Guild Wars 2

First I need to express that gems and gem store purchases are not mandatory to play GW2.

Now that I’ve got that out of the way let’s talk money my fellow WvWers. We all know there’s only one source for income on GW2 after point of purchase, and that source is the gem store. This gem store content is interesting at times but for the most part doesn’t target WvW (or PvP) as much as it should. The concept I’m getting at is, based on the style of PvE updating and unprecedented rewards for little to no effort to it’s regulars, gem conversion rate from gold to gems is trending to make gems a difficult thing to justify forking over gold to obtain. That is of course unless you have volumes of it, which is pouring out of PvE content. This means PvE players are less likely to purchase gems with real world currency because they have so much gold and WvW players are more likely to spend real world currency because they have so little by comparison.

Now, before I go any further don’t read into that as if I’m probing for superficial rewards to demean the game mode. Quite the contrary. I’ve come to realize it should be that way. PvE is dumb, boring, and totally intended for talentless casuals, and those people need loads of superficial nonsense to obtain their unearned sense of accomplishment. These witless idiots are a part of the money machine that keep the conversion rate high to ensure the gem store model is profitable.

The thing that’s missing, and something they’ve also recently been honing in on, is targeting us players who don’t make large sums of gold from our chosen content and therefore are likely to actually buy gems. Unfortunately the current state of WvW and sPvP is patheticly underdeveloped and the number of players quitting, trolling, or here flame posting about the developers (guilty as charged) is increasing.

NCSoft, your best potential for seeing stronger Return On Investment is walking away because your daughter company is making bad development decisions.

The path ANet should be on is making Gem Store items exclusively for WvW and sPvP, and ignoring PvE exclusives, but to support that income the development of WvW and sPvP needs to fall in line with the demands of the consumer base. Read the forums. Fix the problems. Make your consumers happy. Give them something they’ll want to pay for. This is how you make money with the GW2 IP.

I spent money to get 3 additional character slots to have one of each class. The introduction of WXP made that a bad decision on my part. 4 level 80s and 4 from 20-40 that will see minimal time played now.

I’ve spent money for gem to gold conversions in the past, but would not again. I can’t think of anything they could add at this point that would entice me. The Salvage item was close, but once learned it was at a basic salvage kit level, lost all interest.

Overall, a lot of the reason as to why I did the gem/gold conversion was because as a WvW player, I did not earn gold (better now than then), and since I have no interest in dungeons/fractals, I know my gold earning potential will not change. I accept that I’ll be under-geared in some ways, however, at this point I am concerned what Ascended weapons/armor will do to WvW and the associated cost of the items (a further limitation to alts, and driving a further need for gold that is just not obtainable in WvW).