Guild Wars 2

TLDR: Points are boiled down at the bottom, but I encourage you to ready the body.

The Right to Make Money

No one is arguing against any individual or company’s right to make money. What is generally a point of contention is how that money is made. If oil was a clean, safe resource to produce, with absolutely no environmental impacts and operated in more of an open market than say, OPEC, there would be very few people who could complain about how they do business. If the market crash had not occurred due to irresponsible lending and selling of securities, no one would have an issue with how much money the banking industry makes. I am not analogizing GW2’s profit model to either the oil industry or the financial industry in terms of effects on society, merely where people tend to take issue when these industries attempt to do things that make them money. Saying that I’ve Godwin’d ArenaNet is a red herring in this regard.

What this piece attempts to do is describe how poorly these practices are for consumers (ie: you) not just in terms of yourself, but for the game as a whole, and your fellow players.

More Money than a Flat Rate?

The product could in theory be sold on the Cash Shop for a flat rate, especially if they are already being offered for a limited time. The question becomes, why not?

There are various reasons. The return on investment (ROI) of the lottery boxes is higher than that of a flat rate. The cost of a flat rate in order to equal the return that the lottery boxes provide, a flat rate would appear to be too expensive, with too large of a price tag to pay in one expense. This goes towards the wedge of individual experience, further below.

If it were a flat rate, you could determine whether you liked the product enough for it to be worth the flat rate quoted. Or you could consider the product to be worth no money at all, at which point the company has lost your sale and has to make up the difference from a user who wants the product.

The drop rates are unknown until someone bothers to invest and do the research, either by grinding a lot of boxes or buying them outright, the latter of which is a net-positive for the company. And by the time the results are recorded and posted, the company has already seen sales from consumers assuming that the drop rate cannot be that bad.

The Wedges of “Individual Experience” and “Personal Responsibility”

Divisiveness is the greatest weapon of any entity against a collective to shield from its greatest weakness. You want the populace to be split on issues because if a high percentage of the body every aligns itself against you, you will feel its effects.

The randomness of these boxes creates a variable experience. However unlikely it is, it is possible for a lucky person to get the products he needs by opening a mere ten boxes. Suddenly, his experience is “this is the best thing EVER.” For another individual, they could open box upon box upon box and spend a large amount of money without getting a single claim ticket.

Since experiences vary, its harder to reach a consensus on drop rates. There will be people satisfied with their experience and others who feel as if its unfair. Some will be accused of merely being “unlucky.” Some will engage ad hominem, attacking other consumers for buying so many boxes irresponsibly, despite that being the intent of the company. Strife ensues and its much harder to direct blame against one specific entity as the customers squabble amongst one another.

It is therefore much harder to get consensus on implementation than if the product had a flat rate.

They benefit from these wedges to keep their customer-base from coming to a consensus on anything, even as far as debate the value of the implementation instead of the value of the product being offered for the price.

Instilling Urgency Artificially: Limited-Time Offers

If you could just grind these out through normal activity (gameplay), there are always going to be those who stick with the grind over the shortcut of buying the product outright. So to convert even a tiny percentage of those people (a net positive for the company), the company has a limited time offer on the product. That is greed. The limited time offer on the product is nothing more than a trick, to artificially give a sense of urgency.

In games like Tribes: Ascend everyone can get access to everything except skins (which cost money, but are around forever). If just takes time. You can choose to grind it out or you can buy it outright. There is no limited time offer. There are sales to incentivize a period where you would like to see more income, but a gun in Tribes: Ascend is never going to disappear because you did not buy it this month. It is a psychological trick meant to make you spend more money, and is an anti-consumer practice.

This operates much like the Disney Vault, in which Disney only releases a movie for a limited time every seven years or so on home media. This increases the scarcity of the movie and instills urgency to purchase the movie when it eventually becomes available.

Worse than Gambling

Gambling can be viewed as an experience. You play the game and the money is the barrier for playing the game, with more money as a reward for winning. One usually goes in knowing that you will likely lose money, but there’s also a chance you could come out of ahead. It can get impersonal, such as with video poker machines or slot machines, but generally, it’s an experience at playing a game of chance.

Common wisdom is that the results are stacked in the house’s favor, and there is generally a poor outlook on people who think they can regularly come out ahead by playing, or in other words, playing to win.

