Guild Wars 2

Yeah, we are in the era of players who absolutely refuse to pay 15/mo for a subscription, but will fork over 50/mo in a cash store without blinking. And every big MMO but Blizzard is cashing in on it.

John Smedley (CEO SOE) called it right.. oh.. 7 years ago I think with his White Paper on microtransactions being the future. It certainly is.

Interesting read, in light of today. http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1716/soes_station_exchange__the_.php

Villious.8530:

Vayne.8563:

Teofa Tsavo.9863:

I don’t think they have done enough research. The FnF skins offered were limited, not that great, and were probably not a good test of players willingness to buy skins direct rather than RNG.

I don’t think they know how much possible sales income is lost because of people who would buy more desired skins directly, but opt out of RNG gambling.

Also, while gold to gem conversion is attractive, I think we are seeing a problem with it. Mudflation is a fact of MMOs, the bulk of the population is at endgame and gaining gold at a rate outpacing traditional sinks. Anet has to burn that gold off to facilitate RMT gem purchases. So.. RNG leads to more gem conversions by forcing more purchasing of “cheap” items, Keys.. and depletes the gold reserves in game… but how much does it harm actual RMT Gem purchases? Big question.

I will buy items I like. That Item. I will buy stones directly, Makeovers directly, I will not buy a chest for a “chance” at them, and I certainly will not buy a chest for a remote chance of 1/10th of an item I want.

Personally, I will buy a gem card to obtain an item I want, rather than play the conversion mkt and burn through gold. In my case, the rng decision costs them. With 9 chars my ingame gold goes to purchases like Cultural armors, not gem conversions.

I will go to a store and buy a 60dollar Blouse. I would never go to a store and buy 10 dollar mystery boxes guaranteed to have a random cotton t shirt and a remote chance at that blouse.

Why people will do things with pixels they would never do IRL baffles me.

I don’t think Anet is losing money. I think Anet is making money doing it this way. It sucks, but it’s probably true.

Basically there are enough people out there who will spend ten times what something is worth to get it randomly. So for Anet to break even they’d have to sell like ten times the number if they had it in the cash shop.

Vayne, I’m not sure what you mean by “break even”. Do you mean they’d have to sell 10 times as much to equal profits from RNG? If so, I agree.

Have you ever seen someone at one of those stuffed animal crane arcade machines? They will spend $20 to try and get a stuffed animal worth $1.

Yep, that’s what I meant.

There are players who wouldn’t buy a skin that they like if everyone else could buy it too. Some people want stuff because most people don’t have it/can’t get it. That’s part of their modus operandi.

For every person who spends big to get these skins, we’d need probably ten or more people to buy the skin. But not everyone is going to buy or like very skin.

In fact, as more skins come out, I’m finding myself all skinned out. I’m not sure how many more skins I want or need. I think I’m pretty happy with where my characters are now skin wise. I won’t need more until some of my lesser characters get to level 80.