What if every month, there was a different free item on the Black Lion shop?

[mindcircus.1506]

8 hours ago, jokke.6239 said:

If there were no benefit of them giving away free stuff, they wouldn't do it. It brings people to the gem store, where they might notice a another item they might want to get.

LOTRO gives away free items every week for the same reason etc.

It might be too much with 1 item every month though, but I see nothing wrong with the suggestion, but if it were every month I wouldn't expect better items than boosters, repair canisters etc. Black lion keys and black lion claim ticket would still be a rare occurence most likely 🙂

And you feel LotRO's runaway success is something for this game to emulate?

[jokke.6239]

4 minutes ago, mindcircus.1506 said:

And you feel LotRO's runaway success is something for this game to emulate?

Lotro is doing quite well actually, 15 years since it was released and still has a decent playerbase. After WoW and Runescape it's probably the most succesful oldschool MMO.

[mindcircus.1506]

1 minute ago, jokke.6239 said:

Lotro is doing quite well actually, 15 years since it was released and still has a decent playerbase. After WoW and Runescape it's probably the most succesful oldschool MMO.

Average Number of Players over the Last 30 Days:

892.1

[jokke.6239]

Just now, mindcircus.1506 said:

Average Number of Players over the Last 30 Days:

892.1

Yes clearly steam is a great measurement for counting the playerbase. Almost everyone plays in the launcher, doesn't help that the steam install of LOTRO seems to have a lot of issues.

It's not a massive MMO. But it's doing quite well given how old it is.

Still getting expansions and is even getting a graphics update and console release.

 

[mindcircus.1506]

3 minutes ago, jokke.6239 said:

Yes clearly steam is a great measurement for counting the playerbase. Almost everyone plays in the launcher, doesn't help that the steam install of LOTRO seems to have a lot of issues.

It's not a massive MMO. But it's doing quite well given how old it is.

Still getting expansions and is even getting a graphics update and console release.

 

Amazing what people will say to ignore data on this forum.

[jokke.6239]

Just now, mindcircus.1506 said:

Amazing what people will say to ignore data on this forum.

And what is this data i'm ignoring?

[jokke.6239]

13 minutes ago, mindcircus.1506 said:

Amazing what people will say to ignore data on this forum.

According to a shareholder meeting in 2020 it was presented that the game has about 40k subs and averaged 118k monthly users.

Will WoW and FFXIV have to run in fear? Not even close. But the fact that LOTRO is still making profits and having a loyal fanbase, while wildstar, rift and all these other big shots come and go is what I would call a success.

But we're getting quite off-topic here.

[Ashen.2907]

3 hours ago, TagIsBad.1350 said:

Average gw2 player really hates free stuff, huh

Nothing is free. Giving away some content means charging more for something else. 

[Doggie.3184]

I'd rather every month they added a new armor set for gemz, many of which with no butt-capes and properly fit on male Sylvari.

Edited February 12, 2022 by Doggie.3184

[Astralporing.1957]

7 hours ago, Ashen.2907 said:

Nothing is free. Giving away some content means charging more for something else. 

That's a sad truth some people just do not want to understand.

[kharmin.7683]

7 hours ago, Doggie.3184 said:

I'd rather every month they added a new armor set for gemz, many of which with no butt-capes and properly fit on male Sylvari.

That'd be a great trick when we already know it takes about 9 months for Anet to implement armor sets. What other content would you eliminate to make time/resources available for this? 

[kharmin.7683]

Just now, Gibson.4036 said:

Strike missions.

Heh.  Doubtful, since it seems that Anet wants to focus on strikes with the announced changes to fractal rewards.

[Vayne.8563]

12 hours ago, jokke.6239 said:

According to a shareholder meeting in 2020 it was presented that the game has about 40k subs and averaged 118k monthly users.

Will WoW and FFXIV have to run in fear? Not even close. But the fact that LOTRO is still making profits and having a loyal fanbase, while wildstar, rift and all these other big shots come and go is what I would call a success.

But we're getting quite off-topic here.

Comparing Lord of the Rings to Wildstar and Rift is a bit rich, considering no one had heard of either before they were actually talked about by the devs, where as Lord of the Rings is a book that was written well over half a century ago, has multiple movies associated with it, has spawned a number of computer games.  Final Fantasy and WoW were both based on popular franchises as well.  You'd have to compare Lotro to something like Star Wars for a fair comparison.

 

Regardless of that, and more on topic, the idea of giving something free in the store isn't what makes Lotro successful or not successful. Lord of the Rings makes it successful as Middle Earth has tons of fans.  I don't really think giving away stuff in the gem store regularly will hurt the game, or particularly help it.

