Guild Wars 2

Hello,

Just a topic to say how angry I am to see that despite 50 winter box opened (about 80 golds) I couldn’t get the 4 minis.

Since the beginning I have 1.138 hours played. I was collecting the mini pets, trying to have all of them.
I spent a lot of (IG) money in it. Around 80 golds (took me quite a few hours to get it) but I could only manage to get 2 minis in thoses boxes.

Now that the event is done I can’t even buy boxes to get the minis.

I just don’t understand why you had to put items (minis) which was :
- Time limited
- Based on luck
- Based on gems

Is the message ? :
You have to spend a lot of money in a short period of time. But if in that period youre not lucky enough… Too bad…

This is how I feel.

So what am I gonna do now? My main goal (to have all the minipets) was spoiled because of that stupid time-limited-expensive-(un)lucky minis’ way of dropping

Can’t you make them so that they can be sold on the market place?

Thanks in advance

Well, you could wait for the next wintersday event.

Yeah, best advice would be to wait and hope that next year they’ll have the same minipets or that they’ll make these ones tradeable at some point. Not much else to do really :/
Just try not to let it get you down. This new development in how minipets are given makes it much more likely you’ll be disappointed if you try to collect them. When I saw that these ones were account bound I threw in the towel. Not gonna bother with them anymore.

Unfortunately you probably will have to wait until next Wintersday to get those minipets. Hopefully they’ll un-bind them in the next major patch though, so they can be bought and sold on the TP.

If you angry about buying 50 lottery tickets and only winning twice I suggest you spend this whole year farming gold and buying gems, so you can buy 1000 tickets next time they activate wintersday. By my math you will then win 400 times and drown in mini pets. Alternatively, rage management therapy to control your anger and focus it on something useful, like world domination. Then you can enslave A.net and force them to give you mini pets. You#re lucky, it looks like both roads leads to mini pets for you on wintersday 2013!

If we use the first Guild Wars as an example you will never get a second opportunity. I doubt they will recycle the same mini-pets every year, then everyone who spent a lot of money on gems this year wouldn’t have anything to fork out money for.

And if they made them tradeable, guess what they won’t be special anymore.

I could see them recycling some minis and adding new ones.

We won’t know until next year though since it’s obvious they aren’t going to follow anything set in stone by GW1.

So you’re basically upset about not getting something out of a lottery system? Okay lol.
I’ve made this argument before, anybody is capable of the critical thinking to tell that the boxes are a lottery system. The only person who is at fault for you wasting your money on something you didn’t get from a lottery system is you.

Cathgar.7581:

And if they made them tradeable, guess what they won’t be special anymore.

All GW1 minis are tradable and the rare ones are still special, especially to collectors.

If I see a mini panda, or a Vizu or even an asuran (which is relatively common) I’ll usually take the time to watch it and comment on it. The fact that the current owner may well have bought it instead of getting it in the original give-away doesn’t take away from the fact that it’s impressive. If anything it’s more impressive that they found someone willing to sell and could afford the price those things go for than they entered some random draw and got lucky.

It also makes people more inclined to try for the new ones whenever they come out because there’s always the possibility that you will be able to buy the others and complete the collection. It might be extremely unlikely, but it’s not impossible. Whereas if Anet do something like this and make it completely impossible for anyone who didn’t get lucky during that relatively short window to ever get the minis then the collection will never be complete no matter what you do and there’s not much point trying for the others.

I willingly bought Consortium Chests to try for the Lost Shores minis and I didn’t mind that I only got the Karka because I sold the other stuff I did get and used the money to buy the Hatchlings and I’m now saving for the Drake. I don’t mind at all that they came from an RNG box because there is an alternative. This time around I didn’t buy any of the Wintersday boxes because I decided it just wasn’t worth the risk of either being stuck with useless extras or spending everything I could afford and still coming up short.

(And before anyone starts claiming collecting anything is some kind of disease that you should be locked up for look at it this way – imagine if they did this with Legendary precursors. Imagine if the only way you could get them was by throwing exotics into the forge, like now, BUT the precursors are account bound so you have no alternative and each one is only available for one month. then it’s gone forever. Would you claim the people who would still like a legendary are sick and need to be locked up? Or would you say Anet have designed a terrible system and should fix it? Considering all the complaining about how the current, much more flexible system, is terrible I think I know the answer.)

I think this is what happened. Anet did the halloween skins out of the rng boxes. To keep them with a certain level or rarity the drop rate was kitten poor. This kitten off a lot of people. I believe and I’m only guessing this new box system was supposed to accommodate that complaint. The idea being we will dramatic increase the 0.00001% drop rate to 10%.

