Lockbox Apocalypse : GW2

A few days back, when I posted about the addition of new mount skins to GW2's Gem Store cash shop it was mostly with the intention of examining the emotional disconnect I was experiencing between the concepts of "Mounts" and "Mount Skins". In retrospect this seems somewhat like pointing out an unusual species of squirrel leaping from the branches just before a falling oak tree crushes you to death.

As it happens, at the time I wrote the post, I was blissfully, not to say naively, unaware that the topic was even a matter of particular controversy. It was only after Jeromai drew my attention in the comments to the fire raging on the forums that I became belatedly aware of the crowd brandishing pitchforks and flaming torches.

The "Official Mount Adoption Feedback Thread" started by GW2 Communications Manager Gaile Gray has now dropped to page two of the forums, albeit not before it grew to more than seventy pages containing nearly three thousand comments. It would probably still be top of page one and growing if it hadn't been for an intervention by ANet CEO Mike O'Brien, who stepped up personally on Friday to try to get things back under some sort of control.

Blue is the color.

Unfortunately, far from dampening down the fire, his peculiar "Message About The Mount Adoption Certificate" merely served to pour gasoline on the flames. The full text is too lengthy to reproduce here but the gist appears to be "Thanks for complaining. We thought it was a good idea but maybe it wasn't. We aren't going to change anything but next time we'll try to finesse things so it doesn't look quite so much like an obvious cash grab". Or, in his exact words:

"Microtransactions can be polarizing, and we’ve received both positive and negative feedback on the license. We won’t change the existing license in a way that would invalidate the investment players have made, but I want to confirm to you that our next planned mount skin releases will focus on individual sales like the Reforged Warhound and bundles like the Spooky Mounts Pack. We will not add any skins to the currently available Adoption License, thus not pushing down the odds of acquiring any one skin in that set.

We appreciate the thoughtful feedback many of you have provided, and that you hold us to high standards for monetization."

Unsurprisingly, this has satisfied almost no-one. The new thread resulting from Mike's non-apology can't quite match the size of the previous one but it's still near the top of page one and growing, with less than half as many posts so far but even more page views.

A lot of the conversation isn't particularly edifying. There's a deal of the usual to-and-fro between a relatively small number of ultra-committed opponents or proponents that these threads always see. Filtering out the trolls and professional complainers, however, it seems clear that, at the very least, ANet risks losing a deal of good will over this.

Or so you would think from reading the forums. Looking for some further context I went to Reddit. Couldn't really find anything apart from a thread about Wooden Potatoes destroying a Mount Adoption Certificate in his stream. Some good jokes in that thread but not much salt other than a few people calling the OP out for disrespecting Wooden Potatoes.

Starbound top and center.

So much for anecdotal evidence and reportage. How about a witness statement?

Last night, for no better reason than someone called it in map chat, I decided to go do Triple Trouble. I've been two achievements short of a meta there for months but I'd stopped bothering the Wurm after the last several "organized" attempts turned out to be a complete shambles.

This time was much, much better. Organized by QUTE, everything went very smoothly. All three heads came off and died. I went with Crimson, having first remembered to join the escort party (thanks to a sanity check via Dulfy, despite having been told by two people, in answer to my question in-game, that I didn't need to). I got the Phytotoxin Enthusiast achievement I was missing and the kill on the Crimson head. All I need now is a single kill on Amber and I'm done.

Before all that, however, there was half an hour of standing around the campfire at Firthside Vigil waiting for a critical mass of players to be taxied in, squads to be formed and so on. While we waited we were entertained by aerial displays from a squadron of multi-colored griffins including the undeniably impressive if utterly bizarre Starbound,.

I wasn't expecting it to be quite this big.

Also present was a green bunny skinned as a frog and the only mount skin I really like, the Twin Sands jackal. In short, there were a lot of people riding mounts skinned up from the recent and supposedly unacceptable loot box sale.

What's more, they all seemed to be very pleased with their purchases, to the point of wanting to show them off at every opportunity. With a full map and a lot of newer players (judging by the questions being asked) I didn't hear a single negative comment about mounts or skins from anyone.

That was also my experience in Lion's Arch, the traditional home for GW2's never-ending fashion parade. A lot of chatter about the new mount skins and all of it excited and positive. While the forum threads may be filled with vitriolic complaints and threats to quit, the response in game and on Reddit seems to be quite the opposite.

At the very least, the visual evidence within the game seems to be that these things are really selling. What's more, I would note that at time of writing I have yet to see even one player mounted on a 2000 Gem Reforged Warhound, the only mount skin available as a single, direct purchase.

