Guild Wars 2

I bought myself the box of three Halloween mini pets, because I like collecting minis. It was a lot of gold, but hey, at least there was an option to use in-game money instead of real money.

Much was my dismay when I noticed the empty mini pet slot for Chainsaw the Skeleton. Didn’t I just buy all the Halloween mini pets?

You can imagine my even greater dismay when I found out how I was expected to acquire this mini. By throwing all three of my mini pets in the Mystic Forge along with 250 candy corn! Three mini pets, gone! In exchange for ONE mini pet. So if I wanted to own all 4, I have to buy the Halloween pack TWICE?!

This does not seem particular customer friendly, nor in the spirit of Halloween. Most players have not got this much gold to spend to begin with (especially so short after the game’s release), and those that do shouldn’t have to buy the same pack twice just for one mini pet.

From a disgruntled passionate mini pet collector.

As a mini-pet collector in GW1, I think that, Guild Wars 2 is sad :P

Yea I saw this too and thought that it’s a terrible way to unlock minis. By forcing you to buy the same thing twice and then destroy one (actually 3) for a single mini. If maybe you only had to throw 1 in I could get behind it. But honestly, you shouldn’t have to destroy anything you paid real money for.

See it that you’re just paying the 500 gems to get Chainsaw, rather than destroying anything.

I would like to see more mini’s obtainable via in game event chains or something though. I love the ghost pet, it’s brilliant – but I do enjoy collecting them through in game activites more than by buying them.

I didn’t like buying other people’s birthday pets on GW1 as much as collecting them on WoW through achievements etc either.

It’s still a sad excuse to boost sales :/

Was it just me that thought Chainsaw the Skeleton is a lot smaller than the normal Mini Spooky Skeleton I just used as part of the exchange for it?

Zomgorg.9745:

Was it just me that thought Chainsaw the Skeleton is a lot smaller than the normal Mini Spooky Skeleton I just used as part of the exchange for it?

It’s not just you. Chainsaw is smaller than the other three mini pets. I still think he looks cool, but I think the ghost is the best mini of this event!

I agree, that ghost is one of my favourite mini pets at the moment. That is why I was so sad to hear that to get Chainsaw the Skeleton, I had to throw my ghost away. It makes me sad.

The mystic forge and how arenanet uses it is the one to blame, MF is all about gambling or making players lose money.

Hughs.6549:

The mystic forge and how arenanet uses it is the one to blame, MF is all about gambling or making players lose money.

In some cases yes, but not this minipet. You put in fixed ingredients and you’re 100% guaranteed to get the Chainsaw minipet.

You’re just paying 500 gems & some candy corn to get Chainsaw. There’s no RNG and no unexpected loss of money.

I am really, really hoping that this first holiday event has just been a trial and error experiment with regard to the cash-shop and what players will and won’t be receptive to.

I know Anet emps play the game. And I don’t see how any of them would ever think buying the same 3/4 of a set twice and throwing one of them away to get the final 1/4 would be enjoyable.

Minis really don’t do a thing. They are just a fun little collectible. Just about everyone buying them is doing so with collecting or re-selling in mind. So was there an absolute necessity to put a little caveat in there to weasel more money out of players that like to collect them?

No doubt the gimmick made a little bit of money. Not as much as some other things as I’ve only seen pretty few of them in LA server proper and overflows. And it just looks bad on the gem store.

Customer perception is everything in sales. So I think whoever is running the shop should take a look at how things like this will be received and how that could hurt future sales instead of what twists they can throw in there to make a few bucks right this minute. If that mini was put up for sale individually from the pack as a “limited time GW2 inaugural Halloween event miniature”, and made gold or orange while dropping the pack minis rarity one level below it…it would have sold like hot-cakes and not been another blemish on the gem-shops record.

*All this is taking in to account the only way to get all four actually does end up being buying a pack, forging a pack, then rebuying the same thing again. Doesn’t matter that you may be able to get it on TP. If someone still had to go through that process it still feels dirty.

