Guild Wars 2

For example: Those who purchase gems with cash are still spending $10 to buy a 20%(or w/e the % is) discounted finisher. Say a finisher costs 450 gems. Why can I not just pay $5.62 for this finisher and be done with it? The only other alternatives are that I convert gold to gems (not likely) or that I don’t make a purchase at all (the case 99% of the time). It’s ridiculous that I need to convert 17-20 gold to buy trans charges OR spend $10 gems to make a purchase that is essentially $1.87 worth of goods. I would even be fine with rounding it to the nearest dollar as a convenience charge – whatever.

This doesn’t have to be the case for items that are exactly 800 gems or in multiples of 800 as it is actually more convenient to just buy the equivalent gem packs and be done with it.

I would think there’s some laws about that.

That and there’s the issue with different currencies.

It’s simply to encourage you to spend more and buy more. If you have enough left over, you might buy something else or trade the gems for gold, fueling the exchange. Extra gems also encourages some people to buy more gems, because they know they have them.

ArenaNet also has to pay a small fee per transaction, but that doesn’t become a problem until you go into the less than $1 range.

that opens up a very smelly legal can of worms, which I’d imagine most MMO’s in the world would want to avoid.

Can you imagine the sheer drama that would explode if a hacked account racked up someone’s credit card bill by a few thousand?

rapthorne.7345:

that opens up a very smelly legal can of worms, which I’d imagine most MMO’s in the world would want to avoid.

Can you imagine the sheer drama that would explode if a hacked account racked up someone’s credit card bill by a few thousand?

you can save your credit card info when purchasing gems already anyway. and paypal has conversion between curencies so that isn’t an issue.

Proxy currencies are here to stay. It allows companies to simplify their cash shop to world currencies if everything in there is listed with proxy Vs multiple world currencies.

Also by prepackaging proxy amounts it forces the player to buy more than they want and either buy more and get additional items from the shop or convert the remainder to gold thus helping the gold to gem rates. So few seem to hold onto the remainder so they don’t need to convert or buy as much for the next time.

At least guild wars offers the chance to dump the remainders into game gold. I know a few folks back in the day who’d get stuck with 45 microsoft points and there was nothing they could do with it except write it off.

Behellagh.1468:

Proxy currencies are here to stay. It allows companies to simplify their cash shop to world currencies if everything in there is listed with proxy Vs multiple world currencies.

Also by prepackaging proxy amounts it forces the player to buy more than they want and either buy more and get additional items from the shop or convert the remainder to gold thus helping the gold to gem rates. So few seem to hold onto the remainder so they don’t need to convert or buy as much for the next time.

There’s also the legal safety net of companies declaring that their cash shop currency has 0 real world value, which would be thrown out completely by introducing direct cash trading

It’s a pity that “point bucket” systems, like gems or the old Microsoft points, are so popular. They have some advantages for the company, but they’re just not a consumer-friendly practice. As a consumer, I don’t have anything positive to say about them—Obviously some companies (Microsoft, for example,) have worked out the catches sufficiently that they can allow direct purchases, or, at least, allow you to purchase their funny money in the exact amount you need as a middle step.

Really, it’s just the latter I want. Keeping a cash-currency around is fine. I just don’t like that people have a limited number of options when it comes to how many they want to buy. It’s not the end of the world, but it’s still anti-consumer.