BLTC Proposals to Improve Revenue During LSS5

With Living World Season 5 coming right after season 4, and no expansion in the immediate future, the BLTC needs improvements to fund GW2 (and hopefully but probably not other projects). It is not sustainable to rely on sales for mount skins and gear skins (that occasionally look better than legendary skins).

Considering sales that are fair, practical, and non-aggressive but desirable, my proposed Black Lion Trading Company (BLTC) ideas are below. Please share your ideas, and critique the feasibility of my ideas.

• Gem-purchased makeover kits should be replaced with makeover feature set unlocks. Feature sets are a one-time purchase unlock for your account that gives you access to a specified handful of makeover features. For example, there can be a set of green and pink eye/hair colors or a set of wave 2 faces. Actual makeovers should cost gold rather than gems. This can appeal to collectors to spend money on gems to unlock all makeover features while making makeover usage cheaper overall. Current makeover kits in the game can continue to be used, and they will save you some gold rather than gems. The unlimited hairstyle kit will inherently lose a lot of value from this update. To balance this out, this kit should be updated to the unlimited total makeover kit.
• Personal home instances have been getting more NPCs and collectibles which appeal to many players. Moving into the same direction as BL Expedition and Hunters Boards, more BLTC features should get home instance representation. For example, in the Ascalonian home instance there can be a charr helicopter representing each teleportation item. If you buy a Home Portal stone you get one helicopter, if you buy a World Boss Portal Device you get another helicopter, and if you buy a permanent convenience zone pass you get a third helicopter. This can be represented as unique waypoint stones in Rata Sum or a a stable of dolyaks in Hoelbrak. There can also be small things like purchasing a shared inventory or bank slot adds another sack or chest to a pile of sacks and chests somewhere in your home instance. Sharing your cluttered home instance with daily gatherers is one of the few social elements of GW2, and it would be fun to expand upon this slightly.
• Sell forged birth certificates that update a character's age to your account's age. The main goal of this item is to appeal to players who remake their characters frequently without punishing them too much, and it can appeal to players with young alts. This also adds more value to purchasing character slots. Theoretically, someone could use this to "farm" birthday rewards on a single character slot by reaping the birthday rewards, deleting the character, recreating the character, and using another forged certificate on them to reap more rewards. But, the cost of the certificates should balance out the benefits from the birthday rewards. Luckily birthday gift rewards do not affect the in-game economy very much (with mostly account-specific unlocks), and I believe most birthday dyes are not incredible expensive.
• Sell an infinite transmutation stone for a substantial amount of gems. This can unlock a collector NPC in your home instance, who I imagine as a vain, fashionista Mesmer that cycles through various armor skins every day and occasionally summons a clone to check themselves out, that exchanges one-time use transmutation charges for small bags of loot (like materials or greens/blues). The NPC can have some flavor dialogue teasing FashionWars2 and explaining that they can never have enough transmutation charges. It can also be reminiscent of collector NPCs in GW1 that provided a rationale for why they collected an infinite amount of a specific item. This NPC functions as another "eater" tool, like for bloodstone dust and whatnot, but there's more flavor in having a physical NPC rather than a tool filling a bank/bag slot.
• BLTC salvage kits and teleportation items should have inherent shared inventory slots. To clarify, these items should have their own, independent shared inventory slots. Many players place them in shared inventory slots already, but most of these tools were created before shared inventory slots were developed. Now that we have the tech in the game, these items should have the same embedded functionality as the PoF level 80 booster that is bound within a shared inventory slot. There can be an option to toggle whether embedded slots appear before or after custom shared slots. There can also be a black lion agent (potentially in the home instance) who toggles the option of embedding these tools into your account inventory or giving them to you as an item (in case some players don't like the embedded functionality). This proposal arguably won't bring in more revenue for Anet (with reduced shared inventory slot sales), but it makes BLTC teleportation items and salvage kits more desirable.
• This might be controversial. Sell the Legendary Equipment Replicator NPC for your home instance. This NPC will learn and unlock legendary equipment you present to them, and they will be able to create lesser replicas for all characters on your account. Constructing replicas may also have a small gold cost attached to help with the in-game economy. Lesser replicas come in the precursor skin, they retain the functionality of freely swapping stats and upgrades, they are account-bound, they cannot be salvaged or sold, and they come in a distinct text color (like red). So how are these lesser? Purple legendary gear should be updated to transmute freely without consuming transmutation charges, while lesser replicas will consume transmutation charges. The purpose of this replicating function is to enhance the convenience we already have (since purple legendary gear is account-bound and shareable to alts via bank or shared inventory slots) of sharing gear with alts that can freely stat/upgrade swap. This convenience merely cuts out the time it would normally take for us to locate, unequip, bank, and reequip legendary gear on alts. For our 0.00...01% of players who already own multiple sets of legendary gear on multiple alts, you will at least have the added benefit of free transmutations on all of that purple, legendary gear. This convenience tool may also make legendaries more appealing to more players, which in turn should stimulate the in-game economy.
• For my final controversial proposal, implement the BLTC account level. This level gains experience every time you spend cash on your account (whether it is on gems or expansions). The benefits of this level are similar to achievement points, where you gain small, permanent, account-wide, non-combat stat boosts (like magic find and gold find). They could increase other stats (also seen in guild enhancements) like critical gathering, map bonus rate, and PvP/WvW reward track rate. At every level up there can also be a reward chest of black lion key(s) or BLTC junk. If this gets implemented I would like all existing accounts to automatically level up using the cash from their entire purchase history. I'm not sure how feasible that is, but there would be incredible (and justified) salt from veteran players who have already purchased everything they want from the gem store if they do not get experience from past purchases. The main purpose of this implementation, which in reality would be minor in its significance to the economy, is to make gem purchases more tempting. Account leveling is not as manipulative as loot boxes, but the sense of progression can be addicting.

