I’ll summarize my feelings with an image:
http://i.imgur.com/jiARz.jpg
I put $20 into a card for this event. I’ve loved GW1 and 2 and want to support ANet for all the great work that they do. The scavenger hunt was awesome, and the environmental changes show great care, but the bait+switch way the Black Lion Chests were marketed befits a company with far less street-cred than Arenanet; who have always been fan-pleasers. I don’t think anybody who purchased keys with money feels anything other than ripped off, which is something I have never felt before with regards to the Guild Wars series.
People like to say “Hah! Suckers!” and honestly I do feel like a sucker. But I knew full well going in that $20 for keys in a video game wasn’t going to be worth the money in a pure monetary sense. But I wanted to support Arenanet and maybe get a few aesthetic goodies for that support. Instead I feel scammed. I went in with low expectations regarding the droprates, but I figured surely, twenty US dollars can give me more than a 1% chance at getting some stupid skin for my stupid weapons.
It’s my fault. They never said what the % was. They never said that you could open hundreds of chests and get nothing. But I trusted Arenanet to do better by me than some Korean f2p Lineage II clone. Guild Wars fans feel a sense of entitlement because Arenanet has always upheld a standard of excellence in content/holiday fun. I still have truckloads of candy canes and pumpkin heads in my Xunlai storage and I hardly ever even PARTICIPATED in the Guild Wars 1 stuff. I just accumulated it via osmosis.
I don’t know, I feel pretty bitter, pretty disappointed, and pretty dumb. I don’t think that was the intended effect of the holiday festivities. I love the work they’ve done with Halloween in every way except for this. I think I speak for a lot of “suckers” when I say I will not be purchasing gems again. This just feels icky.
