In game we have 5 pricing options for buying gems with real money.
10, 20 , 35, 50, 100.
If you go to a store that has them or get a card shipped to you, however, we have popular options for 1200 and 2000 gems, the perfect balance between the 10 and 20 dollar options as well as the 20 and 35 dollar options.
Right now, this is the problem. We lack enough online auto-add options, but that doesn’t mean we have to.
I, personally, wanted 1200 gems, but realized that I couldn’t actually obtain that amount without driving to a store three hours away or waiting a week for it to be shipped to me, and even then I’d be paying, at least, tax. This wasn’t a good solution, there outright didn’t seem to be one, so that, as well as just for convenience, is why I thought up this post.
Ask yourself: “How can I make this content better?"
Personally, I can’t make this better. I don’t have the ability to choose what pricing I want for fictional currency, for some bizarre reason, yet that does lead me into the rest of this and my suggestion further down.
Consider: How have you seen this particular problem solved in other games?
In other similar games, regardless of how often they’re purchased, I’ve seen “freemium” currency be available for said purchase at numerous intervals, usually starting at 5 dollars and increasing in increment by 5 dollars with each subsequent option.
One example of this pretty much every Perfect World Entertainment game. Say what you will about the company, their games, etc, the fact is they all have a freemium currency and, while sometimes it’s a little tricky to find, it can always be bought in 5 dollar increments from, at least their website, which is immediately added to your account automagically.
Even Rift has some form of this, while it isn’t as convenient, they, at least, allow you to buy a 5 dollar pack multiple times, while technically 4.99, that’s more or less 5 bucks.
Consider: How do you think this particular element or aspect of the game could be improved?
Tell us why: If we ask a specific question, don’t just answer it—tell us why you answered that way.
From this point in the post down “you” and other similar words will be referring to “ANet” and/or “NCsoft,” not “you” the player or “you” the person reading, or “you” as any particular person.
You can make it better, simply, by making the in-game buy options start at 5 dollars and go up to 100, where it currently is, with $5 intervals all the way through. Anet loses nothing on this as customers pay any VATS, taxes, fees, etc, so having fewer options is just better business as money is money, no matter how much or little.
Or, to make it even better, you can put in a custom amount option like you already have for gold to gems. We already know that the cost of gems is $1.25 USD and has been such since the start, the same can be said for pretty much every other currency, as far as I’m aware, the price in game for gems bought with real currency has always been the same in each respective currency regardless of exchange rates.
The latter would allow much more flexibility and would let people buy as much as they want or as little, which is important because, again, money is money and it doesn’t matter how you get all the money as long as you get all the money. Having a “custom amount” option would be a huge boon simply for the convenience of it, even if you put in a minimum and a max.
An example where this would have been highly appreciated, no doubt, is this from this Reddit post. I’m sure he’d have appreciated one large transaction as opposed to 50 $100 transactions. While that’s an extreme example, it only shows how nice it would be to have this as an option, there’s legitimately no reason not to add this since it’s already done with gold to gems, the only difference here is that you’d simply just make it real money to gems with no gems to money. The pricing is set and solid and this would allow people to spend exactly what they want to get exactly how many gems they want.
After all, it’s better for you to get 400 gems worth of money when someone who already has 400 gems can’t wait to raise 400 more gems with gold and they want a new character slot than it is to lose out entirely because they don’t want to drop 10 bucks when they already have half of what the slot requires. This is just one example, of course, yet, still.
These aren’t real gemstones, they take literally no effort to produce, they’re just numbers automagically added to the player’s account once they give you real world money. In such you have nothing to lose and everything to gain with a custom gem purchase amount.
Now, finally, you may be thinking “We’re clever because we force people to buy more than they actually want,” but you’re not. You’re only shooting yourself in your own foot by doing that. More often than not they’ll by the amount below what they need then just grind the rest, with the trains going on it isn’t difficult to grind. Time consuming, perhaps, but many would rather have enough for just what they want than any left over for anything else. While I realize this does not apply to all players it’s fairly obvious that it applies to enough to be extremely valid and to net you even more money.
(edited by trianglecubed.3750)