AcidicVision.5498:

If that mini was put up for sale individually from the pack as a “limited time GW2 inaugural Halloween event miniature”, and made gold or orange while dropping the pack minis rarity one level below it…it would have sold like hot-cakes and not been another blemish on the gem-shops record.

That’s basically what it is though, with an intermediary stage involving converting the second pack of the basic 3 into Chainsaw. Chainsaw is a gold already, the other 3 are greens.

You pay the same price for Chainsaw as for the 3 greens and people get to discover the recipe (some people enjoy trying to work out the fixed recipes).

The green trio costs 500 gems, the rare indivdual mini costs 500 gems and some candy corn.

I don’t understand how the current system is a gimmick to make money, but putting Chainsaw straight in the shop at 500 gems isn’t?

Kana.6793:

I don’t understand how the current system is a gimmick to make money, but putting Chainsaw straight in the shop at 500 gems isn’t?

It’s not. Not at all. You are 100% correct. Thats where the bit earlier in my post came from about perception vs. reality. In reality you are still spending the same amount of money, you end up with the same thing but had to take a few additional steps.

But the perception is, the customer bought something and has to throw it away and then buy the same thing again. 1 – most people don’t like throwing away something they just paid for. Especially if they are attached to it (like the ghost mini). 2 – there’s a psychological factor to consider in how someone feels about paying for three collectible things but then only ending up with one. 3 – people tend to not feel great about a purchase when they have to turn around and purchase the same thing again moments later.

As implemented now, it feels like a sneaky and underhanded way to sell more minis. Where as the other way, people would have spent the same amount of money but felt better about spending the money. And when people feel good about spending money, they spend more.

@Acidic Vision

I tend to look more at the realistic cost of things by default, but think I see your point about how other people might look at it now.

It must be quite tricky for them to estimate reactions to this kind of thing, some people (like me) will just look at the actual cost, some people might see it as throwing things away as you described and some people like to play with the forge.

Maybe it would have been better to make a Chainsaw recipe that uses candy corn and 500 gems worth of mystic stones? Or just straight in the store, I don’t know.

I just hope to see more in game boss drop / achievement pets as well as the store pets. I’m not used to buying them, I always refused to buy a thing from the Blizzard store because I was already paying a sub.

They’ve done a beautiful job on them (especially the ghost) but I just have a feeling that I haven’t earned the pets somehow. Which is silly of course since they cost money!

They could also just have made Chainsaw the Skeleton a reward for completing enough Halloween achievements. That way everyone would get to enjoy one, regardless of how rich they are.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

They could also just have made Chainsaw the Skeleton a reward for completing enough Halloween achievements. That way everyone would get to enjoy one, regardless of how rich they are.

Oh yes! Make it be awarded along with the Emissary of the Mad King title. That I would like.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

They could also just have made Chainsaw the Skeleton a reward for completing enough Halloween achievements. That way everyone would get to enjoy one, regardless of how rich they are.

This kind of reward would have made a sense on the ach, agree. Guess we will not receive anything more than a mad king title

I was a mini collector in GW1 but it only took me the first taste of beta of 2 to know I wouldn’t be a mini collector in GW2.

Anet has a history of making minis that no one is honestly ever going to walk around displaying. Many random human npc models that don’t really make much sense from a storyside perspective, that don’t even look nice in many cases. Why on earth would I want to run around with a mini Logan following me?

In 1 the fact that we had a lot of minis that were more filler and less vanity didn’t matter all that much, since we didn’t pay cash for them, and we could chuck all the boring ones in the Hall of Monuments and forget about them.

In 2, unfortunately, pretty much every vanity item is regulated to the gemstore without Anet actually getting any better at figuring out what people want out of minis in general.

They seem to have a mini picking process of throwing a list of existing mob and npc models into a hat, pulling random ones out, and shrinking them. So instead of getting an awesome Branded Scorpian Mini, we get a tiny Big Nosed Ted because Anet just seems to make minis willy nilly instead of stopping and thinking ‘Hmm.. would I ever actually want to show off a Big Nosed Ted? Or.. would I want something that looks interesting following me around?’

