GW2 Pre-purchase

[tanithryudo]

Pre-purchase starts April 10...apparently this info was out for a while. (My fan-fu is weak T_T)

Quibbling on whether I should buy the Digital Collector's Edition...On the one hand - Beta Weekends access and 3 day head start...on the other hand, NDA might mean I explode from not being allowed to share. =/

Edit: Actually, looking at the bonuses give by the CE, not sure I'm willing to pay the extra $20 for. Three of the items are one time use, the minipet is not a pretteh one from my POV, making the elite skill the only thing worth getting...but not worth $20 by itself... Hrm.

Comments

[cashew.insanejournal.com]

You won't even be able to talk about it with me? ;_; But it'll only be one person and you know I can keep a secret, since it's not like I know anyone else who cares about GW2. And I'm not sure NDA means you can't share. It just means you can't talk about certain aspects of the game.

Anyway, to get serious a moment, I think it depends on how much you want to experience everything GW2 has to offer. I personally don't think I'll be missing the elite that much. On the other hand, I don't see myself playing the game nearly as much as you will. So if you think you'll be missing the skill, go ahead and shell out money for it, given that it's a limited time offer. Or you could always wait for the price to drop on the game, then purchase the CE at a later time.

Also, given that it looks like you need to purchase an account (as I imagine they'll have digital distribution of the client), it seems that this is a pay + cash shop kind of game, which makes me a little...leery. Mostly because I don't see how this payment method is any different from the original model.

[tanithryudo.insanejournal.com]

I did some rough calculations and I'm pretty sure I've already shelled out over $400 and possibly over $500 on GW1 already (both accounts). Of course I've also played it off an on for about 5 years so that's about $100/year. Compared to that it seems $20 is not that much. :p

I would like to know more about the elite skill before putting money down for the CE. Most importantly, is it pretteh? :p Also, I'm wondering if this would be similar to the fire imp summon in GW1, where it's not a very powerful skill but you get to be able to use it as a new char right off the bat rather than wait for lvl 30 and spend skill points to unlock the elite. If that's the case, then it would be something worthwhile to get to facilitate levelling. But that's just speculation.

As for the business model, I'm pretty sure they've never indicated any huge change from the current GW1 model. As much as I'd like them to do a completely free to play model, it's probably not feasible considering the amount of non-microtransaction content they have as compared to other F2P games.