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

[Arewn]

Your lack of technical understanding in what’s involved in running these scripts at scale makes your attempt at correcting that poster worthless. You’re the WoW version of Karen the Anti-Vaxxer.

Tip: it ain’t a copy paste. It’s not at all like duplicating a file on your computer. Upload a file to an Azure server and see if they don’t charge you to duplicate it.

Is $35 a fair price? Probably not. A few bucks would cover the costs and margin.

The cost to operate such a service, if there even is one, is likely completely negligible. Not to mention they already offer what essentially amounts to the same thing with their PTR, no charge involved. Not to mention you already pay a monthly premium just for access to their servers, so the expectation for such services to be included is completely reasonable.

Data storage is very cheap, and can be made cheaper through archival practices for inactive accounts. And players can make new characters on the TBC realm while keeping their old ones on classic, so it's unlikely this charge significantly reduces the number of characters being stored anyways.

Even if it did, charging money as a limiting factor is still poorly justified given they could easily put other limitations in places.

This really just boils down to padding executive bonuses and pleasing share holders. But if you're satisfied being hoisted with exuberant prices and extra charges for such a reason, then there's not much more I can say.

It's good that they reduced it, 15 dollars is at least a lot more reasonable. But the fact that they were able to normalizes this practice in the first place is pretty wild.

[Queen of Hamsters]

I followed a discussion almost exactly like this one over the Mystic Runesaber back in WoD. Now that expansion ACTUALLY lost a huge amount of players, yet there's people here (no doubt listening to Youtubers) claiming that SL is worse off? Even after the latest Quarterly and shit?

Puhlease. People saying "it should be free!!" are like the people I used to deal with running a doggy daycare. "ALL YOU DO IS WALK, WHY DO YOU CHARGE FOR IT????"

Idiots are a blight. ENTITLED ones, are worse.


Quote: Shadowlands continues to drive strong results following its record-setting release in November, with first quarter franchise net bookings growing sharply.

Yeah, it's performing miserably, and that's why an optional copy feature between 2 Classic versions should be free. Gtfo.

- - - Updated - - -

The arguing never stops. Now there's people arguing it should be free.

Indeed.
Your avatar is a perfect embodiment of it all.

[whywhatwhowhenhow]

I think people forget they're intended to be premium services.

Well it's supposed to be a premium game, that's why we pay a subscription to play it.

Are there any other premium games out there that charge premium service charges aswell? Serious question since I don't play other games any more, grew out of gaming years ago, all other games bore me after 30 minutes.

[deenman]

a fully geared BIS lvl 60 who will replace all those epics with green gear in 3 levels... are you stupid or something or just dishonest?

the irony of calling me stupid lol,they keep that character in VANILA...plus advance in tbc,they arent replacing it in vanila with anything

also no1 is replacing bis naxx gear in 3 lvls kiddo,they last well in to raiding

[Prag]

The cost to operate such a service, if there even is one, is likely completely negligible. Not to mention they already offer what essentially amounts to the same thing with their PTR, no charge involved. Not to mention you already pay a monthly premium just for access to their servers, so the expectation for such services to be included is completely reasonable.

Data storage is very cheap, and can be made cheaper through archival practices for inactive accounts. And players can make new characters on the TBC realm while keeping their old ones on classic, so it's unlikely this charge significantly reduces the number of characters being stored anyways.

Since don’t know anything about their infrastructure, it’s all just speculation. I’m going off my professional experience, and for our dev environment alone, we run tens of thousands of dollars a month in AWS charges, and that’s fairly optimized.

Even if it did, charging money as a limiting factor is still poorly justified given they could easily put other limitations in places.

I don’t know how they could have limited it beyond the characters-per-server/account/region restrictions already in place.

This really just boils down to padding executive bonuses and pleasing share holders. But if you're satisfied being hoisted with exuberant prices and extra charges for such a reason, then there's not much more I can say.

It's good that they reduced it, 15 dollars is at least a lot more reasonable. But the fact that they were able to normalizes this practice in the first place is pretty wild.

Of course it is. That’s part of the reason I wouldn’t have paid for the service, but I also don’t want to stick around in Classic, so I’m not really the target audience, even if it were free.

I’m happy that the services they’ve offered have made it possible to keep the sub price the same for nearly 15 years and they still allow me to use my retail gold to pay for my subscription.

[cidic]

I think people forget they're intended to be premium services.

Not even the point. The cost was more than what it should have been from the start. even $15 to "clone" an account is stupid $10 or $5 at best. It's not like they have not been doing this stuff for years already. Blizzard has been greedy for a long time now and let us real they need good faith with the community after shadowlands and the delay (covid-19 or not) no one could have seen it coming but this is not the way to gain back good faith.

[whywhatwhowhenhow]

Not even the point. The cost was more than what it should have been from the start. even $15 to "clone" an account is stupid $10 or $5 at best. It's not like they have not been doing this stuff for years already. Blizzard has been greedy for a long time now and let us real they need good faith with the community after shadowlands and the delay (covid-19 or not) no one could have seen it coming but this is not the way to gain back good faith.

