Guild Wars 2

If you’re reading this (and I sorely hope that you are), please bear in mind that I am by no means an expert. Everything that follows comes off my personal knowledge of the game, talking to friends who play, and generally what I personally feel works. I cannot say if this will work, but I do hope ArenaNet as a whole takes a look at this essay (because it will be long) and at least takes some ideas from it. Please, and I cannot stress this enough, read everything that I say before getting angry at me and TL;DR’ing the post to make an angry comment at the bottom. I promise that I have put a lot of thought into this – and I am willing to put more in as well. If you have any suggestions, feel free to let me know below and I will take it into consideration (provided people want more of these posts…)

Before I begin, I want to give a little bit of background on myself and why I’m doing this. First and foremost, I consider myself a Guild Wars fanboy. I played the original game, I immersed myself in the lore, and I absolutely adore every aspect of the game (to some degree; I’m really not a WvW player). And with that in mind, seeing and playing Guild Wars the past couple months has been equivalent to watching a friend slowly die on life support. I know where the end is, but I really don’t want to get there – even if it would be incredibly liberating to finally pull the plug.

As much as I would like to make vast, blanket statements that get nowhere but sound really good on paper, I’ve decided to tackle this in bite-sized, manageable chunks. Piece by piece looking at what makes Guild Wars the game we love, and why it seems to be dying.

The first place I want to target is the gem shop. Simply because this is where ArenaNet makes their money off the game. Because this is the real money maker, this also needs to be the strongest and healthiest part of the game. Sales are nice and will keep you going for a while, but they won’t pay for the game in its entirety; especially not a buy-to-play microtransaction game such as this one.

Step 1: The Value of a Gem

Before I break down what changes I would make to the gem store, we need to assign a value to a gem. Currently, 800 gems is $10.00 USD. This gives us a base value of 8 gems per .10 USD (8 gems for 10 cents USD) or 80 gems per $1.00 USD. I know I’m repeating myself a lot here, but keep in mind that I’m trying to give you baseline numbers to work with – something easy to calculate and extrapolate.
This means that, in ascending order (all prices are in USD from here on out):
$0.10 – 8 gems
$1.00 – 80 gems
$5.00 – 400 gems
$7.50 – 600 gems
$10.00 – 800 gems

Anything above this begins to have bonus gems added, so I won’t go beyond 10 for 800; it gets complicated for needless reasons. You’ll notice that I’ve added a total for 600 gems as well – I’ll get to that in a bit, but bear in mind that it’s important.

Step 2: Black Lion Chests and Keys

The first step should be removing Black Lion Keys as rare drops and from your Personal Story. The only way to get keys would be to buy them through the gem store (and perhaps leaving the level 50, daily reward, and map completion rewards in). Then, reduce the cost of Black Lion Keys to half or a third of what they currently are. Next, remove the account binding for Black Lion Keys.

What would this do? It would drive the demand for keys up (by removing key farming) while simultaneously allowing people who do not wish to purchase keys with real money the ability to buy keys.

Next, we increase the value of the Black Lion Chest. How do we do this? After Evon Gnashblade ended up losing his vast resources to the Aetherblades during his escape from Lion’s Arch (and subsequent press-gang into the Lionguard), he decided that maybe leaving crates of his wares laying around wasn’t the best possible business practice.

What does this mean? Change the drop rate of Black Lion Chests to the same table as an exotic. Drive the numbers of them around down to increase their value. Next, we make the chests worth opening: increasing the change of pulling a ticket scrap to 50% or even 75% makes the chests more valuable and worth opening; making the chests harder to get also stops the market from being flooded by weapon skins.

Next: almost everything in the Black Lion Chest is unbound. From boosters to tonics to minis, everything that you get from the chests can be sold to the market at large. Add things such as infinite harvesting tools, toys, and other objects (I’ll get to those in a bit) to the Black Lion Chests.

