t3 an OPTIONAL rainbow glow that will make it not strictly less impressive than this new travesty (and optional because I don’t always want to be emitting particle effects).

Or simply remove this flamekissed joke from the game and refund the money people spent on it.

pixie.5940:

Yeah, I don’t plan on buying any the new stuff. It’s kind of lame to give one race T3 Armor, ontop of the price is kind of stupid. Reskin…joy… maybe anet was in rush since thanksgiving is close and they want to spend time with their families.

kitten (don’t you suckers dare change my words to kittens you know kitten well what I said) them and their families, our money pays their bills not the other way around.

Jesus Anet.

I don’t mind you putting out recycled, crappy skin on the Gem Store. Some people definitely will like it and buy it, I understand.

But can we not at the same time destroy the exclusivity of the skin I have?

Thaia.5146:

I’m speechless. I’ve spent 119g on my T3 like… 6 months ago? I HIGHLY encourage people responsible for this to give us an official response.

And here I was hoping to see some cool new armors in the stores with the new content, guess what, all we got was crap.

Totally kitten ed off at this Anet, i have 3 human fem chars all in t3 light which i grinded for plus bought stones for so i could transmute (several times as builds changed) and now its cheaper and better looking and can be applied without transmuting. What..The..Hell….
A brand new player can have the best human armour for way cheaper and better looking. Cosmetics are the endgame remember, what happened to that plan?

edit: oh, and according to the preview its fully dyable too…

I have a human mesmer with a full set minus the headgear (because it looks odd). For months on end I have been happily flaunting it because the skin was exclusive to humans. I’ve sunk over 2000g on this character, if that is any testament to how much I like it.

The new skin looks great on a human. Naturally, since the original skin was designed solely for human characters. But to imagine some fat norn in that appearance? Urgh.

I can’t think of how else to express my thoughts on this, so this will have to do.

tl:dr: This is a big slap in the face to anyone with a human with light T3, myself included.

Eh, I’m actually predicting this one will be resolved fairly reasonably. They’ll take the light version off the gemstore, but not mess with already-purchased copies. Maybe they’ll replace the light version in a few weeks with something else.

Not perfect (sort of a random windfall for the people who bought it already to get some awesome and now super rare armor) but it prevents it from being a long-term problem.

I’m embarrassed for Anet. This move is, I though, below them and a greedy money-grabbing tactic I’d expect to see in a much less prestigious MMO company.
It’s shameful for Anet and really degrading to their name and the company I thought they were.

Is everyone at Anet so busy working on the next (imo) boring and repetitive Living Story content update that no one was available to simply design a couple of NEW armor skins?

I just wanted to say that I’m happy the Flamekissed Set is in the trading post. I’ve always liked the human tier 3, but I play sylvari so I had no chance to get it before. Having as many armor skins to choose from is something that keeps this game fun to me. I like to change armors like I change clothes each day.

I do have a suggestion though.

It would be great if it were possible to dye the color of the flame. I noticed the animation of cinders coming off of the armor also which is awesome. So if it were possible to dye the flames black, and have black cinders coming off that would be amazing. Or even a blue flame like the icy dragon sword, or w/e color people wanted. You know everyone likes their armor to match their hair color and it’s even better to have the glow parts of an armor match the sylvari’s skin glow. And fire is one of those things that looks more awesome in different colors.

With that said. I wouldn’t be offended at all if I saw a human wearing a sylvari cultural tier 3 set, because it doesn’t take anything away from me.

Still no acknowledgement from a dev that this was a major screwup… I think this game has finally jumped the shark. There is just no way to spin this travesty in a good light and I for one will not spend any more real money in the gem store again. Maybe I’ll stick around for a while hogging bandwidth to see if there are any sparks left, but it really doesn’t look hopeful with this blatant display of reckless greed and utter lack of accountability. Sad because the game on its own is amazing, yet they are flushing even the very basic pillars of it down the toilet (race exclusivity of cultural armor should never have had a remote chance of being challenged, yet here we are).

Help us raise our voice here
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/bltc/Anti-Cultural-in-TP-Awareness/page/2#post3269387

Gingelyr.3648:

Eh, I’m actually predicting this one will be resolved fairly reasonably. They’ll take the light version off the gemstore, but not mess with already-purchased copies. Maybe they’ll replace the light version in a few weeks with something else.

Not perfect (sort of a random windfall for the people who bought it already to get some awesome and now super rare armor) but it prevents it from being a long-term problem.