Without data to prove either way, I'm unconvinced transmutation charges bring in any real income for the company given their abundance of in game supply. I would hope a wardrobe/build system would eradicate the charges completely.

The forged birth certificate goes against the spirit of the system, but if I'm honest I could probably care less if it was implemented as it wouldn't affect me.

The bottom one is the one I would safely wipe off the list. I get your reasons and how you propose it and that can you think it is better than rng, however rng is largely accepted/ingrained into the psyche of mmo players. It annoys many, but doesn't really seem to put people off in large enough numbers. Boosts based on spending would simply send out the wrong message. It's not just the idea, it's the perception of the idea. There is no chance you could market it to convince a broad enough spectrum of players that this is a positive move for the game in my opinion. It's like when people suggest optional subs/premiums - the perception would instantly negative regardless of the detail and that's an important consideration to throw in.

I would love an Infinity Transmute stone for convenience and drop $10-15 for it. I think that's fair enough, I tend to transmute to my favorite set or two. One other thing they could add, and this might sound P2W, is insta 80 boosts. Make your character max level without the free gear that goes with it. Leaves out spamming Tomes of Knowledge for those who want to pass everything for some new build they want to try out.

Edit: Did not know Lion Ticket existed until I saw in gem store.

@"Jetra.1238" said:I would love an Infinity Transmute stone for convenience and drop $10-15 for it. I think that's fair enough, I tend to transmute to my favorite set or two. One other thing they could add, and this might sound P2W, is insta 80 boosts. Make your character max level without the free gear that goes with it. Leaves out spamming Tomes of Knowledge for those who want to pass everything for some new build they want to try out.

Such a thing exists

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Black_Lion_Instant_Level_80_Ticket

@"Jetra.1238" said:I would love an Infinity Transmute stone for convenience and drop $10-15 for it. I think that's fair enough, I tend to transmute to my favorite set or two. One other thing they could add, and this might sound P2W, is insta 80 boosts. Make your character max level without the free gear that goes with it. Leaves out spamming Tomes of Knowledge for those who want to pass everything for some new build they want to try out.

