Important info about monetization and microtransactions

[HersheyNesquik]

PLEASE GO TO PAGE 10 TO READ MY MORE CONCISE POST WITH LESS RAMBLING IF YOU ARE ALREADY FAMILIAR HOW GW2 HANDLES MONETIZATION, THIS POST BELOW IS INTENDED FOR PEOPLE WHO ARE NEW. I WILL DESTROY MOST OF YOUR ARGUMENTS ON PAGE 10 IN 1 SINGLE POST, PLEASE READ THAT BEFORE COMMENTING, THANK YOU.

This will almost exclusively touch on the monetization aspects of Guild Wars 2 coming from someone who has over 8.000 hours in the game since 2012.
As the years passed and as we (the playerbase) got used to how ArenaNet handles the development and monetization aspects of GW2 things got more and more sour.
The only reason I stuck around so long is because of the excellent and truly unique realm vs realm war mode World vs World (WvW) and the community and friendships I formed there.

I want to caution every new player by writing a detailed explanation about the woes of microtransactions and monetization in Guild Wars 2 so you are well informed and know what you are getting into.


A bit of explanation on how the game handles cash shop transactions:
the game has a premium currency called Gems and the cash shop is called Gemstore for those of you who are unfamiliar.
This shop is EXHAUSTIVE. It is bloated, has thousands of pieces of cosmetics like clothing, mount skins, glider skins, infinite amount of dyes, outfits, weapon skins and most recently fishing rod skins and fishing boat skins (as of course this was the big feature in the new expansion), etc. The list is almost endless here.
Besides the cometics there are convenience items like bag expansions, bank slot expansions, character customization reset items, infinite harvesting tools, xp boost, instant max level boost, infinite salvage tools (salvaging unneeded gear into materials is a big thing in GW2) and a lot of other stuff as well.
And the game will try it's hardest to inconvenience you as much as possible by offering very little in terms of inventory space because most of the time in this game you only get trash items that you will salvage anyway. There aren't really any special drops from mobs you always get generic green, blue or yellow items that you will salvage and the usable materials well go to your bank for later use the rest is vendor trash.
In any case you will soon be forced to buy a couple of bag expansion slots along with an infinite salvage tool if you dont want to take trips to the vendor every 10 minutes of playing. (of course they sell you 1 time use personal vendors in the gemstore). These items are almost all character bound so you will need to buy more if you have more than 1 char.
Most if not all of these items are exclusive to the gemstore with whole category of items like gliders, cloaks, mounts that 99% only available from the cash shop.
And on top of all this the items in the Cash shop rotate every so often creating this artificial scarcity where you feel pressured into buying the stuff you like otherwise it could be gone next week.

And if you are wondering about the pricing a mount will cost you 20 bucks and an outfit 10 bucks. A bag expansion will cost you 5 bucks each. It adds up.

And there are also lootboxes.....
While playing you will regularly get an item called Black Lion Chest and you can buy keys to this from the gemstore. This is the lootbox system, it was easy to ignore this in the old days but ANET took to the habit of releasing more and more highly coveted skins exclusively into this lootbox system and of course it's fully up to RNG if you get lucky or not.
This is a huge red flag in my opinion.

But all of this would be fine if not for the fact that you can buy ingame gold with IRL cash.
This in turn incentivizes the devs to make sure that even the valuable skins or rare items that are obtainable partly or fully with gold ingame cost as much as possible. A legendary weapon will cost around 2000 gems which is like 80-100 dollars. And most of the items that matter in the game cost gold, there are only a few prestige items that dont need some kind of gold investment all things considered.

In GW2 there is no progression after a certain point. Once you got your ascended gear it's all about prestige items and skins. Thats the endgame of GW2: SKINS. If anyone tries to tell you otherwise they are either lying or don't know the game enough.

And the skins are mostly in the gemstore or will cost you gold in one form or another.
the whole game is set up so you spend as much gold as possible on normal items, in this game gold means everything. if you want a legendary item or max a crafting profession better get gold. And you know what is the devs endgame?
You can buy gold with IRL cash, you can convert the premium currency to gold and vice versa. Now you can choose to convert your ingame gold to gems but you will have to farm all day every day. Even the best gold farms are like 20-40 gold/hour so you are actually better off using real world money if you have a job to support it.
The community actually rates the PVE maps based on how profitable they are which should tell you a lot regarding what people spend their time doing in this MMO. If it's not harassing new players showing off their flashy characters that cost upwards of 20k gold to bling out then its farming and grinding meta events endlessly. And that is not fun.


