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Cost of upgrades
Lavec
Member UncommonPosts: 43
A quick calculation on gem cost of upgrades reveals to me that if I want 8 character slots (3 more purchased) and all bank and bag upgrades that will cost me 16,200 gems (7x600 for bank slots, 3x800 for character slots, and 3x400x8 for character bag slots). That would cost me a whopping $202.50 to purchase the gems @ 800gem/$10.
Sure you will say that I can buy gems for gold but someone has to purchase those gems for me to buy them right? So either way ANet makes $200 out of my account on top of the game purchase. That's a tidy sum and starts to make subscription games look cheap (since in those games those upgrades cost in-game gold but don't bring revenue to the publisher).
It also seems to me that the price of gems for gold could get very expensive since the only gems that will be for sale are from players wanting to buy gold for money. Those buying gems for account services don't count because they will spend their gems and not sell them. In the end we have gem sellers and gem buyers, two class of players, one will have lots of in-game gold and the other little as they need to spend it to get those much needed gems. It will find a balance where the gem buyers value the gold they can get and the gem sellers don't value buying at that price but rather sell it but it does kind of split the community.
Then given this exchange rate it could become very difficult for gem buyers to farm the gold needed and hence make the game boring and they might leave the game.
Time will tell but I can see many players opting to buying gems for the services as they won't be nearly enough initial gem sellers to make it worth paying for those in gold. Again I reiterate all upgrades need someone to buy the gems from Gem Store for cash, if it's not you then it's someone else who needs to buy those so you can grab them for in-game gold. ANet can't lose but there is a risk of losing players who can't afford bag upgrades or bank slots. I serously doubt 1 bank tab is enough for 5 characters so at some stage we will all need to be buying tabs.
I could be wrong if ANet plan to sell new gems for in-game money but I don' think that is the case, or the exchange rate makes little sense.
UPDATE: There have been a lot of good points made in the replies so I thought I'd provide an update on the analysis. Most believe that one will not require that amount of upgrade, cartainly not immediately and even if it was eventually done it would be over the course of months and years.
It has also been suggested the gem price for cash is unrelated to the gem price for gold. Gems for cash are a fixed price commodoty and gems for gold are based on a seperate supply and demand value (gem prices goes up the more they sell and down the less they sell). Players selling gems for gold just sell at market value and possibly don't influence market value beyond being part of the supply/demand calculation. This is unconfirmed but makes sense.
For someone who likes to have pioneer characters (birthday presents anyone 
) and one character of earch class I can see the need to initailly for out $30 for 3 character slots. Nothing to break the banks so to speak.
It seems one bank slot is probably going to be desired but could even be skipped especially if alts are used as mules, even so lets say you spend another $10 on a bank slot in the first 3 months.
Then lets assume you upgrade bag slots only for your main costing $15. Alts can be done much later once you decide to level them, or craft with them, if at all since by then you probably can easily equip them out with 20-slot bags anyway, or you might find it cheaper to buy the gems from gold to upgrade and use much cheap no doubt 12-slot bags (7x12 ~= 4*20).
All up in the first year you might then only need to spend $55 leaving lots to spend on other niceties like minis, costumes, or boosters if that's your thing, given a budget of $10-$15/month. That said it seems the concensus is that you can enjoy the game without a single cash shop purchase, upgrade. I think that would be hard to do but you can always buy the needed gems.
I still think though that gold for gems for cash is a bit dodgy and will be what is most complain about, especially if it is seem as giving players advantage - there's no denying gold buys you the best gear. I can't see why the cash shop could not have worked without gold for cash and only with convenience/athetics for cash, but that's another topic...
Comments
If after 5 characters you are thinking "man I really need another 3 characters" you have too much free time.
I'm trusting that your numbers are accurate.
Let's say I have my typical one character and want to max him out (which I wont do) 7x600 for bank slots + 3x400 for bag slots = $67.50. Now let's say that I only get the bag slots and no banks slots which is most likely going to be the case for me. That works out to... like $15 with some gems left over.
Free to play = content updates for the cash shop. Buy to play = content updates for the cash shop.
Subscription = Actual content updates!
You bought 1. Way too many bags in that example... a ridiculous amount of bags.
If you're playing the game that much, I can't... can't even imagine.