Step 3: Account-wide Upgrades

Now that the Black Lion Chests are worth investing in heavily, we take a look at some of the other aspects in the game. First, infinite harvesting tools. Currently priced at 1000 gems each (and only for a limited time), they come out to just over $12.00 USD – rather high for what they offer. However, with a simple tweak, their value could go up exponentially: buying one harvesting tool will give you the ability to, on any character, go get another copy. They would stay account bound, but you could have them on all characters at the same time.

To entice people to buy more harvesting tools, different ones could have unique bonuses. A Christmas Logging Axe could have a random chance (~25%) to harvest appropriate tier Snowflakes from the tree you’re chopping down (green wood would give you tiny snowflakes, ancient wood would give you flawless snowflakes, etc). The Candy Corn Sickle would have a similar chance to harvest Candy Corn from plants. Mixing and matching these combinations (as well as adding new ones) would give people a reason to expand their collection of infinite harvesting tools.

Also in this vein, we would need to add my first new item to the game: the Account Appearance Plus. This would have two parts. First, Total Makeover Kit+. These would offer you even more control over every aspect of your character by adding several new options: hips, waist, bust, muscle mass, muscle tone, shoulders, arms, every single aspect of your character could be customized with precision (the system I have in mind is similar to the one found in The Elder Scrolls: Online). These options would not be available in the Total Makeover Kit (which would remain), and would cost you 500 gems per Makeover Kit+. The standard Total Makeover Kit would remain, at 350 gems, and still function identical to how it does now.

The second half of this would be the Character Upgrade. An upgrade for your account that unlocks all of the Total Makeover Kit+ and Makeover Kit upgrades (new hair, new sliders, new faces, new colours) on your character creation screen permanently. This would also give you access to all new content (faces, colours, sliders) as they are added. As an account upgrade, it would be expensive (possibly in the vein of 2400 gems) but it would give you unlimited New Character access to everything – existing characters would still require Makeover Kits to be redone.

Another account upgrade would be a Permanent Magic Find booster. This would automatically give your account a permanent 1% Magic Find increase, no matter the level of your current Magic Find. It would put you from 12% to 13%, or from 299% to 300%. 50 gems per 1%. These would also be offered for increased experience, karma, and gold find at the same price – 1% for 50 gems.

Whenever you use a booster (50% karma for 1 hour, etc) they would also leave a ‘residual’ effect on your account: a permanent 1% boost. This would be for all consumable, gem-store boosters (experience, karma, magic find, gold find).

Step 4: Weapon Skins

All Black Lion Chests would have a chance to drop either a random Weapon Skin, or a Weapon Skin Crate. Weapon Crates would be purchasable from the gem store and would give you a pseudo-random weapon from whatever Crate you chose. Weapon Crates would start at 400 gems for the meta they were introduced with, and then increase to 600 gems after their portion of the story passes on (the same amount of time they stay 1 Claim Ticket currently). After a set amount of time (possibly a year), the Weapon Crate would be removed from the store. Weapon Crates, as with everything else, would be tradable on the Black Lion Trading Company.

A pseudo-random system would work like this: there are 19 different weapons in the game, giving each one a 1/19 chance of dropping (5.3% chance). After you open one Crate, that weapon would be removed from the rotation or have a greatly lowered drop chance (effectively making the chance of getting the weapon you want 1/18, or 5.6%). Every Crate that you open has an increasing chance of dropping the weapon skin that you want. You could get lucky and get it on the first try, or it could take you 19 tries to get the skin you want – but you have all 18 other skins to show for your dedication.

All weapon skins would start at the same price they do – 1 Claim Ticket – and would be increased to 3 Claim Tickets once they were removed from the current ‘meta’ rotation. They would stay at 3 Tickets even once their weapon crate was removed from the store.

Step 5: Armour Skins

The first step here would be reducing the cost of all armour skins to 600 gems. The second step would be offering a Black Lion [unidentified set name] Armour Chest. Priced at 150 gems, they would allow you to pick a single piece from the set to unlock on your account. Say you want the Viper legs, but the rest of the set doesn’t interest you; you spend 150 gems to get the piece you care about and then the problem is solved. You save money and still get the set you want.

