Whats wrong with an in-game Blizzard Store??

[Glordif]

You buy an ice cream and they charge you $2.50, if you want it dipped in chocolate it's an extra $0.35 and to coat it with nuts it's an extra $0.25. You buy the ice cream plain, you can buy it with the extras or you can argue how you bought the ice cream so you are entitled to all the extras for free. Blizzard is a business, they are not your buddy or a charity, they want to make money.

Your analogy make's no sense whatsoever as you fail to account for the fact that I purchased the box editions. Lets make it better shall we.
So I go into a shop to buy an Ice cream I pay for the actual base icecream (Expansion or original game) and then I also pay a small fee to the shop owneer to access of the extra toppings (Subscription fee). Note that I paid for the extra toppings with a small fee every month
Now the shop owner creates this brand new topping, but instead of giving it to me like he has in the past (because I gave him a monthly fee) he now decides to charge me twice the monthly fee to use this extra topping on my ice cream.

How is this charity? How is this fair? How can you possibly justify the shop keepers actions as anything other than a way to try and get more money out of his customers?

[Lord Blackmore]

You're missing the point. You are only concerned how people will play with their cash earned items, I don't care if the best guild in the world bought items, the fact is it makes the game pointless.

Lets raid 4 times a week for items that somebody just bought from the store in 2 minutes, every single thing in the game is worthless at that point. It's devalued to the point of it actually being stupid to farm things the traditional way when it's all available for a fee.

Arguing about hypotheticals seems like a waste of time. As it stands now, there is nothing in the cash shop that makes things pointless. When Blizzard announces plans to put pay to win items in the shop, then people should argue about it.

[bufferunderrun]

I don't get how some peoples defend blizzard soo adamantly, we pay for the base game+ all the xpacks we pay the montly sub and now the good things are going to be in the shop for real cash how is that even acceptable? This is double dipping plain and simple because you pay real money for thing that should have already covered by the sub, this is not an extra service.
Intested of defending them the right thing to do is asking for the sub removal or it's reduction or a sub model like the one on the east; china and korea have a different sub method, they pay for the effective played time and not a forfeit like us, for them paying an extra for the xp potion will potentially lead in saving some coins from the sub; we intested get just a good old middle finger.

[ringpriest]

If you can pay for an advantage over other players at ANY TIME in a game (even low levels) then the game is going to start running into problems with it's player base. Yes buying a 500% increase to exp with real money is an advantage even if it is only effecting game play at lower levels. Slippery slope.

I have to agree. For now it's just XP you can buy. (And gold via the Guardian Cub.) How long before it's boosted rep or gathering? And at that point it will be a pay to win game, just very inefficiently. I can also see them potentially selling an "introductory" PvP or Raid gear set. "It's has a lower iLvl than in-game raid or honor gear! It's just to get more players able to participate!" It would be basically the same logic.

[Tokas]

nothing wrong if there's no monthly fee
everything's wrong if there's monthly fee

[Deleted]

I don't mind a store as long as everything sold is cosmetic. Mounts, pets, transmog sets etc. When they start adding things that helps your char in the game I'm against it. Hell, even a "XP-pot" is too much.

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nothing wrong if there's no monthly fee
everything's wrong if there's monthly fee

and no. Nothing wrong with a fee either, why should it bee? no one is forcing you to buy the items and the shop should not be affected by the games payment methods.

[Welsh]

my biggest concern is that their good designs for new gear (and perhaps weapons) are ending up in the store as transmog items.

New tier16 shows this already. for most classes it looks absolutely crap

In my Shamanistic opinion, the tier sets have looked like crap since after tier 6, long long before the cash shop was an idea.

[Zorperior]

I'm less worried about a cash shop, and more worried about the people, excuse my French, that will eat whatever Blizzard shits out on their plate after this thread. I don't understand how people can look at other F2P games with cash shops and still go "WoW won't do that. They won't make it P2W"

Unless Blizzard does exactly what Rift did (Which is a possiblity, they've "adapted" so many other ideas from Tiron already), I don't see this ever being acceptable.

