Guild Wars 2

Maybe an easy (and dynamic) filter is being used? Like not allowing them to buy/sell anything over a silver?

It would impact anyone selling gathered/salvaged T1 mats but would hit characters who have at least one character getting T2 and above much less. Which are the vast majority of paid players.

thehipone.6812:

Birthday gifts containing super-expensive dyes that f2p players would have to wait 3 years to get.

Oh that is a reward for purchasing the game? I thought that was my reward for STILL playing the game after 3 years… hence birthday gift… You gotta do better than that.

Raven.1524:

Someone said that on the next expansion, the expansion before that will become free for core game owners. I personally believe they shouldn’t do that.
Maybe lower the price of HoT to 20-30$ when the next expansion comes after some years, but not free.
I mean, I would love it if I were to own a core game only and suddenly get a lot of content for free, but I rather pay and know that the company will keep getting a nice amount of income to keep creating amazing content for the future.

Also, I believe having a F2P version with account restrictions is awesome considering the fact that WoW is launching a new expansion and Wildstar going F2P (being also from NCSoft). Maybe we should focus first on beating up the competition first :P

PD: I’ll still be testing wildstar btw….. sorry xD (but I promise I’ll buy every friggin expansion after HoT since I already own that one, because I love the Lore in the game)
Oh! and for all the readers in here, buy the books! they are awesome! also the music too xD (don’t quite like the fluffy charr doll though lol)

Personally I believe for their next expansion, it includes all content from Core game and HoT. But free players will always stay with the core game only and not given access to any expansion content till they buy an expansion.

TJgalon.5012:

skigorn.7910:

I’ve gone through Lotro and Swtor converting to f2p. Never had an issue with free players, except where they were trying to do some group event and couldn’t because they were locked out…inconvenience more than anything. We added many good/long term f2p players to our guild ranks in those games.

The only issue I’ve ever had with converting to this model is the gold spammers, and it’s already happening here. I logged into Lion’s Arch this morning and was immediately /w about a site that sells precursors. Ugh. Swtor was inundated with gold spammers, and Bioware was horrible about shutting them down. I hope Anet is more vigilant.

I’ve only been here for 3 months, and bought the game when it was on sale for $15. If it wasn’t for that sale, I wouldn’t have tried this game out. I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who passed this game up because they couldn’t try it for free beforehand. With this change I can see some long term players settling in here. Some will come and go but some will stay, and that’s healthy for GW2 in the long term.

Was it a one time whisper or did it repeat a lot? 30sec per whisper is the restrition on free account.

It was a 1 time whisper, but I was only logged in briefly before I had to leave for work.

Yes, there is a danger of gold sellers using it but people that want help will soon learn to keep repeating the question.

Jiggawattz.2697:

Snip

Why don’t you get one of the free accounts and try it out. That way you can see if it’s the same as what you bought or if there are so many restrictions and rules that anyone who is planning to stay with the game would upgrade to a paid account. Maybe it will change your mind.

face it, it’s more like an awesome trial rather than a true f2p …. if you like the game , proceed to the counter to buy….

Debating if it is a trial or FTP would be something for the merged thread. What we are talking about is more specialized: how a vet saw it. IE, what is the NPE for FTP like for those of us who have not tried it.

ty arena net for broken Gw2….. and ty for steall my money for use f2pers and users now only losers……

Aluna Darklady.3165:

Uriel.6310:

My mouth just dropped.. I don’t know what to say..
1. So.. down the line when we get to expansion 2 and 3… does HoT become free to the newer players after that??

And more importantly,

2. How does this now affect the economy??

Arenanet, this A HUGE smack to the face to every loyal GW2 player since day one, heck even GW1… nothing to compensate to veteran players besides mediocre birthday presents and…… “A” outfit?? Really? Is this what all my money has earned over this years?

I don’t think Arenanet owes us any “compensation”. What about the 3 years of GW2 we’ve been playing? So “all your money” you have spent over the years was so you could earn rewards now? Umm, I think not.