Step 6: Home Instance Upgrades

This will tie into a later post (if I make it), but giving players the ability to upgrade and customize their home instance seems like an incredibly good idea. First, all players would receive a Hearthstone (for lack of a better term) that automatically teleports them to their home instance. It would have a channeling time and could not be used in combat or in an instance (to avoid abusing it), but otherwise would function exactly as mapping to a Waypoint would.

In your Home Instance, you would be able to purchase certain upgrades: a Blacksmith, for example, would give you the ability to customize a blacksmithing area (different layouts, different blacksmiths, etc) and it would give you Weaponsmithing, Armoursmithing, and Huntsman stations within your Home Instance itself. Purchasing from the master here would give you a slight discount and unique skin options to craft (at a slightly higher price than regular crafting).

It would also come with bonus storage (500 units for both ores and refined ingots) as well as a “deposit to Forge” option. This would deposit all of your currently crafting materials, exactly like the current Deposit button does, but it would put all of your unrefined ore into a forge that would refine them for you; it would not level your crafting, but would give you convenience and save you space.

All of these upgrades would be account bound: you buy it once and it’s unlocked for all characters. You would also be able to map into friend’s home instances to use their crafting. However, you could not use the Home Instance of a player who is not in your party or who has left your party, and you would not be able to access their bonus skins, reduced prices, or other personal bonuses.

Step 7: Make Me Pretty!

Another as-yet untouched area would be something as simple as piercings. Spending 200 to 400 gems to unlock earrings, navel rings, or other piercings would be a very quick way for players to make their characters stand out as well as offering a reason to unlock more unique kinds of jewelry.

Offering swimwear (worn under the armour, only appears in specific areas) or dyeable undearwear would also be a quick, easy upgrade that many people would be willing to pay for.

Though they would require exponentially more work than everything outlined above, having unique character voices would also be an option; something more expensive, admittedly, but possibly enjoyable.

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In conclusion, not every idea outlined here is viable. I’m not saying that they are. I’m giving a giant, somewhat padded list of ideas that have occurred to me that I believe firmly would help improve the game experience in one specific area – the Black Lion Trading Company and gem store. If there’s enough interest, I may write other articles outlining different areas that I believe could use improvement; if not, I hope that this simple message makes it to the top and somewhere up there in ArenaNet, there’s still someone who loves the game enough to save it before it bites the bullet once and for all.

Some of these sound like good ideas (the black lion chest stuff, for example), but other things… this makeover kit+ idea, for instance, is impossible without a major overhaul of the character creation system, which I highly doubt would be a profitable investment given the few extra gems they’ll make out of it.
And on the subject of gems – you repeatedly suggest dropping prices on all sorts of things, which I don’t see working out very well. Honestly, right now most of the gem store prices aren’t that bad, what really stops people from buying is just a general dislike of microtransactions, rather than not being able to afford the exorbitant sum of £8.50 (or $10.00, whatever). So cutting those costs won’t help.

I’d argue that microtransactions aren’t the problem here. Take a look at Valve’s DotA2 – that game is a legitimate way to print money. They have microtransactions on top of microtransactions and they recently made over 20 million dollars in a one-week span off of Microtransactions… for this much less than what the Gem Store offers.

Lowering the prices would do two things – first of all, entice people to buy more things. Lower prices generally cause people to spend more. Microtransactions should be impulse buys. You see something and go “I want that in my life”. The armour prices are generally fair, if a bit high (they seem to be on-par with League of Legends’ skins) but some of the other items – Magnus’ Eye Patch comes to mind immediately – are absolutely ridiculously priced.

Another idea would be to completely remove the Gold → Gems option. This would force people to spend money and allow ANet to put farming back into the game. I was leery to broach the subject simply because I assumed people would jump on my back about it, but I do believe that the Gold → Gems option needs to be taken out.

Gem store harvesting tools providing unique resources is a very, very bad idea. Just saying. They should be convenience, not long-term investment. No player should feel forced to buy such items. This comes from a guy with 8 sets.

