mount skin complaint

and you sit somewhere comfortable. The waiter comes to you and asks you what you want to eat. You take a look at the menu and you see that the prices are outrageously high. What the restaurant offers is triple the regular price.Then the waiter makes you an offer:

• Sir, would you like another meal for much less money?You are like "What is the catch?"And the waiter tells you that you can get a much cheaper meal...but you won't know what it is! Basically, the first dish to leave the kitchen will be yours to enjoy. Good, bad, or utter crap it is yours. If you are lucky it might even be the one you actually desire.After that you are like " I don't want to gamble. What I want is specific meal at an acceptable price. Nothing more and nothing less."

What any of this has to do with GW2? Well, it has to do with the mount skins which are currently sold.If you want to choose your meal/skin, you have to pay 1200 gems which is outrageous! Atm the exo-suit mount collection(4 skins), FOUR! costs as much as a single skin of your choosing. This alone should signal how corrupt this business practice is.And if you are the gambling type you can pay 400gems for something which 9/10 times is NOT what you want.

This is almost as bad as loot chests in other games, honestly.

You pay premium to get what you want dont see a problem with that.Its like renting a movie and watch what you want or let the channels you have on the tv decide what you can watch.

One interesting point is that all or part of the Mountfits being sold can be bought with ingame tokens (gold) that the game hands you for playing, which makes it somewhat different than a restaurant which requires money only and won’t give you a single dime for coming in the door and running around playing inside the store.

Funny how that happens.

@"EpicName.4523" said:and you sit somewhere comfortable. The waiter comes to you and asks you what you want to eat. You take a look at the menu and you see that the prices are outrageously high. What the restaurant offers is triple the regular price.Then the waiter makes you an offer:

• Sir, would you like another meal for much less money?You are like "What is the catch?"And the waiter tells you that you can get a much cheaper meal...but you won't know what it is! Basically, the first dish to leave the kitchen will be yours to enjoy. Good, bad, or utter crap it is yours. If you are lucky it might even be the one you actually desire.After that you are like " I don't want to gamble. What I want is specific meal at an acceptable price. Nothing more and nothing less."

What any of this has to do with GW2? Well, it has to do with the mount skins which are currently sold.If you want to choose your meal/skin, you have to pay 1200 gems which is outrageous! Atm the exo-suit mount collection(4 skins), FOUR! costs as much as a single skin of your choosing. This alone should signal how corrupt this business practice is.And if you are the gambling type you can pay 400gems for something which 9/10 times is NOT what you want.

This is almost as bad as loot chests in other games, honestly.

It's a free game. How a free game can exist if you don't pay sometimes? They have around 300 employees, of course some skins are less or more expensive, however the money we spend allows the game to live.

I mean sorry but this is all cosmetic. You don’t have any disadvantage whatsoever when you simply choose to not buy mount skins. If you are shallow enough to be wanting some then you should be willing to pay money.You should be glad that this game provides only a paywall for cosmetic stuff and is not actually pay2win. I mean the company somehow has to make money or do you expect everything for free? I‘d rather have them make a lot of money off of mount skins that you simply don’t need for anything else but looks than selling stuff you wanna get to get an advantage over other players.And don’t get me wrong I sometimes want a skin really bad as well (which I can’t afford) and while it’s sad for me I totally understand the business point of view.

WHilst I don't disagree, albeit less vehemently, this topic has been brutally done to death. The horse is literally beaten into a pulp by now and it isn't going to change. We have had statements from the top which have said this is how things will be presented going forth.

You, myself and others who disagree (who appear to be in the minority given how massively they appear to sell) the choice is simple - don't buy them. like bl keys, the more people use keys, the more they will validate them. As a salesman and retailer of 20+ years, I entirely understand they need to make money and if players are willing to pay, then they have every right to do so, perceived fairness or otherwise.

They are at the end of the day, non-essential, decent selling virtual items. Buy them or don't - it really is that simple.

It is a good thing you can simply avoid said restaurant.

Here’s a Reddit post from Mike O Brien discussing the pricing they used and why.(Emphasis is mine)

Hi,

As I wrote in my previous response, it’s been a wonderful challenge to support all Living World and Live content development for a game of this size, for five years and counting, purely through the sale of optional microtransactions. We laid out our guiding principles for GW2 microtransactions in March 2012 and we've held true to them ever since. My motivation is to continue to stay true to those principles while also continuing to fund Live content development. I recently apologized for our missteps with the Mount Adoption License. Still, mount skins are purely cosmetic, thus in many ways an ideal embodiment of our goal to support the game with optional microtransactions.

