My personal experience from the store exclusive items from Warhammer Online and even Cyptic's other current MMO Champion's Online is that none of the pre-order items are game breaking or really that useful. Most are usually cosmetic or only useful for the first few levels of play, after that it's just crap that sits in your inventory.

I am concerned with the day that these store exclusive items become a major marking ploy, with Wal-mart, for example, demanding that their item be the best over other competitors. This could lead to the imbalance and game breaking that you mentioned. Though the notion of "Pre-order at Best Buy to unlock God Mode" tickles the imagination.

Ah yes, the pre-order bonus.

Always a blessing and a curse. So the last big pre-order bonus "event", we'll call it, that I was a part of was Aion. Drove me freaking nuts.

Depending upon which store you pre-ordered from determined what special ring you would get. They didn't give any actual stats, but it was a token item that would create a small particle effect aura at your feet. After doing all the researching and finally finding pictures (from a fansite, no less, shame on you NCsoft!) of what they all looked like, I finally settled on one. The Ancient Ring of Magic as obtained from BestBuy pre-orders.

So I jumped through all the hoops and decided that I wanted this one because I knew I was going to make a nuker and it felt appropriate to go with magic, and the particle effects themselves looked nice and evil (rolling Asmodian, the "demons" so to speak), I kinda like the color purple anyhow, plus I imagined quite a few people would order through GameStop or Steam and I wanted to set myself apart a bit and not have the same particle effect that half the population would have.

Feeling content with my choice, I got my head start codes in the mail, set up my account and started Aion alongside everyone else who pre-ordered. It was just a weekend's head start, but seeing how insanely cramped the newbie area felt, even with 10 different channels for players to spread out in, I was determined to get out of the newbie area as hard and fast as I could so I wouldn't get caught up in more quests that take an hour of competing with other players for single location ground spawns.

After a weekend Aion binge I come home from work Monday evening and find my account is not active. The pre-order code I received only activated the account for that Saturday and Sunday head start and I need the retail code contained in the box with the discs to activate the account for realsies. Of course, this box was not eligible to pick up at BestBuy, when pre-ordering I was shoe horned into having it mailed to me.

And, of course, Best Buy didn't mail the discs out to me in time to have them *on launch date* so I got to sit and not play the game until that following Friday when they arrived. Needless to say, the group of people I started playing Aion with did not wait up, so I was constantly a couple quest hubs behind everyone else, grinding furiously to try and catch up so I could continue to play with my friends.

I vowed to never pre-order from a brick and mortar again if I couldn't pick it up on launch day during my lunch.

And as well, the Ancient Ring of Magic, the reason I chose BestBuy at all, turned out to be junk. The particle effect was great, everything I thought it would be, except unknown to me that the item had a long cooldown. If you died or were dispelled, the effect would be removed (since it was treated as a buff) and you could not put it back on upon death. It was akin to vanity pets in WoW, except those you could immediately use again after resurrecting. And as anyone who has vanity pets in WoW knows, you never run around with them 100% of the time, even if you really like them, because every death means you have to resummon them. So, like vanity pets, the Ancient Ring of Magic devolved into an item that ate up precious inventory slots (very expensive in Aion) and you never really used in an area that you could die in because of the long cooldown, the high potential to forget when the cooldown does expire and the unknown chance of getting ganked by a gank squad, which Aion had in spades and you could never completely avoid, even if you never set foot in the Abyss.

But I will say this about the remainder of the Aion pre-order bonuses, I wore that hat for about 20 levels and wore the Collector's Edition earrings all the way up until I quit. Those items were really good, but not game breakingly good. Those bonuses they did right at least.

Marketing ploy indeed. I like physical bonuses, like when Circuit City gave away the entire official strategy guide with MGS4. Even though most of these pre-order giveaways are not intended to make the gameplay unfair, it most certainly feels that way. Why shouldn't I get to unlock the blue lasers, or the crit% armor buff? Just because I didn't buy from X retailer? Or because I bought the game after it's launch? Often times the giveaways ARE unlockable within the game itself, which means this is even more of a marketing ploy, but when they are not it just makes other players feel like they purchased a lesser product.

@Tom Newman: That's exactly the problem - we don't know the rules, what's unlockable in-game and what's really exclusive.

I didn't mention this, but there's also the question of how many characters that a player creates will get these in-game bonuses? Only the first? That can be additionally infuriating because a character created later might be the player's favorite?

best preorder bonus I ever got:

preorder Wind Waker, get OOT+Master Quest for free

I'd never played OOT before that

People need to do more stuff like that

@John Smith: That certainly would work. Either an out-of-game item, an item that serves no in-game purpose (e.g. vanity pet), or, as @Tyler Glaiel suggests, a free other game. Those are options that would solve the problem.

It is a ploy to pseudo-lock you into a purchase. I think it has merit. If I like your game and want to buy it (essentially being loyal to a purchase), an unlock is nice reward. A reward that helps you in the single player game is totally acceptable to me. For multiplayer, I think it is fair for a cosmetic item that does not give an unfair advantage.

I never care about any bonuses to pre-orders. I trust that the game is fine the way it is, and I don't do digging to find out what all the pre-orders are. If I don't know what I could have got it doesn't matter that I don't have it. Also most of the pre-order bonuses are not necessary at all. There are plenty of weapons or items in the games already. I don't need some small items that is going to be upgraded/outdated a few minutes into the game anyway.

Funny story from a long time ago: I walked into a game store and asked, "what do I get when I pre-order that game (don't remember game)." He responded, "the game." Kinda rude, but hey. This was before all this pre-order bonus stuff, or at least very little of it, but I always had an idea that they should give a little something for pre-ordering which caught on a few years later, and now it is pretty much a given for any game released.

Worst pre-order/special edition bonus, a permanent forehead tattoo with the letters MUG, I may have confused that with the shipping container sized box for Neverwinter Knights II. But at least it did burn well being made of study cardboard.

I might be tempted by a game offering a soundtrack CD, if it had a nice sound. Case in point, DUNE Spice Opera by EXXOS, fabulous and now quite rare. Worst case, Frontlines Fuel of War, great game but terribly generic hard rock sound. So you can't please everyone with soundtracks either.

I agree that it's a good way to lock people into a purchase, it also gives the retailer promotional incentive. And I think we all agree that they are not that good as bonus items.

Cryptic should hand out Borg Teddys. Who wouldn't want a dozen of those on their desk? Virtual items cost next to nothing to hand out though. Give us special offers and be cheap about it at the same time. How Ferengi.

This is also a problem for completists. I'm most certainly not going to preorder from every store, but I'd always get this pang of "incompleteness" knowing that other people have something that I can't get.