After playing up to level 33 in a single beta weekend, I never had any more than 2 out of 5 bags filled. You'd have to be the world's most disorganized person/crazy packrat to be like that. You'd have to be keeping items you don't actually need (Like pickup items from heart quests), just to clog up your inventory.
Second, you don't need that many bank slots either. If you're playing that much you REALLY need bank slots, make your own guild. You can have up to 150 extra slots of bank storage.
You're also ignoring the collection tab.
Basically, it'd require almost no knowledge of the game + crazy packratting + an insane amount of playing for your nightmare scenario to even start to come into effect.
I'll grant you the character slots, an extra 3 for one of each class is pretty cool.
So now add that up and compare that to a year's subscription.
Ok fair enough not everyone will need more than 5 but it won't make much difference it will still cost about $170 to upgrade you bank and bag slots for 5 characters.
Why would you spend $200 when you could just buy a second copy of the game for $60?
5 more character slots instead of 3 more.
25 more bag slots instead of 15 more.
Only 1 more set of bank slots that includes a whole other set for collectables though.
Seriously, what you're saying basically shows you have almost no understanding at all how the bank/bag system actually works.
This has been brought up before, and debunked fairly thoroughly. Have you not actually played the game? Would you like me to explain in very thorough detail why this isn't actually an issue?
But as meowhead stated you need to be really disorganised to need to max out your bags, you can send all crafting materials direct to your bank from anywhere, those mats then go in to a collections section and don't take up bank space. bags can be crafted so larger bags will be easy to come by a short time after launch.
I can see me needing a couple of extra bank slots as I create alts but beyond that i don't see the need.
That is encouraging. I hope you are right and I won't feel the need to buy bank and bag slot upgrades. It certainly has been needed in all other mmorpgs I've played.
Even so, my point is that despite some people thinking they can play without paying any real money for gems, someone else is and they are really buying gold for cash, and there will be 2 class of players. Maybe it won't matter, I don't care about other players have more gold than me, I only care about my experience.
The Gem/Gold exchange rate can't be set by players directly, you are not auctioning them, that said, the Gem/gold exchange rate can't be easily predicted, I believe they will be rather cheap at first and gradually become more and more expensive as time goes on, then stabilize around a fixed price.
You don't NEED those upgrades to play the game, or even to be efficient. Bank storage is huge already, keep in mind that collectible items like materials and minis can be stored in a separate storage, shared by all your characters, with very high capacity. So that leaves storing only weapons/armor in storage, shouldn't be hard to manage.
The "Deposit Collectible" option takes care of inventory space on the characters easily. I don't see a problem with storage either in bank or in characters, might get tricky once you get more and more characters and progress further in the game but I can't see the requirement of buying all the upgrades, and certainly not for all characters.
edit: typo
Block the trolls, don't answer them, so we can remove the garbage from these forums
Thanks for the offer but I do know how it works. I haven't player enough to know how it will be needed in middle/end game. I'm encouraged by the response here so I will reserve judgement for now. I did make other points other than just the cost of those upgrades though.
Well, I think your'e missing the guild bank.
You can get an extra 50 slots fairly easily. From the look of how fast a single person earns influence, I'm guessing about 2 weeks of not that intensive gameplay. (In 3 days, with me by far and away the most serious player out of our 3 person guild, we had enough for the bank)
You can get it as high as 150 slots. That's actually better than buying the bank tabs.
Actually, if you spend a lot of money in the cash shop, that's when you'd be most likely to actually end up needing more inventory space, haha.
There's just so many random transformation potions and buffs and whole sets of cosmetic clothes.
... but that's assuming you're just going crazy and buying lots of money worth of stuff in the cash shop anyway. IN which case you probably sort of deserve the inventory cruft. (Still perfectly doable, from what I could tell playing beta. Salvage kits and the collection tabs beat the inventory management of the vast majority of MMOs by far and away)
Also, it's possible to craft 20 slot bags. I can't imagine why I'd need extra bag slots after filling all my free bag slots with those.
They certainly have to lower the cost for gems or give more gems for that money, even though you can live without any items from cash shop.
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No, not at all. A lot of people have this excahnge system totally mixed up. You will ALWAYS be able to buy gems with gold and vice versa. If no one bought any gems for 4 years you would still be able to buy gems with your gold.
Players do not sell the gems they have bought to other players. Not directly and not indirectly. It all just goes back into the system.
Thanks for the info Vannor. Do you have a source for this? I'd like to know how they determine the price then.