The gemstore already has Instant Level 80 boosts

The gem store already has a huge variety of item categories. I believe that making the LW5 episodes contain good content that lasts for more than a couple of weeks would be much more effective for gem store sales.

Sell an infinite transmutation stone for a substantial amount of gems

I’d buy an infinite T stone for up to 1K gems. T charges are scarce if you don’t PvP/WvW and would rather pay for a T stone than do more map completion.

This does, of course, presume lack of revenue is the issue.
I'm not sure that was the reason for the down-sizing.

You really want to increase revenue ?

Give people a real reason to play more than one week every 3 months. That's how you generate more revenue.

Looking at that list, I didn't see anything on it I would buy.However, I may be the odd player that really doesn't care about fashion/appearance. So new facial unlocks, unlimited ability to do transformations, etc have no interest to me.However, convenience items do, though I'm not sure that lesser legendaries would be sufficient - it depends on the price, but I could also see downsides there - if too cheap, people would just use that instead of making ascended gear. If a lot more expensive, you can do stat swapping with ascended gear already, it just costs something to use the mystic forge.

I like those ideas. I can see the last one being controversial, but it’s my favorite. I am absolutely addicted to any kind of leveling, and my desire to build that up to insane levels would have me spending lots more money. Also, the idea of getting a little bonus for being a long time customer that spends a lot is a very nice idea.

@TexZero.7910 said:You really want to increase revenue ?

Give people a real reason to play more than one week every 3 months. That's how you generate more revenue.

Easier said that done. Giving you a reason to play more than once every 3 months doesn't necessarily give me a reason. Right now, I have reasons to play pretty much all the time. When raids were coming out more often, I had less reason to play. You can't please all the people, so the question is, which people are or aren't playing and how great is the demographic is percentage of the playerbase.

@Vayne.8563 said:You can't please all the people, so the question is, which people are or aren't playing and how great is the demographic is percentage of the playerbase.It's much easier than you make it sound. Aside from certain weird causes you may (or may not) belong to, most of people still want to play a game. Also, most people can't stand repetitiveness and doing the same things all over again for a while, so they need fresh experiences.

So, to make them play you either need to put out fresh static content on regular basis, or develop some engine which procedurally generates such content on the fly, with a huge amount of variety/randomness. The first seems simply infeasible with Anet's current business model. So the only hope is that they will master the 2nd one.

Also, the 1st approach could still be slightly optimized if they would start to reuse their old content to generate new. Like, they would stop developing new half-empty maps and instead fill the old half-empty maps with much more events, quests, dungeons, JPs etc

@MoriMoriMori.5349 said:

@Vayne.8563 said:You can't please all the people, so the question is, which people are or aren't playing and how great is the demographic is percentage of the playerbase.It's much easier than you make it sound. Aside from certain weird causes you may (or may not) belong to, most of people still want to play a game. Also, most people can't stand repetitiveness and doing the same things all over again for a while, so they need fresh experiences.

If it was easier, every single MMO would retain players in the months after an expansion. It varies from person to person but I know a tremendous number of people who play WoW for 3-6 months after an expansion. Precedural content tend to be repetitive, even if it's different, because it's the same stuff over and over again in different combinations. To some people it doesn't matter if the monsters or maps change, since procedural content tends to lack complexity in design. Better designed bosses don't really happen in procedural content.

More to the point, you have no real idea (nor do I) what percentage of the playerbase likes or doesn't like the situation as it stands now. For example, from my point of view, I'm not doing the same thing over and over again between zones, because to me, the game isn't just about mechanics, it's about flavor as well. Not just story but lore. Not just numbers, but feel. And I'm not alone in this. In fact, I would wage more people play necromancer, a fairly popular profession, for the feel/theme of the profession rather than the numbers, just as people play rangers because they like the idea of taming pets.

