Wish they'd stop calling things that are half the price of the retail box for the current expansion - or more! - "micro" transactions. Even the pets barely qualify.
Wish they'd stop calling things that are half the price of the retail box for the current expansion - or more! - "micro" transactions. Even the pets barely qualify.
OMG 13:37 - Then Jesus said to His disciples, "Cleave unto me, and I shall grant to thee the blessing of eternal salvation."
And His disciples said unto Him, "Can we get Kings instead?"
So they want money but they are not greedy? They want to wring every penny they can from you. I don't fault them for that. It is just good business. If they could make more money from people buying current gear and DLC that they would lose from people leaving then the cash shop would be full of it.
Buy more tokens so I can get more shit cheaply for Heroes and Hearthstone with useless WoW gold. Seriously. Don't stop buying the damn tokens.
Paladin Bash has spoken.
A company wants money?! NO WAY DUDE!
Now tell me, what content are you missing out on because of this? None at all, that's what.
Have you played any other MMO's? I'm telling you if you haven't that they are much, much worse with microtransactions than WoW is. WoW barely has any micro-transactions to speak of if you compare the game to every other MMO.
The biggest problem I see with loading micro-transactions or cosmetic items(such as mounts, skins, pets, etc) on top of a subscription is that it comes off as a cash-grab rather than a quality of life upgrade. People who are paying a subscription are doing so under the impression that they're paying for a more or less full service version of a game. They've already shelled out the cost of the box, and literally can't play the product that they've purchased unless they maintain a subscription. So when that same company comes along and starts separating out parts of the game that you then have to pay MORE for on top of the Box+Sub, it rubs customers the wrong way.
Additionally, I think people would have less of an issue with cash shop or microtransactions in a subscription model if the things being sold for extra were also obtainable within the game normally, within the normal sub. Paying to skip the work or time to obtain a cosmetic item is generally considered acceptable. Locking items behind an additional pay-wall when people are already paying each month comes across as....questionable. I think if Blizzard is going to sell items for an additional cost on top of the box price and subscription fee, they should start giving people who are subbed a certain amount of tokens or points each month that can be used for cash-shop items or other micro-transactions.
What's interesting is that this is sort of what they're doing with the WoW token. The main problem with the WoW token, however, is that the economy of it is set by the players, not by the business. A player's ability to earn enough gold to make use of the wow token for micro-transactions and other cash shop purchases fluctuates heavily based on their ability to earn gold, and the economy of the game itself.
All in all, my personal opinion is that Blizzard is coming off as greedy as hell. WoW already makes money hand over fist between the price of the box and the monthly sub. While it's true that so far everything is optional, any cosmetic stuff in the cash shop should also be obtainable through normal gameplay as well(not through farming wow tokens).
I honestly don't care about cosmetics or minor boosts like leveling being there, hell purchased them myself from time to time. Why is it always wow though? (I know Jay said P2P but people just bring up wow) FFXIV has a much more robust cash shop then wow, sporting not only pets, mounts and boost, but also clothing and emotes, and I barely hear complaints about it. They even have per character mounts for 18 bucks (and account mounts for 25). Boosting a full character will cost you 50, only 10 bucks less than wow (face it, you're not just going to by the 25 dollar job boost, you're also buying the 25 dollar story boost cause who want's to do a level 1 quest at level 60).
All of this is fine, optional, only thing that would make me sigh is if they listed non-cosmetic gear there.
How about all the mounts in the game I can't get even though I paid for the game and for the subscription for over 10 years? If you could get them ingame it would be fine but exclusive cash shop mounts is just plain wrong in a game with a payment model like this. They make so much money off of us as it is.
Not a hard answer tbh, it's bad cause you are paying a quantity of the price for the job designers are doing via the game AND the subscription, then they are selling you that job AGAIN with microtransactions.
There are many, many, many, many, many items in Wow that can not be obtained in game. This isn't new.
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So don't fucking pay. It is that fucking simple.
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It is almost as if services are meant to be expensive. The only 2 times services have been on sale for 50% it was proven for once and for all that the price is a deterrent. When that sale started you could literally watch your realms and factions empty out in minutes and many of these realms never recovered. If anything Blizzard just needs to scrap these services entirely because all they have ever done is harm the game and its population.
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Tell that to Blizzard customer support as they spend hours every day correcting various issues that come up during the process of transferring characters. Yes the services themselves are automated but the support for them is not.
Yeah, that's what I meant - 1 service of any kind you want. Because not only is leveling easy, some people have all of the characters they want at max level so getting free one at max level (for the prior expansion) is kind of useless. But if you could redeem it for anything then it might have some use.
Mounts and pets aren't content and again all of these things are now obtainable with gold and these types of items have ALWAYS existed in Wow even before Vivendi bought Activision and merged them with Vivendi Games.
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Who says? You? No. It is none of your god damn business how and why Blizzard prices things the way they do. You have the greatest power a consumer has which is to not buy. Use it and shut the fuck up already.
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So companies shouldn't sell products their customers want? Do you not understand what a company is?
I'll use Dead Space 3 as an example, as it's the first time it made a big difference to me.
Dead Space 3 features an ill-advised crafting system. You need to craft better gear to realistically progress through the game. Resources for that
crafting drop in the world. EA also made the decision to sell those crafting resources for real money.
"Oh, but you don't need to buy resources. You can just get them by playing the game!"
OK, sure... You can indeed get them. But at a pace EA was actively incentivised to dial back from Visceral's original design intention, fucking up the pace of heavily single player-focused story campaign by introducing boring, unnecessary and soul crushing grinding. Thus microtransactions have hurt my game experience whether or not I've bought them.
This is the problem. What 10 years ago would have just been a skill-based unlockable, or a cheat code, or hell... Just a chunk of game, is how actively segmented off by greedy publishers to raise game prices by stealth. It's mean spirited, psychologically manipulative and in the case of anything non-cosmetic it does have a real impact on the gameplay experience. I know I'm mainly talking about single player here but microtransactions in any kind of pay-to-play game are toxic.
Knowledge is power, and power corrupts. So study hard and be evil.
I wouldn't say immoral. But Since you're already renting your account, it seems like you aught to have access to the whole game rather than some of it. With lore behind a paywall in books, and some cosmetic stuff also behind a paywall, I can't justify also only having rented access to my account.
It works for some people though, so of course it should still exist. It's just not for me.
Buy a wow token in game and apply it to your battle.net balance and use that to get whatever you want. These threads and complaints have always been asinine and lacking intelligent critical thought but it is even more asinine now since the token was implemented and all of these "issues" have long since been resolved.
You're already paying to play the game via a subscription, buying expansions on top of that, everything should be attainable in-game...
At least now you can buy them with Gold, converting bought WoW Tokens into credit for your b.net balance.
Last edited by Daedius; 2017-08-25 at 12:57 AM.
And yet wow is doing just fine after 12+ years of players buying gold to buy gear.
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Do you complain when your cable provider charges you more than your monthly fee for ppv events? Do you complain when your insurance company charges you for life insurance when you are already paying for other types of insurance? No? Then why are you doing it here?
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Do you seriously think Blizzard doesn't put a significant amount of time into researching price points before setting prices for things like mounts and pets? No company not even Blizzard is going to "overcharge" for something out of greed when doing so nets them significantly less profit.