Too many mundane collectables are too expensive (gold value)

[Tatwi.3562]

Truly useless flavor items like endless tonics that require 10 items that cost 8.5g each... Cultural armor that costs 20g per piece... 50g for a home instance node of something that has marginal gameplay value... And so many other potentially interesting, but generally pointless and totally optional things I haven't bothered with in the last 9 years, because I'm not interested in "no-lifeing" a game. I'm certainly not going to spend my hard earned real life money on stuff like this. So, it just gets ignored and that's a shame.

 

I don't play the game every day. I don't even want to play the game every day. When I do play, I don't sit there for hours "grinding" or whatever. I just "do stuff" that I feel like doing for as long as I find it entertaining, because games are entertainment, not jobs or lifestyles.

 

The price of many mundane purchasable rewards in this game were clearly balanced around either "whales" who convert money to gold and that top 2%-10% of people who spend many hours grinding gold, rather than around the income of the average person who just plays the game. And what's the point of doing this for these mundane things/collections? It's not like they offer the pizazz and convenience of legendary weapons. In fact, most mundane collectables are just that, mundane, bland, and often only serve the purpose checking a box on a list to gain Achievement Points. Congratulations, you spend gold. Quite the "achievement". 😐

 

Primarily, I spend my real life and in game gold on things that are actually useful, like bank tabs, character slots, infinite tools, etc. I've purchased only five cosmetic items from the gem store in nine years. It took me until this summer to afford the griffon mount and that was after someone randomly gave me 75g for helping others in map chat. I had no problem spending $30 USD on EOD, because EOD will add a huge amount of content to my experience. That's 2400 gems or about 473g. Meanwhile just the tier 3 cultural armor sets cost 595g. Why? They add almost nothing to the game. Totally out of balance.

[kharmin.7683]

Good news!  You need none of these things to play the game or complete content. 

[Strider Pj.2193]

Go try to buy invisible shoes.  
 

😬

[Lan Deathrider.5910]

It is a concept known as a 'gold sink.'  Their entire purpose is to drain gold from the economy as a means of maintaining a healthy economy. 

[Sobx.1758]

1 hour ago, Tatwi.3562 said:

Truly useless flavor items

If they're just "truly useless flavor items" (and they are) then what's the problem? Just don't get them, play what you want and focus on getting what matters to you.

Edited October 8, 2021 by Sobx.1758

[kharmin.7683]

This seems like a poor attempt to justify lowering the cost on "mundane" items that the OP really wants but won't get because of the perceived high cost.

[Mungo Zen.9364]

I don’t think that ‘every’ item, collection, skin etc is for all players. Rather, there is a very broad selection of options available for players to engage in.   There are so many options that it can appeal to the widest audience possible.

It is great that you can enjoy the game doing what you want the way you want isn’t it?

[Danikat.8537]

The good news is because they're not required for anything and won't help you complete content in the game you don't need to buy them if you don't want to.

Personally I spend most of my time in GW2 just doing what I find fun and don't worry about what virtual items, useful or otherwise I might end up with afterwards. Then every so often I find an item (which for me is usually something cosmetic) which I like and I'd like to have and either I've already got enough gold or whatever to buy it, or because I don't need it to play I can just stick it on my mental list of stuff I like and get it when I can afford it.

For example earlier today I decided to buy the Accursed Treads (Arah dungeon armour) for a cat costume I was trying to make, and found I already had more than enough dungeon tokens. I can't remember when or where I got them, but I didn't do it to get the shoes, but now I've got them as well.

[ugrakarma.9416]

u are too worried about economics for a "casual player"...,

[Turin.6921]

Are you actually complaining that the optional things you find mundane and pointless are too expensive for you to get?

Edited October 8, 2021 by Turin.6921

[Gibson.4036]

This is the way MMOs work, sadly. There are too many people who have the time to play every day for hours at a time and too many whales who can justify throwing $25 at a skin for players like you or me to get much in game just playing casually.

When players can play like a full time job and expect to be entertained by a game for years on end, no dev team on earth could make enough content to satisfy them. The only answer is to make long farms necessary to get the interesting things.

So the hardcore can take 22 weeks to get a full set of leggie armor where you and I might get one piece in a year of play, and Kharmin can come remind us both leggie armor is completely unnecessary to play the game.

And K isn’t wrong. People like you and me can decide we like the social aspect of playing with a bunch of other players enough to be content with only very rarely getting any rewards of significance. Alternately we can go play single player RPGs where everyone gets the cool journey of rags and rusty sword to shiny dragon scale armament of god-slaying in 40 or 60 hours of play total because those designers don’t suffer under the expectation that their games should be an entire second life for the players.