On top of all this the performance is awful even on a top of the line 3090 and ryzen 5900x if you see more than 30 people around you the performance tanks goes sub 60 easily and in big boss fights it sits around the 40 mark usually. Lower graphics settings hardly make a difference either. The only thing you can do is turn off other players completely and they will get an untextured generic model which helps with the frames but also not really.

one can argue that the definition of P2W is not just about the powerlevel of your character but about the associated visual perks as well.
If we take this definition then GW2 is ULTRA P2W as the cosmetic shop and indeed the things one can buy with converting irl cash to ingame gold is almost limitless.

As long as you dont care about your character looking good gw2 is a very fine game in terms of monetization but when you realize that the true endgame of GW2 (because of the inherent design of having no gear progression at all) is SKINS and FASHION then it becomes quite apparent that this kind of monetization model is very predatory.

Since there are no other ways of progression people will naturally try to make their character as flashy as possible. And this will cost a lot of gold/gems. And ANET is going to milk you to look good, make no mistake about this.

Let me tell you that GW2 is the only MMO I know where players after an update check the cash shop first to see what new content is available.


People have a right to know both sides of the coin, GW2 is not rainbows and unicorns like some people would have new players to believe. We have to keep bad business practices out of games and stop supporting them. This system preys on children and weak-willed people with gambling issues and it's not okay for Arenanet to exploit these people.

And to top it off, by paying for these things you make the game worse for everybody in the long run. Anet will make more things for you to buy and wont improve their game design by making these rewards accessible by simply playing.
All ingame achievements are kind of invalidated if you can by yourself to the top. The problem is that everyone thinks that if it does not affect them or they personally dont engage with the shop then it is not an issue but you cant look at it so selfishly.

Another defense they use is that they pay way less than they would if it was an MMO with a sub which is true generally but you also get way less content. 80 or 90 percent of content goes into the cash shop while the living story episodes are the only free content ppl get (not free if you are a new player) and these always consist of 1 hour story and 1 map with super grindy collectibles you cannot even track because there is no system ingame for it so you rely on 3rd party tools even for the simplest things. And of course they will still expect you to pay for the expansions.

The amount of content IN GW2 ppl get is a joke, the latest expansion can be completed in a week of casual play. Its truly a F2P game with f2p casshop this is probably the most monetized non-asian mmo on the market.

[Q]

Well i've played for 10,728 hours for the past 2450 days, just saying.. to give my own argument some epic weight as it seems age is something that will impress new players???

i'll put this simple for everyone, don't break your head...

1- Farm gold (sooo easy)
2- exchange the gold for gems
3- buy the fancy cosmetics... be happy.

BTW you are not required to buy all the sht in the gemstore, no one is forcing you to get the hoverbike or dwayna outfit or that silly mini pig, you literally don't need any of that.

The next items are a MUST but you can still play without getting any of the next:
1- permanent gathering tools at some point which you can do slowly. 2- salvage-o-matic and 3- bags and bank expansion (Easy to achieve). AND once again, you don't need real money for that, OP makes it look like you have to pay real money $$$.

I own plenty and got most of it by the currency exchange system.

Anyway won't reply to such textwall not now, but there's plenty of BS there tbh, You are magnifying the flaws and some debatable features in GW2 just to make it look bad to all the new steam players, at least you seem much more real than some of the clowns and trolls around.

[kalamari]

joke of a post

watch this, he explains it: https://youtu.be/PzOLDt8fLT8?t=1127

[Sustain]

Good post everything you said is true. The game is just there to milk players now for NCSofts shareholders they invest very little in anything but the cash shop.

[Scanntraxx]

Originally posted by Einherjer:

Good post everything you said is true. The game is just there to milk players now for NCSofts shareholders they invest very little in anything but the cash shop.

Didn't Arenanet take over publishing from NCSOFT over 5+ years ago?

[HeInZ]

Originally posted by Einherjer:

Good post everything you said is true. The game is just there to milk players now for NCSofts shareholders they invest very little in anything but the cash shop.

and you sir, are here, every day, talking shait about the game and the publisher, do you get paid for that? on the other hand, anyone that spends like 30mins ingame knows your posts are full of dogpoopoo

[Darkrayne]

Infinite salvage tools are not character bound, you can stick them in a shared slot and use them on all your characters. There's misinformation in your post. I stopped reading at that point because if you're not 100% right when making a post like this then it's not very useful to anyone.

[Sychon]

Originally posted by Lord Cheetoz:

BTW you are not required to buy all the sht in the gemstore, no one is forcing you to get the hoverbike or dwayna outfit or that silly mini pig, you literally don't need any of that.

I'm sorry but the Teatime Chair and Teatime Focus Skin are ESSENTIAL!

[Sychon]

Company sells product. Company evil.

Nothing to see here. Move along.

