Lestat.4970

Very true. I bought gw2 for $15 about 9 months before HOT release. Stopped playing before HOT then came back last year when I bought HOT. When I came back so many people were gone. Turns out HOT release took everything players had put into their guilds & put it behind this paywall. Sure you can use your banners etc but you wont be able to make more etc. Ofc it turned out just as well for anet as it did when destiny tried pull that stunt. Then you have tangled depth which is a massive pain in the ass map for the first hour until you have the first few glide masteries unlocked. Personally it looked to me like they tried really hard to design levels that player could enjoy using the new abilities, maybe even a little showing off, just got lost in the idea & not the practicality. Still kind of what you want dev to aim for. By comparison POF feels like you are paying for a bunch of mounts & new lws maps. Bounties are just world boss trains on steroids. Big open maps like central tyria but without the filler.

Sums it up nicely. Though it's not the first scam just the most visible. The curtain has been pulled back & now everyone can see it's rigged. Pretty much all their loot boxes are like that. There are dozens of 50+ blc chests opening on reddit & youtube with terrible drops (ones with special account bonuses like peachy are the exception to the rule). One opened over 550 during pof beta with zero rare drops. And there will be those who get a rare valuable drop on their 3rd key, but that's how gambling works. Those are rare & far between, and the consumer is tricked into thinking due to the categories that the odds are equal for each item within a grouping when that is far from the truth.

Buy a bunch of skins for US$100/EU$120/AU$175 when you wont use most cause they look pretty bland & you can only use one at a time... After the shitstorm that occurred with HOT release you would think you guys would have learnt to not shit on your customers. You get players returning to play POF & then you pull this stunt. There is literally only two benefits from screwing your players like this.The first is a lot of them are just copy paste models with minor changes so nice & easy to make (after the time consuming first one). Many people (the most vocal at least) would rather just buy 1 skin for each mount. By doing this way the ones noone wants will still sell & the ncsoft report will have higher number of prem store items sold which may bring some bargaining power depending on how well pof sold. The second is by screwing your players with gambling you create fear they may miss the skins they want & it pushes them towards buying the slightly discounted packs. So to the disadvantages. Well it is obvious you have really really pissed off many people from the countless threads & comments in them. You havent really responded cause you are waiting for the sales & player reports to see if it was successful regardless of the rage. You also miss out on people who wont gamble on principle or dont want to risk getting stuck with crap looking skins. Then the people who dont have the ingame gold & cant afford to drop $100+ on nothing more than some eye candy.Then there is the rng issue. If people dont buy the discounted packs & decide to try their luck they might get the couple they want in the first say 4 & wont buy any more which makes the scam less effective. That seems like a big risk & only way I can see you could have avoided that is if you secretly rigged the rng so the best looking ones wouldnt drop unless account licenses ownership was say more than 10 or you did what you do with the blc chests & made the chances of getting the best looking ones super super low compared to the rest. Sure you can deny it & say that it's all equal chance but you reaaly think people will believe you after seeing you pull a stunt like this? The alternatives? Companies like Amazon & walmart rely on selling cheaper but selling more instead. As I said many just want the ones they like best so by itself this wouldnt work. It would have rely on something like 300-400gems for each mount & if you complete the "collection" by buying them all then you unlock a good looking exclusive skin.You sell them in predefined packs & I dont mean like Halloween pack. I mean like packs of say 5 with the obvious most popular ones spread across groups.You sell them singular at 600-800 & let people buy the few they want. Selling a singular skin for 2000gems ($20-25) is stupid & only the rich, ocd & addicted will purchase it. However I do suspect that was put there purely to help sell the licenses to stupid people who compare the two & believe the licenses are a great deal despite all prices being artificially created/inflated.