That’s not reasonable at all. Now the people who bought it have the single be all end all version of t3 light human cultural armor, making the original even less prestigious. The only true option is to recall the armor, and refund anyone who purchased it 800 to 1600 gems.

This is beyond pathetic and stupid. cultural armor was supposed to be unique for races. It was already bad enough to see it on WWW np’s but now they made it totally worthless

If all races could wear cultural armors, there would be no point in having cultural armors.

GuNNeR.9475:

How could they do this? What is next? legendary skins for 10 bucks?

I’ll pay up to 1000 gems for a legendary weapon skin.. make it happen Anet!

You’ve screwed us over with this armor on the gemstore, it makes sense to screw over others who’ve invested a lot of time into this game as well.

Make it happen!

Could we please get a statement from one of the devs? Please?
You can see that a lot of people are quite unhappy! Can you explain your decision to reskin the t3 armor (alongside with two not-so-desired-armors).

I’m pretty kitten ed, I spent 120 gold on a set of human only armor that now any one can get for 800 gems? Hey, I’ve got an idea. Next, how about if you sell Legendary Weapon skins for 1600 gems.

To be honest, I have no issue with other races being able to wear a different race’s Cultural armor. (We already wield their Cultural weapons, after all.) Nor do I have a problem with reskins; I think it’s a bit of a cheap way out, but somebody may like the tweaks, and who am I to deny them what they enjoy?

I DO think that T3 Cultural is grossly overpriced though (especially considering it’s not even Exotic armor), and now that the Flamekissed set offers something that’s (arguably) better for less than half the price, maybe ANet should look at slashing the price for T3 Cultural armor to, say, 20g. Then refund everybody who’s purchased T3 Cultural 100g and a set of 6 Transmutation Crystals per T3 set.

Zaxares.5419:

I DO think that T3 Cultural is grossly overpriced though (especially considering it’s not even Exotic armor), and now that the Flamekissed set offers something that’s (arguably) better for less than half the price, maybe ANet should look at slashing the price for T3 Cultural armor to, say, 20g. Then refund everybody who’s purchased T3 Cultural 100g and a set of 6 Transmutation Crystals per T3 set.

While it’s a great idea on paper, not everyone buys the full set of armor and many have used far more than 6 Transmutation Crystals. Since they can’t even design a new set of armor or code a simple dungeon that isn’t riddled with bugs I can’t say I have faith in their ability to calculate the number/type/cost of pieces purchased across all characters on an account and scale the refund accordingly. For example, I bought a full set of t3 (minus the helm) for one character and have transmuted it probably a dozen times, on another character I have the t3 pants, gloves, and shoulders, which have only been transmuted once. Not even I have an idea what kind of refund they’d have to offer for me to pretend I’m not just waiting for literally any other MMO to come out.

And the hilarious thing is that since the original design of cultural armor also more or less forced you to transmute from the gemstore, the ones getting shafted are the ones supporting them in the first place!

This is glorious.

Seriously though i find it to bee a bad sign that the ship is sinking when developers start pushing reskins out the front door. Either they are desperate to show NC that they can still make money and/or they just realized they could simply get as much cash for less work by reselling a slightly modified version. Both alternatives are scary.

Erskine.5206:

Could we please get a statement from one of the devs? Please?
You can see that a lot of people are quite unhappy! Can you explain your decision to reskin the t3 armor (alongside with two not-so-desired-armors).

Sadly, they will either ignore us like usual and hope the problem goes away on it’s own (or sweep it under the rug), or the response they give will be about keeping the thread constructive.

No response they give will justify what they have done here. There is nothing they can say that will justify selling an exclusive, expensive, rare T3 human cultural set on the gem store and making it available for every race at half the cost.

This is just another bit of proof that shows that they don’t care about the players and the time/effort/money they have put into the game. They just want our money and will do whatever it takes to get it. Even if that means screwing over the players in the process. Nothing they can say will prove otherwise.

Original T3 user here (got the set a few weeks ago nonetheless).

I’m trying to stay optimist here. Based on ANet’s silence, I hope it means they are discussing the issue internally and come up with the best way to fix this mess.

I give them one week to come up with something. I will be quitting this game altogether if they still keep their silence or gives us a pitiful solution. Not bluffing here, I have already asked which of my friends are still playing, so I’ll give them all my tradeable stuff (was ~5% away from my first legendary) and deleting all my characters so I have no incentive to come back.