It adds a whole other dimension, doesn't it?

Maybe that's because the Jackal is the least popular and least useful of all the mounts and no-one rides them anyway. Or maybe it's because 2000 Gems is significantly above what the market will bear for a single mount skin right now. I imagine it's a little of each. 

Either way, it certainly seems people are keener to pay 400 gems for a random skin than 2000 for this specific model. I know I would be.

I'm relatively neutral on the whole lockbox issue: I agree one hundred per cent that there are some serious concerns that need to be addressed over the accessibility of quasi-gambling activities to vulnerable individuals and minors but other than that I don't have any particular problem with items being available either only for real money or via a form of randomization or, indeed, both those things together.

Unless and until regulation applies I think we can safely say that developers will continue to make their decisions on how far to go with this approach based on how much money it brings in. If lockbox sales are outweighed by lost revenue from people leaving the game to avoid them then we'll see fewer lockboxes. If not, then we can expect such sales to continue apace.

Polly want a cracker!

When it comes to these particular lockboxes, I have more of a problem with what's in them than how they're sold. The addition of mounts to the game had an immediate and, to my mind, unflattering effect on the visual landscape. If we're to expect a steady stream of garish and bizarre mount skins - and we are, since that's clearly what sells - it doesn't bode well for what little immersion we have left.

Oh, well. It's no more than  bringing the look of Tyria in line with the looks of Azeroth and Norrath. I guess if I really wanted visual consistency I'd go play LotRO.

As for the commercial future of GW2, it would appear from the first financials since Path of Fire that Gem Shop sales will have to take up most of the heavy lifting over the next year or two. Expect ever flashier skins and even sneakier sales strategies.

I think I'll put my gold in tar and feather futures.

Gold? Don't Talk To Me About Gold! : GW2

"You’ve got the brawn, I’ve got the brains / Let’s make lots of money"

Neil Tennant probably wasn't thinking about MMOs but that about sums up the opportunities on offer in most of them. Pick up your club, march through the city gates, find things weaker than you, hit them repeatedly until they fall over, then take all their stuff and sell it. It's either that or find out who's buying what, work out where to get it then either make what's selling or sell what's making what's selling to whoever's making what sells. Hunt or gather; your choice.

Generally the fastest way to bootstrap a fresh character in any MMO, new or old, is to gather raws and sell them to crafters. Doing your regular quests and general slaughtering will just about keep your head above water but selling ore to armorsmiths will make you rich, although the more industrious, long-term planner may prefer to keep the materials and learn how to use them. Those crafters doing the buying must be raking it in somewhere down the road, right?

Oh, how we hate you, Globby Gloop

Well, maybe. In GW2 money is tight. Really, really tight. I can't remember the last time I played a mainstream MMO where my first character stayed so poor for so long. At first I thought it was down to the continued absence of the Trading Post, but now the Black Lion has its act together sufficiently to keep the doors open most of the time that turns out not to be the case.

Partly it's because creatures in Tyria drop far less coin and and their body parts are worth much less than in just about any other imaginary world I can think of. The universal Glob of Globby Gloop (stupidest standard drop I have ever seen, by the way, and one about which I complained bitterly in beta, obviously to no avail) sells for 3 copper at level one. By level 50 it's selling for 9 copper. Three times bugger all is still bugger all. Even magic weapons at level 50 don't reach the dizzy heights of two silver a time if you offer them to a vendor. When it comes to money-making opportunities, brawn does not appear to be the way to go.

Saville Row, here I come

Tobold was complaining that "There simply doesn't appear to be a point to crafting in Guild Wars 2". Many people put him straight in the comments - crafting gives a lot of experience, is fun and relaxing, has "end-game" relevance and so on - but his substantive point, that you can't make any money by crafting isn't actually true anyway. It is true that you can't make as much money by selling the finished item as you would have done by selling the bits you used to make it, but the crafted gear I'm making sells fast and consistently on the Trading Post for two to three times the price a vendor would give me for it.

If I was adamantly opposed to doing any crafting at all I would be considerably richer than I am, although less poor might be a better way to put it. As far as I can tell there's no subtle motivator baked into GW2 that pushes you into crafting. It remains one of the few realms of activity that can safely be ignored by anyone not actively interested in taking it up. Gathering my own mats, crafting probably isn't a net loss and I am smartly dressed in clothes I sewed myself, but had I sold those mats to crafters and bought my gear I'd be a lot richer and better-dressed yet.

