Guild Wars 2

I’ve heard many thoughts on the gold system in the game. As well as complaints about ArenaNet taking features out of the core game and moving them to the expansion, thus forcing players who want those features to buy the expansion. The reasoning behind these things is pretty clear: ArenaNet is a business. As such, it wants to generate as much profit as possible.

That being said, ArenaNet is not going to do anything that cuts into its profits.

But there’s a compromise that may satisfy both parties. Here are some ways ArenaNet can milk money out of the people who can afford it, without harming the potential fun of the game (grinding for gold versus paying for gold instead of getting these things with fun gameplay).

- Add more skins and pets to the item store. There’s many people who will pay for those.

- Add player housing or SOMETHING that can be decorated, even if it’s just the instance. Rift does a very good job on this. They add items to the item store and there are a TON of people who will come throwing their money at you for this.

-Rift also has a little mini card game. Selling cards is profitable for them. You don’t have to copy this mini game. WoW does pet battles. But some sort of mini game that you can sell items for is extra money.

- Patron status. Enough said.

- Offer the option to pay for an auto level. Maybe it’s just an item that grants one level and they can buy as many as they want. However, it may be more profitable to do one lump sum like WoW.

Basically, add things that in no way take away from the original core features and doesn’t give an unfair advantage in stuff like PvP, raiding, etc.

The problem as I see it is that ArenaNet has a reputation. It doesn’t want to build a reputation that makes it obvious that they would rather you spend money for gold versus giving you active, immersive gameplay (instead of tedious grinding). This is going to turn players away, and they need to think about the sustainability of the playerbase for years to come. Of course things need to be hard. But there are so many other ways these things could be obtained: quest lines, achievements, etc.

TL;DR: Add a ton of things to the item store. Add housing (and thus more items in the store). Add minigames (with more items). Offer gamers substance when it comes to acquiring legendaries rather than relying on people being too lazy to farm and thus paying you. The latter is the easy, lazy way out. Don’t be that company, ArenaNet. You can do much better than that.

What makes you think some of us will give more of our money to anet after this HoT fiasco?

I’d hope they’d undo some of the damage they’ve done first. Here’s to wishing. That’s my point: sustainability. Profit is great, but not so much if your players are leaving because the quality has gone down.

They have the foundation for player housing with the new guild decorations so that’s a possibility. Have instanced houses where you own the interior and can decorate using the tools from guild halls. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s already in the works.

what features were taken out of core and moved to hot?

Phy.2913:

what features were taken out of core and moved to hot?

High level fractals. Guild banners have to be re-earned so not moved to HoT but progress was removed (from what I’ve heard, not having looked closely into it).

I was under the impression that levels 1-50 of Fractals can still be played with the core game. You need HoT to progress beyond that though.

Phy.2913:

what features were taken out of core and moved to hot?

Ones I’ve noticed missing unless you own the xpac: guild buffs (the magic find, gathering, etc. ones; even if your guild re-unlocks them, non-xpac players can’t use them, even though they had access to them before the xpac), guild wvw buffs (+5 supplies, stat boosts while in a claimed objective), guild siege, 2nd and 3rd tiers of guild storage if you didn’t already have it unlocked before the xpac, guild banners.

I’m told guild banquet, guild world boss events, and vault transport were moved to the xpac, too.

And something about fractal rewards that used to be there before xpac, but are only given to xpac players now. I don’t really know the specifics about that, though; just that there were a lot of complaints about it right after the xpac launched.

I don’t think I’ve read the biggest and most obvious (at least to me) reason to nerf the core game. Play for free

Now with the full core game being free there needs to be a way to limit what the P4F players can do and to entice them to buy the game. So some of these limits become basic things that are part of the game, making the core game feel what it really is which is a demo(a pretty kitten good one if you’re barely trying it out compared to other style of demos).

The issue though, is that not every player who paid for the game back when core was b2p is willing to pay for the expansion for whatever personal reason they may have(the decision is on them whether HoT and the future content pertaining to it are worth it).