There's a bias in many that their way of viewing the game is somehow some majority but in reality, most people really don't think deeply about the gaming experience. No matter how many raiders complain that necro doesn't pull numbers, or rangers in the past, it didn't stop the game from being full of necros and rangers.

Same, people who finish new zones in 2-3 hours and never go back are not necessarily a majority, but they certainly are vocal. There's no way to say what percentage of the population finishes zones and never returns, but I continually see people playing in every single zone I enter. All of them. Draconis Mons. Bloodstone Fen. Lake Doric. They all have people...they don't have zergs.

It's not the same 12 guys day in and day out playing 24/7 in any of the zones. It's a steady but relatively light flow of traffic through those zones, because people are still working on that stuff, or they enjoy it so they get alts through that stuff, or they're working on collections or achievements that require them to be there. The idea that somehow changing the system to something you think would be better would work for the greater population is simply wrong.

You can make 1000 precedural dungeons and it wouldn't necessarily add to my game at all, nor that of people who only PvP or only WvW. There's just no way to know what demographic does what.

But I'd wager that adding raids to this game didn't actually increase the game's population even though there were plenty of people asking for them. It happened with HoT. People on the forums, saying loudly, we're losing people because the game is too easy. We're losing people because there's no end game. We're losing people because there's no challenge. So they added raids, challenging end game zones, harder content to placate the loud voices on the forums and you know what? People left the game. In what numbers we can't know, but we have a clue because Anet went back and used a quarterly update to change HoT to make it more solo friendly. more small group friendly, more casual friendly. They didn't do it because it was a raging success the way it was. Showing that this game still has a largely casual playerbase.

Why did they make POF as an anti HoT? Certainly not because HoT was popular. No, it's not easy, no MMO has done it, and if you think it is easy you should probably make your own MMO. But I strongly suspect that it won't turn out keeping more players after an expansion than any other MMO.. They all have ebbs and flows with content releases and they all have things they do well and badly. This game caters to casuals and lost its way when it forgot that. Now it's trying to find it's way back there.

Who complains about that? Harder core players. Are they in some kind of majority here? I'm not thinking so.

@"Vayne.8563" said:If it was easier, every single MMO would retain players in the months after an expansion.I don't see how you made this conclusion. Even without accounting for the fact that "expansion" is rather vague term (an LS episode in GW2 could easily be considered as an "expansion" in some other MMORPG), or for its quality (you can't expect a bunch of badly designed and buggy content to retain players), "months" is too long period for one expansion to keep players. To mostly explore PoF or HoT, you need a month (a single month) at best if you play regularly (on daily basis). Yes you can still re-run it, or run some challenging end game content, like raids - but that appeals to much fewer people, and others will start to lose interest soon after they have beaten the most accessible content.

That's why, again, it's not possible to constantly maintain playerbase's interest with just a static content.

Your another assumption is that all MMORPGs are interested in retaining their players for a while - what simply isn't the case. Most MMORPGs are adhering to rotation approach. They have only that much content which is enough for players to beat in a 1-2 years, and then they are considered an "expended material" and just should die out naturally, dropping the game, substituted by new, naive players. Very few projects really aim for decades of existence, like WoW or Eve Online do.

@"Vayne.8563" said:Precedural content tend to be repetitive, even if it's different, because it's the same stuff over and over again in different combinations. To some people it doesn't matter if the monsters or maps change, since procedural content tends to lack complexity in design. Better designed bosses don't really happen in procedural content.It all comes down to the magnitude of variety engine can produce. Top-tier rogulelike games with procedurally generated worlds demonstrate that they can make each game session interesting and different, and attract quite a lot of followers, even though they don't usually have a story or nifty visuals (no visuals at all, most of the time). Yes, of course, you have a finite number of objects you can combine. But still it produces times and times more different encounters than you can realistically do "by hand" under Anet's business model. The most important part is that, once implemented, it requires quite a little intervention and just produces unending stream of "content" in fully-automated manner. For those who play game for a game, that would be huge improvement over the current static content which gets boring and old after a few runs.

