[Fixed?] Why Has Cryptic Deliberately Excluded Players Who Bought the Gamma Vanguard Starter?

neotomaunum

Edit: so, as of July 23, in the "35% off bundles sale", the Gamma Vanguard Pack - Discounted is now discounted 35% alongside the 'normal' version. While it is likely too late for me (bought the Cardy ship bundle last sale), I appreciate the change. No idea if it was related to feedback or just random, but I wanted to update this post to acknowledge the improvement.

As we've all likely seen,"all Gamma Quadrant products are 35% off in the Zen Store until June 28th!"

https://twitter.com/trekonlinegame/status/1408092693402619904

Good news, right?

Well, turns out this advertisement is not factually correct.


Many thanks to reddit user wrtNSFW for the convenient screen-cap.


Turns out that the Marketing Department has chosen, deliberately, not to apply the 35% discount to one specific Gamma Quadrant product: the Gamma Vanguard Pack - Discounted, that replaces the regular Gamma Vanguard Pack once someone has purchased the Gamma Starter Pack.

I assumed it was an unintended oversight or code glitch, since the Gamma Vanguard Pack shouldn't be purchasable once it is replaced with the Gamma Vanguard Pack - Discounted. Turns out this is not the case:

Arc Support wrote on June 25:

We have been receiving similar reports from other players so we have raised the issue to our higher tier of support. According to them, the 35% discount only on the full-priced version of the Gamma Vanguard Pack is intended. I understand that discounts in the past weren't done like this just like the OP on Reddit posted. However, promotions may change over time and it's done by the Marketing team. If you have any feedback or suggestions about it, you may post them on our official game forum to promote discussions with other members of the community. This way, the team who has influence over the issue would be able to see it and may consider making changes to it.

Emphasis mine.

It seems the Marketing Team has chosen, quite deliberately stick it to players who were foolish enough to support Cryptic earlier buy buying the Gamma Starter Pack.

According to Support, the only thing to be done is to start a thread here. Am I outrageous for thinking that this is a very unreasonable move on Cryptic's Marketing Team?

Unknown

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neotomaunum

Hmm. Checking the language of the Gamma Vanguard Starter Pack I purchased, it did indeed confirm that it would *replace* the Gamma Vanguard Starter Pack with a special discounted version that is 2000 Zen less than its normal price, to allow me to purchase the rest of the Gamma Vanguard Pack for the original price if desired.




Seems Crypic doesn't care that those players who were foolish enough to spend money and support them previously are now going to be out 1300 Zen for nothing.

Players beware, I guess...

Between this and the stealth removal of Epic and Arc account linking (a story for another thread, when my anger towards Cryptic / Arc Games subsumes my disgust and frustration again), I've certainly learned my lesson about giving these taHqeq any more of my money.

neotomaunum

Just a quick post to acknowledge that Cryptic has now included the discounted Gamma bundle with the rest of the bundles in the current 35% off sale. I'm personally still miffed that they didn't include it in the earlier sale (since I bought the Cardassian bundle instead). But, progress is still progress!

darkbladejk

since this has been resolved I'm going to close this thread to prevent any potential further confusion. /closed