The content was not pay gated, and could be purchased with glory. This was a one time offer, and after this these weapons were re-introduced at a low price point.
You are entitled to your opinion. We do not believe that this is hypocritical, as the content was originally made available for in-game resources upon release.
personally I agree with the devs on this one. and I only have one thing to add to this conversation. it might be a dumb point, I’m sure you guys will let me know. but if they did make the glory weapons available via crafting, how do you think that would make people who spent the $5 on them (myself included)? the devs aren’t going to give refunds to those people, and personally i’d feel kind of cheated if that were the case since i spent that money under the impression at the time that that was the only way to get those weapons.
While it wasn’t pay gated at the time, it is pay gated NOW. The point is not that it wasn’t ever “free”, but that now it costs $, not even hard to get resources, just straight money. That is where the hypocrite title is coming from.
Now I understand the cosmetic argument, honestly, I think 80% of the weapons are “cosmetic”. But to claim that it is fair is wrong in my opinion to use as a justification. At one point, Halo games allowed you to change the in game voice, then sold it to you in a still $60 game, for $10, instead of earning it. Moving something from unlocking with time and resources to $$$, IS wrong.
@Bossfrogs this is also something that we considered, as we knew that players who purchased these weapons would feel cheated if they were made available via crafting with in-game resources.
Just would like to point out something:
When it was stated that the weapons would never be offered for Glory again adding them to the soul forge would still be honoring that statement as it will not cost glory to get.
While the weapons are cosmetic, they are still needed for kingdom stars and therefore you are locking content that is needed to progress in the game behind a paywall.
33 weapons, 34 kingdoms…What happened to Khetar?
Only Sin of Maraj currently would be locked behind a paywall (only 3 “free” weapons) but is a long way off from the other requirements needed anyway so I’m sure by the time the other requirements are met there will be more weapons there. All other kingdoms have I think 6 or 7 weapons or more.
12 Stars: x3.25 Tribute Chance
The next would be:
18 Stars: x4 Tribute Reward
This is a long way off being a problem and like I said each kingdom will probably get more weapons before this would be an issue.
20 Stars: +3 Kingdom Skill
This of course is years away and I’m confident all kingdoms will have 8 FREE weapons before being eligible for 20 stars.
Although I disagree with this facet of the weapon revisit, you definitely make a valid argument. I can see where players who purchased weapons previously with cash might be frustrated/angered by having these weapons available with in-game resources now.
What I am significantly more alarmed about, however, are the weapons that ARE going to be craftable with in game resources. The cost seems excessive especially considering they will require a fair amount of the most difficult resource to obtain - diamonds. A weapon that was previously available for glory is now going to require 300 diamonds, 600 each of two other colored jewels, 15,000 souls, and 3 celestial traitstones. This seems extreme, especially for newer players. Even for veteran players, 300 diamonds is nothing to sneeze at. An argument can be made that weapons like Rope Dart, Earth’s Fury, and Trickster Shot are definitely worth the resource cost but the vast majority of weapons will never be used and are more for collection purposes. Regardless of a weapon’s play value, it simply seems like a massive leap to go from a glory only purchase in the past to the resources that are required to obtain it now.
I have been an Xbox One player since the game first came out on console, and I can confidently say that the vast majority of the weapons listed at the top have NEVER been available for glory on console. How can you penalize us for something we never had the ability to get using in-game resources? If the rationale is truly “well, you had your chance, sorry…now you’ll have to pay up”, we on console are still waiting for that chance. Please give it to us and we will gladly take it.
@einsteinle unfortunately we were not the original creators of the console version of Gems of War. We took over the console version of the game during December 2016, and prior to this we didn’t have control over the weapons that were made available. Consoles have been in sync with PC/Mobile since November 2017.
If you can provide us a concrete example of how this has impacted your ability to progress in the game, we will rectify this issue the next time said affected kingdom comes around. Please note that we need an example of how missing out on one of these glory weapons has impacted your ability to level a kingdom, and how this lack has prevented you from progressing within the game, not from completing a collection. Once we have received one and have looked into this further, we are willing to do whatever we can to address this issue.