To me this news doesn’t affect us in that way. I’m more concerned about the community changing, and possible abuse. But I feel those were both addressed well in the announcement, and I see this now as simply a marketing strategy, a “hook” to get people to try the game. I do believe, if they like the game enough they will buy the expansion, if not, they probably won’t play that long.

I’m guessing this is why the expansion includes the full game, I don’t mind essentially buying the game again as I’ve spend more on ten months of wow than three years of guild wars 2.

Seems to fit quite handily that the expansion gets announced and there’s an uproar that it doesn’t have an expansion only option then weeks later the game is opened up for free, great marketing strategy which i… suppose will work without too much fuss from loyal vets who feel cheated out of more money than they are comfortable with. I bought the £80 game because I know I’ve gotten my moneys worth already and then some, they gotta meet there quotas some how.

I don’t know if someone thought about that (i don’t rode all posts here) but imagine a situation (especially Arena Net). f2p guy get a gold no matter how he get it and this guy have a normal account too. From this normal account he can place one iron ore for 100g 28s 03c (to know that he posted it). He can buy this one iron ore witch his f2p account and in that way he get money on his normal account. The other thing is if you have f2p account and a trusted friend with normal account you can give him a money in way like i written before and he can buy you as a gift something from gem store. Sorry if you already noticed that before me and sorry if i written something wrong i am not an expert in english.

Biziut.3594:

I don’t know if someone thought about that (i don’t rode all posts here) but imagine a situation (especially Arena Net). f2p guy get a gold no matter how he get it and this guy have a normal account too. From this normal account he can place one iron ore for 100g 28s 03c (to know that he posted it). He can buy this one iron ore witch his f2p account and in that way he get money on his normal account. The other thing is if you have f2p account and a trusted friend with normal account you can give him a money in way like i written before and he can buy you as a gift something from gem store. Sorry if you already noticed that before me and sorry if i written something wrong i am not an expert in english.

I think it been suggested, but I am pretty sure there our filters in place to watch the market, more so now, and that might be why the market is limited for the F2P, makes them easier to watch a few things then all of them.
Also I do not know how the market works for Free, so it could be different too.

Jiggawattz.2697:

maddoctor.2738:

Dager.2390:

The thingh is that we didn’t buy only the game but also we contract a service (every mmo is a service) and here is the problem in the moment we bought the game the say to us that the game was b2p but now is a f2p.

I’m not agaist new players but I’m agaist what Anet is doing the things

And your service is still valid, you bought the service to play the game forever without paying again and that’s what you got, that never changed.

But the value of the offer has changed drastically. You pay 60 dollars to go to a show, and as you get there and get seated they announce that because 50% of the seats are empty they are letting everyone else in for free. Outrage will insue for anyone that values money and carefully chooses the things they enjoy enough to invest in. As somone who is physically disabled and has to manage my money carefully I made a very active decision to save the money to pre-purchase gw2 because I love the title and the company despite many of my posts on this forum.

All of your posts are completely riddled with logical fallacies and the sort. Let’s spell it out using your analogy.

Say you bought GW2 1-3 years ago. I paid $60 for your “ticket” to the show. You have been watching this show for the past 1-3 years. Other people looked at either the price of the ticket or the show advertisements and said, “nah, I can’t/don’t want to do that”. You said, “Yes, I do want to do that”, so you bought your ticket and have been watching the show while they were not watching the show.

Show’s over now. There is nothing about “empty seats” or 50% off; the show has ended. However they release a new show for the same price that allows you to continue watching the old show parts and new parts. You must pay $50 this time around regardless of who you are, but if you saw the old show you also get a complimentary drink. Maybe your drink tray is full, but they offer you a drink anyway. At one point, as the old show was finishing up, they sold tickets for the exact same price as this drink. They now let people into the old show alone without having to pay, but they moved the chairs out, however you can upgrade and see the old+new show like everyone else for the $50.

