Zen shop Companions

beaghan1

You guys make a small fortune selling the zen shop companions. Also a few bucks on extra active companion slots. A bunch more on people buying zen to sell for diamonds to upgrade the companions. All in all companions are very profitable for you. With that in mind my questions are:

1) Why do you limit the number of active companions? Making them inactive strips their gear and all companions don't use the same items so swapping them out sucks for your inventory. If there were more active companion slots then probably all players would equip more companions and many of those would come from Zen store purchases which would make you a substantial amount of money. All the money from people upgrading 10-20 different companions would be crazy.

2) Why charge zen for the active companion slots that you offer? It's a tiny amount of zen and it's in your interest for players to buy companions which are costly so why nickel and dime the customers on that?

Seriously if you guys put more thought into doing better business you'll make a whole lot more money. I have 5 active companions on my main and they are the same ones that I've had for years. I'd probably have half the ones in the game if it wasn't for these 2 annoying limitations that you put on the game that hurt you more than the players. Basically it seems to me that you don't want my money because your current system makes it a total waste for me to buy and upgrade new companions. Give me free stuff and I'll be happy to advise you on other areas of your business where you clearly fall short..

plasticbat

1. People usually does not upgrade the companion unless that companion is super good. People just buy new companion if it serves better than the existing one. I have 5 active and probably another 15 inactive and will never be used. Other people have more.

2. The active companion slots is for the beginner when they don't have all 5 slots. It is for the player who is impatient to wait for all 5 to be available after leveling. It is not for the people who already has five. You cannot have more than 5 slots no matter how much money you have. You should know that because you played for years.

I don't know why you use the same 5 active companions. It is your choice. Many others like me change their companion when there is a new one that is better than the existing active one.

beaghan1

Yes I know there's only 5 active slots now. That's my point that they should have more. I disagree about upgrading, I've upgraded all of mine on several characters and any of my guild that uses pets also have them upgraded. Most pets don't get their best skills until after they're maxed out.

plasticbat

beaghan1 said:

Yes I know there's only 5 active slots now. That's my point that they should have more. I disagree about upgrading, I've upgraded all of mine on several characters and any of my guild that uses pets also have them upgraded. Most pets don't get their best skills until after they're maxed out.

It is cheaper to buy the purple one instead of upgrading a green/blue one unless this particular green/blue one is super good when it is in purple. Yes, there are some in that category but not all.

dufisto

pet skills are nearly useless outside of a healer. the strikers barely dps (even at orange), the tank pets ai makes it unreliable( perhaps if you could send it in ahead of your attacks), and dont get me started on the "controllers". all the melee pets die pretty quickly on any difficult content post 60 ( even loaded with loyal defender and +defense runes . so you might use a fast caster to proc bonding or need the healer, otherwise there's not really any reason to use anything other than a stone/cat, the other 4 are just buffs and for the most part there are very few that have worthwhile buffs that require upgrading to purple. and most of those you can find in purple for cheaper than upgrading it.

beaghan1

ok well to each his own. The fact is I'd buy more pets with more active slots. They want people to spend more money, and I would. Pets are extremely useful if you solo, if you think not then maybe you need a better/different pet or solo harder stuff, I've gotten through many fights solo that would've never been possible for my class without a pet helping. I like the 20% heal my old healer gives, 20% no matter how many hps you have, I'm not sure if that healer is even available anymore but I have her. Why do they even have upgradeable pets and why introduce new pets if you don't have the slots for them? I'd use them, the 100 or so people I know in game say they'd use some of them.. You could always look at it like if the company makes more money it'd probably benefit you also with better servers or support etc.. More money to them certainly won't hurt the game.

It is a good point that many pets aren't worth having right now so maybe they could also add some better pets for endgame and people would buy them, and revamp the AI on some truly bad ones in game now.

The thread wasn't about the usefulness of pets but I guess we can talk about that too. Ones that I think are good - healer, angel, cat, frost mimic, owl, strikers with knock down sometimes, rust monster and a couple of the defender pets aren't bad for squishy players when the pet is maxed. I prefer the healer over the stone 3/4 of the time, that 20% heal has saved me a million times. Pets do drop like flies on heroics and epic encounters but they pop back up pretty fast usually and so long as they aren't running away getting extra agro (controllers), they help out. Level 40 pets with maxed runes and purple pet gear behave a lot different than they do without those things. On normal level 70 mobs the pets I use don't die. Most don't do much damage, the flaming bird does well when maxed, but I mainly need them to distract stuff while I kill it or heal me. I'd love to see more pets maxed with good gear and see how they are. People don't always post everything and there's a ton of pets so I figure one of rare ones might be a nice hidden gem but I'm not going to spend cash buying them and crystals/time upgrading them to find out if I don't have more active slots. No matter how it's looked at more active slots would be good for the game even if you personally hate all pets.