Guild Wars 2

Now bear with me here. This is a genuine question coming from a place of curiosity. (Haters will still hate but whatever, let them.)

Why three years? I think we can mostly agree that Living World Season 1 especially wasn’t exactly content worth anybody’s time or looked like actual effort was put into it. Season 2 improved quality overall, but it was very bare bones.

So why three years since release for the first major expansion?

On top of that, why this price tag? Just shy of 35 GBP. (Or your regional equivalent)

We have paid the full price for the base game. (Not including CEs in this line of thought) We have microtransactions backing the game. So why the full price tag for Content objectively less than the base game, which only cost an extra 9 GBPs at release? Why three years of wait? What has gone, quite obviously, wrong?

Hard questions, sure. Those are the fun ones tho. If someone could leave legit answers or an entertaining speculation, that’d be great. ’lol kitten hater’ commenters need not apply.

PS: If moderators could not lock & delete this thread ’cus ’hur durr silence the discord’ that’d be great. Reddit is always a thing after all.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/hot/HoT-Price-Feedback-Base-game-included-merged

Actually I think you’ll find there are quite a few people who disagree with your comments about Season 1. Season 1, for some people, was better than Season 2. The real complaint about it wasn’t that the content wasn’t good, it’s that the content was temporary.

Lots of people liked the two dungeons, the nightmare tower, the marionette fight and escape from Lion’s Arch. You may not have liked them, but that’s not reason to discount them.

Season 1 lasted over a year and that’s the reason that this expansion has taken such a long time to make. Because if you take away Season 1 from the equation, this expansion has been less then 2 years in the making.

It’s taken so long because Anet changed their focus from a living story to an expansion. My guess is that decision was made later than you think.

Yargesh.4965:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/hot/HoT-Price-Feedback-Base-game-included-merged

No. This isn’t a question about price. It’s a much more encompassing topic. That is just part of the question. You did a wrong.

Edhedal.7192:

Yargesh.4965:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/hot/HoT-Price-Feedback-Base-game-included-merged

No. This isn’t a question about price. It’s a much more encompassing topic. That is just part of the question. You did a wrong.

It’s two questions, so with regards to one of the questions Yargesh is right.

No-one can say why that price, though I’d wager that it has to do a lot with numbers, expenditure, forecasting and a bunch of stuff I don’t really understand.

As for the three years, Anet initially said that they possibly weren’t going to do expansions but enable things through free updates. Chances are they saw it wasn’t working as well as they needed it to (in terms of engagement and revenue), couple that with an undetermined amount of players asking for an expansion and there you go.

Nobody is going to be able to satisfy your request because you don’t want the actual answer. You want ANET to tell you that they’re reducing the price. Explaining why it is what it is will likely not make you less upset.

That being said, I find nothing wrong with the pricing at all. Considering their business model, the amount of content we’ve seen so far (quite a lot really), and the amount we haven’t seen (quite significant), and the fact that GW2 is known for living world updates that will likely increase both the size of the world and its content (some of which may only be in expansion accessible areas), I do not find the price to be too high.

Most triple A games nowadays are priced this way or higher, and the MMO’s usually have subs on top of that.

If you don’t think GW2 is a triple A tier game, and the price is not justified, maybe you should consider a game that meets your needs better?

I’m not saying this as a dig at you; I’m saying this because you may genuinely be happier with another game since it seems like you are disappointed with what you see before it has even launched yet. Try some other things out, wait for some reviews of HoT to come out, and if you don’t like what they have to say, then don’t come back. There’s no harm, because there’s no sub. That’s the beauty of the model. Nothing is holding any of us here. ANET has to make the game great for players to stick around. Everyone knows this.

TL;DR – The reason it took “three” years is because were working on other projects.

Edhedal.7192:

Why three years? I think we can mostly agree that Living World Season 1 especially wasn’t exactly content worth anybody’s time or looked like actual effort was put into it. Season 2 improved quality overall, but it was very bare bones.

