Why are Build Templates so Expensive?

[TinkTinkPOOF.9201]

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@TinkTinkPOOF.9201 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@"Elden Arnaas.4870" said:re: ANet needs to make money - I see this all the time on the forums. Yes, ANet is a business and businesses need to make money. Then ANet can make stuff worth buying and charge a reasonable price. Their build and gear templates are better than nothing. But they didn't replace nothing, they replaced ArcDPS's templates.

And ANet waited for so long to re-add templates(GW1 had templates they were removed for GW2) that many players really didn't feel the need for them, diminishing the perceived need. Then ANet allowed a 3rd party substitute to be distributed. It was from everything I've heard a well designed, easy to use product. And it had the tremendous advantage of being

free

. So ANet let this exist for a while, allowing the competition. Then made themselves the bad guy when it was taken out of service.(Though this was agreed upon ahead of time) So ANet made a hostile market for the release of build and gear templates. They should have priced them better. At least they still allow the offline storage of the text codes. But that requires that the players devise their own system of storing and organizing builds.

except that majority that did not use arcdps did get great new content. The fact is it did take a lot of time and money to build templates, otherwise they would have done it earlier. There's a world of difference between building a plugin and building professional robust software.

Source on the "a lot of time and money"? Because if it did, they might think of hiring someone competent. As one person, in their free time, coded the exact same thing with more features, and being limited and restricted on what could be done since he only had default API access like everyone else does and all changes had to be approved by anet. And after all of that, it was still free.

The fact anet came out with templates is NOT the issue, the issue is that the 3rd pary templates worked great for those who used them, anet (as shown in my post above) stated that the addon was safe to use as far as ToS goes as it only used the default API of the game to work. That is their own words, then they tell him he can't distributed it anymore without legal action or arcdps as a whole being marked as illegal software and probably either being blocked or result in users getting banned for it. Now, nothing else had changed, so we know it was not for ToS reasons, the ONLY reason was a money grab. Had they released templates and allowed him to continue with the addon as well, no one would have issue with this.

It's their game and platform, they can do as they wish, but I am the one who forks over the money to keep it going. And templates were a "we don't care about the players, we have a worse system that we are going to charge high prices for and we are going to block all other options even though it doesn't break our ToS and only uses the API that we provided for people to make 3rd party addons for."

THAT^^^, that right there is what made people mad.

you know this world has become full of people who demand everything, and complain about everything, its a sad fact of this greedy resource consuming society we have in the west (getting oh so mad at computer games). In reality resources in this world are finite. Evidently it did cost a lot of time and money to develop, because Anet knew there was demand and that people would pay for it (why didn't they 'money grab' earlier?!) There's a couple of possible answers to why Anet took ages to develop:

1: There are incompetent and they could not do it. Well we know Anet generally deliver good content, and we know they eventually did build it.2: They didn't know about the demand. We know that's not true.3: They had no resource and built other stuff with better cost/benefit for us the customer, and they knew there was a add-in out there that people could use in the mean time. Probable.

4. It was more difficult to build than amateur armchair developers realise. Probable. see 3.

Not everything has to have en evil/incompetent face when its not what you want, and sometimes you cant satisfy everyone all the time. In this case it was the majority of players that did not use arcdps that gained, arcdps users lost a bit. What option would you choose?

I always love the "lesser of two evils" excuse given for actions like this. However, there was no choice to be made, anet forced the removal of that choice, as again, like I stated above, if they had left the addon alone, and released templates, even if they cost $100 each, no one here would care.

This is called a monopoly (as every company has on it's own products), and they made the choice to remove an option from users to secure it's templates place, despite you believing this is just some happenstance by anet, this was not with good intentions to users, had this been simply "anet realizing what users wanted" and were after adding features to the game, they would have left arcdps templates alone, again, what changed other than anet releasing their paid version? That is a money grab and nothing else.

