Trivia
Originally released as part of a promotion for the Guild Wars Online Store. Any person buying content for $29 USD (€26/£17) between July 5, 2007 and October 31, 2007 qualified themselves to receive the Bonus Mission Pack for free on November 29, 2007.
Due to a very suggestive written promotion, which sounded like "this is a promotional item; you can only ever get it if you pay $29 between those given dates in the online store", people complained about the price (how they could dare to sell the BMP for $29) and to the fact that it's only available in the online store, which has very limited payment methods.
The statement was corrected - after the promotion - to "we never said anything like this; we meant the promotion is limited, but not the content" and the bonus pack was made available for $9.99 / €8.99 / £5.99 on January 28, 2008.
Though the real tension between the community and ArenaNet arose because of the fact that they used the BMP as a promotion for the crippled online store.
1) The store has too high prices. Because of their own "we can't sell below our own RRP"-policy every retailer / online-shop had better prices.
2) Unlike Blizzard, Valve or other NCsoft published games, ArenaNet "upgrade"-contents are only available via American Express, Master Card and Visa credit cards. No retail "keycards", no PayPal, no direct debit, no transfer, nothing. And unlike in the US, credit cards aren't that common in Europe.
3) ArenaNet promised to add other payment methods. It's hard to tell if this has just a low priority, the programmers are incompetent or this all is made up, but it took over a year from the promise to the announcement from September 27, 2007 Starting on Tuesday, October 7, players in the UK and Germany will be able to purchase character slots and the Guild Wars: 1 Million Edition Upgrade from the Guild Wars In-Game Store using telephony interactive voice response (IVR) billing. Players in the UK will be able to purchase the Guild Wars: 1 Million Edition Upgrade from the Guild Wars In-Game Store using premium-rate short messages (SMS). I don't know what happened to the UK, but the German payment was "delayed" because of "possible security issues". It's now February 17, 2008 and since the delay-statement in last October, there wasn't any news/statement at all.
4) Though today the BMP is probably sold mostly because of the unique weapon skins, this wasn't known when it was announced. In fact, the whole trouble was just about story. The BMP answers open questions about the four characters in question - something for every Guild Wars fan. Yet only a fraction could buy it.
Contributed by
Xoleras (66989) on Feb 17, 2008.
