Get rid of Transmute Charges and make all skins free to apply?

[MoriMoriMori.5349]

@phs.6089 said:

@coso.9173 said:Like I said I don't like to pvp. That includes wvw.Maybe they should just remove TCS from pvp or wvw modes and then all those people who pvp and never use them can understand the problem a bit.

Make a syvari, pass trough first instance, turn around, do Grove completion, teleport to Rata Sum finish it as well, that is 20-30 minutes run, like 2 pvp matches. Rinse, repeat.I played 5 seasons, have 500 TC, try to spend half of that time on PVE map completion, see how many you will get.

..and that's to save about a 20 cents of real money :) Just buy it with gems if whatever you get for free isn't enough, I say. You are awarded 3+ charges for free per month (login rewards), plus some from map completions. If it's not enough, you can buy it from market with gold (about 10g each), or with real money (about 1.5$ for 5-pack). Seems like a generous enough offer already.

[VAHNeunzehnsechundsiebzig.]

buy game: people complainpay subscription: people complainf2p, except cosmetic stuff: people complainf2p, p2w: people spend tons of money and complainbuy game, pay subscription AND p2w: people flog to it.

In all seriousness: gw2 is very, very cheap. Some purely cosmetic and utterly optional quality of life things cost a tiny amount of money and people complain and want everything for free.

Please answer me this: who will pay the devs and who will pay for the servers?

[MrRuin.9740]

Don't care, get so many of these for free in game anyway that it wouldn't matter to me if they just got rid of them or not.

[Rauderi.8706]

The transmutation system is less convenient than in other MMOs I've played. I certainly wouldn't be fussed if they scrubbed the system in favor if more freedom in appearance.Would I pay for transmutation charges? Nah. I get plenty, and having mostly Charr, fashion options are limited af anyway. Would I contribute coin to getting a full skin overhaul on existing stuff so it actually works and stops clipping? Heck yeah.

[coso.9173]

it's not about me wanting to change the look of a lv 6 character, it's an example of how cheap it is.and sure, i had to unlock the look by my main before, but that was done just by doing the main quest and sidequests. I've never grinded anything in ESO, and still i've got hundreds of thousands of gold and changing my looks costs me 1k at most.in here i have to grind something to be able to do so. But like I said before, I understand that GW2 offers much more content for free than ESO or FFXIV, so for them to charge more for cosmetics make sense, I only disagree with giving more charges to people who do pvp/WvW than to those who do PVE.

[kharmin.7683]

@coso.9173 said:I only disagree with giving more charges to people who do pvp/WvW than to those who do PVE.IIRC this is because the reward structures are significantly different. I thought someone determined that those who play PvP/WvW won't enjoy the same rewards as PvE players so this difference was by design?

[AlexxxDelta.1806]

@"VAHNeunzehnsechundsiebzig.3618" said:buy game: people complainpay subscription: people complainf2p, except cosmetic stuff: people complainf2p, p2w: people spend tons of money and complainbuy game, pay subscription AND p2w: people flog to it.

In all seriousness: gw2 is very, very cheap. Some purely cosmetic and utterly optional quality of life things cost a tiny amount of money and people complain and want everything for free.

Please answer me this: who will pay the devs and who will pay for the servers?

Who complained about the original B2P model from core GW2? I 'm pretty sure I remember it being universally lauded by both critics and players at launch as the most fair offering in a landscape full of f2p P2W or subscription services.

[VAHNeunzehnsechundsiebzig.]

buy once, play forever works for offline games without any updates ever. It does not work with an online game needing serious server capacity to run.

[Leo G.4501]

@AlexxxDelta.1806 said:

@"VAHNeunzehnsechundsiebzig.3618" said:buy game: people complainpay subscription: people complainf2p, except cosmetic stuff: people complainf2p, p2w: people spend tons of money and complainbuy game, pay subscription AND p2w: people flog to it.

In all seriousness: gw2 is very, very cheap. Some purely cosmetic and utterly optional quality of life things cost a tiny amount of money and people complain and want everything for free.

