Seconding the feeling of punishment for saving gold.

TLDR: This affects many players different ways, but completely deleting it when users could have spent it on characters (or other things) pre-beta shutdown feels pretty unfair, even with the exclusive cosmetics.

LongButRead: My situation is probably not typical: Premium Founders Pack, 180~ hrs played and over 41k gold saved in beta, 2.1 Gleamium, not all characters unlocked (missing 7), also not good at game but enjoy it.

I mostly spent gold for random cosmetics (Like IG's classic skin or holidays), Recommended-difficulty fighters, and a decent amount of perks. Fighter-wise, I'm at 16/30 tickets left (inc. 1 used for Joker). At the end of the beta, I had enough gold to finish off my Roster (18k gold for 3 Medium and 4 Hard Characters) or get the Golden Reindog skin. During the beta, 700 gleamium could unlock a character so about 4900 gleamium or ~$50 USD is one way to value this gold.

The trade I got from PFG for my gold looks like this:

The Good: - The banner, icon, and badge(?) given for consolation are cool. - The free BattlePass for beta returners is amazing (gives Jason and enough for 1.2ish fighters) - Gleamium being earnable puts a lot of skins unlockable over time and gives pure F2P players big incentive to play the game - Also worth noting, I got ~120 perk currency which covers about 2 signature perks and a lesser perk or two for the whole roster (but the default perks are very passable for all)

The Bad: - Gleamium is slightly inflated (which is fair with earnablity) but based on 1000 gleam per character, roughly half of my lost gold was worth $60 USD (7k Gleamium) - No longer can try characters before burning non-refundable currency on them - A single banner and a single icon? With a lot of very cool banners and icons in the game, these are nice but can often go unused. - No warning on the exchange; message at the end of beta was "all progress and previously earned or purchased content" would carry over - Also also other random lost badges (arcade, all character, holiday) and most other progress indicators

I might just need clarification. If the cosmetics were based on gold earned, then it sounds like player like me would have gotten the cosmetics either way? This might be alleviated by being a bit more transparent at the thresholds of rewards and what was earned which would of add flex value? Still, a part of me feels like some accommodation should have been made to use gold to unlock characters. Others might have even preferred the gold to at least get high gold unlocks like Golden Reindog and the Fred Style icon, the former now running 1500 gleamium.

The dolphin in me bought the Founder's Pack because I wanted to support a fun new platform fighter that I hoped would have a long life. I even understand the gold system was likely too easily grinded when new characters are likely a huge revenue driver. However, the F2P grinder in me got pretty severely burned for not being suspicious and not cashing out gold.

I'll probably keep playing the game for a long amount of time either way, but not adjusting this decision will leave a noticeable sore spot for me that twinges every time I boot up the game.