Or going to a Dave & Buster’s (or Chuck E. Cheese’s). Sure, you may be attempting to win tickets for a particular prize, but you are usually paying as much for the experience of playing the games themselves. You get the experience. It is a poor value and poor sense to play at these places just to win tickets and win prizes, especially without a particularly good run of luck, you would end up buying the prize outright than trying to win it with tickets.

But these lottery boxes are different. You are not paying to gamble for the experience, generally. There is actually no experience, or at least less of one. The similarity is very much like buying a box of cereal you hate because it has an item you really want. At that point, you are just ripping open the box, pouring out the cereal for the product and potentially getting nothing for your trouble. Rinse and repeat ad nauseum until the limited time offer (artificially created sense of urgency) expires or you get the prize you want.

The Company’s Gamble

The company has its own gamble going.

It is relying on the obfuscated nature of its game of chance, with its accompanying ability to change the odds at their leisure, to keep its customer base arguing and speculating over the factual details as much as the subjective details. If you knew all the details, it would be much easier to base an argument for (or against) purchasing the product outright and there would be less coloring and argument from individual experiences.

It is relying on the artificial sense of urgency to push people into buying the product without spending a lot of time thinking about it, as well as pushing those who attempted grind it out to ultimately buy into the lottery boxes from the Cash Shop at the eleventh hour.

It is relying on human nature. There are people out there who are gullible, naive, have little foresight and in some cases, an addiction to gambling. These people with a clinical lack of self-control who will hand over money to engage in this process in hopes of getting the rush of a win.

Defending the Indefensible

The fact of the matter is that there will always be people attempting to defend these practices. Usually, the sum of the arguments is that the company has a right to make money. But why? Why are these practices worthy of money? And why do these people, who can only benefit as a consumer if these practices were revised to be less abusive, defend them? Why implement these practices over a flat rate, offered through the Cash Shop, unless this lottery box implementation makes more money.

I tend to look towards a rather quotable piece of TotalBiscuit:

What the hell happened to gamers looking out for each other? When did that suddenly fall by the wayside in favor of being an unemployed PR representative for a company that has been milking you for money? When did this happen? Was this with the advent of the Internet? Is this a recent thing? I can’t exactly pinpoint when it happened, but fanboy culture has gotten to the point of being actively detrimental to video games. It benefits nobody whatsoever other than the companies in question.

It’s wonderful that they’ve got a small little army of people that are willing to actively suppress dissent. Actively lie about the game. Actively try to character assassinate people. Engage in ad hominems. Slam them over social networks. Downvote videos. Lie in the comments section. It’s wonderful if they’re willing to do that, if you happen to be [the company] or any other company that has people like that. It’s terrible for the rest of us. It’s really really bad.

…

Gamers don’t look out for each other anymore. And that’s really depressing. The last thing that should be happening is gamers actively trying to mislead other gamers because they want to feel better about their purchase. Or because they want more players in their game, even though the game is clearly not up to spec. Where do you get off doing that? That is morally bankrupt. That is ethically unsound in the worst possible way. It sucks, and you suck for doing it.

People who defend these practices want the games they play to succeed regardless of how the company in question behaves, because they have some investment. They either want the game to have more players, be more successful so it will stick around for a long time, get more development, release expansions, etc, etc.

TLDR: Ultimately, it boils down to the idea that the lottery boxes offer a better return on investment than just simply slapping a flat rate on the product. It adds nothing to the product itself and is just a method for increasing profits, without doing anything. It is a form of predation on consumers, it should not be tolerated, but there will always be people willing to defend a company’s decision either out of apathy, a belief it does not nor will ever affect them or some other selfish reason.

Edit: Hopefully most of the formatting has not been preserved from Google Docs.

This morning, the boyfriend and myself had a passionate discussing about GW2, like we do, and suddenly everything seemed so obvious.

The solution to all our woes (Achievement grind! RNG! Monthlies too easy bore-out! Monthlies too hard burn-out!) or How to shut up 90% of forum critics in 3 easy steps.
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Step 1: Reward players for looking at all the new content – at least once.

ANet is putting out new content for us and wants us to pay attention to it. This is fair enough, and it makes sense to motivate people to seek out the new stuff by tying achievements to it.

The current living story achievements are already pointing in that direction: tier 1 of pretty much any achievement is reached when you do something once: bash 1 pinata, light 1 effigy, win 1 game of Dragon Ball.

