I have been thinking about this part and what it boils down to, IMHO, the DLC’s got much more complex as time advanced. Blood and sand originated unique aspects with vaulted ceilings and different style of gates. Prior to that, it was pretty much just reskins.
So the serious question here, would we all be happy with 4 dlcs that were as basic as 2018’s packs and would we pay up for them?
I certainly would. Heck I would have been happy to pay a little extra than the prices they had on the DLCs, because we got value for our money. But as @Nikki said and said well, I am not naive enough to pay some >$20 for 4 items.
I agree with Crom’s. If they offered the basic building sets. I’d gladly shell out $10-20 for them. It needs to have the roofs, walls, doors, ceilings, pillars etc. I get prices go up. I know the cost of employees and servers. But they are doing more harm than good. Every new person that comes into the game generally buys at least one or two of the old dlcs. Eventually they will most likely end up buying them all.
The current system is lost revenue. I’ve been back for a month or two and haven’t spent a dime. I mean if they want to use the bazaar for new item sets to get some extra cash fine. But when the next age comes around it should go into a dlc.
And what happened to it? 
Which is why they’re not catering to you or me. We don’t do that.
This is a 7-year old game, and it’s not aging as gracefully as we would all like. Funcom knows they need whales to keep making money.
Another reason why the current system is a failure. Even if i am playing another game. I still check the announcements for this game. If they broadcasted a dlc being released. I generally jump back into game. So with their current system of Ages. (ok so sorcery 3 and war 3 I didn’t log into due to bad reviews) So every 6 months they are planning an age. At the 3 month mark they could release a dlc collection of stuff. Id end up jumping back into the game to see what it was about. There is nothing at the inbetween phases to pull me back in. I mean 7 years. I’ve knocked out thousands upon thousands of thralls, Built up a ton. Leveled several characters over and over again. Sparkly new things are good. But they need to be reasonably priced otherwise-for my monthly allowance. Im gonna buy a new game that gives me a complete experience.
In 2020 is when they started development on Age of Sorcery (Bazaar and Battlepass) and another age. That’s why there was a content gap between 2020-2022. This idea that these systems sprung up in 2022 isn’t even feasible.
I still have all my croms so more or less a ton of free relatively nice stuff.
I think they would make more in the long run from a bunch of dolphins.
Please, never do.
I dont want to have to buy a whole DLC for some placeables and some emotes.
Are you sure? I think my point was just demonstrated to perfection by our resident peacock whale.
Hhahahah that just made me laugh so hard.
Seriously if funcom would just back up their content, I’d be watching the bazaar like a hawk for certain items to go on sale.
I guess we are gonna have to wait and see what they do when Beta ends. Speaking of that did they ever patch the wheels of pain?
I mean with no battlepass and those free crom coins helping to offset the cost. I’d imagine they might see a decline in what people are gonna buy. I just don’t think this is going to work as well as they figure with their current pricing points. But as CodeMage pointed out. There will always be whales.
I’ve also said from day one that their “excuse” that the DLC’s weren’t generating enough money and so they “had” to go to the “in game shop” model was utter BS. As @Croms_Faithful very effectively pointed out they quite simply STOPPED producing contend to generate income. If you do not produce content to sell, then you simply CANNOT generate income from said sales. This is not a difficult concept to wrap your head around.
Furthermore, all of the scripted corporate speak of “needing to keep the lights turned on” was simply that, reading off of a script and utterly meaningless. Now with that being said, the DLC’s had a price point set in 2018. It is not unrealistic to expect the price of them to have gone up by 2022. Funcom had not raised the price of them by that point in time, but they easily could have (which could have, and WOULD HAVE generated …wait for it…more income 
). I seriously doubt that in a span of four years that people would have complained nearly as hard over an increase from $10 to say $15 as they have over the complete price gouging that has been the case in the BLB (often for broken and incomplete items / sets).
The quality of the old DLC’s has completely gone out the window. It is now shoddy half arsed often broken and often misrepresented things that either do not work, or are “p2w”. Oh but don’t worry, those will all get “fixed”, but not until they rotate out of the shop so they can get as many sales as possible first. 
And what about all of those old DLC’s that they said they wouldn’t go back and make arched ceilings for and other such “new” building pieces for? Well now with the BLB they will put them out in dripps and draps and make you buy them in small blocks for the price of a full DLC set or more! How nice of them!
But do they actually? I mean, they could easily make more attractively priced items and bundles and sell a HECK of a lot more of them which would generate the same if not more money in the long run. So do they actually NEED the whales? Or do they only THINK that they need the whales? After all how many of their long time faithful players that have been supporting them for years have they completely turned off by this practice that they could have instead earned a lot of revenue from? 
You’re kidding me right? You own everything.
How many folks actually paid full price for DLCs vs waiting for the sale price? I’ll be the first to admit I didn’t pay for CE and only got DLCs when the pricing was right. I know I’m not alone, and in fact, part of the majority that currently play on console.
I do not know. Do you? I doubt that.
I will be the first to admit that I paid for CE when it was in EA and I paid for each and every DLC when they first came out. And I will be the first to admit that I have never purchased a single bloody thing from the BLB.
None of us no, it is definitely still worth correcting him especially for others that don’t know
Not like any of us that have disagreed or corrected him can even have a conversation with him anymore, he blocks anyone that gives him more than adoration.
It’s easy to make a mistake of mistaking a whale with a patron. I say that because I used to make that same assumption. We, their “long time faithful players that have been supporting them for years”, we’re not whales, we’re their fickle patrons.
Whales can come and go. They can stay as long as they wish, but they can go away and then maybe come back later. It’s all in good fun.
Catering to patrons means dealing with more entitlement than catering to whales.
Which, I realized, can be lots of fun. Just as he can spew his, um, pearls of wisdom with total impunity, so can we talk smack at him – well-argued smack without having to care for the tone because we’re trying to reach him or something.
If you’re at your favorite venue and you step in muck, you can let it spoil your night or you can have a laugh 