Boycott the Storage Update!

Not only that, there is a youtube video too.

If only people realised the unprecedented feat that Anet pulled by sustaining this game for 4years without asking the amount of money that other companies have asked of their players, they'd see the problem very differently. (the average salary in the UK in the MMO business is £30,000/$45000).

If people see and don't like a "trend", distrust Anet or regret that the game is not as they wish it to be, they should go play the other f2p games. If you find a better deal, I'm sincerely happy for you. Because I know I won't find a better deal. And to go back to the original question, I'm still waiting for the full detail of the April 28th offer, despite still having a good feeling about the update.

I love this thread, all the hoarders are $hitting their pant over having to "BUY" more storage. LOLOLOLOL

GJ A-Net.

LOL

I demand my over 2 million gold advantage that I apparently got when I bought unlock packs.

Seriously, its been a few years. Where is my 2 mil?

Don't tell other people to stop making stuff up and then bull this kind of garbage out of nowhere.

Let's see how many updates did we get for Diablo 2 and how many times did Blizzard say ok now if you want this you'll have to pay us $10 per item? They gave us more storage, more items, harder ai opponents, more content, more fun even a cow level and how much did they charge us for all those updates? Nada! Nothing! It was thank you for buying Diablo 2 origional and here are your reward(s).

NCsoft/Anet have become greedy and forgotten how they got to where they are in the first place(or perhaps they haven't perhaps all along it was meant to be a squeezing program). Now it's just squeezing time for them, a time to drain every penny they can out of the die hard fanboi customers who never look past the carrot in front of them.

This "They Need Money Bull Crap" they sold nearly 6 million copies at $40 a pop is $240 MILLLION dollars fools. Don't go telling me they've spent all that money and need more. Then again they might just be like the car dealerships and have gone on these extravagant vacations and thrown money to the wind for hookers and pizza.

Last thing I ever want to hear about any company is "They Need Money". I could care less. They could make money by making more chapters (as they said they would every 6 months) and selling those instead of barnstorming off to make a new game cause they fudged up on this one and still are fudging up on it.

Ahhh I feel much better now that they know my stance.

I just hope it's not the same as that stupid imp. I already have all 3+1 games from boxes. :P

I'll say what i have seid since character slots where buyable.

They should have added the ability to access the bags of other characters via xunlai, That way we could 'buy' storage slots and get more for our £.

If the cost of the panels are $5.00 each, standard markup in retail can be anywhere from 25% and up. The wholesale business I work for uses a standard of 35% which our customers then markup again for their customers. ANET is a business with costs to be covered and they feel that they need $9.99 to cover those costs

You should have made it 8am 12 april

Thread Started : Apr 12, 2009, 04:30 PM

No what they should have done is like every other mmorpg out there has done and that's given the same amount of storage to EVERY character not just one storage center for every character. They keep saying they aren't like WOW or EQ's or any of the rest, but, they sure don't mind accepting the AWARDS for those CLASSED MMORPG's so if they are going to take the awards they should offer the SAME BENEFITS.

When I played Everquest you had a storage of 22 slots and in those slots you could put 22 (10) slot containers for a total of 220 slots PER CHARACTER. Do we even get that much for our ENTIRE ACCOUNT with GW? And that was just the storage container. Your CHARACTER could carry about the same as well (needed weightless bags but oh well). Even so I still had to use mules in EQ to hold all the stuff I had collected. Now you can see my frustration in GW as I barely get an inkling of that kind of storage. I have 7 mules with full compliments of HEROES all full of stuff. There's a weapon in every hand and an offhand in every other hand. There's a rune or two on everyone and they are complaining about storage space as well.

Except you cannot apply the formulae of merchandising to software. The first panel (rather, the implementation) has a cost equal to the time of development + the storage space needed for the data structure(and unless Anet employs only 14 year old Visual Basic programmers, that can't be more than a few Kb). Each panel after that costs only the storage space, which would be a microtransaction in the truest sense of the word (even using consumer pricing for flash drives, $5 gets 512MB or more. Even the aforementioned VB programmers couldn't use that much space for one panel)

So what they are doing is amortizing the development cost over all of the panels sold. Every one sold reduces the cost per panel. As we've seen with Character slots, I expect that price will never go down.

