Dear ArenaNet Team..

[Bladrid.9210]

Hello ArenaNet Team,

 

I am writing to you from Turkey and we have a request as the Turkish gaming community.

Buying a game in Turkey is quite difficult. Some companies help us a lot in this situation. For example; Blizzard, Bethesda, Amazon. They make regional pricing for us.

World of Warcraft Shadowlands: 40 € but 399 Turkish Liras (Fixed Exchange Rate 10).

The Elder Scrolls Online: 20 € but 179 Turkish Liras (Fixed Exchange Rate 9).

New World: 40 € but 177 Turkish Liras (Fixed Exchange Rate about 4.5).
 
Despite all these pricing, Guild Wars 2: 50 Euro, 910 Turkish Lira in Turkey (Exchange Rate 18) thanks to economy 😞

We ask you to at least keep the exchange rate at 10 like Blizzard and make Guild Wars 2 accessible to us.

 

We believe you will help us, thank you.

[costepj.5120]

1 hour ago, Deoxys.9482 said:

World of Warcraft Shadowlands: 40 € but 399 Turkish Liras (Fixed Exchange Rate 10).

World of Warcraft + 1 year of gameplay: 40 € + 156 € = 196 € but 1960 Turkish Liras (Fixed Exchange Rate 10).

Guild Wars 2 + unlimited gameplay : 50 Euro, 910 Turkish Lira in Turkey (Exchange Rate 18)

[Luthan.5236]

Such a think would - of course - be best ... economically. If you really could use optimized prices for each group of customer. With then more people from Turkey paying for the game and generating more income in total - though the amount paid per person might be lower.

The problem is with regions of the servers - and other peoply trying to access a lower price (which then would totally lower the income should they succeed). I can imagine that in GW2 with only 2 big regions (players from Turkey probably play in EU) it would just be enough to use proxies to get the cheap price - even for gems. While you still could play normally at best ping with the proxy disabled then. (Or VPN nowadays.)

I do not know how WoW handles this. (Would have to google first.) Own turkish "region" (with own servers and when you have bought you could only play there) - would be the best solution. (Needs a big playerbase though.) Steam has a lot of checks within the payment options I think. Credit card has the regional info afaik. (Only way to bypass this - to buy at russian price for example which some people online make guides about since that one is cheap - afaik is with PaySafe cards.)

I guess without adding an extra region ... this could only work with (then not possible with gem cards  - only buying directly at GW2) checking the region via the payment options. Turkish bank account or credit card with region there.

I just think ... ArenaNet does not want this (to make safety checks to avoid people from another region buying at their price). And fears that other (too many) people would try to get that cheaper price then.

Edited July 27, 2022 by Luthan.5236

[Linken.6345]

Even if they did this would it not be 499 lire = 12.5 fixed exchange rate

Since it is 50 instead of 40

[Bladrid.9210]

14 hours ago, costepj.5120 said:

World of Warcraft + 1 year of gameplay: 40 € + 156 € = 196 € but 1960 Turkish Liras (Fixed Exchange Rate 10).

Guild Wars 2 + unlimited gameplay : 50 Euro, 910 Turkish Lira in Turkey (Exchange Rate 18)

Just 6 months ago, the exchange rate was 12. (1 EUR = 12 TL), today it is 18.25. You can't understand inflation in Turkey. This is the main reason why we want a fixed rate.

[mythical.6315]

Would they make much money at all from countries with a lower exchange rate?

[Inculpatus cedo.9234]

If they haven't done it after 10 years, probably not gonna happen.  🤷‍♂️

[costepj.5120]

2 hours ago, Deoxys.9482 said:

Just 6 months ago, the exchange rate was 12. (1 EUR = 12 TL), today it is 18.25. You can't understand inflation in Turkey. This is the main reason why we want a fixed rate.

But if you buy it today, you need never spend any more money on GW2 and can carry on playing until the servers shut down, so inflation is irrelevant. In ten years my total outlay on the base game and 3 expansions amounts to £130. Today you can get all that content for less than half the price.

[Sarius.9285]

3 hours ago, mythical.6315 said:

Would they make much money at all from countries with a lower exchange rate?

they would. Considering it's no extra production cost on a digital product. And that they probably would attract more customers with an affordable price 

[LSD.4673]

19 hours ago, costepj.5120 said:

World of Warcraft + 1 year of gameplay: 40 € + 156 € = 196 € but 1960 Turkish Liras (Fixed Exchange Rate 10).

