Posted my thing for years, Multiple times, so here it is again.
- Remove the Daily Glory Keys.
- Add 1 VIP Key per VIP Level each Week.
(If that is too much 1 Key/2 vip Levels each week)
Let’s say that they added 1 VIp key a day thus ~30 VIP keys a month to some high VIP level like VIP 10. Those 30 VIP keys would not kill store purchases. It certainly wouldn’t make people leave due to boredom 
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Yeah, @vanyel makes some good points.
For TL;DR, skip to the next giant header.
I divide the game into phases based on which currency is obsolete for the player. “Mid-game” has always covered too many people for my liking, and this seems to work better. So we have:
- Newbies, who need EVERYTHING.
- Post-Gold players, who have leveled every kingdom to 10 and only use gold for guild tasks/new kingdoms.
- Post-Souls players, who have pushed all kingdom powers to at least 5, can farm souls quickly, and are more held back by lack of troops than lack of levels.
- Post-keys players, who are missing so few troops keys no longer hold exciting prospects.
- Endgame players, who only spend resources when a new kingdom/mythic releases, get it immediately, then keep hoarding.
VIP keys (and the rewards in general) are worth dramatically less as you progress through those phases. That also correlates to “the things you want to spend money on” dramatically decreasing.
A newbie and post-gold player would certainly agree that VIP keys are worth a lot. They need troops and every kind of resource badly, and any edge they can get helps. The VIP system is oriented towards offering these players a way to skip a lot of grinding in return for a relatively large amount of money. It’s spelled out right in the cost of Deathknight Armor, which skips you straight to VIP 3. It takes 3 or 4 more Deathknight Armor-equivalent purchases to get to VIP 5.
Post-souls players are far less tempted. They’re probably in a good guild and getting a plethora of keys weekly. They have a list of the mythics/legendaries they lack, and have good chances of getting those weekly. VIP keys are still exciting, but these players are also starting to feel, “Once I get the troops I’m missing there’s not much left.” So there is some backwards pressure. If a post-souls player is at VIP 3, spending money to get to VIP 5 doesn’t seem to pay off if done as a lump sum. And if they’re already at VIP 5, I can’t imagine much motivating a purchase to get further quickly.
The two endgame tiers probably aren’t motivated by VIP points at all. They certainly stopped caring about VIP keys when they reached this phase. I think when people spend money at this level, it’s more about reaching some goal like the Raid leaderboard, and I don’t think very many players care about that. (But “very many” is a relative term and we could have a whole thread about defining it.)
I’m just reaching post-souls. In the couple of weeks since pushing my kingdoms to 5 stars, I’ve farmed 225k souls towards Dawnbringer while also spending nearly 60k rejuvenating my GW teams since I moved to a competitive guild. At this point I won’t even notice the % bonuses or “troops start at level 5” aspects of VIP 5 if I get there. VIP keys are neat, but there are only about 5-6 “important” troops left and I’m worried if I get them faster, I’ll quit faster. So I don’t feel a lot of motivation to spend about $90 in one go to finish off VIP 5.
Here’s the TL;DR point:
If I try to imagine rewards that will be exciting to players at post-souls and beyond, it’s kind of ridiculous. I’d love a tiny chance at Orbs of Power as a reward, or a way to trade in VIP keys for diamonds. Those are extremely powerful rewards in the hands of a newbie who pays to get to VIP 5 up-front. I don’t know if that’s bad or good. But I do know if it’s frequent enough to make me happy, players will be agitated you can buy your way to it.
So I don’t know a good way to improve the VIP system other than, perhaps, suggesting that age plays a factor. What if the reward at the end of the weekly event is a “War Medal” that shows you were active in Krystara for 1 week. Maybe you could cash in 1 War Medal for 5 VIP points. That’d get a player to VIP 3 “for free” in 30 weeks, which is roughly half a year. That doesn’t seem to devalue “get there for $30 today.” It’d take 130 weeks (2+ years!) of play to reach VIP 5 at this point, that also seems fair.
This still makes spending money the most attractive way to ascend VIP levels. But it also strongly supplements long-term small purchases. I spend at most $5/week. I’m almost to VIP 4, but if my idea were implemented I’d still only be about halfway to VIP 5. At my current rate, by the time I reach VIP 5 I won’t care about any of it!
