Charging $35 for a character copy is why people say Blizzard is greedy

[Twdft]

Not saying this feature should be free but $35 is outragous. I feel sorry for people who still white knight for this company, its sad.

This is the first time in the games history you can make a copy of an endgame character, an actual clone to play on two different servers. And you think §35 is too much? I'm amazed it's less than a character boost.

[Magneto]

bobby gotta pay the rent after the pay cut!

[Lochton]

in TBC classic they are even trying to strip more money away from their player base from a 13 year old game. Not saying this feature should be free but $35 is outragous. I feel sorry for people who still white knight for this company, its sad.

People, the demand of Classic and further, opened the box.

A market that can be utilized, and price tagged.

What did you expect? It already went downhill once the #nochanges died.

At least it is optional, and the price is fair, to be honest. Blizzard rather has fresh starts than copies, and if copy, then you pay for the shortcut since it was deemed that Classic should not evolve into TBC Classic but instead run side by side, so of course you are going to experience services paid for. Haha.

[FelPlague]

It's really weird. The need to not copy the character completely is fair enough, but surely transferring a character once should be allowed for free.

transfering your charecters, all of them, is free. cloning them is what costs.

[erifwodahs]

Maybe it's just me not understanding, but I thought the system as implemented allows you to either keep your character on the server that's being updated to BC or have your character migrated to another Classic era server. The charge is only if you want your character to exist on both.

How are you losing your progress?

You are correct. Loosing progress as in you loose your progress in Classic if you don't buy copy but want to progress your character in TBC. I have few guildies who are "soft" forced to buy copy, one has AQ mount and another has Naxx staff. And I am not saying it should all be free, but 35$ a character? That is ridiculous.

[Low Hanging Fruit]

transfering your charecters, all of them, is free. cloning them is what costs.

Yeah I think we get it.. that is the verbal technicality.. but the spirit of the conversation obviously isn't going in that direction.

[Piesor]

It's a win win for Blizzard and all 24/7 players that were botting or exploiting layering, who have a ton of gold and sell it on g2g or similar sites. They will double their gold by cloning the characters and continue to control the economy in TBC and Classic and will continue to sell gold for both.

They will buy multiple clones and will have the costs covered within a few days. Blizzard will profit from this like they also do from all the bots.

The loser in this scenario is the casual player who will be forced at some point to buy gold due to the broken auction house pricing. Of course the casuals can also try to spend their few hours / week farming and do stuff they do not enjoy. However this will just lead to an unsub sooner or later.

[FelPlague]

Yeah I think we get it.. that is the verbal technicality.. but the spirit of the conversation obviously isn't going in that direction.

i mean yes it literally is, cause there is people in this very thread who think you are required to clone, so check yourself.

- - - Updated - - -

You are correct. Loosing progress as in you loose your progress in Classic if you don't buy copy but want to progress your character in TBC. I have few guildies who are "soft" forced to buy copy, one has AQ mount and another has Naxx staff. And I am not saying it should all be free, but 35$ a character? That is ridiculous.

if they have atiesh and the black scarab, they dont get deleted if they go to tbc dude...
they are not losing progress by choosing to continue into tbc...

[C20]

One of the fundamental aspects of running a successful business: People will pay for convenience. I'll be diverging a little bit from just Blizzard, but ultimately, the examples below all exist for the same reason.

You could create a new character, and level it up to reach a similar level to your existing character. This costs nothing but time, but that time cost is rather high. Alternatively, you take the other option, and pay them to essentially do it for you in a way that only they can. It's not mandatory to pick one option over the other, nor is it mandatory to pick either.

In the same regard, businesses like UberEats flourish because you're paying for convenience. Many people can drive, but not everyone wants to, so they'll pay for someone to deliver it because it's more convenient.

Likewise, you might pay for a extra storage for something like Google Photos. You could host your own server and write your own app, but the time investment there is very heavy - it might also cost money to host the server unless you're hosting it on your local network and doing some sort of background sync within the app. You're paying for convenience there.

Spotify is another example. You could go to Youtube, make playlists, and add songs there. Then, use or create an app to play those tracks in the background. You're then having to deal with ads (unless you find a way around them) and the possibility of that content being hit with a DMCA takedown meaning your songs might disappear, and you likely won't get all the same features as you would by simply subscribing to Spotify. You're paying Spotify for convenience.

I definitely agree that many of their services are what I would consider overpriced. I'd love to be able to more freely switch factions for all my characters, but I'm paying for the convenience of doing that if I opt to buy the services (which would cost a few hundred dollars/pounds/euro's if I decided to do that for all my characters).

The pricing of their services is a business decision based upon one of the fundamentals of running a successful business. Removing the paid character customisation service and improving the barbershop in-game was one time where the passion of the development team was enough to convince the business-side of things to shut off a potential stream of revenue (albeit likely a very small one). I would love to see that happen more often. We don't know how much these services generate individually, so it's possible that by cutting out the revenue from them would hit the people it shouldn't hit (i.e. cutbacks to the development team, or cutbacks to the front-line customer services).

[uopayroll]

You are correct. Loosing progress as in you loose your progress in Classic if you don't buy copy but want to progress your character in TBC. I have few guildies who are "soft" forced to buy copy, one has AQ mount and another has Naxx staff. And I am not saying it should all be free, but 35$ a character? That is ridiculous.

So the people with the Epeen fetish will all "soft" pay for the clone so they can look special to the few that stayed behind in classic, which will be all the other Epeen folk and nobody will be special....