[Gibson.4036]

3 minutes ago, kharmin.7683 said:

Heh.  Doubtful, since it seems that Anet wants to focus on strikes with the announced changes to fractal rewards.

Indeed. I’m tired, weak attempt at humor. But you were too fast for my almost immediate edit. 😄

Edited February 12, 2022 by Gibson.4036

[jokke.6239]

1 minute ago, Vayne.8563 said:

Comparing Lord of the Rings to Wildstar and Rift is a bit rich, considering no one had heard of either before they were actually talked about by the devs, where as Lord of the Rings is a book that was written well over half a century ago, has multiple movies associated with it, has spawned a number of computer games.  Final Fantasy and WoW were both based on popular franchises as well.  You'd have to compare Lotro to something like Star Wars for a fair comparison.

 

Regardless of that, and more on topic, the idea of giving something free in the store isn't what makes Lotro successful or not successful. Lord of the Rings makes it successful as Middle Earth has tons of fans.  I don't really think giving away stuff in the gem store regularly will hurt the game, or particularly help it.

LOTRO would be dead today without taking place in the LOTR universe. I'm almost sure of it. But I don't understand what's wrong with comparing it to other mmo's that have come and gone though. Doesn't really matter if one has a popular brand behind it and the other doesn't. 

Doesn't change that the others falled behind, but the other is still having decent success.

The argument wasn't really if LOTRO had an advantage by having a popular brand behind it.

Also wasn't claiming that giving away free stuff is what makes LOTRO succesful. 

[Danikat.8537]

I think it would never be enough.

As other people have pointed out you already get 4 free gem store items every 28 days and apparently it's such a great gift that many people forget about it. If they gave out similar items through the gem store it would probably go the same way - players would forget to pick them up or start complaining that it's not good enough and they want something more appealing.

I think the same would happen if they included cosmetics. Elder Scrolls Online does this, their login rewards include a cosmetic item each month (usually something small, a hat, a pet, but sometimes a full outfit or a mount skin or something) and every month there's people on the forum complaining it's not good enough or even that it's insulting (all the usual "this is a slap in the face to loyal players who make the tremendous effort to log in for 14 days in a month" stuff). Admittedly it doesn't help that they used to give out loot boxes, which gave people time to hope they might get something they wanted before finding out they get a random hat, but even when they did that it was never enough. Never the right items, never quick enough to get them, never enough of them.

[Vayne.8563]

14 hours ago, jokke.6239 said:

LOTRO would be dead today without taking place in the LOTR universe. I'm almost sure of it. But I don't understand what's wrong with comparing it to other mmo's that have come and gone though. Doesn't really matter if one has a popular brand behind it and the other doesn't. 

Doesn't change that the others falled behind, but the other is still having decent success.

The argument wasn't really if LOTRO had an advantage by having a popular brand behind it.

Also wasn't claiming that giving away free stuff is what makes LOTRO succesful. 

The original comment was that Lotro shouldn't be copied because it's not successful. You argued that it is still pretty successful with lots of people playing it, and compared it to other older games that don't have the same advantage.  The whole point is irrelevent since Lotro's popularity has nothing to do with anything here. They're certainly not maintaining their playerbase because they gave away free items in the cash shop.  Particularly because I found the cash shop more egregious than Guild Wars 2's by a long shot. And more intrusive.

 

Don't get me wrong, I like Lotro and always have. But when someone, obviously as a joke, commented on the free cash shop items, the whole conversation beyond is just unnecessary.  More so comparing SWTOR or Lotro which have popular franchises (I mean there have been both WoW and FF XIV movies as well), it seems a bit weird to me.  When the Dune MMO comes out, it'll be popular because Dune is popular, if it's done well at all.  People won't necessarily be playing it because the game is good vs I want to spend time in this world.  Other games simply don't have that advantage. Saying they failed, when it's likely Lotro would have failed if it wasn't set in Middle Earth or based on a famous book that had very popular movies seems like a really weird position to take to me.

Edit: Spelling

Edited February 13, 2022 by Vayne.8563

[jokke.6239]

48 minutes ago, Vayne.8563 said:

The original comment was that Lotro shouldn't be copied because it's not successful. You argued that it is still pretty successful with lots of people playing it, and compared it to other older games that don't have the same advantage.  The whole point is irrelevent since Lotro's popularity has nothing to do with anything here. They're certainly not maintaining their playerbase because they gave away free items in the cash shop.  Particularly because I found the cash shop more egregious than Guild Wars 2's by a long shot. And more intrusive.