Exactly. It's just the character copy feature that we have had in the test realms for years. Surely this costs them nothing.

[Alvito]

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.

The fee is for those that want the character to stay on the classic server as well as being cloned onto a BC server. It is free if you pick one or the other. You pay if you want to have it both ways.

- - - Updated - - -

Not even the point. The cost was more than what it should have been from the start. even $15 to "clone" an account is stupid $10 or $5 at best. It's not like they have not been doing this stuff for years already. Blizzard has been greedy for a long time now and let us real they need good faith with the community after shadowlands and the delay (covid-19 or not) no one could have seen it coming but this is not the way to gain back good faith.

They are charging what they think people are willing to pay and they want to get some return on a game they are giving away. If the price is too high don't pay it. If you want the service, than you need to come to terms with the fee. If you can't level up the old way or say good bye to classic on some characters.

[Arewn]

Since don’t know anything about their infrastructure, it’s all just speculation. I’m going off my professional experience, and for our dev environment alone, we run tens of thousands of dollars a month in AWS charges, and that’s fairly optimized.



I don’t know how they could have limited it beyond the characters-per-server/account/region restrictions already in place.



Of course it is. That’s part of the reason I wouldn’t have paid for the service, but I also don’t want to stick around in Classic, so I’m not really the target audience, even if it were free.

I’m happy that the services they’ve offered have made it possible to keep the sub price the same for nearly 15 years and they still allow me to use my retail gold to pay for my subscription.

Kind of at risk of entering an internet pissing contest over unproveable credentials here, but I'm also going off my professional experience in I.T. with these considerations. And we do have some insight into their infrastructure and costs. As mentioned before, at the very least we know they have no problem offering what is essentially a cloning service for their PTR for free.
And, as you mentioned, many of us have an idea of how much these kinds of systems tend to cost based on professional experience. I don't see any compelling reason to assume Blizzard is for some reason way out of line in their costs.
Lets be real here, an automated character copying services isn't something that is going to cost them much to developed or maintain.
Even if we were to compare the operating costs of your dev environment to.... a single transferring service (not really a fair comparison, but eh), that's still something that would be covered by two or three thousand subscribers.

There's a lot of ways to restrict it, not much point hashing that out now though since they obviously aren't going to do it. My preferred method would be an initial limit of 2 clones, and then additional clones/interval beyond that. Like one clone per month, or quarterly. This isn't a difficult problem to come up with ideas for.

Tech has advanced and hosting has become cheaper, plus wages have been stagnant... so of course there's no reason for the sub to increase. I don't think the sub staying at 15 dollars has anything to do with the addition of paid services.

[Alvito]

a fully geared BIS lvl 60 who will replace all those epics with green gear in 3 levels... are you stupid or something or just dishonest?

T3 is going to last through the first wave of raids at the very least. Even if you are not fully kitted out in bis gear as you sugguested you would be hard pressed to replace much if any gear prior to stepping into T5 content and when you did it would be a trinket or weapon.

[Mysterymask]

I think people forget they're intended to be premium services.

It's not forget it's more ignore.

End of the day this is kinda a luxury extra service. Blizz knows there's a chunk who wanna stay on Evergreen Vanilla, a bigger chunk that's going to move to BC, and a smaller minority who's interested in both whether to play both or just have their vanilla 60 as a museum piece . $35 was steep but at the end of the day it's extra

[mitre27]

Agreed. Putting a $35 price tag for a required feature is absurd. If only this was optional.

Ohwait

Sure it's optional, but if you want a new character your other option is to spend like 2 weeks of playtime to get it.

[cidic]

The fee is for those that want the character to stay on the classic server as well as being cloned onto a BC server. It is free if you pick one or the other. You pay if you want to have it both ways.

- - - Updated - - -
They are charging what they think people are willing to pay and they want to get some return on a game they are giving away. If the price is too high don't pay it. If you want the service, than you need to come to terms with the fee. If you can't level up the old way or say good bye to classic on some characters.

A game that's not free as you have to have a sub to play #1. #2 they are charging for a collectors edition (if you chose) No one in their right mind was willing to pay $35 for a clone. Just like classic was "free" as long as you had a wow sub. Nothing is free get over that already cause that argument is long dead.

[Prag]

Kind of at risk of entering an internet pissing contest over unproveable credentials here, but I'm also going off my professional experience in I.T. with these considerations. And we do have some insight into their infrastructure and costs. As mentioned before, at the very least we know they have no problem offering what is essentially a cloning service for their PTR for free.
And, as you mentioned, many of us have an idea of how much these kinds of systems tend to cost based on professional experience. I don't see any compelling reason to assume Blizzard is for some reason way out of line in their costs.
Lets be real here, an automated character copying services isn't something that is going to cost them much to developed or maintain.
Even if we were to compare the operating costs of your dev environment to.... a single transferring service (not really a fair comparison, but eh), that's still something that would be covered by two or three thousand subscribers.

There's a lot of ways to restrict it, not much point hashing that out now though since they obviously aren't going to do it. My preferred method would be an initial limit of 2 clones, and then additional clones/interval beyond that. Like one clone per month, or quarterly. This isn't a difficult problem to come up with ideas for.