I never experienced actually running out of mini-equivs I liked the look of to collect in other games, but I found very little of the minis in 2 to be appealing. That said, the Halloween pets are fairly nice, so I actually had a reason to buy a mini again. Good job, Anet. You didn’t give us a single boring npc turned into a mini for the holiday. Now if you can just figure out to do that in the future more often..

Unfortunately.. putting a pet in the forge in such a way is again, highly iffy. It has an extra income potential right now, for the gotta collect them all folks. That can work in the opposite direction, however. When a serious collector feels they cannot justify a purchase and thus end up with an incomplete collection, sometimes they stop buying anymore of the collection in general, because they feel bummed out by the incompleteness.

Unfortunately.. putting a pet in the forge in such a way is again, highly iffy. It has an extra income potential right now, for the gotta collect them all folks. That can work in the opposite direction, however. When a serious collector feels they cannot justify a purchase and thus end up with an incomplete collection, sometimes they stop buying anymore of the collection in general, because they feel bummed out by the incompleteness.For me, I can’t be interested in gotta collect them all because Anet just makes a lot of really boring minis to begin with, but tactics like this forge ploy just serve to make me even pickier about them. I’d rather Trading Post forage for what I want than RNG the standard pets, and throwing chainsaws at the skelleton pet sure doesn’t make it worth another 500 gems on it’s own to me.

Unfortunately.. putting a pet in the forge in such a way is again, highly iffy. It has an extra income potential right now, for the gotta collect them all folks. That can work in the opposite direction, however. When a serious collector feels they cannot justify a purchase and thus end up with an incomplete collection, sometimes they stop buying anymore of the collection in general, because they feel bummed out by the incompleteness.For me, I can’t be interested in gotta collect them all because Anet just makes a lot of really boring minis to begin with, but tactics like this forge ploy just serve to make me even pickier about them. I’d rather Trading Post forage for what I want than RNG the standard pets, and throwing chainsaws at the skelleton pet sure doesn’t make it worth another 500 gems on it’s own to me.I’m quite happy with my green plastic jumping spider and ghost, on the other hand. I could justify the slight price hike on them over the standard ones, but micro chainsaws on a skelleton just don’t cut 500 gems, to me.

Unfortunately.. putting a pet in the forge in such a way is again, highly iffy. It has an extra income potential right now, for the gotta collect them all folks. That can work in the opposite direction, however. When a serious collector feels they cannot justify a purchase and thus end up with an incomplete collection, sometimes they stop buying anymore of the collection in general, because they feel bummed out by the incompleteness.For me, I can’t be interested in gotta collect them all because Anet just makes a lot of really boring minis to begin with, but tactics like this forge ploy just serve to make me even pickier about them. I’d rather Trading Post forage for what I want than RNG the standard pets, and throwing chainsaws at the skelleton pet sure doesn’t make it worth another 500 gems on it’s own to me.I’m quite happy with my green plastic jumping spider and ghost, on the other hand. I could justify the slight price hike on them over the standard ones, but micro chainsaws on a skelleton just don’t cut 500 gems, to me.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

I bought myself the box of three Halloween mini pets, because I like collecting minis. It was a lot of gold, but hey, at least there was an option to use in-game money instead of real money.

Much was my dismay when I noticed the empty mini pet slot for Chainsaw the Skeleton. Didn’t I just buy all the Halloween mini pets?

No, you bought an item called “Miniature Spooky Trio” with the description: “Seasonal. For sale only during the Halloween season. A miniature spooky ghost, spooky skeleton, and spooky spider come together in this limited-edition collector’s pack.”

If you had read anything you would have known exactly what you were buying.

I agree that a heck of a lot of those regular minis will never be walking beside me. As amusing as it is for a tiny Norn to be walking next to an Asura, monsters and beasties would have been preferable.

