Guild Wars 2

I remember reading that first blog post about dyes, found here
http://www.arena.net/blog/live-and-let-dye-kristen-perry-on-the-gw2-dye-system
where it was said that dyes would be permanently unlocked and account bound. I really liked hearing this because it meant that customisation and changing different dye colours would be so much easier than in other games and it would apply to all my characters which made it even better. But then something changed.

“Customized dye should be something that denotes your characters progress.” Well personally I don’t get any sense of progress from collecting dyes. My sense of progress comes from going through my personal story and getting more skills and traits along with different armour, not from getting a new shade of blue. Your concern was that this progress would only be had one one character, but what’s wrong with having it as progress for my account? There are many things that I would consider personal progress that I can attain for all my characters like achievements, crafting skills, miniatures and personal wealth. I don’t think any of these are in anyway diminished by the fact that I can use them across my account, I would say they are improved actually because it means that not all the work I put into a certain character is lost when I switch to another.

Your other concern seemed to be that you wanted characters to have more unique colours, but there is no need to limit our options for this to happen. People will use many different colours because we all have our own tastes and styles, well except for the people who want a black/white or black/dark red colour scheme on everything, they aren’t unique But even for those people account bound dyes would be great and would save them a lot of time and hassle. Most of the time with this game you do a great job of not limiting our options in any way and make a lot of things easily obtainable while respecting the time we have available, but your choice with this dyes is a big limitation on the amount of customisation I have as a player across my account.

I don’t like to think it but I can’t help but feel you got greedy on this one by switching dyes to being character bound you hoped people would buy more dye packs off the gem store. But you should know how important it is to give people good value for their money. At the moment I have not, and never will buy a dye pack because with the dyes being character bound I don’t think it’s good value. But if dyes were account bound then myself, and other’s I’ve spoken to, would be much more willing to buy these dye packs because they would be useful for all my characters.

I agree, I think the dye system doesnt make the community happy at all

It makes me happy. People are just being greedy and childish.

I think the dye system is great too Bacon, but I think it could be improved quite simply for the benefit of all players, even you.

I could be way wrong (every player has different likes/dislikes and values their money differently), but I’m hoping that after a few months, ANet will see that very few people have spent real money on gems and then spent those gems on dye packs, and then maybe they’ll cave in on this issue. If the forums are a reliable indication, it seems more people want them to be account wide than otherwise.

I don’t buy their claim that it’s because dyes should be a character status symbol. I think it just comes down to “dyes are sold in the cash shop, so limiting dyes to each character allows for more potential sales.” But if data ends up suggesting that most people would place more value on dyes if they were account wide and may actually strive to get them in that case, perhaps the most profitable decision for ANet and the best decision for the players would be one and the same.

You of course realize that putting a cap on the number of dyes each account can consume will then require that the drop rate be adjusted similarly?

There’s already a large discussion on the topic of account bound dyes.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Dyes-Please-make-them-account-bound/first

It was horrible in the first beta. And with that system, it should have been account-wide. And I was a determined proponent of that.

But they changed the system since them, making it much, much better.

• You can get them from drops. I get about 2 or 3 a day. Sometimes more.
• You can get them from gathering.
• You can get them from PvP.
• You can craft them with cooking, choosing the hue.
• You can get them in the gem store, and gems with gsc, so you can get them with gsc.
• You can buy them in the Trading Post from other players, also with gsc. I’ve seen dyes as low as 3c. They are quickly bought, but still, the average low is about 50…60c. Only the rarest dyes go over 1g, which keeps them prestigious.

This makes getting dyes much, much easier, and possible for each character.
And much like in GW1, if you want to dye all your characters back and/or white, it will cost you, or at least require quite some time or luck.

The current system is fine as a it is, there is no need for it being account wide.