Off-topic:

In my Shamanistic opinion, the tier sets have looked like crap since after tier 6, long long before the cash shop was an idea.

But... but... My Firelands tier...

[Shamanberry]

The problem with cash stores is that it's very easy to fall into a trap of making them less "perks" and more "conveniences".

What I mean: Without the cash store, they balance leveling speed for 1 rate - there's no other way around it. Add in a 100% xp bonus, and it starts off fine. Next expansion, though, they may think "hrm... ya know, we could sell a lot more of these potions if we found out what a good, smooth leveling speed would be -- and then reduce it by 10-20%. Not so much that people will notice, but just enough that people will get frustrated with how slow it's going and want to buy more potions".

Even transmog sets and other vanity items are problematic, because art teams have a limited amount of time to spend. Unless they're going to hire a brand new set of artists to work on cash store items, they may start with a random thing here and there -- but eventually, they start to produce dozens of different sets for the cash store, and all of a sudden, the quality of items determines where they go - cash store gets the best and coolest things, and the "standard" game gets the leftovers. The best mounts in the game are no longer a part of in-game achievements that require effort and skill in game -- they're acquired by coughing up another $20 to the cash store. In general, I'd prefer the art team spend their time making things that are included in the subscription, rather than spending their time making new transmog sets to be added to the cash store's selection.

Obviously "pay to win" schemes are obvious and less than ideal, but even "pay for cool stuff" is a problem when overused, and the in-game store is making it seem they're moving towards a scenario in which it could be overused.

[ringpriest]

In my Shamanistic opinion, the tier sets have looked like crap since after tier 6, long long before the cash shop was an idea.

Agreed. Sometimes it feels like the whole art team missed that the BC sets were supposed to be alien and out there in order to match the aesthetic of Outland; they never came back down to Azeroth. I'd love to see some tier set that resembled something an actual adventurer or professional class member might wear. Sometimes less is more - especially when it comes to shoulderpads. (That being said, I'd still like to see more more variety and innovation in shoes and pants.)

[ChocoboRanger]

The $15 price tag a month to look at it is the problem.

[Bremmon]

Blizzards new business model.. .make tier armor and weapons look like absolute garbage.. Put up awesome transmog sets in the the bliz store..../profit

[Fenixdown]

Who would like paying someone to make something and that fee goes towards time making it and all the materials, and then get charged again for the finished product?
We are being charged again for items we already paid for them to make with our subs.

Last I checked, you aren't paying a single extra cent for the new raid, new questing hub, new pets, new tier sets, new PvP season, new PvP gear, the legendary cape, or anything coming in 5.4. I swear you people make it sound like they're putting this stuff on the disc and then making you pay to unlock it later on. Oh wait, no, that's EA.

Also to the guy that said something about how he opposes capitalism...do you buy from Papa Johns? Or KFC? How about Taco Bell? How about stuff from Wal-Mart? If you ever bought a pizza, fried chicken, a soft taco, or anything else from those places, then you actively support companies FAR worse than Blizzard Entertainment. Last I checked, Blizzard isn't selling these items and cutting their employee's wages, or hours, or removing their benefits, or simply doing it just to load up their pockets like they're Scrooge McDuck. They're using this money to assist in the increasing costs of running a growing business. Hiring new workers, expanding and creating new games and new content. It's not like they're making billions of dollars each year off the hard work of thousands of people that are underpaid, overworked, and get no benefits. They treat their employees fairly, and best of all they are still treating their customers failry. They've yet to sell a single, solitary mandatory item in the cash shop. Not one. If they sell an attunement key to the next raid, then we can all go Gung Ho GI Joe on it and stop giving them money.

Seriously, people. Since when did everything become just about you? Nobody thinks about what companies do other than what they sell. I bet you'll still go to Wal-Mart to buy jeans for eight bucks left without even giving a second thought to the fact that they intentionally make nearly 60% of their nationwide workforce only work part time schedules just so they don't have to shell out helth insurance or paid vacation time. These aren't teenagers, these are grown people just trying to support their family. You don't care one lick about them, but you care about a company that offers a transmog helm for additional funds?