Pay attention to the words used. She mentioned doing the math, but didn't get into what the math was, so that you can bet that part of that math was that they had the "New Accounts for Storage" business model factored in there. While they make less money on the cheap accounts, they get something valuable in the mid-to-long term (which is good. Most companies don't bother worrying about that anymore, thus the economic crisis): Every account sold to an extant player for storage is one more hash mark on their claims of "X gazillion accounts active" for advertising. They probably priced the panels to make sure they didn't shoot that market in the foot (and even to give it a boost. At $10 for 20 slots, $15 for 200 becomes a damn nice-looking deal).

lots of speculation here, but...

i don't think "$5 for base transaction" means what people here think it means. $5 cannot be the cost of a transaction (with their payment processor), because the Game of the Year upgrade and 2008 upgrade only cost $4.99 each. if that were true, anet/ncsoft would be stuffing the pockets of the processor and gaining $0 from these two upgrades. that is highly unlikely.

that said, i think it is clear that "$5 base cost" refers to the minimum cost required to recoup service and development costs - which i have a real hard time believing. i could picture $5 base cost per unit for something like a campaign, but not even close for a storage upgrade. $5 per unit to recoup for a storage upgrade would mean that anet spent (theoretically, if expecting 500,000 units to sell) 2.5 million dollars on development (and future support) of this feature alone. and, with the price tag of $9.99 each, they make 2.5 million in pure profit. perhaps 500k units is optimistic, but you get the point - big numbers.

i call shenanigans. there is nothing "base" about that $5 - it is probably their way of recouping for the development of the rest of the update and for continued service. which is fine, really - they are in the business of game software for profit using a free-to-play model, so microtransactions were inevitable and, generally, most welcome. however, and regardless of the theoretical numbers, this storage thing isn't sitting right with a lot of people and i believe it needs to be addressed without a classic anet "yes, we know, and no, we don't care" cop-out.

in summary...i don't really give a crap about number fudging, but hyping up this update without mentioning we'd have to pay for things was lame. they've already milked us for storage solutions via new character slots and new accounts. the storage upgrade prices do not make sense and cannot compete when compared to the price of a new character slot or new account. i don't think anet has properly weighed the impact of these facts by a longshot.

I bought the game because it has no monthly fee and you don't have to buy armor or such with real money.

So i'm not going to buy extra storage.

I didn't know your company was into online games, or maybe you're providing this service for MMO companies?

Sarcasms apart, your post is as ridiculous as the one in the first pages comparing that storage offer to the prize of their 500Go portable drives...

P.S. to OP: very neatly biaised modified OP.

Can you give some examples just to make it more clear? I agree with the imp and partially with skill packs but storage update for me would fit in this cathegory same as BMP for which items almost nobody uses...

Also having 10000 more money does not give any advantage as can be noticed by fow armor wammos with chaos gloves trying their luck in RA....

not only do we not have to buy these, who said you need to buy the max amoutn and all at once, this is ridiculous. Theres no point.......

Do you think that MMO servers require different hard drives than "Enterprise quality data storage?" (Which means, essentially, high reliability, high speed, large size).

Seriously, what is your point here? What's the relevance of what his company does? Enterprise-level hard drives are pricy, but less so than a lot of consumer technologies (some MP3/media players have a higher price/gb than a full enterprise raid-rack).

If Anet has to pay $5-transaction fee(typically in the $.75-$1 for such small transactions) to store 1 pane's worth of data, then they are getting screwed either by their suppliers or their programmers.

It's not just type in your credit card and it's all done. The credit card company charges a fee, the people at ANet doing the paper work on the transaction need to get paid (billing and collections people plus accounting), Electric bill needs paid, as does the bill for the modem lines that receive their transactions. There are ALOT of hidden costs involved with an electronic Credit Card transaction that you don't see. It's called Overhead and Indirect Labor those cost MUST be accounted for to avoid taking a loss.

Learn how the real world works, kthxbye.

I'd REALLY prefer panes at $5 but I see why and know why they are $10. I also feel that initially they will miss their sales goal but over time, a longer time line that they expected, they will reap their sales goal. Much like with the Character slots.