On a separate note, I wanted to add that no specific weapon is required to gain kingdom power. You can choose which weapon you would like to upgrade in order to advance your kingdom power, and more weapons are being added to the game on a regular basis. A player will not need to purchase a weapon to attain higher kingdom power levels.
HOWEVER, this comes with a very small caveat, which is Sin of Maraj.
Sin of Maraj needs 3 weapons to get to Power Level 8, and only has 4 released weapons at this time. One of these is easily available with Mastery, and 2 others will be craftable during the next Sin of Maraj event.
To further help with the lack of weapon availability for Sin of Maraj, we have decided to do some shuffling in our schedule and bring forward the release of our community designed weapon, which is a scythe from the aforementioned kingdom. To get beyond Power Level 8 in Sin of Maraj, more troops are required, which have yet to be released, so weapons won’t contribute to a hold up in kingdom level past this point.
This thread… lol
I weirdly side with the devs here.
Sirrian - “I want everything to be free in gems of war.”
505 - “Wonderful. That’s unsustainable and your servers will most likely be shut down in a year.”
Sirrian - “Hmm… Okay…99% free?”
505 - “Deal.”
End mock meeting
We got 99% of what we wanted. The ability to craft old weapons that are game changers. Take the W and stop beating the devs up about it. There’s nothing worse than giving people 99% of what they want and them saying it’s not good enough. 
If you’ve spent hundreds-thousands on this game and you don’t like paying money for a weapon you’re missing. Fair enough. You’ve literally contributed more than enough already so you have a dog in this fight.
I myself wish Deathknight armor was for free (or at least free to already vip 11). But it’s not, oh well, I moved on.
If you haven’t spent a dime on this game… Can afford $5 to spend on entertainment… But won’t because you don’t want to spend money on a “free game” and are here (or anywhere) digging into the devs because some crap weapons aren’t free. Then you, sir or ma’am, are literally the worst… The… absolute… worst.
100% agree.
Well I only need one weapon and I can’t get the goddamn thing. Daemon’s Leash isn’t even close to good …
No matter what the devs do they just can’t win. People have been begging for old events weapons for over a year wanting them as flash offers or for $5 and now we finally get them and for free instead of being happy everyone is now complaining about old weapons they will never use not being free as well.
300 diamonds is less than 2 weeks of dungeons. I don’t find it that hard to get that sum, you can practically buy 2 past event weapons per month this way.
If you can’t/won’t finish all 3 daily dungeons, do you actually even need those weapons?
For a very long time, Crimson Bat was my favorite troop in this game. In fact, it is still my third-most used troop of all time, according to Lyya’s website. One of the big upsides to Crimson Bat is that it deals true damage to all troops. Of course, dealing a limited amount of true damage is unhelpful if you can’t fully deplete the enemy’s Life. I can’t count the number of times I lost battles because my opponent had less than 5 Life points remaining. In those situations, it would have been invaluable to have had a weapon option to “finish off” the enemy. There is but one weapon in the entire game that deals true damage to all troops: Crescendo. This weapon was never available for purchase with glory on console. And its color combination is such that it doesn’t overlap Crimson Bat at all and thus serves as a perfect compliment to CB. Never having a free option to obtain this weapon forced console players reliant on true damage teams to 1) either cough up the $5 necessary to purchase the weapon, or 2) make do with suboptimal, slower teams.
Even though Crescendo is an older weapon, I would not hesitate to put it to good use today if it were an option. My “go-to” team for pet events now is Crypt Keeper, Tesla, Holy St. Astra, Tesla. Crypt Keeper is okay, but does not deal true damage to the top troop (except for a very small amount if it is fully upgraded). Because of this, it is the norm that the first enemy troop is the last one I am able to kill, usually requiring an extra turn to do so. If Crescendo was available, I would substitute it for Crypt Keeper, and in turn achieve a more uniform distribution of true damage, saving me untold amounts of time over the hundreds of pet rescues I have done.
Unfortunately, this is not seen as a significant block to progress in the game. There are many teams that are useful in game, and many other troops that can be used in conjunction with Crimson Bat. Crescendo is also not considered a meta weapon, and sees very little use in game. Other troops would worth well in this situation, such as Euryali, Marilith, etc. There are many other viable options that can be obtained with in-game resources.
