Birthday Presents for accounts

$#!@ that is a ton of hours! What the heck do you do?

Anyway character age and account age are really not very different, both are pretty reliant on just existing and not really having to do anything, in-game hours on the other hand tend to show something... even if you spend them all dancing or w/e.

...5000+ hours... how????

I like it as is. Why?

I have 9 character slots vs 1 account.

Course I keep 3 free for pvp rerolling (so don't think I haven't missed out on gifts, since until recently most of my pvp chars are lucky to last a week or so) so that still leaves 6 slots I can get gifts on. And I've only got 2 one year gifts so far, since I tend to do a char through before moving on to the next. Even so, those two gifts? More than the one gift I'd have got from account based.

Oh crap, not this topic again! This one already pissed me off!


Where to start???.........hmmm......

<--20 months played
<--2800 hours logged
<--own 2 copies of Prophecies
<--own 2 copies of Factions
<--own 2 copies of Nightfall (1 Collectors Edition)


NONE of my characters are 1 year old yet, because I deleted all my characters and started over just before it was discovered that players received a Birthday present for characters that are 1 year old.

<--I've been faithfully playing Guildwars
<--I have new characters that are getting ready to turn 1 year old.

<--Would have liked to at least get 1 mini pet after my account turned a year old because I felt like I was overlooked.


/turns blue holding breath in anticipation


The only mini pet I ever got was the one I bought and paid for with the Collectors Edition.

Okay, I repeat.

If you're a player and keep re-rolling your 4 slots in prophecies, Anet gets no extra cash from you aside from your initial purchase, but since you re-roll your characters= no birthday gift

Now if you keep all your characters intact (all 4 slots) and never re-roll them, if you want to try other professions you have to buy extra slots from the store = 9.99$ per slot. Anet gets your money and justifies rewarding your characters yearly with a gift (since you don't delete them and need to buy more slots).

That's how I see the logic behind the yearly character gifts and not the account gift. Why would Anet give you a gift for owning an account for a year, for your continued free use of their servers?

The amount of players are there, with the variety PvP provides and with the increasing amount of character classes, you really would spend a lifetime trying them all and completing each campaign with all the classes. Not to mention the fact that you can import your characters from campaign to campaign, it's hard not to have the fan base.

They technically don't even need to give you a gift for your character's birthday but they do so because it does (in part) promote sales of extra character slots. It's nice to give fans freebies but you have to think about their sales too, repeat sales and add ons are their only revenue, not repeat play.

ANet can "intend" a lot of different things, but what people actually do may be different. Most people don't purchase extra slots because it isn't worth it. And, most people aren't worried about missing a free mini-pet, the in-game market has plenty of those for a price, and that price isn't $9.99.

But, if we are going to discuss re-rolling as a benefit to the over all health of the game from the perspective of a content provider, I feel I have made a good argument in my earlier posts.

I think having a character thats 1 year old is alot more special than having an account 1 year old- But I'm an idiot for rerolling characters myself because I like to remodel their appearances, and I do sympathize with people that recreated their chars before birthday presents were introduced.

However, I think its far easier to have an older account than a character and I think the fact that if your character was liked enough to be played and kept upto a year or over that you should be rewarded; in my opinion thats a nice touch in itself.

Someone could easily buy Guild Wars, make a character...play a little and get bored of it, go play wow instead or something, then suddenly come back one day in the distant future to discover his account got a birthday present. Why would they deserve that? I think it would seriously decrease how special birthday presents are if it was just based on your account age, but thats just what I think =)

To all rerollers... stop begging for presents! you wont get them! heh,even if you do,guys with old character just get those and bday presents as well lol!Face it,you will always be behind on presents so suck it up.

But the discussion was about character age gifts vs account age gifts. I'm not saying that what I said was the absolute undeniable no other explanation truth, but I think that it does a good job of "explaining" why character age gets a gift and why account age doesn't.

Even if you don't buy new slots because it's not "worth it" and you don't care about mini-pets, some players just care more about their characters and will eventually have to get extra slots/buy the next installment if they want to try the other classes. The character gift is specifically aimed at those players, because they're more liable to buy extra slots and/or new installments. Again, Anet/NCsoft are rewarding those that will eventually buy their product which is just fair.

Don't get me wrong, I have not bought any extra slots myself, but I do have 3 characters that I don't intend to delete just because I grew attached to them. However, I do have extra slots because I purchased Factions and Nightfall. I didn't purchase the next 2 installments because I wanted extra slots, it just happened that way, I didn't even know I would be able to link all my games together and that was even a happier surprise for me. I liked the first game so much that I bought the next 2 without hesitation. The birthday gifts are just a plus for me and I still would've kept my characters regardless.


It still has to do with selling product and even though it's not painfully obvious, ANet/Ncsoft still needs to make money even if it's "forcing" players to buy extra slots/new installments, and giving people an incentive to keep their slots full by giving yearly gifts is one way of selling their product, although in an indirect fashion.

In retrospect, I'm sure ANet/NCsoft do promote re-rolling of characters for variety of players in game and to try all the classes, but it's just more profitable for them if you don't.

On a side note, you can only re-roll your characters so much, unless you're a PvPer. PvErs would have to abandon their current storyline in order to re-roll their characters and some PvE players just don't want to go through the whole storyline all over again with a low lvl character.