Tech has advanced and hosting has become cheaper, plus wages have been stagnant... so of course there's no reason for the sub to increase. I don't think the sub staying at 15 dollars has anything to do with the addition of paid services.

Not interested in a pissing contest either, but wanted to respond to some of your points:

- I probably could have clarified: I don't believe Blizzard is paying substantially more for any of the services, considering cloud pricing for most services seems to trend downward or flat.
- I wasn't intending to compare an entire staging setup to a single service, it was more toward the sentiment in the thread of "all these services should be free it's just copy/pasting files" which is pretty silly. Our production costs are exponentially higher, and I can only assume that's the case for everyone.
- There are also free template characters on PTR, which are basically boosts, that doesn't mean they should be free in production as well, right?
- I think the restriction you mentioned would have been a much better option. In-line with their "one boost per account", it makes even more sense for a "one clone per account" or something.

I disagree somewhat on the tech advancement and stagnant wages. Tech salaries in California are... high. 2020 had them at an avg of $126k starting, and DICE has the 2007 Tech starting salary average at ~$75k (and ~$95k for Silicon Valley).

Either way, I think we agree on the core point about Blizzard chasing profits, which is sort of a no-brainer.

[Kalisandra]

isnt it also free for most people who just buy gametime with ISK?

Not really. You have to put in a fair bit of effort, one way or the other, to make that kind of ISK, and most people that serious have multiple accounts. They probably pay for some of them with ISK, but some with real money. Most people who don't have free accounts (which while they can be fun are highly limited) will be paying real money (though it may not be theirs).

[ClassicPeon]

Not really. You have to put in a fair bit of effort, one way or the other, to make that kind of ISK, and most people that serious have multiple accounts. They probably pay for some of them with ISK, but some with real money. Most people who don't have free accounts (which while they can be fun are highly limited) will be paying real money (though it may not be theirs).

My bad. I havent played it for a really long time

[Kalisandra]

My bad. I havent played it for a really long time

I think another reason a lot of people don't use ISK alone to pay for their subs is that there's almost always something in-game to spend it on - new ships, better guns, replacement ships, etc. PLEX (game time) has a lot of competition for your ISK in a way that gold doesn't in WoW.

[DarkAmbient]

I think people forget they're intended to be premium services.

People are already paying a premium just to play the game. They shouldn't be charged premium prices on top of that.

[SirBeef]

So just because you personally know classic only players? Lmao literally every source of numbers available shows retail with far more players.

On US servers alone:

https://www.wowprogress.com/realms/rank/us

447k+ players

EU server:

https://www.wowprogress.com/realms/rank/eu

550k+ players

Looking at all classic servers around the world:

https://ironforge.pro/servers/

about 235k players.

Thanks for playing.

That was my point. The person I replied to was claiming classic had more players. The players I know that play classic say there is no way it has more than retail since it 1, had a fraction of the servers and 2, most are medium to low populated. It's OK you misunderstood my post.

- - - Updated - - -

Im sure the other services prices influenced the price of the TBC $35 price tag. Im also sure that they completely ignored the survey that they sent out because im sure no one in their right mind was like "$35 seems like a fair price to pay". If you dont think blizz has to answer to Activision, youre delusional.

- - - Updated - - -



It's not that Blizz is incapable, but if you think that Activision isnt involved in any way, then you're mistaken. At the end of the day, Activision/Blizzard are companies looking to make money. You would do the same thing if you were in their shoes. Guaranteed.

Blizzard answers to ActivisionBlizzard. But I'm pretty sure they set their own monetization prices. Seriously, Blizzars has made tons if mistakes and bad decisions before the merger, there is no reason to pass the blame on to someone else.

[kukkamies]

- I wasn't intending to compare an entire staging setup to a single service, it was more toward the sentiment in the thread of "all these services should be free it's just copy/pasting files" which is pretty silly. Our production costs are exponentially higher, and I can only assume that's the case for everyone.
- There are also free template characters on PTR, which are basically boosts, that doesn't mean they should be free in production as well, right?

I don't think the cost is even meaningful compared to the 13$/month sub. It would pay your transfer and cloning fees for thousands of characters. The 15$ is just pure profit for Blizzard.
The storage to keep the character data for years should cost more than the transfers, and you can make a lot of characters on your account completely free.

- - - Updated - - -

So just because you personally know classic only players? Lmao literally every source of numbers available shows retail with far more players.

On US servers alone:

https://www.wowprogress.com/realms/rank/us

447k+ players

EU server:

https://www.wowprogress.com/realms/rank/eu

550k+ players

Looking at all classic servers around the world:

https://ironforge.pro/servers/

about 235k players.

Thanks for playing.

Tthat's not comparable numbers. Ironforge.pro clearly states it's only players who do logs on WarcraftLogs within 2 weeks. Wowprogress is all players that did any boss in heroic Nyalotha or belongs to a guild that did, logs or not and no time limit.

I would say half of players don't log and half quit within first few months of expansion. It's pretty equal population if that's accurate.