[Guild Wars 2] Why are you still playing?

[Luko]

I don't really. I'm still subscribed, but I seldom log in. Ever since I stopped raiding in early Cata, I've mostly been one of those players that hops back in for a month or two after a big patch, but even that routine has been dwindling. 5.2 was "fun" for about 2 days. 5.1 was fun for as long as the new Pet Battle content took to clear. Then I was logged out regularly again.

I dunno, it's just kind of run its course for me, I guess. Still a wonderful game, but one can only take so much of something. I did about 7 years of FFXI as well, so maybe that's my limit.

[Karizee]

What affects my enjoyment is the fact that game design is severely limited by the fact that the game needs its various systems/features to generate profit. A sub game by comparison can build features on the premise of, "Do players enjoy this?" instead of "Can we make money off this?" To me, that design limitation is the biggest drawback to b2p/f2p games.

Pfft your enjoyment, you've been bashing the game since it was in beta.

Thing is you can buy these luxury items with ingame gold - even basic services like realm transfers you can buy with ingame gold.

---------- Post added 2013-04-15 at 03:23 PM ----------

I don't really. I'm still subscribed, but I seldom log in. Ever since I stopped raiding in early Cata, I've mostly been one of those players that hops back in for a month or two after a big patch, but even that routine has been dwindling. 5.2 was "fun" for about 2 days. 5.1 was fun for as long as the new Pet Battle content took to clear. Then I was logged out regularly again.

I dunno, it's just kind of run its course for me, I guess. Still a wonderful game, but one can only take so much of something. I did about 7 years of FFXI as well, so maybe that's my limit.

Another wayward pup.

[Rukh]

I've realized the main reason I'm just not interested in GW2 anymore is the cash shop. I can go farm or do dungeons for gold, but then I realize someone's just plopping down the credit card and they made 30 gold in the time it took me to make a couple. If you want to do good in guild wars 2, get a better paying job. And things like the legendary, which is a long-term goal is all about gold and just gets bypassed because you can pay the cash shop. I just don't have an interest when I know that legitimately, it's perfectly valid for other people to just pay for their goals to be met.

So that's it. There's not any long-term progress and what long-term things there are, are made irrelevant because of the cash shop.

[Luko]

Another wayward pup.

Oh shit, guess so, haha.

Ah well, we all make mistakes now and again. :P

[Valeron]

I've realized the main reason I'm just not interested in GW2 anymore is the cash shop. I can go farm or do dungeons for gold, but then I realize someone's just plopping down the credit card and they made 30 gold in the time it took me to make a couple. If you want to do good in guild wars 2, get a better paying job. And things like the legendary, which is a long-term goal is all about gold and just gets bypassed because you can pay the cash shop. I just don't have an interest when I know that legitimately, it's perfectly valid for other people to just pay for their goals to be met.

So that's it. There's not any long-term progress and what long-term things there are, are made irrelevant because of the cash shop.

well if you have $2,000 to spend on a video game item then you might have a point

[ShimmerSwirl]

Do you have anything within GW2 that fits that premise?

I can name no play system in GW2 that is designed around making a buck.

Simply put, the entire game is designed from the ground up to get players into the cash shop. I mean its not really that shocking a statement, obviously the games primary source of revenue is the cash shop, its only natural (and required for the game's survival) that they make sure players are spending money at it.

This is a post from another forum that really gives some interesting insight into it, its a good read:

GW2 is centered around its cash shop, which is not unreasonable, because Anet wants to make money and the cash shop is going to be a significant (if not primary?) source of that. The other one being box sales. Compared to a traditional sell-the-box-and-done games, Anet is committing to keeping up the servers for an indefinite period of time and putting out monthly content updates for free (as opposed to paid DLCs in most other games). So naturally, they'd be interested in players using the cash shop.

Prior to GW2's release I wouldn't bat an eyelash at that. Yeah, sure, if they want to go with a cash shop instead of sub, that's cool. It's cosmetic-only stuff, right? No problem there.