 

Don't get me wrong, I like Lotro and always have. But when someone, obviously as a joke, commented on the free cash shop items, the whole conversation beyond is just unnecessary.  More so comparing SWTOR of Lotro which have popular franchises (I mean there have been both WoW and FF XIV movies as well), it seems a bit weird to me.  When the Dune MMO comes out, it'll be popular because Dune is popular, if it's done well at all.  People won't necessarily be playing it because the game is good vs I want to spend time in this world.  Other games simply don't have that advantage. Saying they failed, when it's likely Lotro would have failed if it wasn't set in Middle Earth or based on a famous book that had very popular movies seems like a really weird position to take to me.

And I tried to end the conversation by saying we were going quite off-topic, then you continued it

He argued the game was a failure pretty much. I just said it was not. 

My only point in my first post when I first brought up LOTRO was that they wouldn't do free giveaways if it didn't benefited them in some way, simple as that. 

Edited February 12, 2022 by jokke.6239

[Danikat.8537]

I think a popular franchise can get people interested in a game, but it needs to be a good game as well. I've sometimes said I only play Elder Scrolls Online because it's an Elder Scrolls game and without that I wouldn't have given it a second look, and that's sort-of true. But there was a time when I thought a Warcraft RPG would be my perfect game and I never even bought WoW because the game itself wasn't what I wanted. I love both Lord of the Rings and Star Wars but I don't play their MMOs either. I'm not saying WoW, LOTRO or SWTOR are bad games either, they're just not what I want from an MMO.

Also Guild Wars had a similar immediate appeal for me by being unfamiliar. Of course that meant I had to see more than the name (it was the charr that got me interested) but it had a similar effect of making me want to know more about it, so I found out it was a game I'd like to play. (The next big thing was finding out there was no subscription.)

Having said that I don't think little things like free items will draw players into your game. It's more about keeping them playing once they're in. That's exactly the intention behind login rewards (including free gem store items). I'm sure I'm not the only one who will log in briefly when I first get on the computer, just to make sure I get the login reward...and then see people in my guild calling out events which are starting, or notifications for festivals or remember what the character I logged into was doing...or I just don't know what I want to play and since GW2 is already open I might as well play that. It gets me playing even on days when I might not have bothered otherwise.

So yes, a company giving you free stuff always has a benefit for them even if it's indirect. It doesn't have to be a bad thing for the players either, I don't mind that I end up playing GW2 more because of login rewards. But there has to be something, they're not going to give out free stuff just because.

[mindcircus.1506]

16 hours ago, jokke.6239 said:

He argued the game was a failure pretty much. I just said it was not.

I inferred only that I don't think LotRO's level of success was worth emulating.

At no point did I infer failure.

 

I know false rhetoric is tasty... but truth is tastier.

You should try it.

Edited February 13, 2022 by mindcircus.1506

[Teratus.2859]

On 2/11/2022 at 2:20 PM, yoni.7015 said:

You can get a free black lion key every week 

3 if you're willing to put in a little more time and effort.

The latter 2 even being constantly farmable if you wanted them bad enough.

[robertthebard.8150]

On 2/11/2022 at 8:27 AM, Borked.6824 said:

Given the criminal amount of money I've willingly spent in one sitting on this game (think hundreds),  multiple times, it's not too much of an ask to be honest.

So you didn't get what you paid for during these "criminal" spending sprees?  Why in the kitten did you do it more than once?

Spending money means you're entitled to what you actually purchased, not more free stuff down the road.

[Alcatraznc.3869]

What if you're already happy with what you currently have ? I'm not saying I'm against free stuff but Anet is already generous enough to give free stuff from time to time but also they did not add like mandatory P2W stuff in the gemstore to force people to spend more.

 

At some point players should learn to enjoy what they have, especially when it is for free, instead of asking for what they *could* have for free

[Doggie.3184]

On 2/12/2022 at 7:00 AM, kharmin.7683 said:

That'd be a great trick when we already know it takes about 9 months for Anet to implement armor sets. What other content would you eliminate to make time/resources available for this? 

All other gemstore stuff ofc. Already have an overdose of weapon skins, mounts and gliders. Need some focus on good quality diverse buttcapeless properly scaling armor for once. Pretty soon boat skins will be wasting tons of slots by being the only new thing every tuesday.

Edited February 15, 2022 by Doggie.3184

[kharmin.7683]

4 minutes ago, Doggie.3184 said:

All other gemstore stuff ofc. Already have an overdose of weapon skins, mounts and gliders. Need some focus on good quality diverse buttcapeless properly scaling armor for once. Pretty soon boat skins will be wasting tons of slots by being the only new thing every tuesday.

So, you would eliminate ANet's biggest income generator and replace it with 9 month's worth of delay for 1 armor set to be released?  Not sure that fits the business plan.

As much as many complain about the quality and/or selection of items in the gem store, ANet has to bring in some cash to keep the game running.