However, Anet has done something really smart(from a business point of view) and accepted the loss of those that will refuse to buy HoT, gaining the money from those that will buy/have bought HoT, and by going P4F have pretty much ensured that a new player base will offset the loss of those that bought the core game but won’t buy HoT.

So in the end we essentially have a 3 tiered system where HoT players get every benefit, P4F players get to play a bunch of content for free while being limited, and players that bought the core game are glorified P4F players(sorry).

In my opinion it’s not really so bad as those that bought the game have time over the P4F players and the majority have gotten their moneys worth as they have enjoyed lots of free content as that is a lot of content for such a cheap price. Though of course that depends on your on opinion as to how much your money is worth.

As a final opinion, it feels pretty suitable to move any guild centered activities and bonuses to HoT as they seem to be making everything guild related tie into Guild Housing. Which while in this transition into selling expansions seems to be a major problem to players, in the future(possibly even next year depending on their scheduling for expansion releases) this will all be pretty much a non-issue.

Phy.2913:

what features were taken out of core and moved to hot?

Nothing. They removed some gold gold from dungeons in hopes it would drive more people to fractals but fractals loot is still the same if not worse. And we’ll see what raids has to offer loot wise soon.

Player housing is a terrible idea. There is plenty available as is with home instances and now guild halls are pretty customizable and will only become more so.

It isn’t just the problem of the core game being nerfed, it’s things like the unique item tokens they have just blogged about being locked behind masteries and only trade able from an npc in HoT. This is ridiculous in my opinion. They haven’t said if you can get unique items this way for the core game boss uniques, even if you can you still have to use that one npc.

Want a reward from core game boss? Play HoT…

I actually still love the core game, in fact I love it way more than HoT as HoT stands at the moment. Not good times indeed…

Souto.2716:

Now with the full core game being free there needs to be a way to limit what the P4F players can do and to entice them to buy the game.

The game Rift shows you a different model is possible, it isn’t a ‘given’ that F2P players need to be limited in order to coerce them to buy the game.

True, all other hybrid games (like DDO, LoTRO, ESO, SWTOR, etc.) limit in some way, and LoTRO F2P players are severely crippled, but Trion went a different route and as a F2P player you have access to the entire game (bar new ‘classes’, which even subscribers have to pay for).

Buy Some Apples.6390:

What makes you think some of us will give more of our money to anet after this HoT fiasco?

I don’t know, the people who are enjoying HoT every day since it launched. Those people might. It’s only a fiasco if you don’t like it. It’s an expansion to many.

Kraggy.4169:

Souto.2716:

Now with the full core game being free there needs to be a way to limit what the P4F players can do and to entice them to buy the game.

The game Rift shows you a different model is possible, it isn’t a ‘given’ that F2P players need to be limited in order to coerce them to buy the game.

True, all other hybrid games (like DDO, LoTRO, ESO, SWTOR, etc.) limit in some way, and LoTRO F2P players are severely crippled, but Trion went a different route and as a F2P player you have access to the entire game (bar new ‘classes’, which even subscribers have to pay for).

Except GW2 is closer to the Hybrid(specially ones like LoTRO) games than games like Rift that are actually f2p games, which are focused around being f2p games. I know because they phrase it as p4f it might make some people think that it’s f2p but it’s not and this is really Anet’s fault for trying to coin a new phrase. GW2 is not a f2p game though and hence why they put the limits on the old content which they made free to entice the new player base to buy HoT.

I do wonder though if in the future with each expansion they’ll keep extending what is free. Having a model like EQ where you have to buy the newest expansion but get the old content for free, or decide to keep the original released content free and just keep bundling the expansions together. Making the second expansion unlock both it and HoT, the 3rd unlocking the 2nd expansion plus HoT, etc.

VanillexHope, i completely agreeL Less Pet Rocks and drop rate ners, and more cool stuff in the gem store. Give us more to buy, and less nerfing of the goodness that is GW2.