But then I realized just how deeply the presence of the cash shop influences the game design. I'm going to use WoW as a counterpoint here, but people familiar with multiple sub MMOs will find them largely interchangeable.

The basic idea is: Anet wants everyone to stay poor. Because if you don't have enough gold, you can always go to the cash shop and get more. They want you to get more. How did they change the game design to facilitate this?

- Low-scaling rewards. A lvl 10 completing an event will earn about 0.5 silver. A lvl 80 gets 1.5 silver. Compare to a lvl 10 quest in WoW rewarding 3.5 silver and lvl 60 in vanilla about 50 silver (it varied and I can't remember exactly - been a long time). A maxed character in GW2 earns 3x more for doing basic activities than a low lvl character, whereas a maxed character in WoW made 15x more.

- High taxes everywhere. To continue the above example, a waypoint to a nearby place at lvl 10 costs 10 copper. A waypoint at lvl 80 costs 1.5 silver. In other words, a 15x increase, when rewards increase only 1.5x. WoW doesn't have waypoints, but flight paths don't scale with level at all, just with distance (and ones in expansion areas are more expensive, but we're talking no expansions here). Trading post tax is also quite high at 15%, compared to WoW's 5% tax off the profits + variable listing fee, which almost never came close to 10%.

-Lack of a trading function. This very heavily compounds the trading post tax by taking away an option of bypassing it. People would be trading bulk amounts of materials and expensive items such as precursor between themselves, which is less gold taken out of the economy, which is bad for the cash shop.

- Dye drops. There's a thread right now where people are talking about the recently reduced dye drops. Unidentified dyes are fun to open and I can see why people are upset. I'm also upset, but I'll say that it makes sense for dyes to be more rare that they even are currently. Why? Cash shop. Why would anyone buy dyes from cash shop if they're 3 silver on the TP? Anet saw that and patched it up. A sound decision all around, but unfortunately, the simple existence of dyes in the cash shop takes away a tiny bit of fun from the game here: finding and identifying dyes.

- RNG everywhere. I'm not going to go into a detailed explanation here, because I think everyone knows this one. Suffice to say that RNG instead of guaranteed whatever is good for anet because gambling in any form takes the gold out of the economy.

- Inflating prices on the already-expensive crafting components. I first saw this as a simply stupid design decision, but it's actually quite intelligent, if you only look at the bigger picture. Why use piles of t6 crafting materials and ectos to craft the new ascended gear? Well, because those materials are already in demand for creating legendaries! Kill two birds with one stone: create a new gold sink and make the old one bigger by inflating some of the crucial ingredients. Meanwhile, we get a rich orichalcum vein which significantly devalues a semi-rare material that's not really a limiting factor anywhere.

- This is a bit of an anecdotal evidence, but I think ecto salvages have been stealth-nerfed in November's update. Whereas I was not getting ectos from about 20% of the salvages before, now I'm failing to salvage them from over 30% of rares. (I've actually recorded some stats, but the sample size only around 100 rares and it's in no way conclusive because there may be other factors involved, such as the type of item).
EDIT: Apparently lots of people on official forums thought so too, but it's been statistically proved wrong since. I'm still getting terrible results from salvaging rares.

- Worldwide economy instead of server economies. This serves to largely eliminate a "middle class" : a casual trader or a crafter, who would spend some of his time at the trading post for a profit that's well above average, but not sky-high to the point where he can pay his rent by selling gold. In a worldwide economy, only the most dedicated market players can compete and there's no room for crafting because there's 5000 instead of 50 crafters online at any given time willing to undercut each other. As a result, 0.1% of players (Occupy Lion's Arch!) may become absurdly rich and never need to use the gem store in their life, but the 4.9% that would've been moderately rich are instead locked out of the trading game and kept at a controlled level of income that anyone can get from farming Orr or dungeons or whatever. The remaining 95% are unaffected.