I guess deltaconnected is an "armchair developer" in your eyes? Because it's not an assumption at this point of how much work was involved, as he DID build the addon as a one man show in his free time. Not only that but he also had to patch it in his free time every time anet released a new game patch. So not only did he make this on his own, in his free time, he also had a harder job as he was building this looking from the outside in, having direct access and knowledge of the engine and API and updates coming would have made the job easier, not harder.

I love how every small change that takes anet years to release is some how the hardest coding in the world that takes teams of hundreds to do, and yet time and time again 3rd party devs do the "impossible" with very small teams or a single person in a fraction of the time.

[Magnus Godrik.5841]

@Cekay.2614 said:^Title.

I just discovered that i need to buy ~300 gems to Unlock a new Template. For EVERY Character i have seperatly!Thats ~110 Gold each...whats up with that?

The funny thing is, this does NOT include new Equipment slots or account wide templates.Those cost 500 gems each...Thats ~184 Gold for one of those...

I mean come on...why the heck is this so Expensive?

Yeah idk i bought an equipment slot and found that out the hard way. Shit design if you ask me. Meanwhile most games give you unlimited space for free 99.

[Shena Fu.5792]

Templates

.1. Functionality replaceable by user with text editor. Is not a feature that warrants monetization.

.2. Ironically because of excess, undue greed, deliberately creating a crippled feature in order to sell "improved" QOL. Unfortunately in the end, it is neither profitable nor improves user's QOL.

[Paradoxoglanis.1904]

Once again, a game company charges money for QoL features that reduce the amount of clicks. $$$ = RSI prevention.

[T G.7496]

It's also pay to win.

Another reason why Arc Templates was better. It was fair. It had some heavy restrictions in place in competitive modes.

[Asum.4960]

@flog.3485 said:At the end of the day, we also need to consider the fact that guild wars is a very alt-friendly game.Deep down, I am sure Anet prefers to have players buying and playing many alts than having players only playing a few characters with many different builds that could be free.

Sounds like the cost of build templates is just there to break it even the cost of development and the opportunity of players having accumulated many alts over the years.

Releasing a much requested for years feature, which already had a much superior player made solution and then shutting that one down, when you as a company don't really want players to use (and buy) your own new one doesn't really make sense though.

Plus in a sense this character based system at an extremely high price also directly conflicts with their alt friendly design.While previously with Arc Templates players were able to freely play a wide variety of professions and characters with a tremendous amount of freedom of choices in builds for each and everyone of them, now (unless you are willing to spend hundreds of euros/dollars on these Loadout slots) you are heavily encouraged by this system to pick maybe one or two characters/professions and deck them out with these character based slots, and then stick with playing just those.If they wanted to promote alt play, they should have made these Account wide unlocks, as the price certainly already reflects that.

If making a new character means spending 800 Gems on the slot for it, 3000 Gems on Loadouts and maybe 400-800 Gems of bag slots (coming in at round 60+ €/$, aka the full price of a whole new AAA game), just to make one new character enjoyable and flexible to play with, I'd rather just not, stick with the same old characters and builds, and probably burn out from the game more quickly and take more breaks from playing it (using that money to play a whole new game for a while instead).

But if people quitting or taking breaks from the game was the design intention with Loadouts, they nailed it.

[Astralporing.1957]

@Linken.6345 said:The person who made it knew from the start that when anet launched their own they had to stop update theirs.That's actualy not true. I remember the news about the deal appeared only some time after the addon was already created. From the timing we received about Anet's version of the templates, we also know that they started working on them only after that point as well.

[flog.3485]

@Asum.4960 said:

@flog.3485 said:At the end of the day, we also need to consider the fact that guild wars is a very alt-friendly game.Deep down, I am sure Anet prefers to have players buying and playing many alts than having players only playing a few characters with many different builds that could be free.

Sounds like the cost of build templates is just there to break it even the cost of development and the opportunity of players having accumulated many alts over the years.

