Should wow go free to play?

[Meow]

Expansions are free for Chinese and Taiwanese servers. Would people want to have them free in other regions?

[Pendragon]

Is current retail wow worth paying for? Absolutely not.
Should it go free to play? Absolutely not.

F2p would make the game 1000x worse as more and more content is added to the store and botters will be even more rampant.

They should focus on fixing the game so that it's worth paying for again.

[Flaks]

Free-to-play would kill WoW as we know it today.

Unless of course you really like grinding, micro-transations, pay-to-win, reduced functionality and so and so forth.

Every aspect accept MAYBE "reduced functionality" are already key aspects of retail WoW today.

And no thanks. See what Bungie did to Destiny 2. They kept harping on Activision as the big bad making them monetize most of the game yet the game is significantly worse off now than at any point during the Activision era.

[Deferionus]

No. There is typically a large quality difference between F2P and P2P MMOs. I stay away from F2P.

[Lahis]

No, I don't want the game to become much more expensive.

[Nefastus]

WoW prime time is long gone. I do think its time for it to go F2P.

[Azerate]

"Pay to win - a situation where the player can buy in-game content or in-game changes, with real money, that give the player a gameplay advantage or advance the player gameplaywise."

first link when you google pay 2 win....maybe you need to look up what it means without molding it to fit your own agenda?

You can't buy advantage over others, nor power, with real money in WoW. The only thing you can buy are cosmetics. You can also buy gold, which you can then use to pay players to help you get different things. This has existed prior to there being an official way to buy gold through tokens.

If you want to stretch the definition so much, then any game with economy and player-to-player trading is pay to win, because you can always buy the main currency for real life currency in them, and then pay someone to boost you through content. It's not a "pay to win mechanic" introduced by the devs themselves. It's a result of there being free market in the game.

Pretending that the inclusion of wow token is some kind of a pay to win mechanic specifically added by Blizzard for that purpose only started recently and is mostly a counter-argument to people (rightfully) bringing up that the cash shop in FF14 is much more egregious than the one in WoW. This in turn is a result of people who now hypocritically jumped to FF14 after years of shitting on wow for having cosmetic MTX. Wow token does not make the game any more 'pay to win' than it has always been, so unless you want to claim that wow has been pay to win since Vanilla, you are full of shit.

[deenman]

That is a job, you are essentially working for Blizzard at that point. It is in no way free to play.

we used to make milions weekly when boosting in wod and legion,some could make milions daily,its easy to pay your sub,you dont even need milions,one day of one run can cover a month easily

[MrLachyG]

no. free 2 play games not only attract fuckwit douchebags but also would mean the game massively drops in quality as it would be largely reliant on in-game shop purchases and shit like that.

look at any free 2 play game and you will see it is full of purchasable stuff to enhance gameplay. so any sub money you save would be offset by the fact that you have to pay other things. you've clearly never played a f2p game if you think it's a good idea

[Soon-TM]

look at any free 2 play game and you will see it is full of purchasable stuff

You mean like WoW, where you can swipe your credit card and buy your way to most achievements (and probably some nice pieces of gear as well)?

[Aggressive]

"should wow go free to play" threads, need to banned like their useless cousins, "WoW is dead", and "What class should I play", threads.

Damn. Then you better stay out of these forums. Cause as far as WoW goes this is most of the forums here. With the fanboys defending everything about WoW in though the game has dropped from #1 spot.

[qwerty123456]

That is a job, you are essentially working for Blizzard at that point. It is in no way free to play.

Neither are any "f2p" games. Your job in a f2p game is to keep the buying players still playing the game.

[Exkrementor]

Free-to-play would kill WoW as we know it today.

Unless of course you really like grinding, micro-transations, pay-to-win, reduced functionality and so and so forth.

So...what would change? You pay full price for every expansion, you pay a monthly sub and on top of that there are microtransactions that basically make the game pay2win already.

Making WoW free2play would under normal circumstances make the game less greedy and pay2win. BUT its Blizzard we are talking about. They would milk that shit hard. Like sellling mythic mounts and gear. Normal hearthstone, 2 hours cooldown. Premium hearthstone for 23.99$, 10 minutes cooldown. BuT yoU DoNT nEeD It.

[chaoticcrono]

It’s free to play if you purchase a WoW Token from golds.

Beat me to it

[Blackmist]

I believe they will go buy to play by the time the next expansion comes out. Or at least the ability to do so. You may still be able to subscribe to WoW Gold or whatever for some extra perks.

WoW needs a certain critical mass of players to function.

[RoKPaNda]

Well, with all those unsubs and so on, wow now have less players, and u can notice that walking around the game.

Can you though? I don't play on a dead server and walking around in either TBC Classic or my retail server it's just packed with people, and yeah even in retail those are actual people from my server. It's 7:30PM server time and on classic there's not even a patch of ground between the bank and AH in org where there isn't a person. Logging in to retail to check, Org is a little less packed but still full of players and Oribos is buzzing.

Anyway no I really don't think WoW should go F2P.

[Arewn]

Could see a hybrid like ESO.
F2P all the way to the level cap of 60. But new content is locked behind expansion purchase + subscription.

Could still maintain the gear treadmill by having ilevel scale back down to a default level each xpac launch.

E.g. level 60 initial epic gear is ilevel 500. Through the course of the expansion you'd get ilevel 530... 550...580...all the way to end of expansion mythic raids dropping ilevel 600 gear.
Next expansion launched and all gear that is over ilevel 500 gets stat squished back down to ilevel 500.

[hulkgor]

Well, with all those unsubs and so on, wow now have less players, and u can notice that walking around the game.

Isnt a good time to go f2p now? Doing that surely will bring more players to the game.

And no need to make p2w, blizz shop alone could make a big money to then.

nop. it shouldn't. not unless you want it to rapidly decline into its death, or overall shittiness.

[Ringthane]

You mean like WoW, where you can swipe your credit card and buy your way to most achievements (and probably some nice pieces of gear as well)?

By doing what? Name me ten people who paid to win. Should be easy. Show me ten people who didn't play the game, who didn't raid, or PVP, or anything like that, but just swiped a credit card and won the entire game.

[Usernameforforums]

It should be f2p up to lv50(lv60 next expansion, etc) with the current limited restrictions on the f2p lv20s with higher gold(~5-10k). If f2p want more gold and the ability to whisper along with other limitations removed, they can buy the sub. If they want to get to max level, they can buy the expansion.