@MoriMoriMori.5349 said:

@"Vayne.8563" said:If it was easier, every single MMO would retain players in the months after an expansion.I don't see how you made this conclusion. Even without accounting for the fact that "expansion" is rather vague term (an LS episode in GW2 could easily be considered as an "expansion" in some other MMORPG), or for its quality (you can't expect a bunch of badly designed and buggy content to retain players), "months" is too long period for one expansion to keep players. To mostly explore PoF or HoT, you need a month (a single month) at best if you play regularly (on daily basis). Yes you can still re-run it, or run some challenging end game content, like raids - but that appeals to much fewer people, and others will start to lose interest soon after they have beaten the most accessible content.

@"Vayne.8563" said:Precedural content tend to be repetitive, even if it's different, because it's the same stuff over and over again in different combinations. To some people it doesn't matter if the monsters or maps change, since procedural content tends to lack complexity in design. Better designed bosses don't really happen in procedural content.It all comes down to the magnitude of variety engine can produce. Top-tier rogulelike games with procedurally generated worlds demonstrate that they can make each game session interesting and different, and attract quite a lot of followers, even though they don't usually have a story or nifty visuals (no visuals at all, most of the time). Yes, of course, you have a finite number of objects you can combine. But still it produces times and times more different encounters than you can realistically do "by hand" under Anet's business model. The most important part is that, once implemented, it requires quite a little intervention and just produces unending stream of "content" in fully-automated manner. For those who play game for a game, that would be huge improvement over the current static content which gets boring and old after a few runs.

I can safely say that content without story won't interest me personally, because I need motivation to do stuff, or rather, my character needs to be motivated to do stuff. Give me a solid example of a procedural game that you think attracts the numbers necessary to keep it going long term, the way an MMO has to.

@Vayne.8563 said:I can safely say that content without story won't interest me personally, because I need motivation to do stuff, or rather, my character needs to be motivated to do stuff.And yet atm you and others do the same content (fractals, events, raids etc) again and again, with no new story bound to it. You effectively listening to the same dialogues in them each time. How exactly is this different? It's actually worse, as experiencing the same scenes may drive you mad after a dozen of times. It would be much better if they only would show those scenes on a first few runs, and then would just skip it somehow, or made them optional (group leader disable it for the whole group). So simply adding more variety to the actual content (gameplay) without adding new story would be huge improvement over current situation.

@Vayne.8563 said:Give me a solid example of a procedural game that you think attracts the numbers necessary to keep it going long term, the way an MMO has to.How do you expect me to do that, and where should I get those numbers? I simply point to the fact that this genre exists and flourishes in 2019, and the only thing those games can provide is complex and rich environment, which changes by a great margin with each new game you start. There is literally nothing more to those games, and yet they are sold very well on Steam, for example. This approach works for people which are interested in actual gameplay, first of all - like me, as you could assume. I don't mind a good story at all, but we simply won't get this on a regular basis from Anet. So at least I would like to have a bunch of stuff I can fight regularly, without seeing the same encounters again and again.

I'm against lootboxes so I'm against anything that makes gambling mechanics more enticing to people. Besides, they lost 35% of their staff so they're fine now financially. That's a lot less on the cost side, so there's no need to worry about their future. This sort of thread would've only made sense BEFORE the layoffs.

The problem you're trying to solve has already been solved by Ncsoft.

@MoriMoriMori.5349 said:

@Vayne.8563 said:I can safely say that content without story won't interest me personally, because I need motivation to do stuff, or rather, my character needs to be motivated to do stuff.And yet atm you and others do the same content (fractals, events, raids etc) again and again, with no new story bound to it. You effectively listening to the same dialogues in them each time. How exactly is this different? It's actually worse, as experiencing the same scenes may drive you mad after a dozen of times. It would be much better if they only would show those scenes on a first few runs, and then would just skip it somehow, or made them optional (group leader disable it for the whole group). So simply adding more variety to the actual content (gameplay) without adding new story would be huge improvement over current situation.