I was considering buying infinite gathering tools and Kasmeer’s Staff today, guess they have lost another customer. It’s not only this mess that made me seriously consider quitting, but the fact that I have been steadily losing confidence in ANet’s ability to guide this game to success, based on their recent track record (hordes of gemstore only stuff, but Cantha/Elona not even considered for planning yet?). This fiasco just dumped my confidence left to the trashcan.

SpyderArachnid.5619:

Erskine.5206:

Could we please get a statement from one of the devs? Please?
You can see that a lot of people are quite unhappy! Can you explain your decision to reskin the t3 armor (alongside with two not-so-desired-armors).

Sadly, they will either ignore us like usual and hope the problem goes away on it’s own (or sweep it under the rug), or the response they give will be about keeping the thread constructive.

No response they give will justify what they have done here. There is nothing they can say that will justify selling an exclusive, expensive, rare T3 human cultural set on the gem store and making it available for every race at half the cost.

This is just another bit of proof that shows that they don’t care about the players and the time/effort/money they have put into the game. They just want our money and will do whatever it takes to get it. Even if that means screwing over the players in the process. Nothing they can say will prove otherwise.

This is actually a very true statement. I’d like a dev prove otherwise, but I’m sure they never will. What are their actual intention? Money, money, money. That is all they care about.

I’m astounded that so much (justified) outrage has not warranted a single response from ANet.

And to those who think this isn’t a big deal, remember: today, it’s human scholars losing their T3 cultural skin exclusivity; tomorrow it could be your favored race/profession combo following suit. A terrible precedent has been set today.

This is the kind of moves I didn’t expect from Arenanet! They started the TP out so slow during the first half year but lately it has just been crazy. And the drop is remaking an exclusive cultural set available for everyone, kitten ing on the hard work people put in to get their look.

This game is all about looks and if they start devaluing that there is nothing left to strive for. They need to carefully think about what they have done and the impacts it will have and hopefully never do it again or they will be screwed!

I’m surprised that players are still surprised at the fact Living story as a whole is tied in totality to the gem store profits, pushing out content of all kinds too fast.

I don’t see this changing anytime soon, and don’t even know if Anet is to blame or NCsoft.

Reskinned Cultural T3 wouldn’t have been a problem if they weren’t 100+ gold a set.

Gem store armor and weapons not added to Achievements rewards panel? and not boosting the price up like the gathering tools past 800gems when they should have been account bound in the first place at original price.

Still confused on Anet view on players buying these armors from the gem store, plus craft multiple sets of ascended armor to put them on? Or do they think w/the speed they pump armor skins out that we will buy transmute stones and splitters each new set?

Take in consideration threads like this are because players want the game to succeed.

1. Cost of t3 need 130g
2. Cost of 6 transmutation crystal (5 for 200 gems)

Now, human t3 skin sell in 800 gems, and it equals to (1+2) 130g in 600 gems.

Pls, withdraw the t3 culture sell in tp

Hot Boy.7138:

With that said. I wouldn’t be offended at all if I saw a human wearing a sylvari cultural tier 3 set, because it doesn’t take anything away from me.

That sounds awesome, and something I’d probably drop gems on.

Non-humans could use the recently-reverted versions with all-dyable areas, and the sylvari can keep the originals that adapt to their glow.

To take that concept even further, would love to see some medium leggings available for my heavies, and some heavy/light coats for my adventurers.

Yeah while I think the people who spent gold and gems to get human T3 are right to be angry, I would LOVE to see cultural armour available to everyone. It would allow for a lot of customisation because the cultural armours are much more unique looking than the universal ones.

I am beyond disappointed that anet decided to include this set in the gem store. Like many others in this thread, I put in quite a bit of time and effort in order to earn the gold for the human tier 3 light armor.

Anet, how are you going to fix this situation? We’re all waiting for a response from you.

CrashTestAuto.9108:

because the cultural armours were much more unique looking than the universal ones until Anet decided to remove “cultural” armor and make all armor sets universal.

Fixed it for ya.

Did anyone consider that this may just be a placeholder? The armor isnt released yet, things could change. Although I doubt that.

Or maybe each race uses their own cultural armor and adds a fire effect?

I havent seen a picture of a sylvari or norn previewing it. I also wonder what the asura and charr get with that same skin.

Also, restretching it to sylvari and norn would be alot of work, because its only available for humans, I guess.

Alissah.9281:

Did anyone consider that this may just be a placeholder? The armor isnt released yet, things could change.

There are literally characters of all races running around Tyria wearing it at this very moment. It was released with yesterday’s patch.