[Ultramex.1506]

There are things that should be ignored but one that i believe is both deserve to be forgotten and never to be repeated again by Anet is 

Although dungeon is dead, it offer better rewards and experiences than the boring, waste of time they called  DRM that require MASTERY to get "better" loot, although i have heard DRM used to be very profitable  before price drop

Edited October 9, 2021 by Ultramex.1506

[Stalkingwolf.6035]

18 hours ago, Lan Deathrider.5910 said:

It is a concept known as a 'gold sink.'  Their entire purpose is to drain gold from the economy as a means of maintaining a healthy economy. 

you mean buying gems from €/$. everybody knows whats the purpose of the gemedesign. give a a ton of loot which is not worth anything. make everything extremly expensiv and maybe players buy gems for money and convert them into gold..

a lot of (ugly) skin weapon meta achievements are so ridiculously expensive. yes you dont need them but only a hand full of players craft them, because they are ugly, expensiv and the meta reward a joke.

[Lan Deathrider.5910]

23 minutes ago, Stalkingwolf.6035 said:

you mean buying gems from €/$. everybody knows whats the purpose of the gemedesign. give a a ton of loot which is not worth anything. make everything extremly expensiv and maybe players buy gems for money and convert them into gold..

a lot of (ugly) skin weapon meta achievements are so ridiculously expensive. yes you dont need them but only a hand full of players craft them, because they are ugly, expensiv and the meta reward a joke.

Gold sinks existed before cash shops. True there is nothing stopping you from using the gem transfer  for $ to gold, but that is not needed unless you are impatient.

[Omega.6801]

7 hours ago, Ultramex.1506 said:

There are things that should be ignored but one that i believe is both deserve to be forgotten and never to be repeated again by Anet is 

Although dungeon is dead, it offer better rewards and experiences than the boring, waste of time they called  DRM that require MASTERY to get "better" loot, although i have heard DRM used to be very profitable  before price drop

With you on this one, Saga collections felt too grindy for me too.

@OP: as many have said. If you don't care about the items, great, don't get them, you won't miss them. If you want those items, check what needs to be done/spent and decide if it's worth your time, yes or no. Going "these items are useless but i want them, therefor they should be cheaper for how useless they are" is not how worth works. It's more in the line of "this item might be useless, but enough people want it to give it a certain price within the games economy, as a customer, I get to chose wether that price is worth it or not for me to pay."

[yann.1946]

43 minutes ago, Stalkingwolf.6035 said:

you mean buying gems from €/$. everybody knows whats the purpose of the gemedesign. give a a ton of loot which is not worth anything. make everything extremly expensiv and maybe players buy gems for money and convert them into gold..

I advice you get study how economies work for a little bit. You can't just dismiss goldsinks because the conversion exists. 

 

The reason the loot feels like it is worth nothing is because of the style of loot system that got implemented. Almost everything drops from almost everything. (with slight variation per mob). This makes it that their are very few "unique" drops. 

 

43 minutes ago, Stalkingwolf.6035 said:

a lot of (ugly) skin weapon meta achievements are so ridiculously expensive. yes you dont need them but only a hand full of players craft them, because they are ugly, expensiv and the meta reward a joke.

So how are they a problem for you? 

[aslkefjdf.5684]

Is this satire?

[Doggie.3184]

On 10/8/2021 at 1:06 PM, Strider Pj.2193 said:

Go try to buy invisible shoes.  
 

😬

Anet's biggest sin.

[Danikat.8537]

10 hours ago, Stalkingwolf.6035 said:

you mean buying gems from €/$. everybody knows whats the purpose of the gemedesign. give a a ton of loot which is not worth anything. make everything extremly expensiv and maybe players buy gems for money and convert them into gold..

a lot of (ugly) skin weapon meta achievements are so ridiculously expensive. yes you dont need them but only a hand full of players craft them, because they are ugly, expensiv and the meta reward a joke.

I don't think the majority of players use real money to get gold. Every time there's new items or discounts on popular items in the gem store the exchange rate jumps up so it's more expensive to convert gold into gems, which happens when a lot of people have been doing that. Why would players convert gold into gems to buy gemstore items if they get their gold by converting gems?

For what it's worth I've been playing since the betas and only converted gems into gold once, in 2013 when I was making my first legendary. Even then it was only about 100 gems I had left over after buying something. All the rest of the time (including the rest of the cost of that legendary and the 3 others I've made) I was able to get enough gold for things I want just by playing the game.

[IndigoSundown.5419]

ANet was (and is) faced with a need to appeal to a wide variety of players.  Some players (I'd say many) require things to chase that they want to have.  They expect the developer to provide an incentive for them to play the game.  Since some of them play a lot, ANet cannot just make it easy to get some items.  If things come too easily, these players lose motivation to play.  However, if ANet makes things too hard to get, they risk alienating players who don't play that often.  So, they put in some rewards that are easy to get and some that take a lot of time, effort, gold, etc.

 

The TC is discussing an issue that happens because the hard(er) to get stuff is going to be more attractive to players because it is rarer.  The only cure for this would be for those who want to acquire stuff with less effort, gold, etc. to recognize that they are not the target audience for the hard-to-get stuff.  Since that's not going to happen, they are going to experience the differential reward structures as a problem.

 

Another thing to consider is that the TC seems to want the items s/he writes about.  Why else complain that it takes too much gold to get them if you don't want them.  This complaint -- like may similar complaints over the life of the game -- has an unspoken subtext.  What's always being said is that these players want the items sooner rather than later.  Otherwise, they could do what they want to do in game and eventually get what they want.  So, it's not just about things costing too much, it's about an unwillingness to defer gratification.