So why three years since release for the first major expansion?

Well, the answer is kinda obvious. They had to realise that Living World (season 1) wasn’t delivering what a lot of people wanted before they can shift focus to work on an expansion. It’s pretty clear their original plan was to have the Living Word function a replacement for expansions, it didn’t quite work out like that so they took a look at their plans and adjusted (which is presumably around the time they decided to work on an expansion).

There was also the Chinese release being worked out during that time. They just had their manpower tied up in other projects. Regardless of if those projects worked out or not, that’s why it took “so long” for them to begin working on an expansion.

I also think that Living World season 1 could’ve worked out if it was focused more on permanent additions.

For example if the tower of nightmares had been constructed in an entirely new zone, with some of the open world events (and the tower’s interior content) being in that new zone as a permanent edition then I believe people would’ve been more receptive. Same with the molten alliance dungeon. I really enjoyed it and it would’ve be a nice permanent addition to one of the maps. Marionette? Same, people liked it and if it had been added as a new world boss people would’ve been happy. Etc, etc, etc.

So I don’t believe Season 1 was a complete failure (well, ok I really hated the story with Scarlett most of the way through, for me it only got mildly interesting towards the end). There was a lot of great content in it that unfortunately we’re probably never going to see again, even if they add replayability to Season 1.

Edit: noticed a typo!

Why 3 years?

Because ArenaNet had a vision – a living world. Their model has always been an experiment and the goal was to offer an expansion’s worth of content over time. They didn’t actually want to do an expansion, but the problem however is that free content doesn’t sell the game. From an outside perspective, would you normally hear about some patch an MMO gets? Now what about an expansion? Expansions are treated like a new game and because of that, reach a larger audience. It’s just another step in the experiment and it’s far better for marketing.

Why the price?

The price of a (new) game reveals a lot about it. The price they chose is the standard price of a full expansion. With what they’ve revealed so far however, it doesn’t look like a full expansion. They would have confirmed that if they had chosen a low price. I doubt HoT is going to be a traditional expansion, but rather another experiment; a living world styled expansion. You’re not paying for just HoT, you’re paying for the next ~2 years of DLC – the living story. If they do go this route, the price could remain constant for the remainder of the game’s life.

Why a full price when they feature microtransactions?

WoW’s expansion is the same price as HoT, has a subscription and a cash shop. Why do subscription games even charge for their expansions? A part of it is simply perception. Something that is free is garbage whereas something that is expensive must be better.

Personally, I liked LS1. I really enjoyed a lot of the content. Yes, it started out very slowly. Painfully slow, but it got better as it progressed, and it sure as hell went out with a bang. I think everyone I’ve talked to enjoyed the LA content and the Scarlet battles.

Additionally, I like LS2. I didn’t mind the temporary nature of LS1 and I think I was mildly let down that LS2 was made completely permanent. I understand the “why” behind it, and I accept it so I’m not throwing a fit about it. Still, I do enjoy the replayability of it and the story progression for each character when I choose to tackle it.

Now all that said, why did it take 3 years for an expansion?

Obviously LS was part of that. They told us repeatedly that they weren’t sure which delivery method they were necessarily going to use. They went forward with the LS, basically just trial and error. We see Anet do a lot of this honestly.

Beyond that, the other big time eater was the China release. We know that Anet spent a substantial amount of time overhauling the game to make it “China compatible.”

The time taken for those two things adds up.

As for the price of the game. shrug It’s on par with other expansion prices – between $40 and $60. Personally, I figured it would be $50 (and you can go look through my post history if you like. I’ve been saying it’d be right around that price range for months), and that’s what I set aside for it.

ummm so theres still people talking about this, i like to see people expresing their disconfort or likeness about something, thats called democracy and free will, but… seen the same thing again and again, they (moderators) actually made:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/hot/HoT-Price-Feedback-Base-game-included-merged

and merged various opinions there, other post are just a waste of time…