ArenaNet Offers Refunds and Bonuses to help Pricing Woes

So! With all this E3 hullabaloo going around, it was easy to forget (or at least, ignore) PC Gaming for the past few days—even with the big PC gaming presentation that took place there this year! But now that E3’s cold in the ground and things are getting some normalcy, it’s time to return our thoughts to, what else, the PC master race and the glorious feeling of having no FPS or graphic lock on their future copies of Fallout 4.

Anyway. Not all is well in PC land, at least, not for MMORPG fans and owners of Guild Wars 2, the MMORPG I would marry if it were legal in my state. See, the new Expansion Pack was announced a while back, but only recently was the price of this expansion pack revealed: 50 bucks. Now, that’s not a bad cost for an expansion, until you consider it only contains one more zone, a few new PvP maps, a single new class, and some extra end-game content that should probably free for everyone anyway.

Personally, I never saw anything wrong with the 50 dollar pack: sure, it’s pricey for an expansion but since Guild Wars 2 is free to play anyway (or, more accurately, pay-to-play) I would be happy to inject the game with a 50 dollar booster. But what had myself (and other fans) mostly enraged was the news that pre-ordering the expansion means you get a free copy of the vanilla game—meaning if you bought the game in anticipation for the expansion, you effectively had to pay for it twice.

Fortunately, ArenaNet is listening, and has today debuted a new solution for easing the anger of fans who feel cheated or ripped off: bonuses and refunds!

The first thing (and perhaps the simplest to understand) ArenaNet made clear was that the 50 dollar price tag wasn’t going anywhere. Secondly, the bonus character slot offered to people who pre-ordered the game will automatically be made available for anyone who owned a copy of Guild Wars 2 before January 23rd of this year—so that particular bonus will be enjoyed by all.

But now things get confusing.

Anyone who bought Guild Wars 2 between 1/23/2015 and 6/16/2015 THROUGH ARENANET DIRECTLY will immediately get a refund for their purchase of the game as soon as they, too, pre-order Heart of Thorns. If you bought Guild Wars 2 through a third-party retailer, however, you are ineligible for the refund, but you will get the character slot as a sort of consolation prize.

And finally, if you purchased Guild Wars 2 between the above dates, but don’t want to pre-order Heart of Thorns, you can still request a refund, but you will lose your account and will have to make a new one if you change your mind in the future.

Whew! That’s a mouthful. But it’s also nice to see Arenanet extending the olive branch to those who missed the opportunity now presented to them. I hope it’s enough to keep the rage down…