Would optional gem subscriptions be terrible?

So there has been a lot of discussion on the gem store. Wishes from players for armor/skins/wintersday, mounts, ways for anet to make money without different parts of the community feeling rejected / unable to participate as much as others. So my question is would a gem subscription be terrible. It would be optional to join, can be in different tiers, purchased with non-Tyrian money. In theory it would be a fairly stable source money for anet, since it is clearly a stress point for them right now, and we get gems each month that we either stockpile or spend. In my mind the subscription would have nothing to do with access to normal content being released. Just gems.

I know I wouldn't be opposed to a gem subscription. Months I don't buy stuff they build up so easy to save for the higher priced items. And it's easier to budget an expected expense like a subscription into my 'i need to have some fun' section of finance / budgeting.

(I tried to make this a poll, but for some reason it would let me enter only one option. Tech and I are having words today.)

Not at first, but slowly over time they would become worse and worse.

This of course begs the question, if you wouldn't be upset about a gem subscription, why don't you just spend that money on gems each month anyway? Why do you, and others who make similar requests, only buy gems regularly if there is a subscription attached to it?

I wouldn’t be opposed to it. If ANET’s problem right now is having a stable source of income a optional sub would probably do the trick.

You’d also have to give other incentives for a sub over just going “well I’ll just buy $20 worth of gems a month.” Perhaps giving a black lion ticket or something along those lines.

Is there a discount on the cost of Gems for this 'subscription'? Is there a penalty for 'unsubscribing'?Is there a reason those interested don't budget whatever amount and just buy Gems each month?

Would the cost for the Devs to administer this be recouped if there are no advantages or disadvantages to a 'subscription'?
Would it create 'bad press'?

I, personally, would be happy to budget 10, 15, 20 dollars a month toward GW2, but I just can't afford to at this time. =(

I do pay into an optional subscription system in the form of gem cards I get every paycheck.

I could see treating myself to this. Would also make a nice gift. Over the years I've had various monthly subscriptions a la "book of the month club" type of things, which I have since discontinued.

I guess I usually expect a slight discount with subscriptions. I buy monthly typically, but not opposed to it automatically happening. I wouldn't argue having a bonus black lion ticket or something, but maybe for the heir tier subscriptions?

Yes, it would be terrible.

I wouldn't mind, but I would need stuff to spend it on. I've been sitting on my PoF bundle gems since it came out. So far the only thing they'd added is two very high priced mount skins, and RNG loot boxes, neither of which I would spend gems on. If they added the existing thirty skins as individual purchases I'd have already spent all my gems and bought more. That's the important part, they need to give us more things to spend money on. They need to give us more mount skins at reasonable prices and non RNG acquisition, and they need to provide ARMOR SKINS, not Outfits. If they do that, then the floodgates open up and the gems rain down.

Subs in f2p games come with special benefits that nonsubs don't get. This allows them to trade less currency for more money and have it still basically even out. What would subs get? If all they got was Gems, why would someone spend more regularly for less Gems? If they get more Gems then that would be immediately abused by players that would Sub just long enough to get the cheaper Gems. If it's the same, then just buy Gems at a regular interval on your own, why spend the resources necessary to make a special function to do it for you?

While I don't reject the idea of an optional subscription, I don't understand how it would work or be attractive to the players.

Would this be a buy-gems-in-advance-have-them-doled-out-over-time thing? If so, why would someone choose that over just buying gems when they want them?

Or would it be an automatic-withdrawal type purchase every month? In which case, again, what benefit is there to the player not to retain control of their purchases?

There would have to be some sort of major perk to entice players to tie themselves to an arrangement of this sort. Like maybe the gems would be at a discounted rate. Or you get some sort of very special item(s) as part of the deal. Just the altruistic goal of helping support the company would probably not bring enough support to be significant.

@TheLastNobody.8319 said:I wouldn’t be opposed to it. If ANET’s problem right now is having a stable source of income a optional sub would probably do the trick.

You’d also have to give other incentives for a sub over just going “well I’ll just buy $20 worth of gems a month.” Perhaps giving a black lion ticket or something along those lines.

And this is exactly the problem with subscriptions. Over time the bonuses would grow more and more, until it wasn't really a choice to have the subscription or not past a superficial level (think member accounts in RS). This is just a fact of subscriptions. If the bonuses aren't high enough, people won't buy them. People who would buy them without bonuses attached (the only healthy way to have a subscription on a F2P game) should just suck it up and buy gems monthly regardless in order to support ANet. The game is amazing, you shouldn't need bonuses in order to support ANet as a company.

I don't see any benefit to this over simply buying gems periodically if that's what you want to do.

The negative PR impact of putting in anything which looks like a subscription would be high. If put in, there are going to be a lot of people who think their money should buy them more. Remember the massive anti-HOT pricing thread? I do. More bad PR. The amount of money entitlement in the gamer population seems to be very high. Even the OP wants more gems than the amount of the sub would get him(?). Others would demand more.