- Do they release a certain amount of gems per day/hour whatever and sell them at the demand price, i.e. if they are selling well up the price, if they are selling less lower the price kind of thing?
- In GW1 commodities would run out if they sold out (I assumed because people won't selling them to vendors to increase their stock but maybe they also generated some), is this the case here or would gems always be available at market price?
- Does the buying of gem with real money have any effect on the price?
- Will there be a ceiling price so it doesn't get out of hand once there is an abundance of gold in the economy and otherwise make it impossible for new players to afford gems before they too become millionaires?
The only time I have run out of bag space is when I have run out of salvage kits. You can bank all mats and sell any item on the AH from anywhere in the world. I think 5 bag slots will suffice for a while. But we'll see.
I don't see myself spending 200 bucks on all character slots and all bags slots and all bank slots. Maybe a few here and there, but again, we'll see. And I never had an issue in game unless I was sucking at managing my inventory correctly :P
It probably depends on how big a crafter you are on whether or not you will need/want to buy bank space. If you aren't into crafting you can probably get away with not buying a bank tab.
As far as bag space. You will want to buy or craft some bags for yourself. What you start with fills up quickly. So you have to develop OCD. Always have a couple stacks of salvage kits and break down stuff you don't need. Plus sending stuff to your bank.
I would have to agree with that and also it depends on how many alts you like to have. I'm pretty sure I'll use all my character slots with 1 main and 4 alts and without bank expansion that would only be 6 item slots for each character in the bank (5x6=30 from default tab), not nearly enough, so I'd say you'd want 1 bank tab per character you have at least which will cost you $30 to get 4 more - not too bad when you think of it that way if that is the minimum initial expense after 2-3 months play. Remains to be seen if I can live without the bag expansion slots on crafting characters but hopefully there's some gold to be made crafting and that can go towards the gems to upgrade.
The original post presents a scenario that is extremely unlikely. Very few will buy what the OP presents as essential. Many will buy none of it and not suffer for the lack of upgrades.
Bank Vault Upgrades
I wanted to get a handle on what upgrades may make sense for early purchases during BWE, in preparation for the Headstart. I played 40 hours over the course of BWE3 and decided that if I felt the need to buy an upgrade, I would buy it.
I did a lot of crafting and did expand my account vault to make it easier to store some of the components I had crafted, but didn't need immediately. I also was holding onto a few items for a friend and considering weapons and armor drops for a couple alts I wanted to try during the event. With really bad vault management, by the end of the weekend I had only needed the section of the vault I unlocked once, as I was juggling six crafting professions over three characters. (A lot of my lack of proper vault management came down to time. With the limited weekend, I just threw anything I might want to save in the ault and didn't do any cleaning during the event).
Crafters may want at least one Bank upgrade. The space demands are not any greater than for crafters in other games, less so because of the collections tab where you can store stacks of up to 249 of each common and uncommon crafting mat and cooking ingredient. Thinking to games I have played long term and the amount of bank space I used, I really don't anticipate more than one upgrade early on and with proper bank management, I can't imagine the need for more than three upgrades, over the long term.
Crafters will probably want at least one upgrade. Alt-a-holics may want more, as might people who hoard armor and weapons for the various skins they provide. I think zero to two Vault Upgrades will be most typical for most players. (I played GW1 for a few years, on and off, and only bought one account vault upgrade, even though I had 15 characters sharing that space)!
Character Bag Slots
With proper inventory management, you probably won't need any. Even when we got gems for free in BWE1 and BWE2, I never bought this upgrade. The game makes it easy to send your crafting mats to the special area of your vault that houses them from any where in the world. Carry salvage kits at all times. Salvage any Salvage Items, send the resulting mats to your vault.
Armor and Weapon drops? If you think others might buy them, you can post them for sale on the trading Post, from any where in the world, via the right click menu for the item in your inventory and it is removed from inventory to the trading post when you do so. Not worth selling? Salvage and send the mats to your vault. The mats will likely fetch more than the vendor price, if sold on the Trading Post. (You can post those right from inventory as well, if you don't want to bother storing them in the vault. No stack size concerns, post them as you find them and people can buy in any quantity they want).
Vendor Junk? Most people will be collecting Waypoints and doing Heart tasks. Many Waypoints have vendors and all Heart task NPCs can be used as vendors once you complete the task. If worst comes to worst, you can always just waypoint port to a vendor.