I think that’s the kicker, though. The high-end VIP rewards are there to give huge payoffs to people who spend a lot of money early. People who spend money slowly won’t get nearly as much of a payoff. I’m not sure if VIP has to matter to those players, but I sure wish it did.
As-is, VIP points have very little to do with my purchases. I would love to buy one of the $50 packs, but I’ve also got a list of 10 Switch games I’d like to buy, and my $50 goes farther if I spend it there. Deathknight Armor has a tiny impact on my current GoW play, but I’ll spend hundreds of hours on Hyrule Warriors.
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But that sort of works out because if the vip benefits are enough to drive some purchases, eventually new players that join would be interested.
The devs could:
-
Do nothing and eventually lose players due burnout and other real issues that could potentially bamouth the game.
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Do something that can please the current playerbase and boost actual and future revenue appealing to “midtier” and newish players.
Boredom due finishing everything can happen sooner or later, at this point they wouldn’t see a penny from endgamers like me or others anyway, but in the meantime if the devs/publisher decide to make decent offers, then, they can see some profit.
I can’t really speculate on the kind of revenue the devs want. I do know that after 6 months, these two players look identical:
- “I signed up and got excited so I spent $50 on Deathknight Armor. Then a month later I was mad because I couldn’t compete in raids/invasions and quit.”
- “I signed up and figured I’d F2P. Every now and then I spend $5 on diamonds. I did this 10 times before getting bored and quitting.”
Going too much deeper than that involves making assumptions about if the devs want fast, large purchases or slow, gradual purchases. The shop seems to speak to the former, not the latter.
I think, in the end, VIP is a currency that stops mattering somewhere between post-souls and post-troops. It’s best to think of it that way, and very difficult to modify it to be exciting to those players.
When we speak of wanting it to be fair, I think it’s clear what we really want:
A new currency that isn’t very useful for newbies, but is very useful for late-gamers. That sort of begs for a new mode in my opinion. I can’t think of another way to set one up. That mode would require this currency, and give rewards that I can’t describe yet, probably more of the particular currency that gets you in? It doesn’t sound fun at the outset.
Remember: if you want a game that can be played forever, you need a game with no end conditions. GoW has a very clear end condition. When you get there, the solution isn’t “add new stuff specifically for people like me”. You may think it’s so, but that last paragraph is the problem: it either helps other people get to the end (and thus they stop spending money/burn out) faster, or it has to be gated away from most of the game’s players. Neither makes people very happy.
When a game stops being fun, it’s healthy to find another game.
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I have to agree with your last paragraph, there really is nothing left for me to do but craft 2 end game mythics, and get 2 cards from vault rewards, I would not mind getting a vault key every day, but I have accomplished most of my game goals and other than chasing a few cards to bring a few troops to mythic that I will never use it does not hold much for me at this time other than caring about my guild family and helping newer players, as far as a new currency goes I have no clue how that would work our, the orbs are kind of meh for me but I do not mind stockpiling them so I do not have to use as many stones when a new mythic comes out
I would rather they reduce the cost of vip keys. With spare gems much harder to come by since 3.3 I feel my “purchase” of vip chest access is now worthless if I can’t afford to open them.
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I reached VIP Lvl 19 today… so yes, i spent a lot of money, because i love the game. 
but i would also love to see a change in the vip rewards.
i would say:
VIP 16: 1 VIP key per week
VIP 17: 2 VIP keys per week
VIP 18: 3 VIP keys per week
VIP 19: 4 VIP keys per week
VIP 20: 5 VIP keys per week
anstead of the useless extra team slots, that no one needs! XD
and i don’t think, it would “kill” the game… i opened a lot of VIP chests already and mostly i get epics and stonesm witch i mostly have tones of already too. The chances for Legendary and mythics are very small anyway…
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For the record I would bet most people would disagree that extra team slots are useless. Many of us could do with an extra 5-10 slots easily.
