Guild Wars 2

Grim Faust.6349:

I love how all these awesome new costumes and items to get in the spirit of halloween are mostly obtained with gems. The Black Lion Chest scam was genius. I spent $70 on keys and not a single kitten weapon skin. I guess I should have known better. Crafty capitalists. It’s almost as bad as when they announced the perma versions of those 3 items added to Black Lion Chests. That is the LAST time I fall for their gimmicks and dump money on those chests. What a sick money grab. Guess it worked out for them.

When did they say the 3 perma versions (I’m assuming you mean the shield/bow/staff ones) were in the BLCs?

I really, REALLY hope they don’t require the black lion tools. Those take up so much inventory since they don’t stack and they’re actually worse than orichalcum tools so I threw them all out. Anything else, especially tonics (since they stack and barely take up any room I kept them all), would be awesome.

skullmount.1758:

Grim Faust.6349:

I love how all these awesome new costumes and items to get in the spirit of halloween are mostly obtained with gems. The Black Lion Chest scam was genius. I spent $70 on keys and not a single kitten weapon skin. I guess I should have known better. Crafty capitalists. It’s almost as bad as when they announced the perma versions of those 3 items added to Black Lion Chests. That is the LAST time I fall for their gimmicks and dump money on those chests. What a sick money grab. Guess it worked out for them.

When did they say the 3 perma versions (I’m assuming you mean the shield/bow/staff ones) were in the BLCs?

I was talking about when they added in perma versions of items to summon your bank, a merchant or a trading post npc.

Victim.3016:

You kittens ANET lol I wish I had of read this post before I bought keys
kittening chests…
You just lost my respect.

I’m with you. Kicking myself for not looking this up before diving in with a bunch of gems. I truly feel like I was misled, and scammed because of it. I’m glad ANET is looking for a resolution though, so that means something. Still a bit upset that they would knowingly have people spend money expecting to get something, only for it to be so rare.

I don’t mind Slot machine mechanics with in-game money or resources, but with IRL money I hate it. I only spent 450 gems on keys and i’m kitten off that i got nothing, I can’t even imagine how other who spent a lot more r dealing with this.

Anet, plz just put the Greatsword chainsaw skin on gem store. I’ll be happy to pay for it , don’t ask me to gamble for it.

I had waited until the 23rd to open my 43 chests because I had saw it said they would drop the items starting the 23rd. I had saw this post on the 22nd and I was thinking perhaps they were not supposed to drop yet. So yesterday I waited till later to open all my chests and I got nothing, which I guess that if they are very rare then I can live with that. When I came on this afternoon and there was a update first thing I did is read the update notes and saw this

COMMERCE
Black Lion Chest Changes

Halloween items have been added to Black Lion Chests for a limited time only!
There is now a chance to get new Halloween-themed weapon skins by opening Black Lion Chests. All weapon skins are tradable.
Chain Sword Skin
Ghastly Grinning Shield Skin
Greatsaw Greatsword Skin
Grinning Gourd Rifle Skin
Scythe Staff Skin
Severed Dagger Skin
There is now a chance to get new Halloween-themed shoulder armor skins by opening Black Lion Chests. All shoulder armor skins are tradable.
Deathly Shoulderpads Skin
Deathly Avian Shoulderpads Skin
Deathly Bull Shoulderpads Skin
All Black Lion Chests have a chance to give these items, but only until the end of the Halloween events.
Get Black Lion Keys from the Consumable section of the Gem Store to open your Black Lion Chests.

Was I just unlucky, too early, or should this update have been pushed out earlier to start dropping by the time I opened them and Anet was late on fixing this? I sure hope we can use the stuff we got out of it to compensate us for this if thats the case.

As someone who has spent $350 on gems, don’t buy keys expecting to get a skin otherwise you’ll be disappointed.

Any faith I had in A-net from GW1 has now been destroyed. GW2 only show’s they care more about screwing over their player base for the quick easy $$$ rather than making it were the player base would be happy to spend some $$$ in the gemshop.

I did the same thing, spent 1000 gems and opened 24 chests and prolly 10 more since then and nothing!

