Microtransactions: Buy What You See Or RNG?

Written by: Richie Procopio (@richieprocopio) | December 19, 2012 1:29 pm

27 Comments

Fans of Guild Wars 2 are merrily celebrating the Wintersday content and ArenaNet is offering a smattering of new items for purchase in the gem store. There are festive weapon skins, holiday costumes, and winter-themed minis to acquire. Players can also purchase Wintersday mystery boxes, which have random goodies inside including a rare chance at some exclusive account bound mini pets.

During the Shadow of the Mad King patch in October, you could buy the mini pets directly and the rare weapon skins were placed inside of the RNG boxes. Is ArenaNet going to continue rotating which items are available outright and which ones require luck? Or are they merely experimenting and collecting data at this point and will eventually settle on the method that balances profit and player satisfaction?

It’s reasonable to assume that each person’s spending habits are different and having various methods of acquiring items can appeal to a broader population. Also, while randomness is typically frowned upon, you could argue that these mystery boxes increases the value and prestige of owning one of the rarer items. Having all minis or weapon skins available on the gem store cheapens them and makes them less desirable.

What kind of purchaser are you? Do you only buy if you know what you’re getting in advance or does the thrill of the mystery box make you reach for your wallet? Which method do you think brings in more money for ArenaNet? Let me know in the comments below!

Microtransactions: Buy What You See Or RNG?

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balen arenas

I absolutely hate any kind RNG in an item shop. I refuse to buy the boxes and keys because of that.

I would buy some of the town clothes if it was used more. If they could provide more incentives to be in the cities that would help a lot. Perhaps when you enter a town you could have an automatic toggle on the town clothes. Anyway, as it is now I just won’t get them.

So what kind of purchaser am I? Well currently, nothing.
http://twitter.com/Kiba_Mikazuki Kiba

I believe that RNG DOES make a company a larger profit, however it comes at the cost of a bad reputation among the community. What does not help at the moment with the Wintersday boxes is that the pets that may be acquired are account bound as well, unlike the items during Halloween or The Lost Shores. This makes it so that a player may end up with multiple copies of a pet with absolutely no use for them before they acquire all of them.

Anet selling the Tixx mini-pets on the gem store and seemingly making players only able to acquire 2 out of the 5 for free is also quite shady business. As a forum poster once said “Give a skritt a shiny and he’ll be happy. Give a skritt a shiny then show him another shiny he can’t have and he’ll be upset.”
http://www.facebook.com/combustible.lemon.9 Oblivious Prime

I prefer to buy what I see over RNG.
I bought the 10 boxes and I was lucky enough to get the 3 pets to make the mini quaggon but many were not that lucky. I would rather not gamble though.

They can make a lot of money in the buying what you see if they sell cool stuff.
hint hint sell the endless tonics Anet I want all of them :p
http://twitter.com/AlexisCoelho Alexis Coelho

Yes, I HATE buying stuff that is RNG, buying what you see is 1000000x better. I did try the mystery box on the halloween event and I hated it, and I promised to myself that I would never do that again.
- dawolv
  
  Agree, not even just for real money stuff, RNG in general is a terrible thing -
  If I want a skin, I’d rather buy it with gems -> gold -> BLTC from another person.
  Sure you might get lucky and spent like 10% of it’s value, but I always go for the sure thing.
  
  @Richie:disqus : Do you think that these “gambler”-types lead the market to becoming more RNG based? Because I’d argue that for every gambler you will also have someone (like me) who’d just not buy it at all if it has the chance to not give me back what I intended to buy.
  
  I don’t do my clothes shopping blindfolded, why would I do it in an MMO?
  - http://twitter.com/RichieProcopio Richie Procopio
    
    I think each “gambler” type buys enough on RNG items to fuel 4-5 people who don’t buy any. Some people have bought hundreds of those Wintersday chests in search of the minis. If they put the minis on the store outright, they would probably lose money on those people.
    
    Now some people would buy those minis directly if they were available, but my gut tells me that the RNG items make more money overall.
    