Reguardless ANet is about to hit a sales influx, I expect Storage slots to be sell weel, not great, but well. I also expect to see an influx in Character slots being purchased as well as copies of individul campains spiking. Though the sales of individual game copies won't show as high on the ANet sales charts since I expect them to be purchased from retailers online as well as at game stores and not via the online store, and all copies sold by retailers were already sold by ANet to those people and have since already hit the ANet sales charts.

To sum up, buy some NCSoft stock today and sell it in a month and you will get a profit as ANet and NCsoft report profit estimates for the second quarter based off this sales "spike" mid quarter. OF course this spike will make the funding for GW2 much easier to come by down the road when ANet can report a high sales number at teh 4 year mark of game existance. OF course at $10 a pane adding in the above costs as well as the Direct labor (Devs, Live Team, Other salaries) i don't think they will post a high profit margin, mearly just high sales dollars.

In the company I work increase in the capacity of the database costed 2,5 million euro. Pure 300k for the software to manage it. I wonder why you all technicians and database administrators did not wrote a word that increasing a capacity and MAINTAINING the performance of the database costs as hell. I am quite sure by looking at what we store in our DBA that Anets one is more powerful and thus more costly.

In this case I support Fril. We do not know what kind of DBA they use. How many people maintain it, what kind of software they use and whether they had to upgrade thier DBA for the storage update. So guessing their costs as I or CTB did is just as accurate as predicting weather using /roll emote.

Thank you very much for this link. That sheds some light. In this case their costs might be much much lower than the ones I pointed for my company.

I'm also curious what affect the 3-data centre model has on their database infrastructure. Worst case each data centre has a replica of the database, which means they need 3x as much storage.

This article may be of interest, Shasgaliel: http://www.dbms2.com/2007/06/09/the-...of-guild-wars/

The QQ in this thread is epic.

Here's how it works: If you don't like it, don't buy it. Pretty simple, really.

I for one, will be buying them:
- The convenience of not having to switch to a mule or another account is worth it to me.
- I don't mind supporting a company that makes a game that I've enjoyed playing for the last four years.
- I just can't get that worked up over $40, no matter what it's for.
- Minipets don't stack...

Well you're pretty much on the right track: I wished that the only thing you could be from the ingame store were products that only concerned themselves with appearance and not function, i.e. armor/weapons/mini-pets/etc. (or at least *basic* function)

Those are operating expenses. They are not part of the transaction fee and no accountant with a clue is going to calculate them into individual pricing.

Irony.

I seem to recall a great many Guru'ers willing to shell out $10 for something like this. Besides, they'll be doing a 4th year promotion for a free tab anyway.

Obviously there is inconsistency in the pricing (unless the ease of not having to use characters for storage accounts for the rest 0.o), but I'm not planning on buying it anyways.

/not signed

I think that I've had pretty good value out of this game after playing for 3 years or so. If I needed more storage i wouldn't even think about paying the
$10, it would get bought. I mean, come on its like the price of a pizza over here in UK land.

Honestly, I'd completely forgotten about the "big storage update", but when I first heard about it I did assume that it would be free. I think I forgot because I didn't much care - kind of went "Oh, a bit more storage, that's nice" and proceeded to go off and do a mish and forget it entirely.

Frankly, I've survived with 4 or fewer tabs for almost 2 years (didn't get Proph until 6 months after I started and then waited another 3 to get NF), so I don't mind. Just means my characters have to carry their own junk. From what I see they've fixed my main problem, as we're now getting equipment packs (and that was my the only difficulty I was having - hauling around my characters' 5 sets of armor and 7 different weapon sets took up 70% of my inventory).

So I don't see how this is a big deal. If people wanna pay, they can pay; if they don't, they have to live with 4 (or 5 with the giveaway) slots, same as they've done up until now. We've survived on 4 for a while - so why do we complain when they give us the option of getting more while trying to make a little money themselves (and I'd rather they sell optional things than charge a subscription fee - wouldn't you?)

So I won't be buying one, because I don't see the point in paying 10 bucks (something I have only rarely) to buy a storage tab when I could easily buy a new character for that much (and I've been dying to get a ranger). But I'm not going to begrudge them to those who are willing to pay, not am I against people funding the company that runs our game.