ReginaBuenaobra.6953:

You are not guaranteed to receive a rare item after opening a Black Lion Chest. You have a chance to get a unique/rare item. Some people are luckier than others. The Halloween skins are tradeable, so if you aren’t able to get them in a Black Lion Chest, you can obtain them on the Trading Post.

With how much people sell them for you don’t have enough to buy it from TP because you spent your gold on getting the keys. :\

You do know it’s only a 1% chance of getting skins, right?

I bought the two new costume bundles, bought the other handful of new Town Clothes head items, and bought the mini pack with the ghost, spider and skeleton. I paid cash for gems. I’ve also bought every other costume item, including two copies each of the special light, medium and heavy armor skins (with plans to snag two more for my remaining alts). To hold all of this crap, I’ve bought several additional Bank slots, and a couple additional Pouch slots on my most-used characters. I would happily buy all of these skins as well.

I won’t gamble for them, though.

Even with the sorry pittance of keys that come as Story and Map rewards, I’ve picked up more than enough Mystery Tonics and crappy boosters. Maybe if I had any enthusiasm for the rewards from the BLCs themselves, I’d be willing to sift through a thousand of them to get all these skins. As is, I had a half dozen keys stocked up not because I knew this event was coming, but because I just didn’t care enough to use them any more (but I’m too much of a packrat to throw them away until I need the bank space for something better).

Well that sucks, spent 20 bucks on the keys. Oh well, I suppose I’ve spent money on worse things. I’d be madder if they weren’t working on a refund system but now I’m just disappointed.

Guess what, you know the odds when gambling in real life. With the chests and these skins, the tiny odds were purposely and misleadingly hidden. All of the advertising implies you could open a reasonable amount of chests and get some sort of Halloween item.

In fact, “rare” never appears anywhere in relation to the Halloween skins at all.

So no, it’s nothing like a casino and the comparison is completely invalid.

I opened about 50 and got 8 skins. You must be doing it wrong.

Just when you think they couldn’t add more grind to a dead/dying game, they add cash shop grinding.

I must congratulation Nexon / ArenaNet for their innovative use of monetizing pixels.

“Guess what, you know the odds when gambling in real life.” seems to be the consensus of the people who “wasted” a bunch of money and feel like they deserve something.

So, you’re obviously aware that you didn’t know the odds here and were aware that you were gambling. You guys chose to just dive in and spend money, how is that not your fault? If you really cared THIS much about whether or not you would get your skin why not let some other people spend their money and find out the precious odds for you so you could make an informed decision of whether or not to buy keys or spend those gems on gold to just straight up buy the skins?

Xai Xo.5649:

KorKor.9452:

I’m baffled anyone would listen to people like TSL or Xai. Any business trying to follow their model would run out of customers fast. An empty restaurant, high end shoes nobody pays for, a theatre that people drive past to the one ten miles away to avoid it. That is the kinda place they’d run.

Nobody is asking for the main mystic forge hard to get skins to be changed or the many other fun things during the event. They are asking for a single thing to get changed that was a bad model anyways that many companies have used. It is great news that Anet is deciding to change it for the better.

They are not catering to entitled people of which you have no understanding of the word anyways or whiners. Anet is fixing a bad choice for the paying customer. The item is not being given away for free. This item will instead be rare in another way as it should have been. Even if more get it the item will still be rare due to people changing skins later, players fluxing in ‘n’ out of the game, new players, etc.

So ya, you kinda peeps need to get over your arrogance, fanboyism, whatever. It’s not good for the industry.

Interesting – Casinos seem to be quite popular. Most gambling is. Nobody goes in expecting a win, they go in because there’s a chance of winning big. They pay money for the chance of winning, not a guaranteed win.

What you seem to think is that A) these skins matter, and buying keys/using BLC entitles you to a skin, and C) that RNG is a bad model.

At no point has ANet stated that the BLC skins are common, or guaranteed. Everyone seems to assume otherwise. The skins do drop, albeit at a low rate. As such, nobody should be complaining in this manner. Complain about the drop rate, sure, but practically every page of this thread is ridiculous; filled with vitriolic statements about how ANet are scamming people. That is ludicrous. The drops exist, they happen, ergo this is not a scam.