Guild Wars 2 + unlimited gameplay : 50 Euro, 910 Turkish Lira in Turkey (Exchange Rate 18)

Irrelevant. It's like saying a £10,000 Corsa is cheaper than a £40,000 Impreza, to a guy asking about regional pricing issues.

Anet doesn't bother with regional pricing because its owner barely bothers with the non-Chinese market. Look at Anets marketing over the past 10 years and you'll see they have no desire to invest in anything market-specific. Especially when you factor in fears of key reselling from places with weaker currency (and thus the need for region locking, which = investment).

[Bladrid.9210]

2 hours ago, costepj.5120 said:

But if you buy it today, you need never spend any more money on GW2 and can carry on playing until the servers shut down, so inflation is irrelevant. In ten years my total outlay on the base game and 3 expansions amounts to £130. Today you can get all that content for less than half the price.

My dear friend. I am not selfish, I care about low income people and next generation gamers. Yes, regional pricing can reduce profits, but one is greater than zero.

Edited July 28, 2022 by Deoxys.9482

[costepj.5120]

52 minutes ago, LSD.4673 said:

Irrelevant. It's like saying a £10,000 Corsa is cheaper than a £40,000 Impreza, to a guy asking about regional pricing issues.

Except that's not the topic. The OP wants a fixed exchange rate. But GW2 is cheaper even without a favourable fixed exchange rate. The OP wants to future proof GW2 pricing against inflation, but with no sub model, inflation only applies if you plan to make a lot of gem shop purchases.

[SoftFootpaws.9134]

The problem is when other games do this, players always buy the game with another currency. This was a major problem in the last MMO I played, so much they had to stop selling in the entire region, with many players even opening up foreign bank accounts just to buy things cheaper.

 

Your heart is in the right place, but people will always find a way to abuse the system. ArenaNet isn't Amazon or Blizzard and can't afford the potential losses in place of gains. The only way this would work if its sold locally, and only physically (boxed), where its very hard for foreigners to get a copy with your currency.

 

(Cheap alt accounts are already a major problem in this game.)

Edited July 28, 2022 by Mariyuuna.6508

[Linken.6345]

57 minutes ago, Mariyuuna.6508 said:

The problem is when other games do this, players always buy the game with another currency. This was a major problem in the last MMO I played, so much they had to stop selling in the entire region, with many players even opening up foreign bank accounts just to buy things cheaper.

 

Your heart is in the right place, but people will always find a way to abuse the system. ArenaNet isn't Amazon or Blizzard and can't afford the potential losses in place of gains. The only way this would work if its sold locally, and only physically (boxed), where its very hard for foreigners to get a copy with your currency.

And whats to say some people dont buy physical boxes for 600 lire and resell it for 800 lire to other countries to earn money?

[Bladrid.9210]

1 hour ago, Sunchaser.9854 said:

 

Yeah honestly, might be a bit weird but there's a side game i help mod with a 22-27k active player base. It's not a mainstream mmorpg, but more of like a gacha egg clicker on a certain site that takes a certain 75.5% revenue cut and pays 24.5% of revenue to workers. So the kinda predatory gacha model is like the only way we can pay 5-10 staff since to even pay one person a 15000$ mcWage of working part time at mcdonalds, we need 60,000$ of Revenue. 

 

There's actually a bizarre thing with our game platform at least. Where due to regional pricing, the game's currency is sold at 40% of the cost in some areas in this super confusing and messy area. It's sold through legal platforms from regional pricing to local people and converts to currency the same. But then it has this huge gray or black resell market where people will buy say, the currency Giftcards to cross or real world trade while we're given no answer but blank emails saying that they don't take out of game reports. While others literally purchase it up to the 8000$ range (Literal 800,000 Units of the Game's currency), while others are more commonly in the 1000$-3,000$ range. 

 

I kid you not. I actually did some Steam trading back when steam keys for tf2 keys was pretty white market (you could do it ingame and it seemed encourage to advertise that tf2 items were tradable for anything on steam as a VALVE feature). But yeah. As long as regional pricing can't be denied from region locking or vpns. People will sell at the lowest price and it opens up scams galores for people to sell fake goods or steal accounts and just lots of gray area. Regional pricing would probably open up lots of cross trade/scam potential for people from cheaper countries to sell cheaper gems as well which from a game moderation perspective is incredibly misfire. (Someone purchasing 100$ to send as a gift to a brother or to cross trade appears about THE same to a third party.) 

