Augury

From the Guild Wars news page:

Guild Wars players now have the opportunity to purchase PVP Unlock Packs for all Prophecies skills! For $9.99 USD (€8.99, £5.99), you can unlock all of the 70+ Prophecies skills for a single profession. For $39.99 USD (€35.99, £23.99) you can unlock all 450+ Prophecies skills for the 6 professions. Once unlocked, skills can be used by any of your PvP characters. Head to the Guild Wars Official Store to take advantage of this much-requested opportunity.

Unbelievable. It’s not like it’s even difficult to unlock the great majority of skills in Guild Wars, but some people can’t even be bothered to play the game to unlock them. They merely want to jump right in to PvP as though PvE doesn’t even exist. It’s too bad ArenaNet is promoting this sort of behavior. If we’re going to condone an attitude that PvP players should be able to entirely skip PvE, then let’s continue that thinking and make the PvE game better and distinct from PvP. There’s plenty of unique things that are fine in a PvE environment that don’t belong in PvP.

As horrible as I find this news, it pales in comparison with what some other cretins have thought up. Remember Real Money Trading? Well, some people have decided that Real Money Trading isn’t something that needs to be stopped — They’ve decided they want in on it. Say goodbye to games, via 1UP:

Microsoft mentioned a new kind of microtransaction at the session, as well, which they are calling “consumables.” These purchases would be re-purchasable items i.e. if a game was selling 100 gold pieces, you would be able to rebuy 100 gold pieces when you needed them. The “consumables” tech will be included in this fall’s release of the SDK.

Another thing Microsoft intends to add to the Marketplace is the ability for vendors placed in videogames to allow gamers to buy from the Marketplace. Say, there is a vendor in an RPG selling a rare sword and that sword is available on the Marketplace, players will be able to put the sword in a checkout cart and then return to the Marketplace later to complete the download. For now, the in-game Marketplace will bring the Marketplace experience into the gameplay, but the transactions, for now, will still need to be completed on the Marketplace and not in-game.

All I can say is that I look forward to the early demise of games and companies that try to bleed me for every cent I’m worth with pay-for-play “microcontent.”