Take the OP – 22 chests, and he expected what? I don’t go play roulette or slots and then accuse them of being rigged because I didn’t hit the jackpot.

I fully understand the word entitled. For those who do not:

en·ti·tle (n-ttl)
tr.v. en·ti·tled, en·ti·tling, en·ti·tles
1. To give a name or title to.
2. To furnish with a right or claim to something.

People seem to expect that these rare, holiday-themed items should be common despite that never being alluded to. Others seem to think because they put money into an RNG they somehow deserve them. They seem to think that because an RNG has a low percentage chance of dropping these skins that ANet is somehow cheating them, which is an absurd viewpoint. If the skins did not drop at all, or some chests didn’t give any items at all, or anything like that, it’d be a scam. However, that is not the case.

There are free ways to get other Hallowe’en skins – Buy them off other players on the TP, or craft one of the 3 available skins in the MF. Doesn’t cost you a penny.

TL;DR: If you think this is a bad business model, look up Las Vegas. If you think it’s an unjust business model, that’s fair enough. If you think you’re entitled to the skins because you paid money for gems, you’re an idiot.

This isn’t a casino, this is a video game cash shop we’re talking about. In Vegas you can spend a few hundred and quite possibly win thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions even. This is why that model works for them and people understandably accept it. Here, you get pixels. Novelty Items. ( If you’re extremely lucky at that ) So don’t intermix the two and act like you make sense on acceptable proportions of the ROI of this games cash shop.

The situation involves the company and it’s source of revenue. The people who provide this games revenue are agitated by the poor choice Anet made, so they’re letting Anet know. Anet agrees now and sees their mistake, so they’re making a change. This is how things get done. Companies need to know when they’re in the wrong, otherwise they lose customers and money.

I am glad they are looking to try to rectify the issue, however, I feel it may cause more issues. With the message stating do not throw any items away is probably too late for many. I know I tossed all the tonics and kept only the boosters and other smaller items since they can be useable at some other time. The tonics are a waste.

This is going to be an issue as well so they need to tred carefully on how they are going to do this.

Upset customers is not equivalent to “the company made poor choices”. The fact that they’re making a change is to appease the upset customers. This change shows how much Arenanet cares about the customers, not that they were wrong in the first place.

Generally when a company only says “A chance for a weapon skin during halloween” and the item is obtained with real money, you don’t expect the chance for the skin to be 1 in 100.

Honestly I wouldn’t care if the weapon skins were such a low drop chance if they at least said “1% chance” or put them on something that wasn’t involved with gems.

zeroaegis.1932:

Upset customers is not equivalent to “the company made poor choices”. The fact that they’re making a change is to appease the upset customers. This change shows how much Arenanet cares about the customers, not that they were wrong in the first place.

Oh, so they’re rectifying a good choice.

I see. That makes sense.

Grim Faust.6349:

zeroaegis.1932:

Upset customers is not equivalent to “the company made poor choices”. The fact that they’re making a change is to appease the upset customers. This change shows how much Arenanet cares about the customers, not that they were wrong in the first place.

Oh, so they’re rectifying a good choice.

I see. That makes sense.

They aren’t rectifying anything, how did you get there?

zeroaegis.1932:

Grim Faust.6349:

zeroaegis.1932:

Upset customers is not equivalent to “the company made poor choices”. The fact that they’re making a change is to appease the upset customers. This change shows how much Arenanet cares about the customers, not that they were wrong in the first place.

Oh, so they’re rectifying a good choice.

I see. That makes sense.

They aren’t rectifying anything, how did you get there?

Wow.

Yep.

There’s pages upon pages of complaints. Anet acknowledged they’re changing it now that they see the results of what they did. It must have been a good idea. Totally. I’m really agreeing with you.

zeroaegis.1932:

Grim Faust.6349:

zeroaegis.1932:

Upset customers is not equivalent to “the company made poor choices”. The fact that they’re making a change is to appease the upset customers. This change shows how much Arenanet cares about the customers, not that they were wrong in the first place.

Oh, so they’re rectifying a good choice.

I see. That makes sense.