    But they do have to balance RNG and player satisfaction. That’s why there are always some other items that aren’t random to keep people happy.
    - theunwarshed
      
      i dunno, the blowback from “gambling fever” can go the other way in the long term.
    - dawolv
      
      Maybe this wasn’t the case when this clip came out, but the minis are on the store now! Just saw it, like 5mins ago!
      
      Maybe they listened to you
theunwarshed

my personal feelings about cash shop RNG is that it is a lazy, cheap way to cash gouge your player base. my mantra is always: make a good product, price it fairly and market it well and the people will gobble it up. it’s fair, transparent and honest business. there’s too many short cuts and sleight of hand bs going on in every industry today.

pay your artists and kick them in arse to roll out more stuff for us to buy AN, instead of this nonsense!!
http://twitter.com/dularr Dularr

Nope, I will not buy RNG cash shop items.
jugyfant

Why not introduce mounts to the game which honestly could be a good addition especially for wvw’s and the tedious running involved after death. Some awesome mount skins would sell like hotcakes. RNG is not for me.
http://www.facebook.com/eecjr Edward Crockett Jr.

I buy everything because I’m a big fat sucker.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000138365241 Pi Rate

Delete comment please. Wrong account.
http://twitter.com/squared002 Squared002

So, I guess I’m going to just put this out there.

“RNG” versus “Direct” is a pretty one sided coin for us, the consumer. Generally speaking, most of us are going to want the “Direct” route of obtaining something we fancy from the Gem Shop. On the other hand, ArenaNet will always make bank on RNG depending on what they put in the boxes. Do I have a problem with ArenaNet making money? Of course not! Do I feel that putting $10 down to open 10 RNG boxes is worth it? No. I wouldn’t have a problem if what I actually got out of the box made me feel like my $10 was worth it. The boxes do not feel rewarding for investing your cash into the game. They still have yet to find this balance (Black Lion Chests were changed to 3 items, but they still don’t “feel” rewarding enough to spend roughly $6 to open 5 chests).

I, for one, find myself going the route of a mini-pet collector. Halloween was great for us, as we had “direct” access to obtain all the mini-pets for around $12 worth of gems. Wintersday is a different beast all together since the exclusive holiday mini-pets are RNG based. Some people got lucky and were able to get all 4 within 20-30 boxes (granted a significant price increase from Halloween to roughly $20-$30 worth of gems). Others, like myself, weren’t so lucky; but I had already ventured down that path and there is no stopping a collector until they have what they want or they’re broke. It took me personally 110 boxes to finally have all the mini-pets this holiday event. That is just horrible RNG luck.

I knew what I was getting into by pursuing the mini-pets. ArenaNet, unfortunately, made obtaining these pets any other way impossible due to them being Account Bound.

After my experience with going down this path, here are my thoughts.
1. I would rather they put holiday exclusives that are account bound directly in the gem shop for direct purchase. This doesn’t technically hurt anybody since they’re account bound, they can’t be resold.
2. If they decide to put ANYTHING holiday related into an RNG box, do NOT make it account bound. Granted this will make prices sky rocket on such items, they’re still available via an alternate means instead of dumping a ton of cash into the gem store for a chance to get it. Either way, cash or gold, RNG holiday specific items will be expensive.

This is just my personal opinion of course, but my only real issue with the current RNG is the fact that they are account bound items. This pigeon holes collectors into really only a single viable option to obtain whatever it is they’re collecting. If they weren’t account bound, collectors have multiple venues to go to get what they want.

Damn I typed a lot… shutting up now.
- http://twitter.com/RichieProcopio Richie Procopio
  
  I agree with you, Squared. If it’s RNG at least make it not account bound. That would help in this situation greatly.
- dawolv
  
  That’s why I never buy stuff right at the beginning!
  As with Halloween, I’d always wait a few days.
  
  Now the Minis are in the store for grabs (350 gems).
  Idk how much RL-Money that is, sicne I always change it from gold, but i’d say it’s now roughly 12gold
  
  The account bound thing is annoying, I agree!
  but I never really got the need to collect minis:
  
  In the cities they are not rendered anyway due to so many other things like other players to be visible and when you travel to another zone you always have to go into your inventory and pull it out again. That and the fact that you can only have 1 out at a time makes collecting them less satisfactory.
  