Let people admire the new content, free from any grind:

• Reward (special item like the dragon helmet) for players for achieving tier one (say, after between 1 and 5 actions) in all available achievements.

I know, too easy! So here comes step 2.
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Step 2: Reward players for grinding out more tiers by giving them the sodding weapon ticket

Yes, one guaranteed weapon ticket per player – if they go through all the achievements. They will suddenly feel a lot less grindy, because the holy grail of rewards is waiting on the other end. This will also end 90% of the I hate the RNG! threads.

Don’t have the time for 20 win in Dragon Ball? —> buy boxes
Don’t want to kill 250 holo creatures? --> buy boxes
Want more than 1 ticket? —> buy boxes
Want it right now? --> boy boxes

Plenty of people will still buy boxes, because they don’t have the time or patience.

• Reward (weapon ticket) for players who feel they want to complete all achievements and don’t mind the grind.

But what does “completing achievements” mean? How difficult should it be to get the weapon ticket?
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Step 3: Reward players for the amount they play – but reward them for doing things they like.

I’ve brought up the idea before for monthlies, but I might just as well apply it to Living Story achievements.

Say a specific Living Story achievement (or monthly…) has unlimited tiers, but each tier takes longer to complete than the last.
Tier 1: 1 action
Tier 2: 30 more actions
Tier 3: 90 more actions
Tier 4: 270 more actions

Now let’s say you need a total number of x achievement points in the Living Story chapter to get your weapon ticket. The fastest way to get them would be to work on all achievements in roughly equal amounts – achieve tier 4 (or whatever) in each category. OR you might pick the five things that you think are fun, and spend the entire month mainly playing Dragon Ball, and still accumulate achievement points towards your weapon ticket.

ANet would have complete control over how hard it would be to get the final reward by deciding how many total achievement points you need.

• Reward players for playing a lot, but let them choose where to put the focus – fully scalable with unlimited tiers (non-linear formula).

In case of monthlies, at the end of the month these counters would be reset and you could start over. And Living Story chapters only last roundabout a month anyway.
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TL;DR: This is what we could achieve by the three highlighted steps above:

• You hate achievement grinding but want the helmet/wings? You can have them, just appreciate the work that went into the new content at least once.
• You hate RNG and want a guaranteed weapon ticket? Work for it.
• You want more/faster tickets? Give ANet money.
• You hate Dragon Ball? Do something else instead, you’ll still get achievement points!
• You run out of things to do too quickly? There’s more tiers for you now!

Everybody wins.

Whoa there fanbois! Before you type your reply how about listening to the first mintue of the video. After that you’re welcome to ignore the rest

Now I know there are those that hate videos/my voice so here’s what is covered in this video:

• GW2 and WoW already share many similarities, both good and bad. Anet should be emulating the good things that don’t interfere with its goals while dropping the bad stuff.
• I compare the first 10 months of WoW to the first 10 months of GW2 for thoese that break out the “You can’t compare the two because WoW is older” arguement
• Some things Anet could take from WoW are Clearer Patch Notes, Risk Vs. Reward, Content for long term players, Public Test Realms and More Permenent content.
• Some things GW2 should stop doing that Wow does is Enforcing a Grind/Timesink for challenging content and Dumbing down their game for the casual playerbase.

As always guys I welcome feedback, Ideas and Critisism alike, Though I do ask you keep the rabid fanboism down if you can. If you want to defend the current state of GW2 as being okay I’m cool with that, but give us a bit more then “WoW sucks, GW2 is Great! You Suck!” comments please.

I target something with left click and as I’m constantly moving the camera with right click, it’s constantly targeting things I don’t want targeted. I’d love it if ArenaNet disabled right click targeting or at least added an option for it, because it’s really annoying.

Suggestion: At the topic states, a toggle to disable it. A HUGE amount of people believe that simply making right click target on mouse release instead of mouse down, that it would fix the problem, but I still feel I would randomly target things. Example being when I target something, turn my camera just a little to get a different view, and release on a huge group of people (that I obviously do not want to be targeted.) Perhaps we could have an option for all 3?

Here is the Reddit thread (I would have posted here earlier but was unable) if anyone wants to read more feedback:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/105hmc/is_it_just_me_or_should_right_click_not_target/