Besides, I doubt a "boycott" is going to do anything. The only people who will do it are those who wouldn't buy the slots anyway - the people with cash will still buy them. So in effect you're not really taking away any revenue - and note that they would lose more if they gave away slots for free.

Not to mention the fact that Guru, as I've stated in other threads, provides a skewed sample of the population (we tend to be angrier and more "the end is near" than the general population). So if a large percentage of even the people here doesn't really care... then probably most of the general population don't care either. Seriously, every time ANet gives us something (or sells it to us - doesn't matter, they're still offering something new) some tiny minority of the community takes it upon itself to whine as loudly as possible that it's expensive/it's gamebreaking/it doesn't reward things in the past that it had no method of tracking/it doesn't affect them/it affects them. And they come to Riverside and cry about it. Occasionally, they're right. But mostly they're just loud. And annoying.

Tell mum to shop at Iceland... 10 pizzas for £10

My small voice on this small matter is that while storage is worthy of being purchased, it would need to be at a price that made me want to choose that over a new character slot or separate account. Whilst it remains the same price as a character I see no benefit. Character swapping is not a bother and the XTH benefits have already been highlighted.

However, I only have one account and all the chars I will ever need and intend to just 'make do'. I've managed for this long, so hey.

I thought we'd just have to pay in-game money to unlock the storage, kinda like in WoW. Then I was surprised to see that anet wants 10$ per tab for it. Aside from the fact that I didn't even expect them to do that, 10$ is too much. You can already buy a new character slot for the same price, which comes with more than twice as much storage (20+5+10+10 = 45 slots, as opposed to 20 from one tab).

I'm not raging over it or anything. To me it's just another thing anet hyped up and then did not deliver.

Not really...

considering the new tabs are only one part of the storage Update

but hey, we also know there is more coming that we don;t fully know about

Ok, I'll bite. So where is the money coming from to cover the cost of ongoing operating expenses?

This, but yeah could care less i dont need more storage and not gonna buy more, i just delete items that wont fit on inv/storage

I live 5 miles from work. I could walk there but it might take me 50 minutes to an hour to get there. I can drive my truck, although it is going to cost me to do so, and it will only take me ten minutes. I gladly pay for the cost of gas for the convenience and time saving. Those are my options, I choose which one is right for me, others may choose differently.

You know, you can get Guild Wars on Newegg.com for $9.99. Why not do that for the extra storage space instead? You'd also get extra character slots too.

Well Targren, that two people who have asked where that money comes from I'll be the third.

And you can't say "other" products or "investers" because if the "other" products pay for the Operating expensses then what pays the "other' products production costs?

And you can't say "Investors" because no one is going to invest in a company that has no idea what it's bottom line is.

Here's two Terms, learn them, figure out the differences then come back:

Gross Profit

Net Profit

KTHXBYE

You know what would be funny? Anet reacting with: 'We drop the project alltogether, forget about the April update, we'll continue with next month's skill balance'

Now that would be pretty cool.

You really need to not self-own so hard. Seriously.

Net Sales = Sales - Sales returns (of which there will be 0 since OLS doesn't allow returns)
Gross Profit = Net Sales - Cost of goods sold
Net Income = Gross Profit - Overhead
Net Profit = Gross Profit - Overhead - Interest +/- "1-offs" = "Bottom Line"

These terms apply to the business as a whole. Note how "Cost of goods sold" is SEPERATE from "Overhead", and for good reason.

Please stop posting now. You're hurting my faith in humanity.

@the poll

Couldn't care less. Not "could care less," which means something completely different (and is one of the most vague expressions in existence).

And I didn't answer it because it's a fatuous question you set up as a strawman when I said that "Overhead" does not belong in the calculation of "Cost of production". I never said anything about paying for overhead other than out of income (you don't pay for overhead out of profits. "Profits," generally used to mean "net profits" or "bottom line", are what's left after you pay the overhead, costs, etc... See my equations above.). I said you were including things in the cost of the item that did not belong there, and you were.

You can throw all the ad hominem attacks you like, beat the crap out of all the strawmen you need to to make yourself feel smart, but at the end of it all, you were wrong, you were talking out your hindparts, and you got called on it.

And since you're so into advanced economics, go look up the term "Marginal Cost", and think very very hard on how that curve might look for software.