Tom Nook's Journal

Here we are, my one hundredth entry.
I would have liked it to be something special, but unfortunately that's not going to be the case.
The reason why, well three words: Bonus Mission Pack.

Let's get one thing straight from the start.
It's good that ANet is making the Bonus Mission Pack available once again. It's great that they are reaching out to a wider player base by offering it from selected retail partners (though we don't know who they are at present) as well as the in-game store.

What has irked me though is that I suspected that ANet would in fact release the Bonus Mission Pack outside of the promotion. But with the constant non-committal answers from ANet when asked about it being released at a later date, I decided that I couldn't take the risk of missing it.

So on the final day of the promotion, I bought stuff that I neither wanted nor needed. My take on it was this:

• If the Bonus Mission Pack was in fact released at a later date, the worst scenario would be that I've paid over-the-odds for it.
  
  
• If it wasn't released at a later date, then the worst scenario would have been that I would have missed the opportunity to obtain it.

It turns out of course, that the first scenario was the correct one and I've ended up paying far, far more for the Bonus Mission Pack that I should have.
Better than missing out on it completely I suppose.

Still, the whole thing could have been avoided by a simple statement from ANet saying that the Bonus Mission Pack would be made available to purchase sometime in 2008. It contains enough information for people to make an informed decision about buying it, yet remains vague enough for ANet to be able to release it at their leisure.

It's a shame that this has come on the back of the Polar Bear mini-pet debacle. I think that a lot of people are loosing faith in ANet and if it continues, Guild Wars II will suffer in turn when launched.

And that would be a crying shame.