Many Guild Wars players were cautious and suspicious when the idea of an in game store was first introduced way back in GW1. Alarm bells started ringing almost immediately as soon as fancy dresses and fun items started popping up that you had to pay for. Immediately players started wondering if all the free Halloween masks and Wintersday hats that they had received up to now, would soon be locked behind the iron bars of the store. Especially the Halloween costumes that popped up in the store, and the store only, did not seem entirely in the spirit of Halloween. Having to pay, to dress up during Halloween? Fortunately, we still received our free hats on a yearly basis… but our worries were not entirely unfounded.
Fast forward a few years later, and we have GW2. A game in which the Gem Store has infected the game like some sort of illness. And this isn’t really about whether the store is necessary to fund the further development of the game. This is more about how deep the Gem Store’s muddy fingers reach down into the reward system of the game, and ultimately destroy it.
We first run into the problem of the store when we receive Blacklion chests. For a while we still get free keys for doing our personal story. But then we soon learn that this source of keys quickly comes to an end, and after that you have to pay. And while we may have no inclination to buy any keys, the unopened Blacklion Chests still start filling up our bank, and it doesn’t feel like we are being rewarded. Instead, it feels like every drop of a Blacklion Chest is an ad for the store, a never-ending attempt to draw us in. And still we refuse, and so the blacklion chest pile starts growing and growing. How many of us have a pile of over 250 unopened Blacklion Chests in their bank?
But the problem reaches much further than this. The game seems to lack a lot of actual rewards. Most of the fun items, mini pets and cool armor skins are locked in the Gem Store, leaving the rest of the game rather barren, like a wasteland after a plague. Many of the valuable items that a player might wish to craft, require insane amounts of grinding, which is made easier with just a few purchases. There are a lot of things for which you will need to spend vast amounts of gold in other to obtain them. Many recipes seem to require such insane amounts of crafting materials, that buying them from the tradepost seems like the only option. This drives up prices, and ultimately undermines any desire to get these items.
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-On3Ya0_4Y)
To all of you.
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