Releasing a much requested for years feature, which already had a much superior player made solution and then shutting that one down, when you as a company don't really want players to use (and buy) your own new one doesn't really make sense though.

Plus in a sense this character based system at an extremely high price also directly conflicts with their alt friendly design.While previously with Arc Templates players were able to freely play a wide variety of professions and characters with a tremendous amount of freedom of choices in builds for each and everyone of them, now (unless you are willing to spend hundreds of euros/dollars on these Loadout slots) you are heavily encouraged by this system to pick maybe one or two characters/professions and deck them out with these character based slots, and then stick with playing just those.If they wanted to promote alt play, they should have made these Account wide unlocks, as the price certainly already reflects that.

If making a new character means spending 800 Gems on the slot for it, 3000 Gems on Loadouts and maybe 400-800 Gems of bag slots (coming in at round 60+ €/$, aka the full price of a whole new AAA game), just to make one new character enjoyable and flexible to play with, I'd rather just not, stick with the same old characters and builds, and probably burn out from the game more quickly and take more breaks from playing it (using that money to play a whole new game for a while instead).

But if people quitting or taking breaks from the game was the design intention with Loadouts, they nailed it.

No offense but I don’t think you understood what I was saying. They don’t want you to have one main character and flexing it with as many builds as you want. They want you to keep all the alts that you may have created over the years and still find a reason to play them and gear them appropriately for a particular role/a particular mode/a particular gear, such as different condi builds for character A and different power builds for character B.Other than that they also expect people, for each character you own, to do one final gem purchase just to have three builds and three gears slots and get a bit more support financial support from players who may have not decided to use alts; either by incentivizing them to get more alts or pay the price of using the few characters they own if these players want to increase the range of playable builds while also increasing the range of gemstore stuff to acquire/gold to gems purchase.

You also need to consider the fact that on a regular basis, you don’t need to have that many builds in the game to be effective at it and the game does have a wide array of different profile of players, hence the convoluted feature of the build templates. If it is not for the convoluted feature, you can’t deny that it felt like a massive investment that are targeted at all players and not only to a tiny demographic of either heavily invested WvW players/raid players.Other than that, you can’t ignore that the primary function of arcDPS was to measure DPS and all the other buffs surrounding DPS. To the few players who might have heard of arcDPS before the implementation of the build templates, arcDPS was only here for the numbers because nothing indicates in the name that it also shares a build template feature and if it did, I would bet that it would have gotten far more popularity like the TACO and the wheel mount overlay, at the very least from the veteran community of players. In that particular case, then Anet wouldn’t have needed to develop their own build templates system.

Anyway that is my opinion.

Now the very problem of build templates, as said before, isn’t that it costs money to fully upgrade for each character you own. That is something that veteran/more hardcore players can live with because for the majority of these they had the opportunity of insta leveling/gearing many different characters and even across multiple accounts. The real problem is that from a functionality point of view and for the cost that the system represents, it doesn’t do a stellar job at handling infusion/sigils/legendary items and that is an issue because in the long run, it won’t motivate players to get into easy endgame content. So I guess these particular issues will be resolved with the legendary armory.

[Phobia.9651]

@flog.3485 said:

Anyway that is my opinion.

It sure is, cause you make it sound like you know all about Anet's intentions while you're merely projecting your own views.In my opinion they should have EITHER triple-dip'd and made the unlocks accountwide OR only monetize the equipment loadouts and made the unlocks characterbound.But changing the pricing scheme at this point would be admitting defeat so they are likely going to try to burry it instead.

[flog.3485]

@Phobia.9651 said:

@flog.3485 said:

Anyway that is my opinion.

It sure is, cause you make it sound like you know all about Anet's intentions while you're merely projecting your own views.In my opinion they should have EITHER triple-dip'd and made the unlocks accountwide OR only monetize the equipment loadouts and made the unlocks characterbound.But changing the pricing scheme at this point would be admitting defeat so they are likely going to try to burry it instead.

