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Chip H.3951

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  1. Stone dwarves was my vote with Tengu second choice. Both races have a long history of playing roles within the story lines and both have great expansion storyline potential that would justify their entry into the current storyline. Not sure how either are suited to be retrofitted into the existing personal story, but that goes for all of the possible new races, but I'm willing to suspend some disbelief if it gives us more choices.
  2. My 2 cents: Is this a good move? Hell no. Currently, there is the free default look for mounts and that's ALL that is available to non-gem store customers. Picture this game with a single light, medium, and heavy armor skin, and literally every other armor skin behind the gem store. Or a single skin for each weapon type, and every other skin behind the gem store. That's what this is. By all means, have some of the more labor intensive, blingerific skins in the gem store, artists did have to spend time making them, and having some gem store exclusives should be expected given the cosmetics for cash business model that has kept this game alive for half a decade. It's even healthy to give those who support the game beyond the base purchases a little something to show off. But, when that is the only way to dress up something as basic to the game now as armor and weapons, it's a massive violation of the expectations created by ANet for them to keep it all behind a locked door. How about that RNG distribution scheme?Yeah, this is why the backlash is severe AND deserved. As much as it would have annoyed many players, had we just had 30 individual skins for sale in the gem store along with some packages to get a discount on buying multiples at once (like the Halloween ones), that would have at least been arguably supportable. Mount skins were an obvious add on to the game, and would inevitably be in high demand by the slice of the player base that loves crafting their characters' looks. Keeping all but the default behind the gem store would have caused an uproar, but adding the additional layer of RNG distribution is the proverbial salt in the wound (along with some ground glass and lemon juice). How does this affect me?Well, I'm going to keep on using my default mount skins. There are three, maybe four, of the skins I would actually want, which means 26-27 skins I wouldn't care if I had or not beyond collecting another skin unlock. The odds are not remotely in my favor buying them individually, essentially 8:1 against me. If it was a $5 lottery ticket for $1000 with those odds, sign me up, but a $5 lottery ticket for a Jackalope skin? Hahahaha, nope. At the bare minimum, if they were going to keep the RNG, we should have at least been able to aim better for what we wanted by picking the mount type we were "adopting". If I ever bought one of these licenses, it would be purely for S&Gs, and given that there are still functional gem store purchases I want, that's going to be a long time. This isn't rage inducing or a deal breaker for me, but it's certainly disappointing in the signal of ANet's priorities and current design philosophy. At this point, I've been with the GW franchise for over 10 years, I don't see myself ever leaving it completely unless I just quit this style of game entirely, and I like to support game development that benefits me, but I can't support such short sighted silliness as this. It's particularly frustrating in seeing how trivial it would have been to deflect: release 3-4 skins for each mount available in some way in-game first, even if it was ye old farm gold and buy it from a vendor distribution. THEN, release gem store exclusive skins with or without the egregious RNG distribution. Players would have had choices, do you want to spend gems to dress up your springer, or do you want to go collect 250 foozle tokens from some mob somewhere, or farm 30 gold, or, heck, add skins to dungeon token purchases as incentive to run them. Customization is what drives the end game in GW, it did in GW1, it does in GW2, but the degree to whether it's satisfying to the player is whether we have any agency in that customization. There is currently no player agency in customizing mounts beyond the default, we either spend, or we don't, whee!, and that's why this was such a bad move.
  3. These posts have been happening long before Guild Wars 2 was a twinkle in the ANet dev team's eyes. GW1 & GW2 are, mostly, MMOs about playing dress up with your characters' avatars. That either keeps you playing, or it doesn't :)
  4. I heard you can't convert gold to gems if you're a completely free account. Heh, didn't know that. Had the digital deluxe preordered April 2012 after playing GW1 since 2007, what I know about the FTP limitations are what I've picked up here and on the wiki. So it's even more insane that you would worry about mounts of all things when you don't even have the option of actually doing anything of note for free. Can't even imagine trying to play with just 3 bag slots and 2 character slots.
  5. The thing you must remember is that a single $30 expansion upgrades your account features alone by more than $80 worth of gem upgrades, never mind the expanded content you can access along with access to either gliders or mounts. A limited version of the core game exists to bring in new paying customers, full stop. Are you disadvantaged even in core by not having a mount? Yes, of course you are, you're also disadvantaged by limited character slots, limited bag slots, inability to post in map chat, and inability to access the guild bank. Further, you lack access to many of the more profitable areas. So, even if you were a grind monkey for farming and using the market for raising gold to convert to gems, you would still need to farm 1600 gold just to catch up with the utility of the bag and character slots available to someone who just buys the basic Path of Fire. Again, never mind the expanded content AND mounts they gain. If you refuse to (or can't for whatever reason afford to) buy at least one expansion to support the game, you're not part of their equation for good reason.
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