We are specifically referring to an inability to level up something to get a bonus. The most obvious one we can think of is kingdom power, and we would consider a block to raising kingdom power a significant enough issue regarding game progression to be considered seriously. For example, if you were unable to level Pan’s Vale because you were unable to get Crescendo, then we would take steps to rectify this issue.
Thank you for replying in such detail, we appreciate the time you took to explain this to us further.
Would you mind quoting your source? The weapons were offered repeatedly, for glory. Allow me to quote one of the many occasions to refresh your memory:
https://gemsofwar.com/madness-returns/
Hey, look, it’s Farsight Orb returning, for glory. And the first appearance of Staff of Madness, which also showed up later again, for glory.
Please get your stories straight. Repeating things like
over and over again doesn’t make them any less incorrect. Repeating them as justification for an unpopular decision feels exceptionally annoying.
Salty joined the team long after Staff of Madness was introduced (and Farsight Orb reintroduced). She is passing on received knowledge from those who were at I+2 before her. Blame the incorrect source, not the messenger relaying the info.
So, I appreciate that care is being given to not block progress by entirely paywalled weapons. That was a big part of my concern. I hope this practice continues into the future.
Now, obviously, I think it is better that a game that focuses primarily on collecting things would allow you to collect said things through gameplay without reaching the end of the line and saying nope, give dollars. But I also recognize that Gems of War, for whatever reason, has already staunchly decided to not be the type of game that allows players to reach new players to not ever reach 100% collection (only a few much older players can) since the inclusion of non-repeatable cosmetic pets already crossed this line. This will still be a dealbreaker against for some completionists even starting the game (if they know about it), but it matters far less that salient gameplay affecting choices are covered for the average player. I hope this is addressed at some point, as it is still something I have to bring up when I talk about the game or show the game to prospective players. But having all the other weapons in soulforge now, I am slightly more confident that if a younger me was just hearing about this game right now, that I’d still be willing to play it. With no way to get the old weapons, I had to give it a “do not recommend”, because a lot of the stuff I use in my daily gameplay is an “old weapon” and they’d have a fundamentally different experience without access. Now, I can give it a “this is a fun game, but don’t start playing if this bothers you” and then list a bunch of stuff.
My negative gut reaction here I think many others comes from slippery slope fallacy where if we start allowing this, then its only a matter of time before they decide to paywall other stuff. Which may hit hard on many of us who have watched the game go through a near complete transformation in terms of both core gameplay and monetization practices. But we also have to keep in mind that all these listed weapons, up to this point, were already paywalled past their initial release. This has already been going on for over two years now. And people actually welcomed when the $5 packs came back in the shops, full well knowing they were paywalled and only trophy items. If this is where the line is… well… again, I don’t think its “good” (and it is very clearly against the design philosophy of your lead designer), but maybe its not that bad.
But I should also note that early responses to the issue did not help here.
The old weapons are playable content. This content is pay gated. 90% of the current playerbase (or more) hadn’t even heard of the game when some of these weapons were available through in-game means. “Because we said they would only be available for glory that one time” is one of the weakest justifications for this practice that I’ve ever heard, in addition to being untrue. “Players would feel cheated if we made them available for free” is another extremely weak justification. Please, please stop doing this. We know this is the case of executive meddling pushing player-unfriendly practices that have found to be within a tolerable range in an effort to generate revenue, but don’t pretend they aren’t at least a little player unfriendly. I just hope the revenue it is generating is worth it.
“While they are playable content, they aren’t dominant or even generally very good choices, trending more toward trophy items, and we will make sure a cash purchase-only weapon will never power gate kingdom upgrades” (with the unsaid part being “therefore, we had to concede that it would be okay that we allow these to continue to be cash-only because the publisher thinks this will generate more revenue than still having the purchases but also having a free way to obtain them”) is still going to have some upset people, but probably much less upset. We should have started there. Much easier point to maintain, and much more relevant discussion comes out of it (how much is gameplay affected by this paywall, is it within reason, etc.).