[zanes]

Originally posted by kalamari:

joke of a post

watch this, he explains it: https://youtu.be/PzOLDt8fLT8?t=1127

Yeah it explains a lot, it even said that all mount skins are only on the Store and not rewards for any type of gameplay. Not counting conveniences and some other services

Originally posted by Lord Cheetoz:

Well i've played for 10,728 hours for the past 2450 days, just saying.. to give my own argument some epic weight as it seems age is something that will impress new players???

i'll put this simple for everyone, don't break your head...

1- Farm gold (sooo easy)
2- exchange the gold for gems
3- buy the fancy cosmetics... be happy.

BTW you are not required to buy all the sht in the gemstore, no one is forcing you to get the hoverbike or dwayna outfit or that silly mini pig, you literally don't need any of that.

The next items are a MUST but you can still play without getting any of the next:
1- permanent gathering tools at some point which you can do slowly. 2- salvage-o-matic and 3- bags and bank expansion (Easy to achieve). AND once again, you don't need real money for that, OP makes it look like you have to pay real money $$$.

I own plenty and got most of it by the currency exchange system.

Anyway won't reply to such textwall not now, but there's plenty of BS there tbh, You are magnifying the flaws and some debatable features in GW2 just to make it look bad to all the new steam players, at least you seem much more real than some of the clowns and trolls around.

Again people wth 10 thousand hours coming here to say "you can just farm gold and buy it lol"
Your game time don't give your comment more credibility, it just makes obvious how out of touch it is to new players and how deep in the bad monetization you are. Just because there is a solution to a problem they made themselves, doesn't mean it is good.
If they want player retention, it is time to make a better initial experience at least.

[HersheyNesquik]

Originally posted by Lord Cheetoz:

Well i've played for 10,728 hours for the past 2450 days, just saying.. to give my own argument some epic weight as it seems age is something that will impress new players???

I include playtime so people know that the information I give them is coming from a place of experience instead of just simple bias.

Originally posted by Lord Cheetoz:

1- Farm gold (sooo easy)
2- exchange the gold for gems
3- buy the fancy cosmetics... be happy.

Pay attention to my post, I mentioned that you can do this. But it's also not that easy as you make it out to be especially if you are a new player who don't know what the good gold farms are or how to turn stuff into gold and even the best gold farms are not THAT profitable and are just endless unfun grinds without any challenge.

Originally posted by Lord Cheetoz:

BTW you are not required to buy all the sht in the gemstore, no one is forcing you to get the hoverbike or dwayna outfit or that silly mini pig, you literally don't need any of that.

You are not required to do anything anywhere at any place in time inside video games or outside so it is completely irrelevant to the discussion. The system is there for people to use, most likely children or people who are impatient/have no impulse control are going to be buying stuff, do you think it's okay to exploit these people?

Originally posted by kalamari:

joke of a post

watch this, he explains it: https://youtu.be/PzOLDt8fLT8?t=1127

Good job linking to a person who is sponsored by Arenanet and makes his money creating GW2 videos, very reliable intel there, buddy.

[zanes]

Originally posted by poo-monkey:

Originally posted by kalamari:

joke of a post

watch this, he explains it: https://youtu.be/PzOLDt8fLT8?t=1127

Good job linking to person who is sponsored by Arenanet and makes his money by creating GW2 videos, very reliable intel there, buddy.

It's funny because even the guy in the video says that the store sucks and won't defend it.

[HersheyNesquik]

Originally posted by Sychon:

Company sells product. Company evil.

Nothing to see here. Move along.

This could be an interesting argument if you unpacked it more. Yes companies need to make their money but there's a difference between inherently building your game around people swiping credit cards and having a shop outside of the game that has maybe 5 mounts and 10 skins.

In GW2 there are thousands of microtransactions and it's advertised heavily ingame, the icon for the store is flashing blue every time there are new items available, for example. I don't think that putting 80% of your cosmetic rewards behind paywall should be an acceptably standard by any game company

[PocketYoda]

Originally posted by Darkrayne:

Infinite salvage tools are not character bound, you can stick them in a shared slot and use them on all your characters. There's misinformation in your post. I stopped reading at that point because if you're not 100% right when making a post like this then it's not very useful to anyone.

You gotta buy share slots with GEMS...

[Darkrayne]

Originally posted by DanteYoda:

Originally posted by Darkrayne:

Infinite salvage tools are not character bound, you can stick them in a shared slot and use them on all your characters. There's misinformation in your post. I stopped reading at that point because if you're not 100% right when making a post like this then it's not very useful to anyone.

You gotta buy share slots with GEMS...

You can also move them around your characters via the bank.

No dice, my friend.

[PocketYoda]

Originally posted by Darkrayne:

Originally posted by DanteYoda:

You gotta buy share slots with GEMS...

You can also move them around your characters via the bank.

No dice, my friend.

Bank fills up real quick in a free to play account.. fills up real quick in a Vet 10 year 17 bank spaces as well.