- Lastly, the very existence of the cash-to-gold conversion is bugging me. 300g for a Dusk is a huge amount of gold to me. I have about 100g at the moment and I play quite a bit. Probably about 2 hours a weekday on average and much more on a weekend. So it would take me hundreds of hours to get a legendary, which is working as intended. But, I could put down roughly what I make it 2 days at work and buy that Dusk. (Slightly more if you make minimum wage, but for anyone with a job, with the only exception being that 0.1% professional in-game trader, RL-income is higher than game-income.)

I'm not about to do that, because it feels like cheating and I don't think I'd get much satisfaction out of buying my legendary with cash, but the idea that you can do that certainly diminishes the game as a whole for me. Moreover, there are people doing it and they're increasing the cost for everyone else by taking the gold out of the economy.



TL;DR: The cash shop in GW, although not directly selling power, influences the game in a lot of ways. The existence of the cash shop and gold-to-gem exchange makes it Anet's prerogative to keep players poor so they are tempted to buy stuff or gold with cash.

- Rewards don't scale well between low and max lvl characters
- There are high taxes built into the game in form of AH fees, WP fees, and lack of trading function.
- Drop rates get normalized to be in line with cash shop items, not with "fun". Dye nerf is an example of this. Requiring a ton of t6 mats and ectos to craft the new stuff and deter people from their legendaries is another.
- Global market as opposed to a per-server economy eliminates a "middle class", downgrading them to the baseline income/
- Ability to buy the most desired items in the game with cash via gold-to-gem, which just shouldn't be there.

I wish Anet just charged 15$/month for this game and never had this cash shop.

[zito]

Simply put, the entire game is designed from the ground up to get players into the cash shop. I mean its not really that shocking a statement, obviously the games primary source of revenue is the cash shop, its only natural (and required for the game's survival) that they make sure players are spending money at it.

This is a post from another forum that really gives some interesting insight into it, its a good read:

To bad none of those things actually get you into the cash shop and to bad if the cash shop never existed that those issue's that particular player has would still be in the game regardless. Everything you listed was in the game before the gem shop was even in the game (and probably planned) during beta.

The only thing even relevant to the question of "getting people to spend real money in the cash shop on content" in that list is buying gems to trade for in game gold. Which in results only saves time in this game. But the thing is, it isn't forcing you nor is anet trying to make money off that. You can easily make money without spending cash, you can probably make enough money to craft a legendary in a week of running cof path 1.

[Rukh]

You think the cash shop wasn't planned in beta? really?

[zito]

You think the cash shop wasn't planned in beta? really?

I said the cash shop was planned/finalized/whatever after everything else on that list in beta. Try not to jump the gun when wanting to prove someone wrong.

[Rukh]

You're completely and utterly wrong, and I don't need to prove it because I know nobody else is going to think you're correct either.


Just as an experiment to see how stubborn you are though, i want you to think about this for a moment. The PAYMENT MODEL FOR THE GAME was not thought out before particular balancing was done in beta. Please, reason that one out for us.

[Valeron]

You must be a great in debates. "I'm right and you are wrong" Why? Well because I'm right.

[zito]

You're completely and utterly wrong, and I don't need to prove it because I know nobody else is going to think you're correct either.

Anyone paying attention to the game before Beta 1 knew the travel fees, the tax for the tradepost, and everything on that list before the gem shop was even finalized and up and running. Press beta even said that the gem shop wasn't up and then press beta 2 and 3 had very little in it.

So unless you want to prove otherwise don't just say I'm wrong.

[Zoneseek]

Im very casual and only give mmo's 5-10 hours a week, MoP much like CAT did not feel casual friendly to me. 85-90 took too long on alts with no flying, everything on my alts was gated behind dailies, getting 1000 valor pretty much took ALL my gaming time every week whereas in wotlk a quick 15-20 minute daily H got your 7 badges a week so to "cap" yourself on the best currency you could get back then as a casual player it only took 2-3 hours a week. Not anymore, not by a long shot. So I quit late in december and GW2 has been the perfect little injection of MMO that I need in my gaming time So far I really havent thought about wow, been keeping up with it (that's why im here!) but nothing in it seems to be drawing me back at all. GW2 is always enjoyable to log in and get a laurel and I even completed all my monthlys for the first time in the game last month lol

[Rukh]

Anyone paying attention to the game before Beta 1 knew the travel fees, the tax for the tradepost, and everything on that list before the gem shop was even finalized and up and running. Press beta even said that the gem shop wasn't up or had very little in it.

