I don’t know if admins read this but I just wanted to vocalize something here on the forums where maybe they would. I bounce between games, including MMO games, and haven’t played GW 2 in a while, although I did always enjoy the game. I was recently thinking about purchasing HoT and playing again, until I logged in today and found out I would have to pay for season 2 story content, or do a large mount of farming to trade gold for gems. I respect that the game is free to play, and is a quality game. I understand that some elements of game, cosmetic and item wise will have a cost associated with them. However the cost of experiencing major story content that other players got to experience for free certainly deterred me from returning to your game in any meaningful way. It seems to me that if someone purchases a game, any significant story content associated with that base version of the game should not have an extra price on it that only applies to some players. A similar thing happened with the extra character slot for preorders of HoT. Its greedy, and disloyal to your original customer base. And it certainly is not inclusive of any new players that might wish to join.
Pre order bonuses are common and they aren’t greedy, they’re incentive to buy a product before reviews either make or break the product.
As for selling the story packs… players playing and supporting the game got it for free, players on a break aren’t supporting the game .
I don’t know if admins read this but I just wanted to vocalize something here on the forums where maybe they would. I bounce between games, including MMO games, and haven’t played GW 2 in a while, although I did always enjoy the game. I was recently thinking about purchasing HoT and playing again, until I logged in today and found out I would have to pay for season 2 story content, or do a large mount of farming to trade gold for gems. I respect that the game is free to play, and is a quality game. I understand that some elements of game, cosmetic and item wise will have a cost associated with them. However the cost of experiencing major story content that other players got to experience for free certainly deterred me from returning to your game in any meaningful way. It seems to me that if someone purchases a game, any significant story content associated with that base version of the game should not have an extra price on it that only applies to some players. A similar thing happened with the extra character slot for preorders of HoT. Its greedy, and disloyal to your original customer base. And it certainly is not inclusive of any new players that might wish to join.
in any other game you would pay a $15 a month sub, thats $180 a year. + expansions. You pay a fraction of this for the story content, and in fact can get it for free by simply farming gold if you don’t want to contribute to the games upkeep.
“Trying to please everyone would not only be challenging
but would also result in a product that might not satisfy anyone”- Roman Pichler, Strategize
Perhaps the extra character slot wasn’t greedy, although I would point out that most preorder bonuses are limited to cosmetic items, extra out of game items, or buffs which usually wear off in usefulness after some in game time. However, you are right, the extra character slot for people who preordered probably isn’t as big of a deal. But I was under the impression that buying their games was a show of support for a company. I fail to see how not logging in frequently means you should not get major story content that everyone else got for free? I guess you disagree. You’ll keep playing and buying their stuff and I won’t. No big deal.
It’s not like you even had to log in THAT frequently. All you had to do was log in once every two weeks to get Season 2 content for free. I can completely understand the tendency to bounce from game to game, but doing so might mean you miss out on some things.
I could understand if you associated festivals or Living Story S1 with the base game and didn’t feel right buying those separately, but Season 2 began nearly two years after the base game launched, and it unlocked freely for active players at the time. That seems totally fair to me, and not at all disrespectful.
I mean, at what point do you, as a consumer, decide “this is no longer part of the base game, I should really pay for this separately?” It’s pretty subjective, but I’d say Season 2 hit a good balance with its free/paid unlock.
Maybe see if someone in your guild would be willing to go through Living Story Season 2 with you? You won’t get to do the achievements, but you’ll get to experience the story.
The earliest version of Living Story (aka Living World) was available at the same rate (free) for the same length of time (~2 weeks) or sometimes less (the karka invasion lasted a day). It was not available afterward for any price.
LS2 (and presumably LS3+) are a compromise: ANet still offers it for free to currently active players and anyone who isn’t around (or buys the game later) retains the option to purchase the content, with in-game currency or cash.
Any other alternative would require everyone to pay for it, rather than making it free for everyone — it’s simply too costly for ANet otherwise.
John Smith: “you should kill monsters, because killing monsters is awesome.”
Outnumbered I am. Guess no one else is bothered by it. Fair enough, its probably just cause I’m subjectively bias. Was excited for new story content, just didn’t expect to have to pay for it. I haven’t played many games that had major sections of story content free at times and priced at others. Its usually either/or, like in priced expansions or small content packages, or free in the form of updates/patches. I guess if its a matter of it not existing anymore cause it costs ArenaNet too much money to maintain then it makes sense. Sorry for venting.
They clearly said that each Living Story 2 episode was free for 2 weeks if you logged in to unlock it, and it would require gems after that. Its not a surprise, and you clearly couldn’t care if you didn’t bother checking once in a while (they hyped it up for months before, not to mention living story went on for like 6 months), let alone read all the emails during living story 2 saying “Log in now to unlock it for free!”
TL;DR You forgot about the game and missed out on some stuff, its only 20 bucks and worth it.
But I do agree that not including at least episodes 5-8 with HoT is pretty greedy.
