Will any remaining Anet fans please put their hands up?
A while ago I posted a fairly upbeat post about the sorts of changes needed to make Guild Wars 2 a success. Despite several abominable screwups on Arenanet’s part, I made an attempt to defend them. Not any more. Their latest scam totally-non-exploitative marketing proposal is to create a new mission pack (with four missions covering the Guild Wars backstory) only available to those who spend £17 or more in the ingame store.
In other words, those who buy GW:EN online instead of paying less money to an online store for more product (game + printed manual + other stuff in box) than Anet provide (just the game). This will probably prove to be the most ridiculous marketing move Anet have ever made, the screwup upon screwups that finally killed off any lingering support they had from the Guild Wars fanbase. Anet have two choices: they either make this pack available to anyone who wants to buy it (instead of a cartel-like bundling deal with other products), or they lose a very significant proportion of the Guild Wars playerbase (77-page complaint thread on Gwonline, Guru has crashed under the weight of people) . Put simply, they either fix this or Guild Wars 2 will sink like a stone.
Tags: ArenaNet, Computers and Internet, Games, Guild Wars, Guild Wars 2, Scamming