  Once they get the polymox arena up and running, i don’t think I’m going for any.
  At least not ones I’d have to pay for.
http://twitter.com/Akame79 Bostjan

There is also one thing which ppl tend to forget as everybody when buying stuff is focused on “me me me me ” is that every item in the gem store can be earned in-game via gold exchange or paid turnaments rewards. Yes it sux when you dont get what they want , but at the same time Anet need to make money to produce new content & for them to do that they must also have a close eye on players gold/gems savings. RNG somewhat compensate for that, keeps the overall economy healthy & they can also grab some money from it.
http://twitter.com/FishBaitism Fish Bait

While I know they need/want to make money, I think RNG on Gem store things is a bit off.
I`m fine buying pets etc from the store, but not when you could get hit with having to buy hundreds or thousands or get lucky & buy one chest to get the drop you want.

tbh like most, I think they should make town clothes combat wearable, they would make a huuuuge fortune there.
http://profile.yahoo.com/EHB4JP6TVURBGDBZBNDZSJ7PZQ Glacius

I’m not interested in random chance chests form the gem shop. Perhaps if I had some ridiculous amount of gold (like thousands) to spend on gems, I would buy them, but I’m not interested.

As for this idea that ArenaNet is “rotating” ideas or something, it’s worth nothing that for this holiday, what they have actually done is more of a split: Some weapon skins are directly purchasable in the gem shop, and some are from the random chests. The ones from the random chests are also obtainable by exchanging dropped items. (Technically, the directly purchasable ones are also available via chests, but it’s probably not the best way of obtaining them.) Some of the mini-pets are earnable in-game and those are also available for direct purchase, while others are thus far only obtainable via the random chests.

It doesn’t seem like they are rotating so much as splitting to try to appeal to both crowds. It pretty obviously does not appeal to people who just want the specific items that are in the random chests, but don’t want to deal with the gambling element, however.

Perhaps the most frustrating part is that the chest minis cannot be sold on the trading post, unlike the weapon and armor (from previous events) skins.

Of course, we still haven’t seen exactly what can be obtained during the last part of the event, but they seem to have made their intentions pretty clear with the dumb RNG chests. I doubt they are going to do anything that would drastically undermine some people’s motivations to purchase them.
Jado Cast

I think the Black Lion Chests are one of the worst aspects of the GW2. Love the game, but I will not buy chests for random items.
Kagitaar

I am very anti-RNG, if just because I have terrible luck.
Demi_God

Short term RNG will net more money for a games company. Some people will pay a lot to win, or even look cool/ridiculous.

Long term, they will lose their customer base, server populations will dry up. And then there will be no one to buy RNG bags/boxes.

Some of it depends on the quality of items sold RNG, but nonetheless varying degrees of frustration always follow from those who don’t have the money.
http://www.facebook.com/oneniisama Bear Powell

Give me items I can see and buy. RNG while it will never be removed from games has been and is a terrible model for any type of item acquisition.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1141881782 Mark Bradden

Guild wars is becoming a cash cow only time will tell
http://www.facebook.com/t.bergeron Tommy Bergeron

I really don’t get what’s the fuzz about minipets? Why? Why shell out cash to get tiny pets that does absolutely nothing in game? Please enlighten me about this!
Pernille Sylvest

If I were to spend my meager luck and money on a chance of winning something, I would prefer trying for a million in the lottery rather than spend the same amount on a random loot chest for a virtual chance of virtual goods.

I prefer rng to only effect ingame loot, not something I pay extra for.

However, just because I do not like to pay for a random item loot chance, it does not mean I think noone else should have the chance, if they are so inclined. This method of aquiring something valuable should just not replace ingame methods of obtaining something equivalent.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=651820555 Vincent Emanuel D’Amico

I like both, gambling is fun to me but i also like o be able to buy what i can see. there should be a balance in a game. but i’d also like to see other forms of gambling besides chests, games of chance are great time wasters while waiting on groups. i’m sure an azura could throw together a slot machine type game.

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