I upgraded my bags to 8 slot asap. (Many crafting professions offer 8 slot containers that are easy to craft with mats you will aquire fairly early in the game. Even if that's all you ever craft, it's worth doing. You also get XP for crafting, so you progress while doing so as well). I only had full bags twice all weekend, just because I had gone a long stretch with out inventory management. Clicked "Send collectibles to Vault" and poof, a third of my slots were empty. Salvaged a bunch of items, sent those to the vault, posted a couple green items on the Trading Post and more than 2/3 of my inventory was free again.
In short, inventory management is made very easy and most players will not need any Character Bag Slot upgrades. (Bags can go to at least 20 slots, so even as I get deeper in the game, I don't see inventory space being an issue. 20 slots bage is a doublng of space vs. 5x8 slot bags.
Character Slots
People with an obsession for playing every profession will need to buy three slots. The vast majority of the rest will need zero for at least some time to come. People who play alts to experience many different play-styles may eventually want more slots.
People who play alts to re-experience the more simple, casual fun of lower level game zones, or to play with friends/guildmates with lower level characters don't need a character slot to do so. Level scaling makes it easy and rewarding to revisit lower level zones with higher level characters. (Loot and XP even scale to your true level). You can't redo Heart Tasks or your own Personal Story, but you can repeat Dynamic Events, will likely encounter events you missed on earlier visits and can even join lower level friends in their Personal Story.
It's expected to take about 110 hours to level to the cap, but being at the cap doesn't mean you have nothing left to do. I can easily imagine getting 300 hours of PVE play, per character. Some people may even didicate themselves to a single characrter and GW2 actually makes that possible.
Most people will not need to buy Character Slots, even over the course of hundreds of ours of game play.
My Upgrade Expectations
I played 125 hours between all beta events and expect to easily excede 1,000 hours over the course of the first year. That's about 20 hours a week for a year. I think that's more than typical and very few people would more than double it. I also am an aknowledged alt-a-holic in previous games.
All said, I anticipate buying no Character Slots, no more than three vault upgrades and no more than 3 bag slots for one character, (that last only if I decide to do all my crafting with a single character).
That's 3,000 Gems. Let's say I buy 2800 and get the last 200 via gold-gem exchange. (I think I will very easily afford that leveling just one character to 80).
That's $40 for my anticipated "essentials" over the course of the first year. Someone who doesn't do a ton of crafting and is better at vault management probably will have $0 of "essential Purchases".
Want to know more about GW2 and why there is so much buzz? Start here: Guild Wars 2 Mass Info for the Uninitiated
170 is roughly a year subcription to another mmo. so i dont think it's overpriced.
I don't think there is a proper source for this, not a properly detailed one. The press release they gave was vague on the details, it's also pretty old now. There was proper confirmation that this is how it works in the first 'general public' closed beta weekend, the one before prepurchase. I can't remember any direct quotes and there is a chance some details might have changed, it's in beta afterall.
For a cash shop to work in lieu of a subscription it must have some items that the majority of players will want to buy. These are the "must have" items and are in the cash shop so that it will be successful as a funding model.
- Bag slots
- Character slots
- Bank slots
- Transmutation stones
That is why they are there, they expect most people will want these and will want to spend money on them (or buy gems for gold to get them). The rest of the cash shop items don't really fall into the "must have" list but will be the occasional purchase for people.
The Enlightened take things Lightly
its been proven that the CS model can make a hell of a lot more money than the sub model. There are stupid iphone and facebook games rivialling some sub based mmo's for profit.
If you continue to make sweeping statements like you know what everyone everywhere thinks about a certain topic then I am going to shout at you.
It easy to type 'I think this is the worst game ever'
Rather than the 'This is the worst game ever'
$202 does seem quite a bit for 8 characters maxed out bank slots.
Are you wanting this in the first month? Or going on a traditional subscription rate $15/month model this would take a year equivilant.
Mate! Don't forget! Players can take up tailoring I believe.. and crafting decent sized bagslots! But I honestly thing the 3 locked slots is not required, If you buy or craft the best bag slots available in game + default size.. this is more than enough.
Bank Slots I believe are also more than enough. Maybe 1 upgrade is okay, but I don't see the need to max these out.
Over the 3 betas I've never had any issues with exceeding all my available inv/bank slots.