Regional pricing isn't a bad idea, just anyone who's worked in another game knows it'll be cross traded or probably used via vpn to fund cheaper bots and alt accounts. There's a reason why games even with 1-2$ minimum dollar purchases need less botting protections than complete f2p ones. 

 

Regardless even at 60$ vs 10$. Gw2 is still a pretty potentially cheap game for a buy it for life model. Sure people will gripe about the 20$ cat, but gw2 is actually one of the few mmorpgs to successfully do a cheap no sub model funded with cosmetics.  {Even though from player pov it is still kinda lame there's not even many earnable ones either lmao. XD. I guess i can't complain. Our gacha game literally has to sell near INFINITE power to pay half of a living wage to devs with a 75.5% cut. It's kinda sobering how a game with 3,000$ spenders can only afford to send 2-3 people to a 10,000$ a year school when a 75.5% cut is applied. ) 

Pretty logical and grateful answer, thank you. 🏆

[Dayra.7405]

 

There is only one tip for living in an inflationary country: Spend your money fast, the faster you spend it, the more you get for it.
 

ANet needs its money in Dollar, if they would have a fixed price in an inflationary currency, they would get less and less from sales to pay their costs.

Edited July 28, 2022 by Dayra.7405

[mythical.6315]

4 hours ago, Sarius.9285 said:

they would. Considering it's no extra production cost on a digital product. And that they probably would attract more customers with an affordable price 

There are costs beyond the game itself as it is not playable offline. 

[Sunchaser.9854]

Just now, Deoxys.9482 said:

Pretty logical and grateful answer, thank you. 🏆

Yeah, maybe I went a too bit into detail. But black /gray market trade was a huge part of my modding in the game and people were literally often purchasing 3000-8000$ worth on single accounts to trade it to others and rwt it or profit. We weren't/aren't even a conventional game business either.

 

Just someone who was there to mod the discord and then got into looking at the numbers to keep the game healthy. Im pretty sure any mainstream mmorpg should probably (?) Have a bigger net problem then a small fangame? (But we were literally handling at least 30-70+ profiles of 1-3k avg tip spenders are 8k was our highest) 

 

I suppose gw2 could mitigate it by region locking the games. But region locked pricing tends to attract a big reseller mark and server costs can be fixed. It's a game that's already a very generous f2p to max levels and even just pof + hot is a good value for 15$. A reseller market could risk opening up a botter haven, even our small game has vpn users for cheaper purchases and if gems or ultimate collection was sold cheap enough to be resold, people reselling region locked gw2 copies could be easily possible. 

[Sarius.9285]

2 hours ago, mythical.6315 said:

There are costs beyond the game itself as it is not playable offline. 

obviously? Im talking about Anet offering regional pricing, which wouldn't cost them anything....

[Sunchaser.9854]

I mean regional pricing isn't new, but the copies have to be region locked and there might be server costs behind the scenes. Big hosting is likely cheaper via scale than small hosting, but it wasn't uncommon for l4d2 servers to pay like 10-15$ a month for a 4 man server, and l4d2 was a single map game.

 

It's probably a pretty negligable cost, but lets say a 24/7 player slot might run about 2-3$ a month. And a player might be on, say, 4-8 hours a day. Gw2 could probably vary, but considering you can easily like get POF on sale for like 15$ and then play a couple months off just Path of fire and HoT and get mounts. A 15$-50$ buy it for life model isn't that unfriendly. 

Sure, having no living seasons to get a 1st or second viper trinket if you play vipers since you can't use laurels for Viper rings or trinkets which seem the primary intended double ring/assessory method kinda sucks. But hey, i mean. for Wow, you pay 15$, sub and then the sub expires and you can't even play the game again even IF you bought the expac.

Not endorsing the Wow model, but as far as mmorpgs go, Gw2 with a buy it for life model that starts at the cost of a 1 month wow Sub isn't the worst player model out there tbf. When i was a kid, i wanted everything to be free, but then every game i played would go bankrupt or run out of funds for development. Now i like paying a little for a game i know will continue and all the grinds i pay for will leave it alive years later. 

Edited July 28, 2022 by Sunchaser.9854

[Cyninja.2954]

1 hour ago, Sarius.9285 said:

obviously? Im talking about Anet offering regional pricing, which wouldn't cost them anything....

There is literally an explanation in this thread which goes into detail how it does cost the developer if copies are not region locked, which GW2 so far has not been doing in regards to NA and EU.

Not region locked keys in countries with lower value currency can lead to customers buying the product there instead of their own country, see Netflix/Youtube/Amazon Prime subscription for Eu countries in Turkey, which does "cost" the developer/publisher revenue.