You chose to watch the show earlier than everyone else. Market trends clearly display that shows lose value as more people watch it (less viewers remaining). This means that at some point the old show by itself was going to either become less expensive or free at some point or another. Either that, or it won’t even be offered at all. You could very well wait 60 years before watching a recording of this show when you can get it and the sequels for a grand total of $5 in the discount bin at Big Box Mart, but then you’d have to wait that long.

Biziut.3594:

I don’t know if someone thought about that (i don’t rode all posts here) but imagine a situation (especially Arena Net). f2p guy get a gold no matter how he get it and this guy have a normal account too. From this normal account he can place one iron ore for 100g 28s 03c (to know that he posted it). He can buy this one iron ore witch his f2p account and in that way he get money on his normal account. The other thing is if you have f2p account and a trusted friend with normal account you can give him a money in way like i written before and he can buy you as a gift something from gem store. Sorry if you already noticed that before me and sorry if i written something wrong i am not an expert in english.

I don’t think we know enough yet about the restrictions on the f2p accounts to say. We do know there are restrictions on buying and selling. Restrictions might stop them from putting up items for sale worth more than a small percent of their gold. Since this could be a possible tactic for gold sellers to their buyers to get around the 500 gold a week limit and they don’t do this, it’s possible that sudden strange spikes in prices are monitored by the computers or the 15% tax bite makes this unfeasible.

I want to talk about the free to play account restrictions. I’m ok with most of them because anet doesnt want gold farmer accounts but why is the gold to gems trade blocked off for ftp accounts. They only start with 2 character slots and 3 bag slots. I think it’s fair for ftp accounts to exchange gold to gems to buy more bag/character slots because (let’s be fair) ftp accounts are quite limited. I don’t know how curency exchange for ftp acc will break the game but i think if they want to update their accounts (without buying HoT) we should let them. I hope i’m not the only one who thinks like this but if i’m missing something in the bigger picture please tell me.

TJgalon.5012 and Just a flesh wound.3589 maybe you right. I just wanted to help the way i can. I hope Arena already know about what i am written i don’t have nothing to this “peoples from other world” (really some ppls think that will be a real zombie apocalypse). I don’t really have opinion about this “f2p” thing Anet should know what they are doing to keep this game in good condition isn’kitten I guess this F2P like everything in this world have advances and disadvantages (except beer and boobs ^^).The point is that i hate cheating and i love this game and i don’t want it to fall so as i said before i just wanted to help the only way i can.

It acts as a nudge for free accounts to purchase the full edition – effectively a restricted demo account which won’t expire. Giving them access to gold:gem conversion would perhaps draw the line too far between the new player purchasing the game and remaining on a free account.

Surely giving them free access to the core game with restrictions was enough to help them decide whether or not they wish to purchase the game?

Perhaps it’s so that ANet gets some money from them, even it’s only $10 so that they aren’t all expense for the company and no income, as well as getting things for free being a reward for upgrading the account. They do cost the company in support costs when they make a ticket as well as extra costs for squashing hackers, gold sellers and and other malicious accounts.

Biziut.3594:

I don’t know if someone thought about that (i don’t rode all posts here) but imagine a situation (especially Arena Net). f2p guy get a gold no matter how he get it and this guy have a normal account too. From this normal account he can place one iron ore for 100g 28s 03c (to know that he posted it). He can buy this one iron ore witch his f2p account and in that way he get money on his normal account. The other thing is if you have f2p account and a trusted friend with normal account you can give him a money in way like i written before and he can buy you as a gift something from gem store. Sorry if you already noticed that before me and sorry if i written something wrong i am not an expert in english.

not sure if this is possible.

IIRC, you cant buy at higher price when there are lower prices available. The TP will give you the lower price and refund you the different. That’s what I remember.

Zalladi I guess you are right but to get gems you need so much gold at the moment (400 gems for 70gold or something like that). I think it wont be too bad to let them exchange gold to gems because they will already have played a lot of the game to have enough gold to exchange to gems right? If they have already played so much to have gained so much gold then they probably didnt want to update anyway.