Please answer me this: who will pay the devs and who will pay for the servers?

Who complained about the original B2P model from core GW2? I 'm pretty sure I remember it being universally lauded by both critics and players at launch as the most fair offering in a landscape full of f2p P2W or subscription services.

Yeah, I think the complaints started to roll in when content got left by the wayside such as dungeons. I think the devs ended up deciding to make the living world updates persistent, not because players complained but because if they didn't, there would be even less content to participate in.

[TheBlakeNorn.5732]

I use to play DC Universe Online and in that game, you could change your look any time you felt like it. When I started playing GW2 and found out that you had to use transmutes, it was a total turn off for me. There were times where I got really annoyed with running out cause I have an addiction to changing my look a lot!!! I've been WvW so much that I've collected over 300 trans, so as long as I keep myself in these high zones I'll be ok. I still think transmutes was a yuck idea, coming from games like DCUO.

[Donari.5237]

I'd be happy with an interim step: Make all account bound skins convertible to transmute charges. That way if you buy a skin but don't immediately use it, it's not using up storage space and still provides the one free application the skins currently offer, just banked in the wallet rather than in inventory slots.

[Klipso.8653]

@Donari.5237 said:I'd be happy with an interim step: Make all account bound skins convertible to transmute charges. That way if you buy a skin but don't immediately use it, it's not using up storage space and still provides the one free application the skins currently offer, just banked in the wallet rather than in inventory slots.

Would be nice, I just throw the skins away

[Dreamy Lu.3865]

I voted no. For me, to swap a skin is like any other "nice to have" options of the game: We have to earn it. But that's me. :3

[Mithos.9023]

Now I think I have an idea that could serve as a middle way.What if instead of using charges to reskins, transmutation charges are used to unlock skins? That way transmuting skins being free could be a thing as it would not devalue the charges. This could help the charges to not being seen that negative as it is now the case. We see discussions about them every view weeks and I got the feeling that there is not a small percentage of people who dislike them. With them being used to unlock they become a tool that adds value to your account, instead of being an annoyance with only temporal effect. To explain, a charge used to change skin is lost but its value is lost the moment as well, when you want another skin in its place. As being unlocks, their value is permanent.

So how would it work? The basic stays the same if you bind a piece of Armor to your account or salvage it the skin would go to your wardrobe, but to get there a transmutation charge is automatically used. If you don’t have any left, unlocking skins wouldn’t work. I have to add a second idea here, because nobody would like to lose a skin wile salvaging because they didn’t check if they have enough charges left. A new queue is added. A skin that would be eligible for your account to be unlocked, through salvaging or binding, will be added to the queue. If enough charges are at hand, they will be used, and the skin will be added from the queue to the wardrobe. Now that it was moved to the wardrobe you can use it for free whenever you like. If you don’t have enough charges the skin stays in the queue and is not lost. So you have a chance to earn charges and unlock it later.

With this it would satisfy the people who like to change their look regularly as it would be free now. On the other side charges still have value. They might even increase in value as people would want to continue adding skins to their wardrobe. Therefore, arenanet doesn’t lose out on their sales. A win-win situation, transmuting becomes free and charges might increase in perceived value.

I still see two points that would need to be taken care of. First the number of charges you get might need rebalance. Currently, I seem to have unlocked 2400 of 5561 skins. Even as wvw player, I might have not had enough charges go come close to 2400 skins ever. Even if I could count the charges that I have used up I still think I would only reach 1/3 of that, at best. More charges would need to be introduced to offset that as it could be far too restrictive otherwise. I don’t know exactly but having a 1:0,8 ratio of skins to charges seems optimum for me. With that you can unlock a lot of skins but you can run out as well and therefore be inclined to buy them. But hat is for areneanet to decide.

Last point would be new players. For them the number of unlockable skins is the highest. But a new account starts with no charges. I think here we would need a small boost in the beginning, for example through achievements to not let them behind too far. For example, achievements that follow your first character you level to 80. Every five levels you get a bunch of charges to have a better start. I am for an achievement here as it would be single use instead of upping level up rewards. If it would be level up rewards, we would see a lot of people simply farming them through their build up tomes of knowledge which would bring veteran players far too ahead again.