They did offer LS2 to you for free. You, essentially, turned it down. Now they offer it, still free of real money cost, for a willingness to trade gems.
I do think that including it as part of the HoT purchase might have been a good idea to add value to the expansion.
All of that said, I do not think that, “greedy,” is an accurate decision for choosing to charge for a product that the company spent money to produce.
They did offer LS2 to you for free. You, essentially, turned it down. Now they offer it, still free of real money cost, for a willingness to trade gems.
I do think that including it as part of the HoT purchase might have been a good idea to add value to the expansion.
All of that said, I do not think that, “greedy,” is an accurate decision for choosing to charge for a product that the company spent money to produce.
Including LS2 in the HoT price tag would being good or bad would have been debatable. For some people it would be yet another thing ANet would be double dipping on.
Living world 2 should have been added to the HoT expansion pack as they make no sense with out each other together, tacking the LW 2 on as a separate purchase is very poor..
But its what many have come to expect from Arenanet so its not surprising in the slightest.
You were gone so you would’ve missed it entirely if they had kept it like season 1. Either you can purchase season 2 or just consider it like season 1 and you missed out since you were not playing at that time.
You were gone so you would’ve missed it entirely if they had kept it like season 1. Either you can purchase season 2 or just consider it like season 1 and you missed out since you were not playing at that time.
Which would be fine if the huge first expansion pack just released didn’t need it in its entirety to understand the story.
You were gone so you would’ve missed it entirely if they had kept it like season 1. Either you can purchase season 2 or just consider it like season 1 and you missed out since you were not playing at that time.
Which would be fine if the huge first expansion pack just released didn’t need it in its entirety to understand the story.
You were gone so you would’ve missed it entirely if they had kept it like season 1. Either you can purchase season 2 or just consider it like season 1 and you missed out since you were not playing at that time.
Which would be fine if the huge first expansion pack just released didn’t need it in its entirety to understand the story.
It needed it no more than it did season 1.
I disagree, as a returning customer that purchased hot i had no clue wtf was going on at the start of the Hot story, i actually thought Dry top was Hot…
It is needed and its incredible that it was never added, especially at the cost of the expansion.
You were gone so you would’ve missed it entirely if they had kept it like season 1. Either you can purchase season 2 or just consider it like season 1 and you missed out since you were not playing at that time.
Which would be fine if the huge first expansion pack just released didn’t need it in its entirety to understand the story.
It needed it no more than it did season 1.
I disagree, as a returning customer that purchased hot i had no clue wtf was going on at the start of the Hot story, i actually thought Dry top was Hot…
It is needed and its incredible that it was never added, especially at the cost of the expansion.
And without doing Season 1, people have no idea about what is going on either. Like I said, Season 1 is needed just as much as Season 2.
Let’s be honest… the story is packed with cringeworthy lines and meaningless mob spam… I find myself clicking through everything ……….even the leveling up noone cares to do events……they’ll hit one mob and run on. Every1 is kidding themselves….
You were gone so you would’ve missed it entirely if they had kept it like season 1. Either you can purchase season 2 or just consider it like season 1 and you missed out since you were not playing at that time.
Which would be fine if the huge first expansion pack just released didn’t need it in its entirety to understand the story.
It needed it no more than it did season 1.
I disagree, as a returning customer that purchased hot i had no clue wtf was going on at the start of the Hot story, i actually thought Dry top was Hot…
It is needed and its incredible that it was never added, especially at the cost of the expansion.
I’d argue that’s because ANet did a poor job of easing people into HoT in the first place (not just in terms of lore, for that matter). There are lots of ways ANet could introduce people to the story and they pretty much chose…none of them. Worse, once in the jungle, we aren’t always well-informed about how/where/why. It’s only after spending hours in each map that I’m starting to get a picture of the Pact’s original plan and how they handled the disaster that spoiled those plans.
The point being: ANet doesn’t have to include Season 1 or Season 2 in the price of HoT. However, they could have (and imo, should have) offered a better synopsis of S1 than exists so far and definitely doing the same for S2.
John Smith: “you should kill monsters, because killing monsters is awesome.”
in any other game you would pay a $15 a month sub, thats $180 a year. + expansions.
That’s a pretty strong assumption you’re making there, as if monthly fee is something players would obviously agree to pay. Plenty of great games cost nothing and provide good quality entertainment for years – take a look at Twitch directory of games for example.
Some companies have tried the scheme of monthly fee for games and vast majority of them have failed. Players have come in at release and played for some months before moving on the next thing. It’s not like companies can just release a half-baked game and start collecting rent. Competition is tough and they have to justify what exactly that 15 bucks per month gets for players that they haven’t experienced already. Server costs and yadda yadda is not our concern.
Worse, once in the jungle, we aren’t always well-informed about how/where/why. It’s only after spending hours in each map that I’m starting to get a picture of the Pact’s original plan and how they handled the disaster that spoiled those plans.