The unique resources would be something that you could get naturally through gameplay but only at specific times – such as the Watchwork Sprocket pick that was already on sale. Thanks for the feedback, though, and I will try to be clearer with my words next time.

They still would provide a steady profit for their owner. They would soon become almost mandatory in the economy race. No gem store item should be mandatory.

Edit: btw, you were right about not including the gold—>gems removal among the initial propositions. I won’t even argue against it, dude. Just… No.

Asmodeus.5782:

Gem store harvesting tools providing unique resources is a very, very bad idea. Just saying. They should be convenience, not long-term investment. No player should feel forced to buy such items. This comes from a guy with 8 sets.

I just use what I get from merchants. They work just as well and don’t look ridiculous or annoying.

Asmodeus.5782:

Edit: btw, you were right about not including the gold—>gems removal among the initial propositions. I won’t even argue against it, dude. Just… No.

I honestly believe it would be the best thing to do for the game at this point. Hear me out.

Instead of having a Gold → Gems system like we do currently, we have the ability to list Gems on the BLTC. You buy Gems with your hard earned hard currency and then you can sell it to people in the game for Gold. Chances are you would get a similar transaction rate (give or take some change) and you would get your Gold. They would get their Gems.

Part of the problem that ANet is having is that people are converting Gold into Gems and avoiding the need to pay for anything, which is causing a general downward spiral as they try to shore up the leaks and make money. It’s seen in the death of farming, very poor-quality patches and updates (nothing in most of April save things that should have been in the game since Day 1, then nothing until the 20th, which is old, rehashed content).

With a system that allowed you to buy Gems and then sell them to other players, you avoid this situation; somewhere along the line, ANet still gets their money. You don’t have to pay for your Gems and you can get them through Gold. This means that ANet can bring back and happily allow farming without crapping their personal real-money economy out, while allowing the players themselves easier ways to attain the things that they want. On both sides of the coin, you have an increase in profit and revenue and can increase content quality.

I really do think that Anet should be looking at some of your ideas, as of this last patch I really do feel that I may stop playing, which is sad because of the love I have for this game and gw1, hell its part of how I met my fiance. If an Anet employee is reading this, please give this some thought, a lot of people are not happy after this last update and I don’t want to say goodbye to this game just yet, please listen to your fanbase.

Ten Cent Soviet.7523:

Part of the problem that ANet is having is that people are converting Gold into Gems and avoiding the need to pay for anything,

I don’t believe that this is the problem you think it is. The people farming gold to convert to gems are providing a product that entices other people to spend money on gems. The genius of this system is that people who might never have been willing to spend a dime beyond the box price of the game become part of the product for those who are. They provide a sense of a populated world while also providing a service for those willing to spend real world money on gems.

Ashen.2907:

I don’t believe that this is the problem you think it is. The people farming gold to convert to gems are providing a product that entices other people to spend money on gems. The genius of this system is that people who might never have been willing to spend a dime beyond the box price of the game become part of the product for those who are. They provide a sense of a populated world while also providing a service for those willing to spend real world money on gems.

Though I want to agree with you and say that it’s helping, I can’t think of any other reason why literally every single farmable location gets killed off in order. Even the Zephyrite event makes gold harder to come by (when not balanced by the Queen’s Jubilee farming) – it sucks the crafting materials out of the system and artificially inflates their prices, which devalues gold as a whole. Gold seems to be ANet’s target, and they seem to be removing every way people find to make it – and yet they’ve started advertizing, everywhere, that you can ‘buy gold with gems’ (ignoring how horrific the exchange rate is).

If the game is going to continue to exist healthily, I do not believe the Gold → Gems system can stay. It’s simply not sustainable in a buy-to-play, microtransaction based game.

Or, as much as I hate to say it, maybe GW2 simply was never meant to last; it was a stop-gap until something better (such as Wildstar, which is what NCSoft seems to be banking on) comes along.