So unless you want to prove otherwise don't just say I'm wrong.

So because it wasn't in during that time they hadn't planned the way they were going to make money. Huh, that's an entertaining notion right there. Also I'd like to point out, I just asked you to clarify, you're the one that jumped to all aggro mode, and I'm guessing it's because you realize how wrong you are and hope you can just bluster your way out of it.

[Karizee]

Simply put, the entire game is designed from the ground up to get players into the cash shop. I mean its not really that shocking a statement, obviously the games primary source of revenue is the cash shop, its only natural (and required for the game's survival) that they make sure players are spending money at it.

This is a post from another forum that really gives some interesting insight into it, its a good read:

People trying to make a thing out of something that isn't even a thing.

This game practically throws gear and gold at you. I make 5g off one fractal run, 100g would outfit 5 characters in full exotic.

Or you can run dungeons for dungeon tokens (free, no RNG) or use Karma (free, no RNG) for free gear.



The only RNG is tied to very rare items to make Legendary weapons, as it should be.

[zito]

So because it wasn't in during that time they hadn't planned the way they were going to make money. Huh, that's an entertaining notion right there. Also I'd like to point out, I just asked you to clarify, you're the one that jumped to all aggro mode, and I'm guessing it's because you realize how wrong you are and hope you can just bluster your way out of it.

If you actually are trying to follow the main arguement. It is "b2p models are trying to make content get you into the cash shop". and muchtoohigh linked a bunch of things that would stay and was planned regardless if the cash shop wasn't planned and the things he listed were released to the public before the cash shop was full completed thanks to press betas telling us this.

Try to follow along okay?

[Valeron]

The only RNG is tied to very rare items to make Legendary weapons, as it should be.

I disagree with that philosophy. I feel that they could have made it possible to make a legendary with the time component without using the massive RNG that they currently have.

[ShimmerSwirl]

Anyone paying attention to the game before Beta 1 knew the travel fees, the tax for the tradepost, and everything on that list before the gem shop was even finalized and up and running. Press beta even said that the gem shop wasn't up and then press beta 2 and 3 had very little in it.

So unless you want to prove otherwise don't just say I'm wrong.

So you think because the gem shop was not included in one particular beta build played by the press that the entire idea was just added as an afterthought?

Anyone who actually followed the game in beta will tell you that Anet stated numerous times that the key to their cash shop success was going to be the very fact that the game was designed from the very start with the shop in mind, it was most definitely not one of the last things they tacked on.

[Rukh]

If you actually are trying to follow the main arguement. It is "b2p models are trying to make content get you into the cash shop". and muchtoohigh linked a bunch of things that would stay and was planned regardless if the cash shop wasn't planned and the things he listed were released to the public before the cash shop was full completed thanks to press betas telling us this.

Try to follow along okay?

See how antagonistic you are?

http://nerdybookahs.wordpress.com/20...otransactions/

2011 saying the payment model. Way before the beta.

You claimed the cash shop wasn't planned before the beta balancing. You're wrong. I didn't have to prove it, but you decided you'd be a jerk about it, so now you're wrong and look silly. Congratulations.

[zito]

So you think because the gem shop was not included in one particular beta build played by the press that the entire idea was just added as an afterthought?

Maybe you shouldn't put words in peoples mouths

Anyone who actually followed the game in beta will tell you that Anet stated numerous times that the key to their cash shop success was going to be the very fact that the game was designed from the very start with the shop in mind, it was most definitely not one of the last things they tacked on.

Yes they stated the game was made with the shop in mind. They did not say the game is being designed around the cash shop or for the cash shop or to get you into the cash shop or the content around the cash shop