Because gold grind bots could crash the exchange rate.

You get a several thousand bot acounts doing nothing but grinding gold and buying gems, and next thing you know it costs 300 gold for 400 gems.

Some of the arguments are not even related to the topic. HoT for someone who hasnt already bought the Core game is priced well in my opinion. Having to pay the same as those who have not already bought the core game for people who did is a bad deal all day long.
Some of you are comparing it to entitlement and to time enjoyed etc. I bought many games many years ago that I still get to enjoy when I feel like it. I still have PS1 games that I go back to from time to time. I still play GW1 from time to time. I bought this game so that I COULD enjoy it as much as I wanted.
Some are arguing that games like WoW would charge us monthly but I didnt buy WoW for that reason! I bought GW2 because I want to have permanent access to the games I spend my hard earned money on. If I am not mistaken (which is possible as noone is always right) the reason that most people who gave Guild Wars a chance is because they advertised that there was no monthly fee! Thats why I bought GW1 and thats also why I bought GW2.
I want to hear Anet say that my purchase is invalid and Ive used up my time with the game now that Ive had 3 years to enjoy it. It doesnt matter if you feel Ive had my moneys worth. If you feel like you have then you go ahead and pay again to renew your purchase and Im sure noone will try and stop you. We did not buy a time gated game and we did not buy a subscription based game and at least in my case this was done on purpose so the amount of time I got to enjoy it is irrelevant.

@Using trade post to move gold… isn’t the trade post built in such a way that you have to buy from the lowest seller or sell to the highest bidder? Yes, you can select a price, but doesn’t it automatically mark ALL other buy/sell offers before it, price-wise, so to buy that 100 g, 28s 03c Iron, he’d have to buy ALL Iron listed by other players at a lower price as well. Isn’t that so? I always was under the impression that the “best” offer (highest bidder / lowest seller) was “forced” upon the trader.

As far as F2P goes… I’m okay with it. I don’t know how they’ll handle the next expansion, if F2P stays Core only or then includes HoT. And frankly, I don’t care. By then, I will have been playing (and enjoying – otherwise I wouldn’t be playing, so the time I spent on the game is WHAT I GET OUT OF IT, not something ANet owes me anything for) Heart of Thorns for a year or two already, and getting ready for the next fix.

F2P will help me get people to try the game more easily, and maybe some of them will buy. I have high hopes for this, and the restrictions sound very well-made to me. Sure, there might be some adjustments in the future, but I’ve yet to be disappointed by ArenaNet.

The only thing worrying me (I can’t really judge (haha, okay, now I know why that got censored, my bad) how much of an issue WvW might see) is that a huge influx of new players might change the tone of the community. I’ve seen it happen before. But so far, community has been awesome towards the new players, and I hope that rubs off on the people actually joining the community in force. I had planned to start a new character anyhow (to see how start-up leveling had changed in the past three years), and made it on saturday, stumbling right into some sort of welcoming party for new players when entering Queensdale. An awesome job, GW2 community, I hope we can keep this up… it has me wanting to walk the starting zones looking for new players to help them find their way.

NTDK.4897:

Biziut.3594:

I don’t know if someone thought about that (i don’t rode all posts here) but imagine a situation (especially Arena Net). f2p guy get a gold no matter how he get it and this guy have a normal account too. From this normal account he can place one iron ore for 100g 28s 03c (to know that he posted it). He can buy this one iron ore witch his f2p account and in that way he get money on his normal account. The other thing is if you have f2p account and a trusted friend with normal account you can give him a money in way like i written before and he can buy you as a gift something from gem store. Sorry if you already noticed that before me and sorry if i written something wrong i am not an expert in english.

not sure if this is possible.

IIRC, you cant buy at higher price when there are lower prices available. The TP will give you the lower price and refund you the different. That’s what I remember.