From the developer side, optional subs never get put in as "just" store currency. All of them contain features that the player is renting, and must continue the sub to continue renting. In order to push subs, the rental features are generally only optional if you want to be annoyed while playing the game.

You can emulate a subscription by giving let's say 10 eur per months.If you aim to get advantages on the others who don't pay or simply buy gems with not regularity, then nope.

@Biff.5312 said:I don't see any benefit to this over simply buying gems periodically if that's what you want to do.It's a psychological issue... It's a matter of perception.Because WoW has been so successful, most people associate Subscriptions with quality, which isn't always the case, just look at the majority of Subscription games that had to downgrade to F2P and you'll understand that's the case.So whenever some issue with microtransactions (not gw2's case-way past micro) or premium stores (GW2 case) people always think that subscriptions would be the solution, when usually they'd aggravate the problem.The problem being, apparently, that Arena Net failed to attract enough players to finance the game. And their solution is to antagonize more players with exaggerated prices.

Subscriptions fell out of favor with the masses due to a problem with value assessment. Basically to make themselves enticing, most use a bundle method of presentation to advertise some kind of cost savings in exchange for long term commitments. Anyone with a Celphone contract or Cable service understands what I'm talking about.... and how often its abused to the detriment of the customer. Roll over minutes in Cell services is still very rare, because they're goal is to oversell you on a service they don't expect you to use. With cable companies, that bundling 50 channels you don't care about with the half dozen you do.... and charge you for the whole lot, and put a discount on it to make it more palatable. Make no mistake, you're still paying 5 times more then if you were to get the ones you wanted ala Cart at the given rate..... but presuming they even allowed it, they'd try to charge each one even higher to make sure your paying the amount they want out of you. A similar trick by Cell services is to mark up per-month services by a huge amount, so the 2 year contract is a clearly more favorable option.

A gem subscription would then be confusingly pointless if it only offered an amount of gems.... unless there was a discount. But the main reason those types of offers are almost never made is that it creates a softcap on people's spending habits, by behaving as a type of sanctioned budget. The thing is impulse buys are so powerful, and so hard to make objective comparisons on in the moment, that spending $10 here and there, without the overarching context of how much you spend a month, makes it incredibly hard to realize how much you're spending in total. Even with this Gem store, making a bulk gem purchase with the discount, and then trying to meter your gem spending is REALLY HARD due to how the Gem store uses limited offers as an advertising method. Because you have so many gems on hand, you're more inclined to be looser with your spending... and the disconnect between gem and dollar value makes it hard to maintain context while all of this is going on. Tell me how much a 700 gem item is in dollars, off the top of your head. What about a 680 gem item? Most people have to stop and do the actual math, because the conversion is really muddy. And thats is very much intentional. Every wonder why $10 is only 800 gems, instead of a 1000? It destroys the easy 1:1 comparison to dollar value.

Touching on the mounts situation for a second; the big Red flag that set everyone off about the whole thing was a double whammy of 2 abnormally expensive items being released at the same time, and utterly failing to cause an anchor effect, because it fall too far out of the price frame of reference created by the Gliders. The gem store doesn't have a clear Gem/$ relationship, but it does have a very clear internal price hierarchy. Outfits are 700-800 Gems, with super premium items (like the Wedding Attire outfit) being 1000 gems. Single item skins run from 100 for common, up to 300/400 for a premium piece (usually the ones with story significance or special effects). Gliders used a bundle model of 700 for a Back piece and Glider skin. If sold, a stand alone backpiece is 300-400 gems. Mounts mentally categorize as Gliders, as thats approximately where it fits in terms of function.... but has a value dilution as theres 5 of them we need to collect skins for. The goal of Anet was to release the Premium mount skins for big spenders exclusively, and using that to anchor the "discount value" of the Adoption licenses. And it utterly failed to get that perception, because the numbers for both offerings were waaaaay outside the range of everything we were accustomed to. The top end offering is double the normal price; and the mid/low tier offerings had a very high practical investment requirement, further soured by the random nature of the system. Further more, they had set a precedent with the Spooky Mount pack at 1600 gems for a full set, establishing a baseline value of 320 gems each, which we'd probably round up to 360 or 400 gems for an individual skin purchase.
They were counting on Impulse buys in response to how desirable the skins were... but the numbers were so shockingly out of norm, that we had to go back and reassess everything to try and place it in context.

All of this is whats going to get mashed up in a value assessment of a Subscription service.... and it would either have to offer something at a perceived discount, or offer something entirely exclusive to justify the long term commitment. Keep in mind, a subscription system has to exist with separation from flat gem purchases, otherwise its unable to justify its own existence. It can Offer gems as part of the service package.... but if it only offered gems, why not simply buy X gems on a monthly basis yourself? You also have to consider gem cards, as not every place in the world has a compatible creditcard system with the ones Digital River can service; and will very often affect the types of discounts (or non-discounts) that can be associated with it. Some games get around this problem by having their game cards be used as either subscription time or currency, converting to equivalent value of the card's price. But with all that said, what good is stock piling currency over time, when I can buy in bulk at a discount when I need it? (change that to set aside money and buy bulk gems when desired)EDIT: I boned up on that last part, and had another game's pricing scheme in my head while I was writing it.

