I'm not a fan of it. It is understandable if someone wants to buy a lot, then they get a discount, but we are talking here about an online game, where the team didn't want to interfere in:
- DEC pricing (if it rises, let it rise)
- Card prices be on the market as they are
- Renting prices, even though they introduced the EOS rule (which makes sense), but let the renters do what their want for profit, and did nothing to regulate it (fortunately a lot of card holders are fair if you are a long time renter)
- Bots are fine
Now from this mindset I would not expect them to announce a "pre-sale", with the excuse that we will make pooling available, so it does not scream like pre-sale.
If there would be no pre-sale we could still get screwed by bots flooding the market and buying up the packs (well it can be both eventually), but now I know that there will be people who will get the packs before me.
They should have tried to find a decentralized way to facilitate this.
The second issue here is the poor communication:
- The news was that they will to a voucher system and then they will see
- 2 weeks later it was another round of vouchers
- 1 week later it is an optional pre-sale for big buyers.
This just sucks out the fun of waiting for and opening pack, which let's be honest is one of the biggest joys in these card games. So I'm very unhappy with these decisions.
On the other hand I don't believe all 15.000.000 packs will be sold in minutes, as that would cost at least 45.000.000 USD (with a 25% discount), and I don't believe we are talking about so much money on the table. So I'm hoping I can buy packs, or even better, earn them in daily quest rewards (with the 1% chance) until all are sold out.
This could have been a blogpost...