I think NTDK is right. If you price one ore at 100 gold, you can’t select and buy only that one. It will sell all the lower prices ores to you all the way up to the 100 gold ore or you lose all your gold by buying the lower prices ores before you get to it, whichever comes first.

I dont understand this panic “omg i bough the game and now it is going to be free”…

Free players will be time gated, will be BLT item gated etc, skill gated….etc gated…

And…

IT will be a good boost for some game modes.

warning: lots of text incoming
As a paid player who has a few hundred hours and 2 level 80s(and one upcoming lv. 80), id like to give my 2 cents on the topic of the new F2P restrictions. While i agreed with many of the restrictions to preserve the economy, prevent botting, flooding, ect., there are a handful of unnecessary(in my eyes) restrictions put on F2P players that would in turn discourage new players from getting into the game and (eventually) buying the core game+HoT.

After bouncing off my ideas to a few other paid players, and some of my friends who started the game out in the new F2P model, me and them have come up with these:

Map Chat
While this was a wise decision on Anets part to prevent flooding, gold marketers and others who wish to ruin our game, it becomes a double edged sword, as at later levels, /m becomes an integral part of the game. Most players use /m to notify other players on the map to events going on, help on completing PoI/Vista/Hearts or to just communicate and give a nice conversation to listen to/partake in while running around finishing the map. Under this new system, if a F2P were to find a event going on, they cant ask for help or to inform everyone else, And huge turn-off to many players is being alienated from the game. Lets say if I for example, cannot figure out how to reach a Vista/PoI, i could just hit up /m and get a nice player to help me out, and a free to play cant without hunting down a player and asking in /s.

How to Fix This
Option A. Add a cooldown
Adding a cooldown on free players to use /m would allow players to call out events, to ask for help, to get the assistance they need.

Option B. make /m a leveled unlock
While /m is very important in the beginning to answer every question a new player has, it becomes especially important at later levels. To prevent spammers and gold bots, allow players to unlock the ability to use /m at a later level, even if you need to add Option A. as well.

Forum Posting
This has the same vein as /m, where it becomes a double edged sword. the implications are obvious, to keep the forums clean and and prevent spam and flood. However, this is a bigger issue then removing /m. New players need the forums. they need to ask questions and solve problems. what if a new player cant launch Gw2 after some future update, and then need to wait for a paid player to have the same issue as them to ask for a fix? what if a player finds a big issue/exploit/flaw that no paid player has found, and wishes to inform the forums about it? this safe move by Anet ultimately cripples free players.

How to Fix This
Option A. Give Free Players a daily posting cap
while not the smoothest or most secure option, it serves the same purpose as /m, where it gives free players the ability to communicate with the community and give them the chance to participate and give to the community. a cap would allow them to post technical issues, report issues, and give to the community.

Option B. Up the security for Free Players
again, not the smoothest, but it serves its purpose. Even if you need to add Option A to the mix, adding a capcha, perhaps a backlist of banned websites, a F2P thread section, or similar, it would allow players to participate in the forums and still prevent spam and flood.

In-Game Mail
This feels like more of a security feature for players then it does to prevent the bot flood that plagues every free game. While the bot circumvention is evident, entirely preventing mail is a bad idea. In 2 or so years, there will be an army of free players who want to play with their free friends. Now lets say a free Engineer finds a nice Rare Quality Greatsword. As an Engie, he/she cannot use a GS, but his/her warrior friend can. Unfortunately with the mail lock off, now these players cannot trade this sword with each other. Another scenario is if a free player wishes to buy an item, but is a few G off. with no way to trade with their friends, it becomes an “every man for himself” scenario.

How to Fix this
Option A.Go the Path of Exile Route
In the game Path of Exile, a player cannot trade rare items or consumables until they hit lv 25, however they can freely trade lower grade items. Adding this system would allow players to trade items/gold together, and allow them to use an integral part of the game as the game lacks…

Option B. A trading system
In a more unlikely option, Anet could add some form of a light trading system to allow mutual friends to trade items with each other without using the mail system. this would allow friends to trade items, and prevent scammers/bots from taking strangers items.