Is this what you want? I think not.

If the game design doesn't particularly encourage crafting, gathering's a very different kettle of cod. Unlike most MMOs, GW2 does expect you to gather plants, chop trees and mine ore. If you resolutely refuse to do so not only will you miss out on a sizable chunk of very easy xp, you will never complete a Daily Achievement because for each of those you need to gather twenty items. Do that every day and you'll soon get the habit. (There's a nice guide to Daily Achievements here, by the way - did you know that rabbits, armadillos and other critters count for both Daily Kills and Kill Variety? I didn't until I read it there).

What with that spur and the magnificent non-competitive nature of nodes, gathered materials, especially ore and wood, are extremely common on the Trading Post and I'm not sure whether the effort required to fill a stack would be worth the reward. The riches on offer to those prepared to go low-level grubbing in WoW or EQ2 may be missing from GW2.

In a game where xp is easier to come by than money I wonder whether the better strategy isn't just to level poor and get rich later. There must be more money at eighty, mustn't there?

Ding 50! : GW2

The flat leveling curve was one of Guild Wars 2's several USPs.  For a while it seemed  it might take no longer to get from level 79 to 80 as it took you to reach level two after setting foot on Tyrian soil.  That always seemed a tad utopian. It turns out there's a slight downhill slope to the curve (if such a thing is topologically possible) as far as level 30, after which things do indeed flatten out.That's how it feels, at least.

GW2 is not an MMO where you study levels closely, but content is gated behind them all the same and levels do matter. Traits and skills come in tiers for which you need both points to spend and the right level against your name. For traits there's a third requirement: coin.  Your trainer doesn't just want to ID your level before he'll show you how to access your Major Traits, he wants a gold coin for the book that tells you how to do it.

No, you won't be the only Pink Moa in Timberline

I imagine this was considered a trivial sum in design, and now the Trading Post is finally up perhaps it will be. When my ranger hit 40 however, he had scarcely a gold to his name and rather than return to the rag-picking poverty of his cubhood he chose to wait a while before bankrupting himself to buy the book. By level 50 he'd scratched up just over two gold and finally paid up.

Without the Trading Post he's been relying on what he finds or can make for himself. An extended and highly enjoyable romp through Blazewood and Dredgehaunt Cliffs netted enough Claws, Blood, Fangs and sundry body parts to raise leatherworking to just shy of 225, start of the next tier. Astonishingly, this means he can now make Rare (yellow) quality armor to match his adventure level. Keen claimed recently that crafting was the way to go for gear. I was sceptical when I read that and Mrs Bhagpuss more so, but it turns out to be no less than the plain truth, at least if self-sufficiency is your goal.

Black Citadel branch of World of Leather

In beta I was mildly miffed with the speed of leveling. I felt it was too fast, not by much but by enough to notice. Of course, non-optional scaling forbids you from out-leveling anything or anywhere, which mitigates (not eliminates) any problem there might have been in leveling too quickly, but in any case, now that I have more experience than I had in beta (and more levels) I withdraw my reservations.  Leveling speed is fine.

It's fine because there really is a lot to do in Tyria. Tobold extrapolates a base 300 hours of PvE content from his play thus far, which may be true if you play one character systematically through all the content once, as Syp is doing. Normative MMO play would presumably be more recursive than that, although who really knows? Everyone presumably thinks his or her own playstyle is "normal". For those not limiting themselves either to a single character or a single visit to each location.  My plans, such as they are, are to play all eight classes. Whether all of them will get to 80 I doubt but it's sure going to take me a lot longer than 300 hours trying.

The belated appearance of the Trading Post is going to prove a mixed blessing when it comes to leveling up, I fear. As someone in my guild pointed out last night, a global auction house with upward of a million players pumping their drops and crafted gear onto it day and night is going to mean very low prices and very wide availability. Fine if you like to twink, which I do on occasion, but conversely debilitating when it comes to valuing your own efforts.

The thrill of seeing a rare yellow weapon drop is inevitably going to diminish when you know there will already be several hundred like it for sale at no more than a copper or two above vendor. Any pride in the gear you've cobbled together through graft and enterprise may be hard to maintain against the nagging knowledge that you could just open the TP and upgrade every slot for peanuts.

On balance I'd still rather have the Trading Post than not. Drops are all very well but the one you get never seems to be quite the one you want. It's only another ten levels to my ranger's Grandmaster trait manual and that gouging trainer wants two gold pieces this time round. Have to make some money somehow.