[kharmin.7683]

@TheBlakeNorn.5732 said:I use to play DC Universe Online and in that game, you could change your look any time you felt like it.Was that a sub-based game?

[sokeenoppa.5384]

This game is "too free" already. More free stuff imo Will make quality of game worse

[AlexxxDelta.1806]

@kharmin.7683 said:

@TheBlakeNorn.5732 said:I use to play DC Universe Online and in that game, you could change your look any time you felt like it.Was that a sub-based game?

No, DCUO is f2p.

[Etria.3642]

Be glad this isn't swtor--you have to buy a dye each time you want to use it; and you cannot remove it. Couple that with some of them costing a ton and yuck. Coming into gw2 to find dyes, once you had them, were unlocked account-wide made me very happy. Swtor also had you buy outfit 'slots' to store looks, these were per character. If you wanted to change otherwise, you needed the actual item. Talk about an inventory mess.

[Etterwyn.5263]

@coso.9173 said:it's not about me wanting to change the look of a lv 6 character, it's an example of how cheap it is.and sure, i had to unlock the look by my main before, but that was done just by doing the main quest and sidequests. I've never grinded anything in ESO, and still i've got hundreds of thousands of gold and changing my looks costs me 1k at most.in here i have to grind something to be able to do so. But like I said before, I understand that GW2 offers much more content for free than ESO or FFXIV, so for them to charge more for cosmetics make sense, I only disagree with giving more charges to people who do pvp/WvW than to those who do PVE.

But... the game awards more materials, gold, pretty much everything else, to those who PVE. Competitive modes have horrible rewards in comparison. However, I agree that it's out of balance in the sense that the kind of reward competitive players would want is not Transmutes, but they get flooded with them anyway.

I wouldn't mind TC's becoming tradeable, that would at least add value to time spent in PVP/WVW. Granted, I just convert Skirmish Chests to unidentified dyes, but I bet TC's would hold a higher value.

[Aeolus.3615]

Skins are already free to aply due how transmute charges are easy to aquire.

[Leo G.4501]

@Mithos.9023 said:Now I think I have an idea that could serve as a middle way.What if instead of using charges to reskins, transmutation charges are used to unlock skins? That way transmuting skins being free could be a thing as it would not devalue the charges. This could help the charges to not being seen that negative as it is now the case. We see discussions about them every view weeks and I got the feeling that there is not a small percentage of people who dislike them. With them being used to unlock they become a tool that adds value to your account, instead of being an annoyance with only temporal effect. To explain, a charge used to change skin is lost but its value is lost the moment as well, when you want another skin in its place. As being unlocks, their value is permanent.

I like that there are people who still think outside the box...or aren't afraid to put their ideas out there and flesh them out.

@Mithos.9023 said:So how would it work? The basic stays the same if you bind a piece of Armor to your account or salvage it the skin would go to your wardrobe, but to get there a transmutation charge is automatically used. If you don’t have any left, unlocking skins wouldn’t work. I have to add a second idea here, because nobody would like to lose a skin wile salvaging because they didn’t check if they have enough charges left. A new queue is added. A skin that would be eligible for your account to be unlocked, through salvaging or binding, will be added to the queue. If enough charges are at hand, they will be used, and the skin will be added from the queue to the wardrobe. Now that it was moved to the wardrobe you can use it for free whenever you like. If you don’t have enough charges the skin stays in the queue and is not lost. So you have a chance to earn charges and unlock it later.

With this it would satisfy the people who like to change their look regularly as it would be free now. On the other side charges still have value. They might even increase in value as people would want to continue adding skins to their wardrobe. Therefore, arenanet doesn’t lose out on their sales. A win-win situation, transmuting becomes free and charges might increase in perceived value.