@ReaverKane.7598 said:

@Biff.5312 said:I don't see any benefit to this over simply buying gems periodically if that's what you want to do.It's a psychological issue... It's a matter of perception.Because WoW has been so successful, most people associate Subscriptions with quality, which isn't always the case, just look at the majority of Subscription games that had to downgrade to F2P and you'll understand that's the case.So whenever some issue with microtransactions (not gw2's case-way past micro) or premium stores (GW2 case) people always think that subscriptions would be the solution, when usually they'd aggravate the problem.The problem being, apparently, that Arena Net failed to attract enough players to finance the game. And their solution is to antagonize more players with exaggerated prices.

There are some problems if you try to compare WoW with GW2

• WoW had a open beta long 4 years ( vanilla ).

• Blizzard had a well known brand because of games like WC and SC.

• Subscriptions were a thing 10 years ago, but now SH moved to other systems, like F2P/B2P + Shop

• Content Lock behind equipment, and Equipment progression. This is the main point, which allows blizzard to mantain the same content for way more time, and also force the players to change equip every new content. And players want to incrase their stats. That's why gw2 is not really appreciated by those people.

And also, about the store

• Players will mostly use gold to gems in order to buy 400/500/700/800 items.Whatever they were 1, 10, 100, 1000 and so on. And since ANET goal is not that players buy items but gems with cash, it would be useless to have many low cost microtransictions ( unless they remove the conversion gold gems ).

The problem is that ANET tried to be fair with a double exchange system, but realized that it has flaws and the numbers do the talk.

I would be against it.

I left ESO due to the optional subscription, so if it is anything like that I would not be happy.In ESO the lack of a sub blocks you from useful things like dting costumes or a craft bag (imagine playing GW2 with no material storage!) which makes playing without the sub really painful. I do not know what they would want to lock behind the sub to make it enticing enough to buy into it, but not terrible like ESO for those who do not sub. Why not just buy gems?

oh boy another one of these.You already have an option.you buy gems, or you dont

@"Nick Lentz.6982" said:oh boy another one of these.You already have an option.you buy gems, or you dont

Indeed.

Perhaps the OP is suggesting that ANet automatically charge one's credit card each month a fixed amount, if people don't have the discipline to spend every month.

In a neutral sense, there's nothing interesting about that. In theory, that means someone is paying exactly what they intended to pay in the first place.

However, the psychological difference is enormous, not only for the subscriber, but for every other player in the game. First, that changes the business model from "buy to play; optional for everything else" to "buy to play; optional subscription". Regardless of any conditions, it's still a subscription.

People feel differently about subscriptions and ultimately those who choose the auto-pay option are going to feel they have a legitimate claim for 'extras'. Maybe a mini here or there, or an extra booster. And ANet is going to feel pressure to accommodate. There would be anger if the extras are exclusive ("oh so we have to subscribe to get the Mini Deby Derryberry?") and unrest if they aren't ("oh so I pay more and don't get anything special?").

None of that is necessarily awful and at some point, ANet is going to have to seriously reconsider their stance on subs. But it will change the character of the game... or at least, how people feel about it. And that can't be good for ANet or the community in 2018 or probably even 2019.

tl;dr no, optional gem subscriptions wouldn't be terrible. But neither would they be a win-win. The income benefits would almost certainly be overshadowed by the ill will.

I wouldn't support it either. Too easy to cross the wrong lines, for them and for the players.

Not if all we'll be able to buy with them is overpriced mount skins and bundles, which is where MO indicated the store is headed.

A subscription would have to come with some benefits at any rate. I was buying gems pretty regularly, but now... I would definitely need an incentive.

@Ardid.7203 said:I wouldn't support it either. Too easy to cross the wrong lines, for them and for the players.

This.

Just the word "subscription" alone carries with it too much stigma for me. One of the things that drew me to this game was the lack of a subscription, that I could give them money at any time if I wanted more out of the game in terms of cosmetics and/or convenience/QoL stuff. I quite like the system as is right now.

@TheLastNobody.8319 said:I wouldn’t be opposed to it. If ANET’s problem right now is having a stable source of income a optional sub would probably do the trick.

You’d also have to give other incentives for a sub over just going “well I’ll just buy $20 worth of gems a month.” Perhaps giving a black lion ticket or something along those lines.

And that's where it kind of snowballs. What incentives would they have to offer to get people to do a $10/month or $20/month subscription?

I'd be glad to do a $10/month sub, but being the selfish sod that I am, I'd expect something extra every month for the commitment. Extra keys (a free 5-pack per month!) or extra gems (get 20% more gems for your subscription!) or some other similar gem-store oriented benefit. But with Gold->Gem conversion in play, it would be decried as pay-to-win.

Or, instead of a subscription, have a Gem Reward Track! The more gems you buy with real money, the more rewards you earn!(Yeah, I know, it's a horrible idea. :mrgreen: )