I never intended it to be a “know it all” post. I am sorry that you got that impression.Everybody is projecting their own views on forums based on their own experience. And I would argue that making account bound gemstore purchases out of a limited and finite number of slots might not the best business decision, especially when they are now planning a new expansion.

[Phobia.9651]

@flog.3485 said:

I never intended it to be a “know it all” post. I am sorry that you got that impression.Everybody is projecting their own views on forums based on their own experience. And I would argue that making account bound gemstore purchases out of a limited and finite number of slots might not the best business decision, especially when they are now planning a new expansion.

No problem mate.I would have totally been fine with the unlocks being characterbound IF they didn't triple dip at the same time. It would give you a nice longterm goal for your characters if it was only the equipment loadouts that you had to buy. But now I am so disappointed in the system that I won't be spending any money on it.

[Deeb.7638]

@Cekay.2614 said:^Title.

I just discovered that i need to buy ~300 gems to Unlock a new Template. For EVERY Character i have seperatly!Thats ~110 Gold each...whats up with that?

The funny thing is, this does NOT include new Equipment slots or account wide templates.Those cost 500 gems each...Thats ~184 Gold for one of those...

I mean come on...why the heck is this so Expensive?

Should be totally free if you ask me but i'd pay 200 gems max

[Arheundel.6451]

@Teratus.2859 said:While I am a fan and defender of the gemstore I will say this much.

Never spend your real world money on ANYTHING!! in any MMO that is Character locked.It is a complete waste of your money.Only buy account upgrades that you can use on all your characters, those are far more worth it.

The money you spend on a single character...is less than the money you spend going to the cinema : £17 to get two build/gear templates...a cinema trip can cost up £25...it's not that much

[Arheundel.6451]

@Eloc Freidon.5692 said:

@kharmin.7683 said:

@Einlanzer.1627 said:

They would have generated a lot of good will, interest, and almost certainly increased their revenue through other gem store items by making it a free and simple feature like the wardrobe system was and like the addon was.

Increase revenue by making it free? How does that work?

The more free quality of life features that get added, the more people are willing to spend their money on fashion. Good will begets good will.

Lol.....in real life they give you max a trial version of a product..not the fully working one, any company would go bankrupt acting the way you're suggesting

[Shena Fu.5792]

Did Anet go bankrupt when GW2 went F2P? Do they go bankrupt while giving free daily/weekly gemstore items? Did they go bankrupt giving out free episodes? Are free sites like Youtube going bankrupt?

Some things are not worth paying for, not even a penny. These loadouts are one of them. Some things are there to entice customers to buy more expensive, profitable stuff. You buy an expensive car, the dealer throws in free stuff, like detailing, tires, navigator, etc.

[Teratus.2859]

@Arheundel.6451 said:

@Teratus.2859 said:While I am a fan and defender of the gemstore I will say this much.

Never spend your real world money on ANYTHING!! in any MMO that is Character locked.It is a complete waste of your money.Only buy account upgrades that you can use on all your characters, those are far more worth it.

The money you spend on a single character...is less than the money you spend going to the cinema : £17 to get two build/gear templates...a cinema trip can cost up £25...it's not that much

Not the point.

Anything character locked can be lost forever if you choose to later delete that character for whatever reason.Account locked items you will always have access to no matter how many characters you delete.

[lare.5129]

I agree with you. The price if absolutely accepted and logic for everyone if it unlock in all account but not on one character.

[scerevisiae.1972]

they're too expensive considering character-only but also just badly implemented.

it would have been better to have build templates that combine both equipment and traits together and go with that instead of this split equipment / trait template system which introduced a WHOLE WORLD of edge cases which I know for sure complicated the crap out of the programming, compared to the simple combined build templates.

And in the end it was not worth it because equipment and traits are not orthogonal, because sub-class-specific weapons require sub-class traits so the split system is actually crap in practise. most of the time, you're forced to have an equipment slot + trait slot for each build you actually want to use.