But the danger of doing that is you have a global TP so if a large number of people are opening these boxes with the high drop rate of 10% you’ll end up with a flooding of duplicates on the market which would make their gold price drop like a rock (like with the toy skins) making the purchase of rng boxes silly.

So to prevent that potential issue they figured they’d make the pets account bound. But this new system for holiday event rng items was a bazillion times worse than with the halloween skins.

honestly the account bound system wouldn’t have been that bad if they had A) more mystic forge recipies to convert duplicates and/or pet parts to the other 3 green pets. Maybe use the other 2 to get the 3rd. and B ) better consolation prizes when you didn’t get a pet. Like maybe a pet part (glue stuffing cogs).

Another fixer would have been a token system. Each time you open a chest you get a token and you can use those tokens to buy the pets from a vender (like how the claim tickets worked) . That way if you are lucky and get pets in x boxes good for you but anet caps the number of fails you have to endure before you get the pet by default at say like 25.

If you aim for perfection where a RNG is involved you are setting yourself up for either failure or poverty, especially if the items are BOP. My advice is just to chill and not worry about them.

As a fellow collector and someone who rolls eyes at the “lol but it’s a lottery” arguments: give up the goal of collecting all the minis.

It’s what I did, well before Wintersday was over. The moment I accepted the fact that there would be RNG/cash-based account bound minis was the moment I gave up on the collection. If I can’t trade my extras away or buy the extras off of someone else, it’s not much of a collection at all, and it’s not worth the trouble.

Cathgar.7581:

And if they made them tradeable, guess what they won’t be special anymore.

Actually that is incorrect. They would still be special due to the fact that the supply is limited and will never be replenished. They would probably be worth increasing amount of gold as time goes on and continue to become rarer as collectors snatch them up and keep them. Those who were unlucky enough to get 2 of the same mini-pet would be able to sell one without issue. It’s not such an unfair thing given how expensive the wintersday chests are (people often buying them with real money → gems)

You dont need to give up the collection, just like in real life collecting stuff, sometimes you simply are not able to collect exactly everything you want in your collection.

Blackwolfe.5649:

You dont need to give up the collection, just like in real life collecting stuff, sometimes you simply are not able to collect exactly everything you want in your collection.

In real life you still might have the opportunity to complete your collection, in-game however you will not.

Even in collections in real life they just might not be attainable. Some things just aren’t made anymore while others are just so expensive it’s not realistic to own for some collectors. It’s the same in game.

It shouldn’t be, video games are fun, do you think that part of collecting is fun? It isn’t.

I simply find it odd that the Halloween minis could be bought as a 3-pack directly from the store, yet one event later the Wintersday minis come from RNG boxes.

If anything, the Wintersday minis should have been available in a similar 3-pack in my humble opinion.

All this soulbound and accountbound garbage that has been done in the name of protecting our economy from RMT has done more to upset the hardcore GW2 fans than to achieve their (stated) goal. In GW1, everything was just fine. Experimenting with the minis system has been a brutal disservice to those of us who are embassadors for ArenaNET.

I was fortunate to get the set of Wintersday minis and retain my collection, but it put a very sour taste in my mouth about the ethics of NCSoft (who I believe is more likely to be “at fault” than ArenaNET themselves).

Lost Shores minis were done in the way I feel was the most fair. Now, they have the potential to be more rare than the exotics that come in 3 packs (who got sucked into buying a bunch of those at discount on the 5th of January, in hopes of getting a Jack-a-lope?)

All we can hope for is that at some point, ArenaNET will remove account bound from collectible items, or AT LEAST separate their acquisition from the RNG lottery.

On a positive note, at least it’s possible to get the Miniature Collector title with the standard 55 minis!

If any ArenaNET staffer was able to provide us with the honest-to-goodness truth about why they would do RNG, it would probably work a lot toward establishing trust in such business practices.

The only exclusivity it provides now is those with the most real life money have the best chance of maintaining their collection. Quite uncool.

The honest-to-goodness truth is that it earns the company alot of money and thus keeps them employed. That is somewhat obvious. If the question is why they are so mean and dont just sell tem for a fixed price, the answer is there enough rich/foolish/OCD in the 1 million+ playerbase that blow so much money on the RNG that it makes them more money then a fixed price, and it’s hard to convince a company to intentionally make less money then they could.

It’s not impossible though: Change their minds by increasing fixed-price item revenue and reducing RNG-item revenue through your purchases and give it half a year to a year for that change to actually show a trend on their revenue charts and they will start to design more fixed-price items. This responsibility is on everyone here though, as long as enough rich/foolish/OCD people throw money at the RNG, nothing will change.

So to anyone that still spend $50 or $100 on the cristmas RNG even after we witnessed the Halloween and Lost Shores RNG, YOU are the reason they do this. YOU need to change what you are buying so they change what they are selling, not the other way around.