I just wanted to say that I almost never log on to reply or create a thread. This thread however inspired me to do so.

Most of your ideas are absolutely gold and I really think those should be implemented. The gathering items with a bonus is a fun thing to have, maybe gamebreaking because it gives the owner an advantage to others which isn’t what the gemstore should do (although they have boosters in there). The 1% increase in MF, GF etc. should not be implemented. That is clearly pay to win and that’s a big no no.

The way you handle the gemstore chests and keys is absolutely magnificent though, and if Arenanet does that, I can instantly drop the 500-ish euros I have been saving up for games and the like (call it my entertainment money). The current way of the gemstore feels bad and the system you described could make it work.

I also argue for removing gold to gems and then being able to sell gems on the trading post. This would look like buying materials, instead of buying 100 copper ore you are buying 100 gems for x amount of gold. This will make gems even more valuable and the gemstore system you described would increase the demands by people big time. Remember, having 100 people buying an item of 100 gems is worth more than having a few people buying highly priced items. Sure it would look nice on paper gaining big numbers instantly but the smaller impulse purchases would really make a lot of money.
This way Arenanet would have a potential bigger income because more people have the incentive to buy more things since they are cheaper and the mentality would change.

The character customisation seems like a really nice idea but I think that would be too much work with an already existing game. I’d rather they focus on other parts of the game or creating actual new and lasting content or designing armors and weapons which we can earn through in-game activities Note: not an achievement point barrier but things like new dungeons

I would like for as many people as possible to read this thread and comment aswell for I think this would make for a better game and I find it quite sad to see so many of my in-game and real life friends literally flying away from Guild Wars 2 to Wildstar, of which I am sure we GW2 players funded quite heavily aswell with our microtransactions.

Undeadkemea.4865:

Most of your ideas are absolutely gold and I really think those should be implemented. The gathering items with a bonus is a fun thing to have, maybe gamebreaking because it gives the owner an advantage to others which isn’t what the gemstore should do (although they have boosters in there). The 1% increase in MF, GF etc. should not be implemented. That is clearly pay to win and that’s a big no no.

The way I see both of these things, they would not be game breaking (aside from the 1% permanent increase, which could get a bit ridiculous after a while, I fully admit; maybe having an upper limit cap at 200% or something would be good). The boosters would come from Black Lion chests, thus, would be sellable on the market. Their value for max-level players would increase, but having more of them available would mean that, while they are a luxury item, they would not overly influence your standing and account. Yes, players who rush them to max them out would still get the bonuses faster, but it would still take 100 hours of play to get the maximum bonus – each booster lasts for 1 hour, plus stacking them would not ‘reset’ the countdown.

The harvesting tools I imagine in the same vein as the Watchwork Mining Pick that exists already; it does not give you anything new, it simply gives you a limited time item more consistently (everyone can get Candy Corn or Watchwork Sprockets, provided they got the harvesting nodes). Again, thank you for the input and the support, it means a lot. I am glad to see that some of these ideas appeal to you. Hopefully someone at ANet will see this post and take some form of action on it.

Ten Cent Soviet.7523:

Instead of having a Gold – Gems system like we do currently, we have the ability to list Gems on the BLTC. You buy Gems with your hard earned hard currency and then you can sell it to people in the game for Gold. Chances are you would get a similar transaction rate (give or take some change) and you would get your Gold. They would get their Gems.

Undeadkemea.4865:

I also argue for removing gold to gems and then being able to sell gems on the trading post. This would look like buying materials, instead of buying 100 copper ore you are buying 100 gems for x amount of gold.

Nice idea. Obviously the instant this system was implemented you’d get a whole storm of complaints from people insisting that it was proof that Arenanet hated its players… but then, that seems to happen with every single update anyway, so I suppose it’d be no big deal.

So yeah, I’m also behind this idea.

And apparently, having seen this post (sorry for formatting issues), the final nails are slowly being hammered into the coffin.

Advertising on the forums/every post on social media/gem stores is failing… so now they’re spamming like gold sellers.