Think about that and then tell me who's the "psychopath".

[Deleted]

We all could've seen thing coming. The started with pets and went to mounts.. So now they are starting with gear/boosts. I actually quit WoW over a year ago and recently was thinking of maybe coming back. I mean I had problems with the pets and mounts being sold but back in WotLK you could still get exclusive stuff from PvE/PvP. When I noticed they removed everything exclusive I felt that this was it for me. Even if they did the store with reasonable prices I may have been fine with it but the prices are absurd. What is it 15 euro's for a helm? 20 for a mount? As for why it isn't ok while it has been said many times already: You just can't ask people to pay a sub fee each month then hide certain(or any item) behind a paywall. It's double dipping and it's not cool. But I guess Blizzard is trying to milk the game as much as they can since people actually accept this.

[Sierra85]

Blizzard is trying to milk the game as much as they can since people actually accept this.

why shouldn't a business try to maximize their profits?

it's like a golf course charging to loan you some golf clubs. you could go out and get your own clubs if you wanted, or you pay the convenience of using their store. what difference does it make?

[ringpriest]

Last I checked, you aren't paying a single extra cent for the new raid, new questing hub, new pets, new tier sets, new PvP season, new PvP gear, the legendary cape, or anything coming in 5.4. I swear you people make it sound like they're putting this stuff on the disc and then making you pay to unlock it later on. Oh wait, no, that's EA.

WTF do you think the monthly fee supports? It's sure as hell not all going to salaries, servers, and bandwidth.

[Dabrix32]

I think the problem comes when it seems like they are purposely designing stuff to look bad so people will buy transmog stuff. Also cash shop items have NO place in a sub based game. Is there another sub based game that also has a cash shop? Hell I cant even think of another sub based game. Every MMO I have played has gone free.

[But I Hate You All]

Has anyone else noticed how (like with the helmets) they continue to ignore and lock threads? Claiming theres already a thread open but not linking people to that thread like they usually do.

No blue posts on the matter. This is them creating a massive rift in their community yet again.

Yep its called censorship. They tend to do that with any criticism over there

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Last I checked, you aren't paying a single extra cent for the new raid, new questing hub, new pets, new tier sets, new PvP season, new PvP gear, the legendary cape, or anything coming in 5.4. I swear you people make it sound like they're putting this stuff on the disc and then making you pay to unlock it later on. Oh wait, no, that's EA.

Wrong 15 dollars a mo and 60 bucks a xpac so yes we pay for them things

[spectrefax]

Blizzard: We want you to buy our game because it's awesome and you'll need a pay a sub fee for access, upkeep and future content.
Player: Ok.

Blizzard: We made a new expansion, we'd like you to purchase that in order to have access to the new content. The sub fee remains the same.
Player: Ok, sounds reasonable.

Blizzard: To keep the integrity of the game, we won't allow name changes, pve to pvp server transfers, faction transfers, etc.
Player: Sounds great.
Blizzard: Wait, there's too much money to be had here, we've changed our mind. Ignore what we said previously.

Blizzard: We've decided to release some cash-shop only items to generate more revenue. These items are not available without purchase, however, they are cosmetic only and do not affect game play.
Player: Wait what? That doesn't sound right, I believe everything should be accessible in a pay-to-play game, but ok.

Blizzard: We won't be putting elements in the cash shop that affect game-play.
Player: Good. Pay-to-win, on top of a initial purchase and sub fee, is not what I signed up for.
Blizzard: Wait, we changed our minds. We've put a decent amount of development time into making the cash shop a much bigger part of the game. We're also going to start releasing items that affect game-play. Ignore what we said previously... just keep those sub fees coming.

Just imagine this trend by middle of next xpac. "Yes, I'd like to buy my fully-teir-geared, max-level character for $100, since it's a 'convenience feature' that helps people without time to raid."

[Deleted]

Wait paying for experience boosts wasn't a joke someone made up?

Oh man, its like Blizzard want me to hate WoW.