 

I'm sure that things which cost (a lot of) gold serve as an incentive for some players to buy gems to convert into gold.  However, I'm also sure that that's a by-product of ANet's real incentive to produce rewards that take time to get.  That incentive is to keep players playing.  Pure and simple, bleeding players is the death knell of a game.  Lapsed players don't buy gems, don't buy XPac's, and most importantly, don't populate the game world -- which is never good for a massively multiplayer game.  That's the real financial reason behind items costing a lot of gold, because gaining gold is a matter of time spent playing.

[Tiilimon.6094]

Save your login reward money till you can flip stuff on trading post, its an endless source of gold and you won't require any farming or real world money at all for anything in the game, ever. Eventually you can make hundreds of gold by logging in for a few minutes to list stuff on tp.

 

Thinking that playing a lot will make you rich is as silly as thinking you'll become rich working some 9-5 job irl.

[Gehenna.3625]

21 hours ago, Stalkingwolf.6035 said:

you mean buying gems from €/$. everybody knows whats the purpose of the gemedesign. give a a ton of loot which is not worth anything. make everything extremly expensiv and maybe players buy gems for money and convert them into gold..

a lot of (ugly) skin weapon meta achievements are so ridiculously expensive. yes you dont need them but only a hand full of players craft them, because they are ugly, expensiv and the meta reward a joke.

I think you don't understand how the gem/gold exchange works. It's actually really clever how they did it.

The gold you can buy with gems is actually gold that's already in the economy and is the gold that people buy gems with. On the other side those gems are paid for because only the gems that are bought to buy gold with are available. So any gems you buy with gold are paid for by players. The exchange rate is therefore dependent on the availability of both currencies and that's why the exchange rate changes all the time.

So the economy is not affected by this at all and the gold sinks do work. You don't create gold with gems it's effectively an exchange between players. This is key to how it works and why it doesn't affect the economy negatively. 

[Tatwi.3562]

On 10/10/2021 at 12:49 AM, IndigoSundown.5419 said:

Another thing to consider is that the TC seems to want the items s/he writes about.  This complaint..,, has an unspoken subtext. 

No.

The purpose of my post was to point out that I will never buy these items, because their price is extremely out of balance when compared to the price of actually useful items.

Quote

$30 USD on EOD, because EOD will add a huge amount of content to my experience. That's 2400 gems or about 473g. Meanwhile just the tier 3 cultural armor sets cost 595g. Why? They add almost nothing to the game. Totally out of balance.

 

[Gehenna.3625]

1 hour ago, Tatwi.3562 said:

No.

The purpose of my post was to point out that I will never buy these items, because their price is extremely out of balance when compared to the price of actually useful items.

 

I agree that the price is out of balance compared to the price of an expansion. However, you don't want to put the hefty prices at the front door and an MMO needs two things to stay alive. Revenue and population. So the low prices for expansions in combination with no sub make it that many people can afford to play and play whenever they want.

So in essence I'm saying that yes the comparison like for like is out of balance but that's on purpose because they want to make playing the game accessible for many people and that generates some revenue but the focus there is on population. That's why the core game is free also.

But to make enough revenue to please the lords of NcSoft and indeed to keep their doors open, means that they have high priced cosmetics and services. I think you'll find that other MMOs tend to have higher prices or comparable prices in their cash shops.

Now you may never buy these items and that's ok for ArenaNet. They put these prices at a point where they can maximize profits. Making them cheaper will result in more sales but not necessarily more revenue. If they sell 1000 copies of an item at 800 gems they make the equivalent of 800000 gems in revenue. Now if they lowered the price of said item to 200 gems and they would sell double of them they would make the equivalent of 400000 gems in revenue. So sales are doubled but revenue is halved.

Now you might ask how do I know that these numbers are accurate... well, I don't. But it's just an example of how more sales don't equate to more revenue and Anet will have the actual numbers. In other words if they could sell them for lower and make more revenue at the same time, why wouldn't they do that? It would benefit them to do this. But if the extra sales you get with a lower price don't add up to more revenue, then they wouldn't benefit from that and for me that's a strong reason not to lower the prices.

And added to that, there's a lot of cosmetics in game already. This is something that GW2 does a LOT better than SWTOR for example where almost all cosmetics come from their cash shop.

So in conclusion, you correctly identified an imbalance in price between the cost of an expansion and the cost of items in the gem store, however, they want to keep accessibility to content low and they can do this because of their revenue from the gem store. 

[Zentao.6314]

3 hours ago, Tatwi.3562 said:

... their price is extremely out of balance when compared to the price of actually useful items.

 

If you think these items are not useful, why are you complain?
As others already said, these items are not required at all for any gamemodes, only cosmetics.

People who having fun playing this game every day deserve these rewards for their time.
Why ANet should give you all items for (almost) free if you don't even play this game regularly?

It would just ruin the game for everybody else who actually care about the game, because they could unlock everything and stop playing because they achieved everything.

Edited October 11, 2021 by Zentao.6314