[Cyninja.2954]

@Shena Fu.5792 said:Did Anet go bankrupt when GW2 went F2P? Do they go bankrupt while giving free daily/weekly gemstore items? Did they go bankrupt giving out free episodes? Are free sites like Youtube going bankrupt?

Some things are not worth paying for, not even a penny. These loadouts are one of them. Some things are there to entice customers to buy more expensive, profitable stuff. You buy an expensive car, the dealer throws in free stuff, like detailing, tires, navigator, etc.

You do realize, literally EVERY single thing you mentioned, is subsidized with other revenue streams right?

Youtube makes money via advertisements, so while you do not pay with cash, you pay with attention.Every little thing you mentioned for GW2 is subsidized by the gem store sales they make. You just dislike that one of the items you might desire (or not desire) is not within the free handout package.

[Cuks.8241]

@Cyninja.2954 said:Every little thing you mentioned for GW2 is subsidized by the gem store sales they make. You just dislike that one of the items you might desire (or not desire) is not within the free handout package.

Well yes that is exactly what we are saying. We feel build templates are essential piece of a mmorpg and should be part of a handout package while being subsidized with other gem store purchases.A proper build template system would increase my interest in the game because I like trying new builds but this game just makes it unnecessarily complicated. This new system didn't really improve much because I got what I already had with pve/wvw/pvp system that used to be in place plus a few more for the flavor with clunky interface.

Gear templates I feel similarly only that it makes more sense that they are not completely free since they provide extra storage space which is a commodity in this game. The price is to high though.

Now some might say that most don't need and use these templates and are not really incentive to play and spend more for most. Well if that is the case they won't sell much anyway and might as well leave the better and free Arc alone.

[Cyninja.2954]

@Cuks.8241 said:

@Cyninja.2954 said:Every little thing you mentioned for GW2 is subsidized by the gem store sales they make. You just dislike that one of the items you might desire (or not desire) is not within the free handout package.

Well yes that is exactly what we are saying. We feel build templates are essential piece of a mmorpg and should be part of a handout package while being subsidized with other gem store purchases.A proper build template system would increase my interest in the game because I like trying new builds but this game just makes it unnecessarily complicated. This new system didn't really improve much because I got what I already had with pve/wvw/pvp system that used to be in place plus a few more for the flavor with clunky interface.

Gear templates I feel similarly only that it makes more sense that they are not completely free since they provide extra storage space which is a commodity in this game. The price is to high though.

Now some might say that most don't need and use these templates and are not really incentive to play and spend more for most. Well if that is the case they won't sell much anyway and might as well leave the better and free Arc alone.

and all of those reasons are exactly WHY this template system is being monetized, given the revenue for the game has dropped. What you are asking for only works IF the games revenue is in a healthy state. The less revenue is generated via traditional means, the more new revenue avenues need to be tapped.

The only part I agree with is that the revenue generated by templates probably under-performed expectations due to issues with how they were implemented. Hence why we are seeing the changes to legendaries.

As is right now, templates are not needed for infrequent players. They are targeted at the more dedicated player crowd. Making them free makes no sense. Fixing the issues they have while increasing their value proposition (especially versus extra character slots) will be the probable approach.

Also just to be clear, if the game does not increase its revenue, we WILL see more aggressive monetization in other areas.

[Cuks.8241]

Oh I agree and get what they were trying to achieve with this or at least I think so. Only Anet really knows the real data. Maybe they are selling like hot bread.But when you try to sell something that would fit this game very well and people are used to getting for free in other games or even GW franchise it can back fire.

Anyway this has been beaten to death 100 times over. I really doubt anything will change and even if they do change it, it probably won't have any real effect on revenue. I'll still spam these threads in hope something will happen because this was one thing I wished for since the first day I started playing. And if I wanted to buy a meaningful amount of these templates (gear + build) it would cost me years of playtime of a mmorpg with monthly fee (for 1 qol feature, wth).