Now whether they’re lame as high level VIP rewards, well that may be. I’m pretty sure I could be convinced to pay $5 for 2 extra slots if they put that in the store…
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with VIP lvl 19 i have 45 team slots…
i use 10… 6 for every color in the guild wars, 1 defence team, 1 attack team, 1 gold farming team and one slot for experimenting… that’s it XD
I think there’s two ways to get to a very high VIP level. One is to spend a TON of money up-front. The other is to spend small amounts of money over a long period of time. I think what makes determining “worth it” VIP rewards hard is what “matters” depends where on that spectrum you fall.
If you spend slowly, you’re at a level where the kind of “worth it” rewards are silly to give away for free. Ignoring VIP level, at my phase of the game about the only thing I’d love to pay for is diamonds. VIP keys aren’t super exciting compared to that.
I don’t have a good handle on what’d be interesting for a player who spent enough to get to VIP 10 in a short span of time like 3 months. I don’t think even spending that much money gives you a solid basis for approaching competitive play. So sure, for those players “more VIP keys” is a great incentive. It kind of makes sense someone who throws a ton of money at the game intends to make a LOT of progress. To that end, giving out lots of VIP keys at those high levels makes sense.
So maybe this is just another one of those things in the game where what counts as “good” is very context-sensitive. Slow spenders don’t benefit from the VIP system much at all, even with increased rewards. Fast spenders benefit much more at the current reward levels, but I lack the context to decide if it’s “enough”. In the end there’s really not much the game could put on the table that’d talk me into spending more than about $20 in a month. It’s not that I don’t like the VIP rewards, it’s that I have limits on what I think is a responsible expenditure.
You’ll be using 11 once you get tasks lol
I splurged on the good armor and a number of gem packs over my year here, but my last purchase with real cash was quite a while ago, and it isn’t because I got anything super amazing from when I did spend cash. As I said in other threads, I will not financially support where this game is going. I’ll play it until a slap in the face (like gem sink shops) hits me harder than I can recover from. Ie: PVP costing gems per play, etc etc.
With that said, my VIP level is I believe 8, and I don’t even know what I get from it. Some glory keys I think? Before the gem sinks and nerfs, I was fine with it. If I could get all of the things I got with real life money taken away, and my money refunded, I would take that option in a heartbeat due to the turn of events.
In general, VIP chests, and the rewards from the VIP level, are both completely and utterly worthless. They can help a brand new player with the armor, or maybe to pull a Mythic, but honestly with so many mythics being as bad as they are (in comparison to the good ones), it isn’t worth it. To me at least.
Fair enough! I have 29 and wish I had a few more. 12 tied up for GW (2 for each color), 8 for GW defenses, 1 explore, 1 to rotate event teams each week and the rest for PvP & misc. I have enough solid teams now that if I want to mess with anything new I have to cannibalize 1 of the existing ones.
Wish I could purchase 2 or 3 of your unused ones 
On another note, thanks for your philanthropy, helping keep the game around for the rest of us to enjoy! 
There are now so many gem sinks in the game I never have gems to buy VIP keys anymore, so I wouldn’t recommend being a VIP at all anymore! I don’t think I’ve spend any this entire year and they got me with pets. They did such a good job with the pets. I bought some and before you know I’m scrounging just to have enough gem for bounty this week.
VIP keys? What are those? I’m VIP level 14 and I may as well be level 4 without access to VIP keys for all the good it does me now.
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I haven’t been VIP 5 for long and I’m not sure if things were better before or not. I do wish you’d atleast consider reworking VIP rewards … a weekly VIP key or something would be cool.
As for the gem sinks … eh … sometimes you just can’t buy everything … if you see bounty coming up … maybe take the week before off and save gems for it ? If you really like raid and want to crush at it … save for 2 weeks and then kill it . Is it ideal ? no … but it is what it is .
Agreed entirely! I Love this game… I spend real money in exchange for virtual goods and services… Those of us who invest into this game, as we do, deserve VIP rewards. I dropped $50 the other day for gems… Didn’t even land one mythic out of the deal when I used them. The least that could be done to reward my purchase or any other purchases I’ve or others have made is throw us some VIP keys.
If you dropped $50 and are not happy with the result. You should look at the “Path to…” Offers instead, they Guarantee a Mythic.
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this
What is that… I’m down for any guaranteed mythics! Just got scooped by a great guild but never heard that mentioned… Still learning
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