I still see two points that would need to be taken care of. First the number of charges you get might need rebalance. Currently, I seem to have unlocked 2400 of 5561 skins. Even as wvw player, I might have not had enough charges go come close to 2400 skins ever. Even if I could count the charges that I have used up I still think I would only reach 1/3 of that, at best. More charges would need to be introduced to offset that as it could be far too restrictive otherwise. I don’t know exactly but having a 1:0,8 ratio of skins to charges seems optimum for me. With that you can unlock a lot of skins but you can run out as well and therefore be inclined to buy them. But hat is for areneanet to decide.

Last point would be new players. For them the number of unlockable skins is the highest. But a new account starts with no charges. I think here we would need a small boost in the beginning, for example through achievements to not let them behind too far. For example, achievements that follow your first character you level to 80. Every five levels you get a bunch of charges to have a better start. I am for an achievement here as it would be single use instead of upping level up rewards. If it would be level up rewards, we would see a lot of people simply farming them through their build up tomes of knowledge which would bring veteran players far too ahead again.

I'm not a big fan of the idea as a whole but I feel there could be permutations of the idea that could fuse with the current system so as to preserve the values players have become accustomed to as well as improve it.

My alteration of your suggestion would suggest another layer of the wardrobe dubbed the "premium wardrobe" (because I can't think of a better name at the moment). The current wardrobe would remain the same but your suggestion to have some skins being free to swap into would require you use "Transmutation Charges" to promote a regular skin from the wardrobe to the premium wardrobe and the amount of charges it would cost to get a skin to promote could vary depending on various factors. Some of those factors:

• How many times you've transmuted to or from a skin. Every time you swap to a particular skin, an internal value can tick down until it eventually becomes free to swap to like an achievement checkbox.
• The tier of skin it is. So simple skins could be rather cheap to make freely accessible but BL chest weapons or achievement backpieces would be more costly to make premium
• How many skins you currently have opened for premium use. I feel the objective should be to take off the edge of the costs and making armor that you use often accessible, not making all reskinning to be as convenient as possible. Convenience in MMOs has a premium cost to it always and if everything is made too convenient, the game's staying power is lost. So the more skins you have promoted, the pricier it can become.

I feel this idea captures some of the intent of your idea while also making a transition from the current system to something similar to your suggestion without needing to worry about possible contingencies that might upset the players while also retaining the value that "Transmutation Charges" have. They could even introduce "Prime Transmutation Charges" specifically for promoting unlocked skins at a premium cost in the gemstore.

[Justine.6351]

If only I could sell mine on the tp. Although they wouldn't sell for much considering how flooded the market would be.

[Shirlias.8104]

I have over 700 charges but I will be okay removing them from the game.Big part of the game is about aesthetic and multi characters, and even if players won't change everyday their set, the possibility to do it whenever you want would be a great thing.

A good deal could be to allow players to pay a "only a charge" whatever the numbers of item skins replaced.New set? = 1 charge

[Deimos.4263]

I have at least 3 thousand charges and I enjoy the freedom to change my look at will without even thinking about it. It really sucked when I couldn't do that. I would be happier if everyone had this freedom from the start.

Goodwill and quality of life contribute significantly towards revenue and player retention, and nobody can say with confidence if removing these charges would be a net gain or loss. Even Anet's marketers with the current numbers don't know that. It just hasn't been tested. It would be a gamble, and they're probably not willing to risk it.

No-transmutation charge weekend, anyone?

[sorudo.9054]

@kharmin.7683 said:

@sorudo.9054 said:IMO they are getting a bit over the top with this, even the skins you buy from the gem store still need charges.i think that, with the armor skins already at quite a high price, a free-to-apply condition is something to make up for high prices.

Who is to determine if the prices are high? Seems to me that ANet has a better idea of the price point than anyone one of us.

well, i do have 13 years of MMO experience with a 12 years of singleplayer gaming experience before that.i see the same pattern in every MMO that asks crazy high prices, they ether don't get sold as much or ppl simply refuse to buy them at all.just looking at some other popular mmo's like rift, i can easily get an armor skin for about 50 points while it's 950 point per 5 euro.i can buy a whole skin collection for the points rift sells, in GW2 one single armor is pretty much as expensive as 1/4 the game.....