Why are Unusual Coins and Ancient Coins separate currencies?

[Mungrul.9358]

The game already suffers from ridiculous currency bloat, yet here we have two currencies that ultimately serve the same purpose and have a 1:1 trade value.

It's confusing and unnecessary.

ANet's ridiculous insistence on adding individual currencies for almost everything is already annoying, creating false complexity and obfuscating things that the player may not even know they could buy that would benefit them.
The amount of times I've bought something with one precious, rare currency, only to discover later on that I could have bought either the same thing or something functionally identical for a less valuable, more widely available currency is non-trivial, and feels like the game is spitefully punishing the player for not being able to keep track of which currencies buy what.

Yet here it's annoying and pointless. Because of the 1:1 trade ratio, there is literally nothing you can buy with one that you can't with the other.
The only purpose having these two currencies serves is to waste the player's time while they find a vendor to trade one for the other.

ANet, pick one and bin the other (obviously making sure to consolidate players' coins into the remaining one!)

Edited Thursday at 09:30 AM by Mungrul.9358

[jwaz.1908]

I believe it's so that you have to actually play the newest content to earn new rewards.  I remember seeing a message somewhere that says every time a new expac comes out, all unusual coins in your inventory will becoming ancient coins automatically, so you can't just unlock everything new instantly.

[Mungrul.9358]

Ah, thanks @jwaz.1908, that would explain things, although is still no less annoying.
As there's a way to exchange Unusual Coins for Ancient Coins, I had automatically assumed that the reverse was true, but upon further investigation, I'm mistaken.
I'd taken a year off when SotO released, so when I came back for JW, I only saw things that could be bought for Ancient Coins.

I'm not a fan of time-gating in games full stop, as I view it as being the most basic manifestation of the psychological manipulation tricks developers use to ensure players keep playing  their games. When you're using those tricks instead of relying on the actual gameplay, chances are, you're doing it for monetisation reasons.
It also has a tendency to engender toxic elitist sentiment and divide communities between the haves and the have-nots. Anyone who really cared about eliminating toxicity in their gaming communities could do worse than removing time-gating.

[Solnos.8045]

I think it’s pretty smart for the purpose you want right? It lets players have to play new content to get new stuff without having to always create a new currency leading to even more currency bloat. 

[Dean Calaway.9718]

2 hours ago, Mungrul.9358 said:

ANet's ridiculous insistence on adding individual currencies for almost everything is already annoying

That's so you actually have to play the game, not just AFK farm gold and drop a bag of it in the new content. 

[Dean Calaway.9718]

2 hours ago, Mungrul.9358 said:

eliminating toxicity in their gaming

Let me start by saying I never take anyone that uses the word toxic seriously.

2 hours ago, Mungrul.9358 said:

not a fan of time-gating in games (...) has a tendency to engender toxic elitist sentiment and divide communities between the haves and the have-nots.

How does this make any sense... ?

With time gates the average player actually has a chance to keep up with the perpetually online 30k played hours players, if you really wanna see the difference between haves and have nots lift those time gates and you'll be back here after a month complaining you can't keep up with inflation and Anet should do something about those people that have all the time in the world to play and are leaving you in the dust.

[Hotride.2187]

53 minutes ago, Solnos.8045 said:

I think it’s pretty smart for the purpose you want right? It lets players have to play new content to get new stuff without having to always create a new currency leading to even more currency bloat. 

Doesn't it mean you just have to wait until the next expansion, to get all the stuff from the previous one "for free" (assuming you've stacked so many coins)?

[Pifil.5193]

The point of these two currencies is actually to reduce the number of currencies in the game. We now have only two types of "coins" regardless of how many expansions they add,

If they hadn't decided to consolidate the coin currencies like this then they'd have EoD coins and SotO coins and JW coins and whatever the next expansion is coins.

Now they have one type of coin for the current expansion and one for everything that came before it. Much better.

[Pifil.5193]

3 minutes ago, Hotride.2187 said:

Doesn't it mean you just have to wait until the next expansion, to get all the stuff from the previous one "for free" (assuming you've stacked so many coins)?

Yep, if you want to wait then that's true, assuming you have the coins you can effectively buy up everything that remains the moment the next expansion comes out.

But you'll have to get the coins for that new expansion's stuff.

[Lucy.3728]

2 hours ago, Mungrul.9358 said:

Because of the 1:1 trade ratio

I didn't even know you can trade one for the other. Wouldn't even come to my mind to look that up.

I always thought that one is to market the most recent expansion and gets transformed to the other with next expansion so people have to collect from 0 in the most recent release.

But when I can trade one for the other then it's really useless and I feel fooled.

[yoni.7015]

5 minutes ago, Lucy.3728 said:

I didn't even know you can trade one for the other. Wouldn't even come to my mind to look that up.

I always thought that one is to market the most recent expansion and gets transformed to the other with next expansion so people have to collect from 0 in the most recent release.

But when I can trade one for the other then it's really useless and I feel fooled.

You can trade unusual coin for ancient coin but you can’t trade ancient coin for unusual coin 

[Lucy.3728]

1 minute ago, yoni.7015 said:

You can trade unusual coin for ancient coin but you can’t trade ancient coin for unusual coin 

Ah ok.

Bad trade then.

[Remus Darkblight.1673]

5 hours ago, Mungrul.9358 said:

Ah, thanks @jwaz.1908, that would explain things, although is still no less annoying.
As there's a way to exchange Unusual Coins for Ancient Coins, I had automatically assumed that the reverse was true, but upon further investigation, I'm mistaken.
I'd taken a year off when SotO released, so when I came back for JW, I only saw things that could be bought for Ancient Coins.

I'm not a fan of time-gating in games full stop, as I view it as being the most basic manifestation of the psychological manipulation tricks developers use to ensure players keep playing  their games. When you're using those tricks instead of relying on the actual gameplay, chances are, you're doing it for monetisation reasons.
It also has a tendency to engender toxic elitist sentiment and divide communities between the haves and the have-nots. Anyone who really cared about eliminating toxicity in their gaming communities could do worse than removing time-gating.

As @jwaz.1908 already said, the whole point is so that you cannot hoard unusual coins during the current expac and then drop them all at once on new items when the next expac is released.

It's not time-gating as such, it's so everyone goes into the new expac with a balance of zero coins. You still get to keep the extra unusual coins you earned as ancient coins. This has the bonus secondary effect of allowing you to use ancient coins earned through any previous expac on any of the items available in all but the most recent content. For example, let's say you didn't get around to making legendary armour during SotO, now that JW has released and SotO is no longer the latest expac, you can farm ancient coins in Soto, EoD, or convert your JW unusual coins into ancient coins for your armour. This makes it much easier to complete older content quickly and catch up.

Unfortunately it seems Anet can't catch a break here since on the one hand you have the people that complain about it being a time gate, yet if they let everyone hoard and spend unusual coins instead, people would just dump them all in the first week of a new expac and then complain they have nothing to do.

[Alester.7063]

This is also the case for Prophet Shards, where green ones are for the current Expansion and Blue ones are for everything else. Green ones are not obtainable currently, but I'd assume they will be used as currency in the new raid.