If they want to spend money to show off a mount or weapon on two servers, that is on them. Are they also only going to ever wield the staff in TBC just to show it off, instead of progressing their weapon slot?

[Queen of Hamsters]

One thing is certain. A LOT of people get outraged without even knowing exactly how this shit will work.

No wonder we live in a post-facts world.

[Makorus]

Why would you still want a classic character after TBC is out.

[Low Hanging Fruit]

i mean yes it literally is, cause there is people in this very thread who think you are required to clone, so check yourself.

Check myself? Is this a prison or something? Maybe a 90s Martian move or something?

Do you even get paid for this or do you actually do it for free?

Just because you can find an example to back you up doesnt mean that is the direction the conversation is going. Obviously people think 35 is to damn high.

[Erous]

Original BC'ers didn't get the option to choose whether or not vanilla would remain in tact. In fact, the pre patch basically erased vanilla. You're paying for Vanilla, not for BC with the character copy feature.

[T-34]

in TBC classic they are even trying to strip more money away from their player base from a 13 year old game. Not saying this feature should be free but $35 is outragous. I feel sorry for people who still white knight for this company, its sad.

Blizzard is a business, just like any other in our capitalistic system. Its sole reason to exist is to maximize its profits.
The bean-counters, and I bet Blizzard has good bean-counters, have calculated to a price of 35 US$ will maximize Blizzard's revenue from that service.

I will not pay that price, but I don't take nything personally that Blizzard or any other company does.
I know well enough not to treat any company as my friend. I only exist to provide Blizzard with revenue, Blizzard only exists to provide me with entertainment.
Taking anything personally what a company does is a waste of ones time.

[Exkrementor]

I mean its nothing new that Blizzard products and servives are always more expensive than you expect. Its kind of a Blizzard tax. Here is my calculation for every Blizzard payment: I think a cloning should be around 15$ so corporations probably think 25$ is good price and after that you add about 30% as the Blizzard tax. 35$ it is.

Blizzard is kinda the Apple of game developers. They charge premium prices because they think they sell premium products but its worse than the competition most of the time.

The only way to tell them is maybe to stop buying a character boost for fucking 60$. Holy shit that is like 2-3 real games. Or storemounts for 25$, which is most likely just a recolor anyway.

Blizzard lost players but gained profit. Stop buying dumb shit you disgusting whales.

[scelero]

I'll do the math again. Record to level to 60 is 3 days 20 hours.

92 Hours x 18.25 an hour = 1679 Dollars / 40 Bucks = 2.4%

So me giving a 2.4% cut of me working instead of leveling is a money grab for me. Jokes on all those who think not working is worth more in dollars than working. How many of you pay 14 a month while not playing the game?

If you don't like it, don't use it. They are NEW FEATURES that aren't in the original side of it. You don't have to partake of these added features. I for one am grateful I don't have to grind to 58 but can instead go work instead. Because I'm not a world record leveler so I will be making more money and thus lowering that 2.4%.

Also there was no cloning service up till now. Even when TBC came out 15 years ago you still had to play on that realm, there was no 'lets stay on a server with no expansion features'. This is a NEW FEATURE. YOU DO NOT HAVE TO TAKE PART OF IT.

Imagine having choice and cry that you have no options.

[Jdance]

I'll do the math again. Record to level to 60 is 3 days 20 hours.

92 Hours x 18.25 an hour = 1679 Dollars / 40 Bucks = 2.4%

So me giving a 2.4% cut of me working instead of leveling is a money grab for me. Jokes on all those who think not working is worth more in dollars than working. How many of you pay 14 a month while not playing the game?

If you don't like it, don't use it. They are NEW FEATURES that aren't in the original side of it. You don't have to partake of these added features. I for one am grateful I don't have to grind to 58 but can instead go work instead. Because I'm not a world record leveler so I will be making more money and thus lowering that 2.4%.

Also there was no cloning service up till now. Even when TBC came out 15 years ago you still had to play on that realm, there was no 'lets stay on a server with no expansion features'. This is a NEW FEATURE. YOU DO NOT HAVE TO TAKE PART OF IT.

Imagine having choice and cry that you have no options.

aren't you supposed to enjoy the game that you're paying for?

i dont get it. why pay for the game and then pay to not have to play the game?

[Wuusah]

I'll do the math again. Record to level to 60 is 3 days 20 hours.

92 Hours x 18.25 an hour = 1679 Dollars / 40 Bucks = 2.4%

So me giving a 2.4% cut of me working instead of leveling is a money grab for me. Jokes on all those who think not working is worth more in dollars than working. How many of you pay 14 a month while not playing the game?

If you don't like it, don't use it. They are NEW FEATURES that aren't in the original side of it. You don't have to partake of these added features. I for one am grateful I don't have to grind to 58 but can instead go work instead. Because I'm not a world record leveler so I will be making more money and thus lowering that 2.4%.

Also there was no cloning service up till now. Even when TBC came out 15 years ago you still had to play on that realm, there was no 'lets stay on a server with no expansion features'. This is a NEW FEATURE. YOU DO NOT HAVE TO TAKE PART OF IT.

Imagine having choice and cry that you have no options.

Where do you work that you can just decide to turn your free time into more work time and get paid more in that week/month?

[Temp name]

aren't you supposed to enjoy the game that you're paying for?

i dont get it. why pay for the game and then pay to not have to play the game?

Because some people don't enjoy leveling, but enjoy max level content..?