Trade of product keys is not something new or unheard of, it is being done all the time and it most certainly does create loss.

Edited July 28, 2022 by Cyninja.2954

[Vancho.8750]

They might do regional pricing with Steam since Arenanet does not have such system in place but Steam does, it really depends is it worth for Arenanet to do it and then comes the whole issue with the gems being so tied to the ingame economy which would be ripe for abuse or the gem/gold conversion, gifting , sending mail have to be turn off in the region.

There is also the issue that GW2 works on mega servers so you can't really rope in a region and exclude it, which means there would be a need of a separate mega server which I do not see happening for just Turkiye or even Middle East/North Africa, they haven't done one for SEA and the company is owned by Koreans, and SEA is probably the big MMO profits region. 

[mythical.6315]

1 hour ago, Sarius.9285 said:

obviously? Im talking about Anet offering regional pricing, which wouldn't cost them anything....

With a VPN, the pricing would. Why pay $30 for something when I can just hop onto a VPN and pay a fraction of that amount elsewhere.

Edited July 28, 2022 by mythical.6315

[Sunchaser.9854]

And even if not a VPN, what happens if you region lock someone to a country or if it's a vpn and they move? Do you lock their account?

A big problem with the separate minor game i modded is: cross traders and RWTers always try to pass them off as "innocent players" "donating for charity", and a huge problem is someone giving "1000$" worth of video game currency "out of the good of their hearts" with a (300$ check sent to russia) and receipts we found on their facebook page was just the "appreciation gift"..

 

{The donation place? A cross trading reputation fourm.. I kid you not...}
People will be caught red handed with literal receipts posted in the open air on cross trading rep threads.. And still play themselves off as innocent cross trading 1000$s when caught.

 

Others are literally spots we're left just as confused as anyone else. Like we had one kid... literally spent like 2000$ in a single day from beggar to whale in one day. (How he even got 2000$ as a kid in 1 day is beyond me).. Lots of people just see the price point side of whales. It's just as absurd to be a person who tries to check to make sure the items weren't hacked or being cross traded/rwt in our game, Since pretty much EVERYTHING was tradable, bis gear, and people would fuse and merge all their items to make the best stuff. But that'd be getting off topic into a gacha item fuser game. 

Of course well, other games have the freedom to choose what they want or mod or don't want to mod. But yeah our's is a kiddie game i just played to fill up the mmorpg hole after i quit WoW and got tired of privates and the trial and abandonwared f2p mmorpgs. (Where f2p often comes with no development abandonware with p2w gear cashshops and dead content/ 0 people zones. ) 

Now to clarify, it wouldn't be the end of the world, if they want to accept cheaper pricing, it's their game, their model, and region locked keys have been done before and i doubt most general people would want to bother with a turkey key that locks them to turkey servers. But i don't know if turkey servers would even pay for the turkey players unless they get lumped under a EU section(?)

 

Even then, Gw2 is still significantly cheaper than most mmorpgs. Considering you can play the game f2p 1-80 and honestly most of the important parts of the game (mounts, best story parts [heavy personal opinion for HoT's dark jungle and PoF's fun mounts and Joko], for 15$. Gw2 gives a pretty good value as one of the f2p games where a cosmetic cash shop selling 20$ cosmetics without p2w gear actually works.

 

The only minor problem is the only outfits that sell are the ones cool enough, everyone feels left out not having them haha. XD And they won't give out any for free or even unlockable achievement mount skins(?) [Curse you, Cosmetics!] XD) 

 

But i'd be lying if being charged for haircuts wasn't the one minor pet peeve that i'll always hate lol. XD. I'll always really regret not having the ability to change my earlier kitten Charrs with the ugly smashed in pug faces or spaced out cats into nicer faces and skins haha. XD. Cause i think gw2 has one of the more fun character creation menus i always want to mess with. Yet it's the one game that'd charge you 4$ a use without a way around it that's so irksome haha. 

I think that regional pricing works well for single player games, but for Gw2, it's already pretty cheap. It'd have to be region locked, still pay server fees, be at a price point people couldn't use it to fund botting or buy on vpn and fund NA/EU afk bots.. And.. hmm.. 🤔. It's still just 15$ for Pof/HoT on sale for a buy for life model though. Maybe +30-50$ for LS4 -3 and a Griffon/skyscale, or ascended gear if you value gold farming above 2$ a hour. But you can all make that ingame too technically with gold to gems.