@Vayne.8563 said:Give me a solid example of a procedural game that you think attracts the numbers necessary to keep it going long term, the way an MMO has to.How do you expect me to do that, and where should I get those numbers? I simply point to the fact that this genre exists and flourishes in 2019, and the only thing those games can provide is complex and rich environment, which changes by a great margin with each new game you start. There is literally nothing more to those games, and yet they are sold very well on Steam, for example. This approach works for people which are interested in actual gameplay, first of all - like me, as you could assume. I don't mind a good story at all, but we simply won't get this on a regular basis from Anet. So at least I would like to have a bunch of stuff I can fight regularly, without seeing the same encounters again and again.

GW2 is a mmoRPG and as such it needs a decent amount of story content to go with it. If you decide to lean more heavily into gameplay and ignore further narrative development you might as well toss the RPG part out. You know which AAA dev decided to try that approach? Bethesda went from making open world RPGs with a strong narrative component to an open world MMO that went full gameplay, no NPCs, barebones story. And the result was the dumpster fire that is Fallout 76.

Also to you point about MMOs adhering to rotation approach, that's only partially true. Yes, they expect some of their older playerbase rotating out for new but the main focus of any MMO is sustaining a core playerbase over the years. They want those players who have been with them for years, because they have invested so much that they are unwilling to let go, despite boredom settling in. And in remaining active, those "core" players sink even more time and money in the game. There is a reason industry people call these 'lifestyle games", because they focus on integrating themselves in your daily routine.

@"Brad.9730" said:With Living World Season 5 coming right after season 4, and no expansion in the immediate future, the BLTC needs improvements to fund GW2 (and hopefully but probably not other projects). It is not sustainable to rely on sales for mount skins and gear skins (that occasionally look better than legendary skins).

The premise is flawed. There is no evidence or data that we have to support the claim that BLTC needs improvement to fund GW2. There is no evidence or data to suggest that things are not sustainable.

I like the legendary equipment replicator idea, I had a similar one which would be to have shared armor/weapon slots. possibly shared trinket slots. all those slots could amount to quite a lot of gems.

commander upgrades. this could be pve open world specific buffs, added functionality (being able to prioritize combo fields, cross party buff prioritization for 10 target skills, breakbar (only if at least 10 people following, kinda p2w tho)), unique commander skins/ mounts (grub mount for wvw), maybe some pve cross map commander specific chat to rally peoples (only adjacent maps hear it, or even region specific).

since there are some things that don't have the open all option, maybe some open o' matic thing. seems weird tho since this is more of a qol feature that should be inherent.

build/ gear templates.

Facial unlocks seem cool and all, but I'm not sure I would pay for anything else here. The game already drops trans charges like crazy, and once I reached a certain point, I became happy with how my character looked.

A personal wishlist of mine would be for Anet to stop developing mount and glider skins and focus on 800 gem armour designs that are simple and break the class fashion norm - but that's all it will be. A personal wish list, not a get rich quick scheme.

@Westenev.5289 said:A personal wishlist of mine would be for Anet to stop developing mount and glider skins and focus on 800 gem armour designs that are simple and break the class fashion norm - but that's all it will be. A personal wish list, not a get rich quick scheme.Probably a lot easier to make mount skins (like outfits for characters, but for mounts) whereas armor skins are more resource intensive would be my guess.

@kharmin.7683 said:

@Westenev.5289 said:A personal wishlist of mine would be for Anet to stop developing mount and glider skins and focus on 800 gem armour designs that are simple and break the class fashion norm - but that's all it will be. A personal wish list, not a get rich quick scheme.Probably a lot easier to make mount skins (like outfits for characters, but for mounts) whereas armor skins are more resource intensive would be my guess.

The logic doesn't make it hurt any less. I like my mix and match cosplay styles, dammit. :/

I'd like a thing that can convert armor weight or type. Got an extra ascended light shoulders kicking around? Turn it into medium pants. For some number of gems. Probably many.