Now I am a bit confused
Vanilla Guild Wars 2 as people like to call it is old and probably doesn’t attract very many new players anymore. It was probably a good move for Anet to give the base game away for free to new players wanting to buy Heart of Thorns. Players who paid for the base game in the past had a large head start, tons of characters and gear and years of fun memories that the new player will have missed out on. I was never bothered by making Vanilla free.
It’s also worth noting that a lot on endgame stuff is pretty hard for F2P to access since methods of acquiring ingame gold are fairly limited for them because of the TP restrictions. And you need ingame gold to do higher fractals(ascended crafting) and so on, then there is the plethora of other very weird restrictions to F2P, some justified as a safety measure, some not. Also I see the cause-effect chain of your thinking that we who payed for the basegame should get HoT for free, but from a money making point of wiew that would make no sense for Arenanet, it is still a company trying to make a profit after all and not a charity.
I’m sorry OP, but you’re right. You have to essentially buy the game again.
As an incentive to buy HoT, Anet nerfed many thing from vanilla or gated them behind HoT. And the new elite specs are very powerful.
Basically the whole ‘vanilla game free’ is like an expansive trial version of the game. People can do dungeons, fractals, WvW, PvP etc, but they are restricted in many things. They only have 2 character slots, 3 bag slots per character, 1 bank tab, can’t mail items or gold, can only buy limited items from the TP and so on. I think it’s a wise decision to do this though. If new players had to buy HoT + the base game it might turn away alot of them because it’s quite a steep cost. By allowing new players to try the game out for free they can lure in potential new buyers and keep the playerbase growing.
Having started as a F2P player I can tell you that the biggest short-term limitation is the bag slot limit and the biggest long-term limitation is the lack of a daily reward. No daily reward = no laurels. Don’t be thinking that F2P players are getting that whole core game for nothing. The trading and laurel limits mean that they will reach a plateau eventually and every day they play the temptation for upgrading is very, very large.
HoT is not accessible by free to play players?
HoT is not accessible by free to play players?
Nope.
This will be their ongoing way to sell the game. This one has the base game inside. The next one will have the base game and HoT free with the new expansion. The one after that will have the base game and 2 expansions free with the new expansion.
They will need to bring new people in. New people to replace veterans who no longer play and to increase the game’s population. A game that has too high a price-wall can’t attract new people in the numbers wanted. Not with so much competition from the free to play and single player games.
The game is priced for the expansion. The free base game and the succeeding expansions inside in the future are not for us vets. They are there to keep the pricewall as low as possible to bring in new people.
As an example of how pricing can keep new players out: World of Warcraft: expansions and prices
Excited as I was, I did research on what I would need to start playing WoW. It turns out I would need to have purchased all the other previous expansions. After doing the math and going to local stores. Just to start wow, would cost me $120.00 Canadian (Including the legion preorder).
I’m not an expert on the marketing or how it would work, but can anyone clarify why Blizzard is unable to roll all their previous expansions into their most currently released one? It would be more encouraging. For example, I hyped up legion so much, that my older cousin wanted to get into wow, he saw that legion was only 49.99 USD said “Wow this isn’t so bad, I can afford this”, after going through checkout and everything and realizing he has to purchase the previous expansions as well, he decided that wow wasn’t really worth spending all that money initially and backed off.
Be careful what you ask for
ANet may give it to you.
ANet may give it to you.
HoT is not accessible by free to play players?
Nope.
I know was more rethorical question :P
I came back to this game after hearing that it became free. Needless to say, I was a bit annoyed since I bought it for 60 bucks, but this game was worth it, so whatever. Then I hear about the Heart of Thorns expansion, and my spirits were lifted. Oh boy! I assumed that since the game had gone free that people who got the free download would have to pay for the HoT expansion, while people who had bought the base game would get it for free. I am now learning that this isn’t the case and we have to pay the same price as the free riders. Somebody please tell me I am wrong… PLEASE!
You’re wrong.
We paid for access to the base game from 2012-2015 and we got that. Play-for-Free offers the base game for no charge, now, but those accounts never had access to the game before mid-2015. Purchase of HoT unlocks the new content (new zones, new story, new specs, new collections, masteries, raids, etc) and includes the base game, since that’s free for everyone in any case.
You might not be willing to pay full price, feeling that you shouldn’t have to pay nearly double. If so, you can wait it out. If ANet follows what some believe is their new cycle, I would expect HoT to be deeply discounted no sooner than April or June and the next expac to be announced in early 2017, at which point, HoT will probably go F2P, too.
Personally, I’d rather play now (and pay full price) than wait it out; your mileage might vary.
John Smith: “you should kill monsters, because killing monsters is awesome.”