I realize that Anet and NC soft want to make money, but this isn’t right. Being forced to buy the same product twice, specifically targets the collectors and completionists in an unfair way.
Anet – Please stop nickel & diming your customers.
If you want us to buy from the GEM store, then straight-up offer these types items for purchase.
“Cute” Sales and Marketing techniques like this alienate your customers and are, in the long run, only going to harm your sales.
You folks worked far too hard on this awesome game to ruin it by such obvious money grabs.

This is just another crap way for Anet to get money. They need to go back to the GW1 store model.

AcidicVision.5498:

I am really, really hoping that this first holiday event has just been a trial and error experiment with regard to the cash-shop and what players will and won’t be receptive to.

I know Anet emps play the game. And I don’t see how any of them would ever think buying the same 3/4 of a set twice and throwing one of them away to get the final 1/4 would be enjoyable.

Minis really don’t do a thing. They are just a fun little collectible. Just about everyone buying them is doing so with collecting or re-selling in mind. So was there an absolute necessity to put a little caveat in there to weasel more money out of players that like to collect them?

No doubt the gimmick made a little bit of money. Not as much as some other things as I’ve only seen pretty few of them in LA server proper and overflows. And it just looks bad on the gem store.

Customer perception is everything in sales. So I think whoever is running the shop should take a look at how things like this will be received and how that could hurt future sales instead of what twists they can throw in there to make a few bucks right this minute. If that mini was put up for sale individually from the pack as a “limited time GW2 inaugural Halloween event miniature”, and made gold or orange while dropping the pack minis rarity one level below it…it would have sold like hot-cakes and not been another blemish on the gem-shops record.

*All this is taking in to account the only way to get all four actually does end up being buying a pack, forging a pack, then rebuying the same thing again. Doesn’t matter that you may be able to get it on TP. If someone still had to go through that process it still feels dirty.

Based on the sheer number of chainsaw minis I’ve seen running around in LA, I think that you are going to be the one disappointed next holiday.

No, you bought an item called “Miniature Spooky Trio” with the description: “Seasonal. For sale only during the Halloween season. A miniature spooky ghost, spooky skeleton, and spooky spider come together in this limited-edition collector’s pack.”

If you had read anything you would have known exactly what you were buying.

Oh, I knew exactly what I was buying. You misunderstood my post. I was dismayed to find out about some extra Halloween mini. If you are a mini collector, you want to collect them all. Especially if they are exclusive to this Halloween event. The description in the store seems to say “You can only get them now”. So to find out that to get the missing mini I need to buy the same product a second time… Ugh, that’s just awful. And its a lot of gold too. Most of the players I play with don’t even have 1 gold. Why make it so exclusive to rich players?

Mad Queen Malafide.7512

Why make it so exclusive to rich players?

Because players want status symbols. They want to have the option to wear 20 gold worth of rare dyes while flashing around their 1,000g legendary. This mini is just one more way to do that.

Working as intended. 2 sales better than one.Besides someone has to keep the gold sellers in business.

I was dismayed to find out about some extra Halloween mini. If you are a mini collector, you want to collect them all.

O.O

Declares himself/herself a collector.

Is dismayed to find out that he/she needs to buy the stuff he/she wants to collect.

Word of advice never get into collecting comics, I hear some of the first editions can cost quite a lot of money.

Word of advice never get into collecting comics, I hear some of the first editions can cost quite a lot of money.

Oh really? Have you ever had to buy a set of comics, but in order to get the missing issue, you have to hand in your previous set of comics?

Paying 500 gems for the green pets = “Okay. Thanks ANet, loved the ghost minipet!”

Paying 500 gems + 250 candy (which is less than 30 silver on the TP) for the gold pet = “OMG! What a dirty shady way of treating your customers! Im leaving the game and reactivating my WoW/Tera/SWToR account right now!”

I see..

Oh really? Have you ever had to buy a set of comics, but in order to get the missing issue, you have to hand in your previous set of comics?

Yes.

Many collectors buy issues they already have to flip them or trade them to get the ones they don’t.

Just got 2 boxes and from them all 4 minis.

There is no luck shot here , all you need is to consider is if the rare mini is worth 500 gems to you.

If it is , grab it , if not , leave it. Seems simple.