Guild Wars 2

The Halloween event, while fun if a little confusing, has raised my hackles with a few things.

Why are outfits now bought on a per-character basis and not account-based?
Why are there no NPCs who allow you to choose what skins you want when you want them?
Why are certain desirable items only available through random chance instead of having a guaranteed acquisition path?

In GW1 if I bought an event outfit, all of my characters would have access to it. The same thing happened with hats acquired from events.
Even better, I would not need to have them cluttering up inventory space, as free-to-use vendors would be in every major city that could give any character who wanted it a copy of any hat or outfit I’d unlocked any time I wanted it.
For desirable items, such as celestial minipets, while there was a chance they’d drop in the world, there were also guaranteed ways of attaining them, such as grinding out tokens then trading them in.

I hate to grind this axe, but I suspect this is purely a monetisation issue, with ArenaNet really looking to mine the wallets of their customers.
Individual character costumes means potential multiple spends.
Cosmetic items occupying inventory space means people are forced to buy gems to expand storage and bag space.
Low random chance drop rates means you end up with people spending ludicrous amounts of real world money on gems to buy keys.

But you know what this has done for me?
It means that I’m never buying gems with cash again.
I didn’t buy any for the event, and after experiencing it and seeing the soulless grab for cash, I won’t be giving ArenaNet any more money unless it’s for expansion content.

So instead of providing an incentive for me to spend money, ArenaNet have actively driven me away as a customer.

Finally, while I would never spend 50/80/100 dollars on keys, I can completely sympathise with those who did spend that much and got few if any rare skins.
Shame on you ArenaNet.

Just as a note on the outfits, all of your characters can use them. It’s not as convenient as generating a new outfit was in GW1, I agree, but they are account bound.

Mungrul.9358:

The Halloween event, while fun if a little confusing, has raised my hackles with a few things.

Why are outfits now bought on a per-character basis and not account-based?
Why are there no NPCs who allow you to choose what skins you want when you want them?
Why are certain desirable items only available through random chance instead of having a guaranteed acquisition path?.

1. Outfits are account bound so u can swap them as u wish, I love it.
2. Dont really understand second point, u buy what u want O.o
3. Random? You can buy them easily on TP with 99.999% of success, excluding 0.001% chance of bug occurance. Yeah kinda random.

That’s interesting, but it’s still not going to convince me to buy one.
With a sequel, I expect all of the convenience options of the previous game to at least be included from the start.
Otherwise, that’s just forgetting lessons learned in the past, and a sign of shoddy workmanship.
This was in response to Eivene.

If you don’t understand my second point Kareth, you never played the first game.

And saying skins can be bought from the trading post… have you even seen the prices?

“With a sequel, I expect all of the convenience options of the previous game to at least be included from the start.”

I can’t understand this view. It would be nice, yes. But to demand, that every little thing that’s only for convenience, be included in a software. That just sounds ridiculous.

I have to say I agree with the lack of the NPC from GW1 for costumes. If they were going to get rid of that idea (which I understand why they may not want it for cosmetic reasoning maybe). They should of applied something else in its place. Ie. Have a list of bought items from the BLTC that you can generate on each new character. I mean its not hurting anything, and they are bound to account so its not like having multiples of cosmetic items are bad. Either that, or give us a bank tab for cosmetic items, or a bank tab for BLTC items (a good 60% of my storage is crap from chests that I will probably never use but might as well keep).

I do fear that they have resorted to having to nickle and dime you for every tiny thing (bank space much? even in GW1 with expansions you got plenty of storage for free, without trading gold for gems you are giving such a minimal amount and so many things to store its outrageous). In GW1 you didn’t have all these cluster of cash shop items taking up every little bit of space with boosters and tonics and things.

Ending rant…I think its something they can work on though.

imo if you spend hundreds of dollars on a very small chance to get a bunch of pixels that dont really exist you have totally lost the plot and have more money than sense.

zogrim.6925:

“With a sequel, I expect all of the convenience options of the previous game to at least be included from the start.”

I can’t understand this view. It would be nice, yes. But to demand, that every little thing that’s only for convenience, be included in a software. That just sounds ridiculous.

I work in support of professional editing software, and with every release, as well as adding features, they retain old ones and even improve them.
This is standard practise.

I understand GW2 is a completely different type of game compared to the first one, but all of these convenience services really should have been included. I would also include things like the stylist at the Temple of Balthazar in this list as well as name changes.

They know these are things people want; they implemented them after popular demand in the first game. To chop them out of the second is either ignorant or negligent, or possibly both.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say I’ll never give them money; I’ll give them money if they offer me the skins I want, but I will not and never will pay for gambling tickets for the skins I want, no skins, no money that simple.

I believe the mistake Anet has made to some extent, is to bring in a cash shop expert from a cash-milking F2P model, and ditched their GW1 B2P /w extras model, even though a large portion of their player base are returning GW1 customers who arn’t going to buy into the gambling model that most F2P’s use

See, that’s just the thing, I was more than happy with the cash shop model the first game had, and never once regretted spending money on things I could buy through it, yet the current shop implementation is leaving an increasingly nasty taste in my mouth and is probably turning out to actually be worse than Diablo 3’s RMAH. At least players can make real world money with Blizzard’s version!

Jezath.7395:

imo if you spend hundreds of dollars on a very small chance to get a bunch of pixels that dont really exist you have totally lost the plot and have more money than sense.

And while you stand there with your purse and fanny pack belittling those who feel theyve had a bad service experience and want to “get it off their chests”. I stand here with my wallet in my hand wondering why arenanet doesnt want anymore of my money.

Remember, if you arent buying gems, your nothing but content for those that do. Thats the bottom line.

Everything op brought up is perfectly valid.

I’ve been a huge supporter of GW2 and ArenaNet after putting a ridiculous amount of time into GW1 (probably my favourite game of all time). I was looking forward to the halloween event… but everything really DOES seem to be about money and gambling. It’s not something one can easily ignore either, every time I get a chest, it’s a prod in the side telling me to buy keys. I refuse to buy gems with real world money, but trading gold for gems is becoming less and less viable. It currently costs 1g25s for 1 key! The price for each costume is 7g – Perhaps I’m doing something wrong, and probably taking this way off topic but I can’t help feeling that the only true viable way in future of attaining wealth in game is to buy gems to convert to gold.