Shear-buckler
Well-known member
Sorry, but you are not getting the specific point I am making.I am listening, and understanding you... I just disagree.
There was a time when "all non-expansion quests included with VIP" meant MORE. There was a time when you needed all of the content in order to level from 1-20. Over time they started giving away content, and included a lot of content in the expansions which covered the "gaps" where it used to be tough to level. Some would (and have) argued that a lot of the content the devs gave away with the coupon codes was "dead" content that doesn't get run much anyway. No matter what your view is on the latter point, the VIP perk of "all non-expansion quests are accessible" has consistently diminshed in value over time. By the time the dev team gave it away to everyone, it held much less value than it previously had. Despite this, the move was classy during COVID and also managed to pull in additional players. It also has the added benefit that more people now have access to content that they otherwise would be very unlikely to purchase since it's "dead" or run less frequently.
Yes, if you compare a "list of exclusive to VIP benefits" before and after the coupon, there is one less thing to list. A minor thing, that held significantly less value than it had previously. And they gave away gold rolls for a year plus to VIPs. And there's a ton of other perks they just introduced. The value items they added far outweigh the coupon they gave away (which also added value for VIPs for the two reason's I've already mentioned).
Would love to discuss this with you though! Let me know if you want to hop onto an upcoming livestream to discuss.
Whether or not the gold rolls makes up for the lost value or the significance of the packs to the VIP benefits can only be discussed AFTER you acknowledge the fact that the free code and the move to paid expansions has devalued VIP in the first place.
Discussing the current value of VIP is moot because the major factor of whether or not VIP is a worth it is your economic situation. For me the cost of VIP is completely insignificant and I really don't care that they made is less valuable.
What we can see though is that they have spend a lot of time and effort on promising and implementing a system to improve the value of VIP, so clearly the ones with the data have at some point decided that they could make more money if they made VIP better. Sadly as such a system the one we got is very bad. The only ones cheering for it are people like you who already are VIP. For people whom VIP represents an amount of money with tangible opportunity costs there is very little chance that the new system will sway them to sub.
There is also another dimension to the problems with the new system, not only are the rewards bad, they can never become particularly good either because they set it up as an endlessly stacking ladder that is impossible to catch up on. With the current system increasing the bonuses would likely cause far more problems down the road than it would solve today.
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