[Astralporing.1957]

@Cyninja.2954 said:Also just to be clear, if the game does not increase its revenue, we WILL see more aggressive monetization in other areas.That's, ironically, usually a start of a death spiral. More aggressive monetization chases some players away, the revenue drops, so devs make monetization even more aggressive. That chases even more players away, revenue drops, and...Stuff like that can indeed offer a short-time boost to income, but it always happens at the cost of long-term sustainability.

Basically, if their financial situation is so bad they have to monetize stuff like templates so aggressively, then this game is a goner already.

By the way, it didn't really start with templates. It's something that has been happening for at least some time already (with the first more visible case being mount licenses, but in reality even that wasn't the beginning. There were some warning signs even earlier, it's just people kept ignoring them, and saying that nothing has really changed.

[Cyninja.2954]

@Astralporing.1957 said:

@Cyninja.2954 said:Also just to be clear, if the game does not increase its revenue, we WILL see more aggressive monetization in other areas.That's, ironically, usually a start of a death spiral. More aggressive monetization chases some players away, the revenue drops, so devs make monetization even more aggressive. That chases even more players away, revenue drops, and...Stuff like that can indeed offer a short-time boost to income, but it always happens at the cost of long-term sustainability.

Basically, if their financial situation is so bad they

have

to monetize stuff like templates so aggressively, then this game is a goner already.

By the way, it didn't really start with templates. It's something that has been happening for at least some time already (with the first more visible case being mount licenses, but in reality even that wasn't the beginning. There were some warning signs even earlier, it's just people kept ignoring them, and saying that nothing has really changed.

Well yes and no, obviously customers seldom appreciate to have to spend more money for the same return. In this case though, it's often customers spending less money over time for the same return.

It's also not about a financial situation becoming bad. A good business will keep an eye on revenue streams constantly to prevent the situation becoming that bad.

There are different ways to generate more revenue. The one way which will never work though: is give everything away for free.

How and in which way to engage the customer to spend more money can obviously be up for debate. Given the competitors in this market and what they are selling (far more restrictive actually game affecting things, SW:ToR for example, or strait up way to win) many players who only know Guild Wars 2 are oblivious as to how bad monetization CAN be. Or how annoying or customer unfriendly many alternatives are.

[Astralporing.1957]

@Cyninja.2954 said:

Well yes and no, obviously customers seldom appreciate to have to spend more money for the same return. In this case though, it's often customers spending less money over time for the same return.Sorry, but if you're trying to say that GW2 is decreasing their monetization level overtime, then we're playing some very different games, i'm afraid.

It's also not about a financial situation becoming bad. A good business will keep an eye on revenue streams constantly to prevent the situation becoming that bad.True, but we're talking about a complete change in the gemshop model. If you don;t know, there are generally 2 approaches to it (with some variations depending on how much p2w are you willing to sell). First model aims at high retention playerbase - with moderate prices and mostly replaceable offerings (usually visuals, and consumables in more p2w oriented cases), its goal is to keep milking that playerbase as long as possible. The second model aims at low retention high turnover playerbase and its goal is to straight out rip off the player for as much as possible in the short timeframe while they are still hooked to the game. That model is generally a domain of web-based clickers and phone games, and is used in games like GW2 (ones with mostly aging playerbase and limited number of new arivals) only if someone decides they need as much money as possible in the short term, no matter the long-term consequences (so, usually when a decision to wind down and close shop has already been made).

Template monetization model comes straight from this version, so either they are desperate, closing down, or think the players are dumb and will buy anything.

To Anet's defence, players up until this point have shown that they are willing to accept (and even defend) any level of blatant monetization, and even if some cases might cause some uproar, a fast handwaving without actually conceding anything is enough to placate the community, so maybe it's that last option that is the case here.