They aren’t rectifying anything, how did you get there?

It’s called reality.

They see the results of players who made the choice of spending money on “a chance”. These complaints are opinion-based, not fact-based. I don’t care if my opinion doesn’t match your’s, we’re both entitled to them.

“It’s called reality.”
That made me laugh. Not sure why…

TerrellEdenost.7086:

Dear Regina and others at ArenaNet,

Let me first say that I love this game and admire your resolve to tackle new ideas and make this game better at each update. I am not going to rage on this issue, but instead provide a suggestion for how to address this for future holiday events.

I think the major issue here is that the way that the rare items were rewarded here were tied to both chance AND real-world currency. In the past I have read in the GW2 blog that the gem system was going to allow ppl with disposable income a way to short-cut through the grind of getting that rare item. On the other hand, those who don’t want to spend the money on gems can just invest game time and eventually have a path to achieve the same rare item.

In this instance, ppl with disposable income only had a chance to purchase the rare item. And although it was stated that this was a chance, nobody knew what that chance was and so they spent alot of money for nothing.

My proposal:
————————-
1.) Rare holiday skins should be straight up purchased from BLTC. I’d advise researching price points and would direct your research to LOTRO’s model as I always felt it was “reasonable”. Something like $9.95 for a single skin makes sense to me as that was what costumes costed in GW1

2.) If you desire to keep the randomness approach, I would suggest going the same route as purchasing mini-pets from BLTC. Basically someone can buy a bag that contains a random skin. If it’s not the one they want, then they can sell it to someone who wants it and take that profit to buy the skin you actually do want.

3.) To keep with the theme that if you don’t have disposable income there is still a path to get that item… Make these rare skins random drops from dungeon chests or even monster drops. A drop rate of 2% on dungeon chests and 0.1% on monster drops is feasible to me. It reminds me of the mini-polar bear in GW1. People were running the snowman dungeon for ages just to get that thing and I think it would apply here as well.

---

To me, this is the only system that makes sense. People who want to buy cosmetic items should be spending much more than $10 to get want the want. And for those who want to earn it in game… Play the game! When that rare item just drops in your lap there are very few things in this world that can match that level of excitement

Anyways, I hope you will consider this idea for future holidays like Christmas.

Thank You,
Terrell

Terrell states this better than anyone has so far out of this (now) 24-page thread. However, at this point, I would agree that in order to “fix” this absolute PR and customer relations disaster, ANet should simply release the skins for free or by doing some sort of quest (maybe give each player a skin of their choice once finishing all 4 acts). The reason I say this is because a lot of players have disposed of their tonics and boosters (I have over 200 tonics and about 100 boosters, so I am not fighting for myself here) not knowing they would one day be useful (especially the tonics).

The next 72 hours or so will be crucial in terms of ANet’s decision on how to fix this. Whatever they choose, they could potentially lose thousands of customers who have grown up recognizing the all too familiar stench of 21st century corporate greed. This is the very reason I haven’t bought an EA game in almost 10 years.

You walk into a casino knowing the odds and paying for the entertainment. With a virtual vanity item that isn’t advertised as being rare in the first place, any and all players should expect to receive what they want if they pay $20+ in real life money for it. Geez…we didn’t even get candy corn or trick-or-treat bags from all those BLC’s.

Only time will tell…I’m gonna go grab some popcorn and wait this one out.

35 chests and I did finally get the chainsaw great sword skin. HOWEVER, they say we’ll be able to buy/trade the normal junk for Halloween stuff? That does little good when you’ve already trashed all the items you have no use for and really need the bag space. I dumped a bunch of boosters and 77 mystery tonics(I got an endless mystery tonic and figured I wouldn’t need the others). Can I get those back?

Dear Anet,

With a game of this magnitude being non-subscription based… and me spending $50.00 USD on gems that netted me nothing… and then you coming along and wanting to make changes to this system that is clearly making you money hand over fist… I don’t know what to say. Have you lost your minds?

I paid good money for this game and was expecting a product and real-money purchasing system that not only ripped me off but delivered to me nothing of any in-game value whatsoever.