Option C.Force a mutual friend system.
A potential idea is to extend the current mail idea of trading with mutual friends only, but design the system to allow players to trade items via mail once every X minutes, and only to mutual friends.

SMS/App confirmation for 8/28/15~ players
While this is not exactly a F2P issue, its a fine example of “Road to hell being paved with Good Intentions”. Under this new system, if you wish to access a guild bank OR your mail, it is required to confirm it via an App or through SMS. this is a feature that backfires completely, becoming a tedious chore, especially if you are preforming multiple mail or bank transactions at once or in a short period of time

How to Fix This
Option A. add a SMS/App periodic check
design the system to only ask for a confirmation once every X transactions, allowing the feature to exist and prevent annoying confirmations

Option B. Go the Steam Route
whenever a trade is preformed on steam for games such as Team Fortress 2 or CounterStrike, an email confirmation is sent out for each player to accept. However, this feature is optional, its a setting a player can disable freely, and all it takes to disable the feature is a single email code confirmation.

This is just a small list of gripes to the new f2p system implemented that would detract from the game and potentially turn free players away. some of you may be wondering “why even bother making this, youre not a free player, what does it matter to you?”, and i respond with the fact that i love this game, its one of the best online experiences ive had in a good long while. i want to see this game flourish and drastically improve with the new free players, and i want to encourage them to purchase the core+HoT to fully enjoy the game with zero drawbacks.

Did i make any mistakes? hate my ideas? did i miss anything? want to slap me with a slice of pizza? feel free to correct me/berate me/add onto me/only with a pepperoni slice, and give your own ideas on how one can improve the F2P system to ensure our new free friends get the best free experience. Thank you for taking the time to read my essay.

Just a flesh wound.3589, NTDK.4897 Yup i just checked it my theory is down. kitten 3 years of playing and i didn’t noticed that . I can sleep calm now cya.

Ty Arioso now i get it. I didn’t think about this. I guess you are right.

A lot of the restrictions are focused on making it very hard to get gold and items off of a free account. Players who missed this one have already suggested buying gems with gold and using those gems to gift items to your main account as a way of using the rewards earned on a free account to benefit your main account. (Which would probably be fine if it was just people playing normally wanting to move the rewards over, but anything that allows that could also be used by gold sellers.)

But I suspect it’s also an incentive to purchase. Not being able to buy gems with gold won’t stop anyone trying the game, but sooner or later it will get frustrating (especially for people who are wary about spending money on it) and that may encourage them to buy the game.

Same here dont see the reason for all this doom and gloom f2p accounts are rather limited and even if you could exploit broker to ‘boost’ your alt in such way, well those things are easy to track and ban both account in process.

But it will sure help gold sellers they dont care about limits as long some crap is getting spammed and not like its hard to level in gw2. Guess i have to get rdy to wastly extend my block list.

The only way those will effect ecconomy is by dropping price of lower tier mats as those will probably be good source of income for some which in turn might drop price of ascended mats but i dont see it happening at least not the ascended mats price drop.
So i’d say thats good thing.
And population boom should help with dungeons and escape from elitism if you have nerves to run with fresh ppl XD

Biziut.3594:

Just a flesh wound.3589, NTDK.4897 Yup i just checked it my theory is down. kitten 3 years of playing and i didn’t noticed that . I can sleep calm now cya.

Yeah I had forgotten about that fail safe feature till NTDK posted.

The Pingvinator.2017:

Zalladi I guess you are right but to get gems you need so much gold at the moment (400 gems for 70gold or something like that). I think it wont be too bad to let them exchange gold to gems because they will already have played a lot of the game to have enough gold to exchange to gems right? If they have already played so much to have gained so much gold then they probably didnt want to update anyway.

Actually it’s more like 107g to buy 400 gems, and only about 73g if you sell 400 gems.

And it would affect the market. Effectively paid accounts paid for the right to exchange in game gold for gems, and f2p accounts have to pay rl money to acquire gems. Seems fair since they didn’t buy the game.

