The Sting:

Just yesterday Bioware broke silence on the details of the changes they’re bringing to the Cartel Market and related Collections system.  Here come my angry-man comments on the whole sheebang.  Some really exciting changes, but when they say stuff like this:

Better quality items in each pack – The baseline pack items will now primarily be Armor, Mounts/Vehicles, Decorations, and Toys. We will add other item types as well, but only when they are high-demand items.

…and this:

Two items per pack – Each pack now only has two items in it. One item will be from the bullet above, a mount or some other “bigger” item. The other item slot will be a Grade 5 rare or artifact level Companion gift.

…it just makes me worry that these changes are only being made because Cartel Pack sales aren’t as ridiculously high as some fool at EA wants them to be.  It’s like they’re absolutely begging people to blow more dollars on those near-useless packs, totally missing the point that people generally don’t like to pay real money for something when they don’t even know for sure what that something is.

But hey-!  We’re still seeing lots of benefits as players, and if the unlikely claims above do actually turn out to be true in deed as well as word, we’ll be getting much better value for our real-world dollar.  So lets dig in…

Draegos’s Highlights:

Well, the changes they’re promising for the Collections interface have me dancing in the street.  We’ll finally be able to search/filter collections to find what we’re looking for without having to click through every last damn page.  And it’ll tell you which pieces of an outfit you have unlocked, which’ll be handy.

They also say that they’re going to start temporarily cycling full armor sets through the market so you have the option to buy, say, Satele Shan’s set outright for a week instead of taking your chances and buying cartel packs and hoping for the best.  Sounds good to me.  Assuming the pricing will likely be in line with sets like the Destroyer armor (~1500 cc or 2.5 month’s sub allowance), this will be likely go over really well.  Other items like mounts will occasionally be cycled through the market this way too.

Headscratchers:

Bioware wants to clear up the confusion over the rarity ratings for their cartel items (“Rare,” Super Rare,” and “Ultra Rare”).  They’re apparently going to do this by… just changing the names to “Bronze,” “Silver,” and “Gold.”  Very 80s, just renaming any problem you can’t or don’t want to solve.  Worst part: it’ll work and people will go for it.

The new “Grand Packs,” which are really just catch-all packs featuring the items from all other packs in one big roulette, don’t do much for me.  Statistically, you have even less of a chance to get something you want from them, because the pool of possible items is so much larger.  They are breaking them up by category, so at least a player can specify if he wants weapons, dyes, pets, emotes, or whatever.  But if they’re going to do this, why not just bring back the removed embargo’d packs in the first place..?

Draegos’s Deep Thoughts:

Eh, whatevs.  I think I’ve only bought one cartel pack, ever, so this isn’t really something that’s going to appeal to me.  I don’t like gambling with what little petty real-world money I have left over after the real world savages my bank account every month.  The idea of shuffling full armor sets or mounts through the market so I have the option to buy them outright sounds good, though.  But for the most part this whole thing just calls to mind a bunch of 102-year-old executives meeting in a board room saying “Gentlemen!  We need to trick our players into spending more real-world dollars in our magical electronic computer game thingie’s imaginary store without actually giving them anything of value in return.”  To me it’s simple: if you want to give me the option to buy a new item, then give me the option to buy a new item.  Don’t give me the option to spend $10-20 for the chance to perhaps maybe possibly get the one item I’m looking for out of the thousands of possibilities in a grab bag and tell me I should thank you for it.

The Cartel Pack-addicted Tohru, on the other hand, will absolutely love these new options.  Hope she’s already started saving up.  😀