However… after playing for hours on end… I’ve got nothing to show for it but an interesting story, cool graphics, no wait times, dungeons everywhere, a new approach to the Holy Trinity, a re-defining of how an MMORPG should be designed and played, and unparalleled response to a community that loves you. And that last part, which I don’t think I have to point out, is creppy as all heck.

Now you have the audacity to change the system to make people happy… I can’t properly convey how disappointed I am in Anet for this decision. It should take months to change something like this… not hours. The roll-outs and updates should break more things that they fix… not just fix things.

I’m so happy that I don’t know what to be unhappy about.

This approach really ticks me off. I get more done at work, I’m happier in my relationships, my cat got better, and I found my wallet I lost back in 07’.

I don’t know what you guys are doing over there… but please cut it out before I volunteer my time with homeless children or something.

I opened like 30 and got nothing but I guess it was my fault :\.
Opened it before they posted the update of BLC haha… Oh well.. Just goes to show — me no buy anything until confirmation >: .

wrote this in another thread, and I find myself so interesting that i want to hear me say it again.
And maybe just a little bit because the other thread is bound to be locked, and it should be here anyway:

As for the lottery: a lottery with better droprates on the rares would have given Anet MORE money than a lottery with bad droprates…

on top of this it would have given Anet better prospects of gaining money from lotteries in the future…

So spare me the crap about ‘stop complaining that it was a lottery’.
It was a BAD lottery, bad for the customers and bad for the company.
Everybody lost. How can that be good for anyone than?

We shouldn’t complain about something implemented so bad that literally everybody lost in it?
While it would be easy to turn it into something everybody WINS in it?

Do you hate the game so much you would deny the developpers this feedback, so they could end up winning and making their customers happy?

having 22 pages of complaints is what turned it for the better, NOT all the excuses of the fanboys!

here ends the copying.

It’s pretty clear I was somewhat unamused by the OP of that particular thread.
For all clarity: the hostile tone of my post isn’t aimed at anyone here, but I do stand by the message.

To all the people who used real life lottery as an argument:

1. The real life lottery has literally millions of dollars at stake and only so many people can win. People know that going in.

2. Next time you look at a lottery ticket, flip it over and look at the back. Every lottery ticket/scratch off/etc. is required by law to list the odds of winning.

3. These are holiday themed skins that can be infinitely generated.

4. Using “colorful” marketing terms like “stocked” gives the impression that you’re going to be getting holiday themed stuff out of at least 50% of the boxes opened.

And so the infamous Halloween BLC Thread of 2012 has finally died down in popularity. Over 50k views and over 1k replies…what a great 42 hours this has been! WHAT A RIDE!!!!

Surely to go down in interwebz hall of fame and GW2 history.

So you spent money on a CHANCE to get something completely kitten meaningless as anything but a weapon/armor skin and didn’t get what you want; big kitten deal.

Get over it and either spend more money or stop spending and shut up.

That’s the thing about a lot of fan boys though, they complain about complaints and think they’re doing the company good by defending it. In reality, they’re doing exactly the opposite. Lots of companies sink thousands, if not millions in to marketing research so that they can find out what people think about their products or why people don’t like them. They do so in order to find out how they can change what they have, to make people happy, to generate more revenue for themself.

A big difference and boon that online game companies have in contrast to most companies that sell physical products at physical locations is that they have forums. The marketing research data is practically dumped on their laps. These forums are convenient for their customers to access and rant on, which is why they have them. Sure, some people get way out of hand, but those people are dealt with on an indivdual basis and have their threads/posts locked or removed.

The next time you have the notion to white knight for a company, maybe you should think twice. You’re not they’re employee, you don’t know what feedback they find valuable or not. The feedback is not meant for you to make up excuses for. Go play the game you have no problems and keep your opinion of an opinion to yourself.

Looks like ANET has sided with the buyers here – thank goodness.

I anticipate their solution being a Black Lion exchange using the mystic forge. Toss in boosters, etc to get skins.

In the future, I think the lesson is learned. ANET doesn’t have to trick anyone to make money – just continue making fun content and people will pay for it.

Thanks to the team behind seeing the error of their ways, and thanks to everyone who came here to post.