Whispers in your ear: “micro-transactions”.

The Pingvinator.2017:

Ty Arioso now i get it. I didn’t think about this. I guess you are right.

Free Acounts can also purchase gem with real money, if they want to buy something off the gem store.

Arioso.8519:

Because gold grind bots could crash the exchange rate.

You get a several thousand bot acounts doing nothing but grinding gold and buying gems, and next thing you know it costs 300 gold for 400 gems.

And this way maybe that exchange rate can come down a bit.

how to solve ALL of this: Buy the full game.

I want to talk about an other thing. I saw that daily chests aernt available for ftp acc. Then how will they get laurels and ascsended earings/amulets/rings or did i just not understand it properly?

Didn’t you prepare the login servers for the rush of new players? :/

First it forces them to buy gems if they want gem shop items.

Second they can’t drive the exchange rate up by buying gems.

Third if they sell their bought gems for gold, it helps the paid players by lowing the exchange rate.

I think the restriction is right on the money.

dane.4638:

Some of the arguments are not even related to the topic. HoT for someone who hasnt already bought the Core game is priced well in my opinion. Having to pay the same as those who have not already bought the core game for people who did is a bad deal all day long.
Some of you are comparing it to entitlement and to time enjoyed etc. I bought many games many years ago that I still get to enjoy when I feel like it. I still have PS1 games that I go back to from time to time. I still play GW1 from time to time. I bought this game so that I COULD enjoy it as much as I wanted.
Some are arguing that games like WoW would charge us monthly but I didnt buy WoW for that reason! I bought GW2 because I want to have permanent access to the games I spend my hard earned money on. If I am not mistaken (which is possible as noone is always right) the reason that most people who gave Guild Wars a chance is because they advertised that there was no monthly fee! Thats why I bought GW1 and thats also why I bought GW2.
I want to hear Anet say that my purchase is invalid and Ive used up my time with the game now that Ive had 3 years to enjoy it. It doesnt matter if you feel Ive had my moneys worth. If you feel like you have then you go ahead and pay again to renew your purchase and Im sure noone will try and stop you. We did not buy a time gated game and we did not buy a subscription based game and at least in my case this was done on purpose so the amount of time I got to enjoy it is irrelevant.

What is getting invalidated, and how? Your account stays a full, paid account, without F2P restrictions. Your characters and progress is still there, as is your access. You can still enjoy the same game you bought back then (plus everything they added in the mean time). The only thing you don’t get to play is Heart of Thorns if you don’t buy.

And this is how it was in GW1: I was a Prophecies player. Factions was standalone, Nightfall was standalone, EotN was an expansion and whenever something new came out, the previous installment got a little cheaper until there was a bundle offer with all previous installments and the most current ones, until people got all three base games plus EotN for less than I paid for any single one of them. I didn’t complain. That’s how expansions and then “Gold Editions” work.

If you wait, it gets cheaper. Someone else is now getting a restricted version of what we’ve been playing for up to three years for free now, to get them to buy an expansion. So what? What is this taking away from you? Nothing. Hence: Entitlement.

Jiggawattz.2697:

Sinope.5630:

Guild Wars 2 is just a product what have had normal product life cycle.

1. Price is placed higher than normal price would be.

• Innovators will buy product no matter what price is placed to the product.
• Innovators want to be first ones, those who are ahead of the time.

2. Price is lowering to that price what has been normal this kind of product.

• Mass consumers buy the product, because they have heard what innovators have talk about it.
• Some of the innovators start to quit use this product.

3. Product have discounted price

• Those users buy this product whom interests arise because they heard mass users talk about it. It is not so important, but they want to be part of that product.
• Innovators start to looking for something new and some mass users start to quit use this product.

4. Product start to be giveaway with some other product, or it is changed to be free to play (if it is a game or program)

• Those players will try it whom get it free. It is not so important to them, but it is nice to try it, because some people are still talking about it, or new version from it is coming to the markets (expansion).