Most of us have two relationships with the GW2 gem store. One relationship is that of a customer: we purchase things when we want them for ourselves and agree with how they’re bundled and priced. Another relationship is that of an interested party: we know that ArenaNet funds Live development through the sale of gems for cash, and we enjoy playing new content like today’s release, so we hope that the gem store does well enough to keep supporting content development. We might say, “I wouldn’t buy that!”, but if enough people buy it that it supports ongoing Live development, we’re still happy.

Mount skins are style items, and style items have some unique challenges. They’re subject to individual taste, so except for the very flashiest items, individual style items will have limited sales. Also, GW2 isn’t setup to support an enjoyable experience of browsing through a large catalog of style items, so players tend not to do that. What our data shows is that higher-priced flashy individual items can work, and lower-average-price-per-item bundles can work, but lower-priced individual items generally don’t generate meaningful revenue to support the game. And the whole point of these items is to support the game.

GW2 is a content-rich online world with no monthly fee, so it’s a great overall value, with microtransactions doing the heavy lifting of funding continued development of the game. It shouldn’t also be our goal to have the lowest-priced microtransactions. In that case, the only logical outcome would be that we could afford to make less content than other developers, and I think that’s not what any of us are looking for. I love our current pace of content development and I hope we can support it for a long time to come.

We’re all in this together. It’s obvious in your posts that you’re thoughtful and motivated to see the game do well. You balance between loving the game and not always agreeing with how gem store items are bundled or priced. That’s fair. We have a commerce team that lives that dilemma every day. We’re all doing our best for the long-term health of the game.

Thank you all for your passion, and again, thank you for your continued support of Live development.

~ MO

If your not picky then of course your going to run out of resources. Wanting a bunch of stuff comes at a cost... obviously.

That being said, if you become more picky on what you want, life becomes easier.

@Nash.3974 said:I mean sorry but this is all cosmetic. You don’t have any disadvantage whatsoever when you simply choose to not buy mount skins. If you are shallow enough to be wanting some then you should be willing to pay money.You should be glad that this game provides only a paywall for cosmetic stuff and is not actually pay2win. I mean the company somehow has to make money or do you expect everything for free? I‘d rather have them make a lot of money off of mount skins that you simply don’t need for anything else but looks than selling stuff you wanna get to get an advantage over other players.And don’t get me wrong I sometimes want a skin really bad as well (which I can’t afford) and while it’s sad for me I totally understand the business point of view.

Yup, this. It's purely cosmetics. Thus so far as I'm concerned, they can do whatever the hell they want. It would be a different story if they were selling game-breaking advantages (like some other games do). But it's nothing of the sort... so.

Also, this ''restaurant'' has many other features that you can partake in. Nobody's forcing you to do this one transaction.

I'm mostly ok with the current way mount skins are sold, except the 30 from the original adoption licence, and even those bother me less now we have other options. Yes of course it could be better - for example it would be nice if we had all 3 options (themed 5/6 pack, random licence or select licence) for all the skins. And there are some skins I like but haven't bought because they cost more than I'm willing to pay for them.

But overall I've been able to get a good selection of skins for my characters without spending more than I'm comfortable with. The only ones I actually spent real money on are the Branded pack and IMO they're well worth it because they look good on almost all my characters, and I got the full Istani Isles set with gold which again I thought was worth it. I haven't got any others because they fall into that "not worth what it costs" category for me. And I can't decide which beetle skins I want. But I'm sure I'll buy more skins in future, either because new ones are released or existing ones go on sale.

Not overpriced at all. All skins are worth it, even the basic ones imo. Paying 700 for a backpiece and most basic glider is more insulting than that.

But not everybody as as much expendable income, so opinions will vary even more so than usual on a topic like this

And I agree, it's been discussed a dozen times already at least

Well what price would you pay for these skins, OP?

You show me a price that is seemingly fair to you and profitable for Anet and I'll show you a person that thinks that's too expensive.

Almost as bad as chests in other games. You mean the chests in other games that cost as much, if not more, only to give you trash items worth 1% of what you paid? You're guaranteed all the mounts after spending a certain amount, in other games you're lucky to get one of the items in that same amount. When they offer a guaranteed way of getting something, it's generally 30$+ too.

The cost of items are determined by everything, Anets pricing is standard, and sometimes even lower than the standard. It's no different than how restaurants price things, it's why in some areas a coffee will cost twice as much as the next city. Also, buffets are RNG restaurants, you pay and eat what they have there which isn't always the same thing, and may not have what you wanted.