Revalor Famaris
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Paizo Plus gold - In theory, its a great idea. For spending money with Paizo, you can get a discount on future purchases.
But - its either a full time job to try to figure out how to use it (since you would have to make a new order for basically every $20 of purchase), or its a useless benefit that was hyped, and which we then get to watch go down the drain.
I am going to detail my specific issues below, but before I do, some concrete asks that I think most of your customers would get behind:
1) Add options for gold use that align with the current purchase costs of digital items (with a reasonable buffer for taxes). Digital goods are the best example of what gold is for - and it works best when it covers the full purchase price.
2) This is primarily for making it useful for physical - though it would also help with those trying to not make many one-item orders; either provide larger options ($100, $200), or allow stacking. Without those, it makes it virtually impossible to USE the gold in question for any physical goods, or without wasting a lot of time making essentially microtransactions.
From my point of view (I obviously cannot speak for everyone), I would accept a worse gold/dollar amount ratio for #2, for the benefit that it would be reasonably useful. Unless its a much worse ratio, when doing a physical order, I would likely still come out ahead on the shipping vs. having to pay shipping for every single book.
The issues this is trying to address:
1) Ignoring Society for the moment - outside of a sale, nothing is $20 - they are all more. Which means I am always going to have to spend more just to use my gold, especially for physical items.
2) The fact that the amounts are so low - and, because they are coupons, cannot be stacked - means that, if I want to use the gold for physical items, then I have to put every book in a different order. And pay shipping on every single book. Which means even when I can find a good discount deal, I am likely either giving up 25% of the gold used, or I have to pay more on every order - and the shipping is added as a surcharge on every order. And that is obviously worse for those overseas
3) And, for PDFs, the recent change in PDF price means that gold for PDFs still requires paying $10/PDF out of pocket. Having a coupon that covers a full PDF seems like a no-brainer.
Bluntly - Without some sort of change, the benefit you provided that is supposed to help folks feel invested and rewarded, is just going to become something that makes them upset, because:
1) It uses up a lot of time trying to make it work
2) They end up having to either pay more/pay a measurable surcharge to use it, or give us most of it for nothing
3) For those with measurable amounts, they/we are just going to end up watching it get taken back for no benefit, because its not worth the time/effort to try to find a way to use it within the rules that does not cost almost as much. Which is the opposite of feeling rewarded.
I know I am neither the first nor the only person providing feedback on this. I know there is the Suggestions and Feature Requests thread where this has been brought up more than once. But, given we have roughly 6 months to address this before the gold people have starts going away, I figured bringing this to its own thread (where it can hopefully be addressed directly and timely) may be appropriate.
If there are other actions being taken on this, I am not seeing any mention of them on the forums - so, if this is already being addressed, any info on HOW it is being addressed would be appreciated.
Revalor