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Last edited by SirCowdog; 2019-12-03 at 05:49 AM.
Players aren't bitching about Blizzard's prices just because of the price. Speaking strictly from a WoW standpoint it's asinine to believe that you have to pay upwards of $50-60 for an expansion, then $12-15 PER MONTH, then they have the audacity to also throw in a transaction shop. That's the problem people have with the cash shop. It's actual milking of the playerbase with no improvements being made towards the game itself, it's run on an outdated engine with little graphical improvements made, they don't even listen to their players, even after being proven wrong with Classic and saying "it was a humbling experience", and they minimize features being put out.
It's like the whole fiasco with the M+ toys, they made a claim saying the prize pools would be increased by the sales of the toys, instead they used the sales of the toys to fund the prize pool and only adding a tiny amount to the actual prize pool.
Would people be as upset about it if the expansions were free or if there was no monthly subscription, I'm sure there would still be people bitching, but I'm positive the widespread hatred wouldn't be there.
Pretty much this. It's a matter of context, and I really can't stress that enough.
In a general sense I despise loot boxes and P2W mtx. I also dislike cosmetic options or content locked behind MTX, but find it tolerable in a F2P model, depending on the value offered.
The issue with WoW is that it's double dipping, which even then might still be tolerable if not for their scummy pattern of behaviour outside of the game. It's just too much.
$60 bucks every two-three years works out to.. what, $2.5 per month? Add the normal sub for $15/mo and you're still under $20 month. The cosmetics are one-off costs but if you buy one $25 shop item every month you end up with cost under $40/month, which is still cheaper than buying a new game release every month. As far as any other hobbies go, that's still cheap. As far as videogaming hobby goes, it's still cheap. Especially since over half of that monthly cost is cosmetics you don't have to buy if you don't feel like it and the game has hundreds of free mounts, pets and transmorgs to collect.
The rest of your "outdated engine with little graphical improvements made" comment was your usual fabricated bullshit opinion presented as fact.
I'm gonna have to disagree on this point. And I see people make it a bit too often, despite it only being true if you restrict thinga to buying new AAA games.
There are a LOT of titles you can buy for $40 or less that contain bas good as or better content than a single month of wow, depending on how you play. If you're savvy and capitalize on sales, you could easily get multiple games.
For instance, right now the steam autumn sale is going on. I could pick up 2-4 games which would be mine to play as much as I want without losing access after a month.
Then there's things like the publisher subscription, EA Origin Premium, which carries the same $15 sub as WoW, but allows full access to an entire array of full games, many of which were released in the past year or two. While you don't "own" the games like with Steam, you can finish multiple games in the space of 30 days.
The problem with wow(and to a similar degree FFXIV) is that their business model is double or triple dipping with a box price, sub, AND cash shop. No matter the rationalization, that's a greedy move, and why so many people find it offensive.
I'd be perfectly fine with it if they'd put the money being earned back into the game to make it better. But there's little actually being done, old engine, old graphics, systems that are rehashed. If they put even a fraction of the money back into the game we could easily have some great features that didn't turn out like Islands or Warfronts.
tbh, thats wishfull thinking, more money doesnt mean the new ideas will be better in any way...
warfronts or garrisons are great examples of that, its not a problem of resources but rather of ideas and their implementation, and neither of that will be different just bcs of more money
I'm aware, I'm not optimistic at all when it comes to Blizzard anymore. I'm still skeptical that they're going to follow through with ANYTHING they announced for Shadowlands and I'm convinced they're going to entirely fuck up the solo 'endless' dungeon. But the thought process is with more money into the game you can put more into the development of more grandiose ideas rather than having crummy inceptions of what could be amazing. Taking your example, Garrisons had HUGE potential, but they threw all that potential away and removed nearly all the player choice involved in the Garrison. But with more money into the team, they could have easily hired more employees to pick up the slack.
garrison didnt fail bcs of lack of resources
and sure, you can put more "grandiose ideas" ingame with more money (if you have any such ideas), but they can fail as much as any simple ideas, and if they do its worse money wont make idea successfull, so no, more money wouldnt solve anything, garrison the least
It would though, they had a ton of ideas the players loved and desired with the Garrison, but they had to scrap most of the ideas because they were crunched on time for the release, with more money they could hire more staff and they could have had more people coding and testing for bugs to make their initial vision of Garrisons come to fruition.
I was just thinking how good warfronts could have been if they were tuned for pvp. And how good islands might have been if they'd been more randomized and actually about exploring(which we see is happening with torghast).
Neither of which would really have required a significant difference in dev time, but rather just implementation and fundamental design.
Now if Blizzard was to go back and retool those features, that's different.
on this i have to disagree, garrison was a failure to me bcs it took any need to go out in the world (apart from raid), and that wouldnt be solved if the garrison was better that would be solved by making it less prominent, and if they put more money work and functions to it it would make it all worse imo
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precisely, they dont need to put more resources in, they need to put more thinking to implementation of features
they have great ideas, but they fail to pull them through, they always get stuck like half way through
Not really. When WoW was created, it was about creating a great game, money aside. Fact is the server issues they had as they did not expect to have so many of us interested..
IF it was about money, they would have ensured that realms were available for 3 or 4 times as many players as expected, because you don´t want to risk losing any.
You know he doesn't actually hate video games, right? He was a big gamer in the 80s and will still play video games with his kids if they want to.
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The garrison mine/garden and workshops should have been an efficient way for players to slowly level professions over the course of the expansion, while people who want to put a bit more time into them can do it in a more traditional way without the time-gating.