My recent return to Guild Wars 2 for the Secrets of the Obscure expansion resurrected one of my old gripes: The cash shop almost never has things I want to buy.
Granted, this gripe is related to why the game is consistently the best value MMORPG in the whole dang genre: because there’s very little you need to buy. But I don’t want to talk about needs. I want to talk about wants. I like to support the games I’m playing, and I like dumb unnecessary things like noodle cart chairs and mounts that look like Super Adventure Box escapees.
But when I came back for SOTO, I checked what was for sale against my list of wants (of course I have a list of wants) and came up empty. There are like a dozen things like outfits, mount skins, and passes on my list, but not one thing was in the cash shop, having been rotated out for FOMO. I’m standing there with a credit card and a wish list and the game wasn’t trying to get my money even a little bit. (To be fair, the game didn’t seem to be trying to get anyone’s money; this was an expansion that gave everyone a free skyscale, and there were hardly any skyscale skins on offer for the first two weeks of the game. I was astonished at how much money they were leaving on the table. In week three, they finally started rolling them out, but I dunno where they were or how many casuals were still playing to buy them.)
It’s better than it used to be, but I was still annoyed. And it’s far from alone in the MMO industry; LOTRO does this all the time with sales, seldom putting anything I’d want to buy on sale and stubbornly refusing to sell things it knows we want.
Do MMO cash shops usually have things you want to buy? Or do you find yourself logging out of cash shops with a shrug and a fat wallet?
Every morning, the Massively Overpowered writers team up with mascot Mo to ask MMORPG players pointed questions about the massively multiplayer online roleplaying genre. Grab a mug of your preferred beverage and take a stab at answering the question posed in today’s Daily Grind!