So I only see positive action from ArenaNet that they put Guild Wars 2 free to play. It is nice to have new players to enjoy the game with us.

I have been enjoyed this game couple days over 3 years now and it has been worth all money what I have invested to it.

Guild wars is not just a product, it is a service. We are happy with the product, unhappy with the service. Re-evaluate and fix post.

You can easily replace ‘Product’ with ‘Service’, or even better ‘Software System’, in that post. It wont change the deepest meaning behind it. To, partially, quote Shakespeare: “A Rose, if called by any other name, won’t smell any different.”

mcwurth.2081:

how to solve ALL of this: Buy the full game.

now yes, that is true.

however, it is unlikely that a free to play user will spend 50 bucks on a game he/she is not invested in, and one of the biggest ways investment can be ruined is if the social aspect is butchered for them

Sorry, but these systems need hard caps, not once or twice every so often. One account could post one message, one hundred accounts could post one hundred messages. Spam would get through.

Plus there needs to be some incentive to buy the game.

Once again, bots and gold sellers ruin the experience for honest players. Just a couple examples. Gold sellers advertise websites with in game messages. Right now that results in account termination. Free accounts, even with limited message capability, could be used for this with no penalty. Since the accounts are free, just get as many as needed to advertise. For economic transactions, level restrictions are basically useless, any gold farming bot will level up as a by product of farming. The most difficult to understand is the forum posting restriction. I would guess this to stop posts that violate the rules of conduct. If the account is free who cares if you lose it.

Arena Net must drop the SMS verification nonsense. Who wants to need their phone with them whenever they want to play the game? Mine is usually in my coat pocket, upstairs, in the closet.

The Pingvinator.2017:

I want to talk about an other thing. I saw that daily chests aernt available for ftp acc. Then how will they get laurels and ascsended earings/amulets/rings or did i just not understand it properly?

ascended from: drops and guild missions, and laurels from achievements. Remember, exotic is perfectly viable in everything except higher fractals.

Alloy.2839:

Once again, bots and gold sellers ruin the experience for honest players. Just a couple examples. Gold sellers advertise websites with in game messages. Right now that results in account termination. Free accounts, even with limited message capability, could be used for this with no penalty. Since the accounts are free, just get as many as needed to advertise. For economic transactions, level restrictions are basically useless, any gold farming bot will level up as a by product of farming. The most difficult to understand is the forum posting restriction. I would guess this to stop posts that violate the rules of conduct. If the account is free who cares if you lose it.

fair enough, these were just a few ideas to give free players just a few more rights, and most of our ideas pretty much came up with “make the level requirement high”, as most gold botters wouldnt take any effort into making these accounts that high a level(and even with tome spamming, it will cost a heavy bit on their end)

but yes, the forum block is somewhat unreasonable, id genuinely like a mod to explain this to me.

The Pingvinator.2017:

I want to talk about an other thing. I saw that daily chests aernt available for ftp acc. Then how will they get laurels and ascsended earings/amulets/rings or did i just not understand it properly?

They can pay for the game and get the benefit? Wouldn’t that make sense?

Enrif.7359:

It’s interesting to see how vigilant some are againt unrestricitng some things for people who have proofed not to be Goldsellers/Trolls by achieving lvl 70/80.

Unfortunately, being lvl 70+ does not prove you are not a gold seller. Gold sellers get gold by botting, bots level as a result of gold farming. A gold seller could easily level free accounts and get access to map chat for advertising.

Todd.8162:

Arena Net must drop the SMS verification nonsense. Who wants to need their phone with them whenever they want to play the game? Mine is usually in my coat pocket, upstairs, in the closet.

Well not really 2 factor Auth is nice and helpful if you some one tires to log in. Its just there to make sure your safer. If you live in say the UK and some one from South America IP tries to log on and you dont have 2nd auth its annoying to get the items and things back what iff all the toons got killed and you cant get those names back. Very annoying