Blizzard needs to F**K right off with Cashshop Transmogs

[Pheraz]

Both of these are posts from this thread about transmogs in the game shops.

That said, do you believe that FFXIV is "...milking the franchise as much as possible before all of the customers are gone for good?" Because their store is much, much larger than Blizzard has ever been with its store. Not to mention EVE Online which has a subscription tier that you can pay for with in-game currency (In fact, the WoW token system was largely lifted wholesale from EVE Online's) and an enormous online store.

I simply do not understand the logic in which Blizzard is milking their customers before they are gone for good when there are all kinds of games that are doing quite well that have the same setup. Help me understand why Blizzard is so terrible and others are not.

Or is this more about winning at social media? That, I can understand. I'm truly confused about how this is a sign of Blizzard's greed and evilness when it's not much of an issue for other games. Will this be OK when Blizzard's customers take them for granted? Because you've had little but praise for other games and do not consider it disqualifying to have a shop that is 50X bigger than Blizzard's. I don't get it.

It is just cool to be angry at big companies.
Or just the bigger fish.
Another example from a totally different world is Ubuntu. They are one of the biggest open source players and are doing awesome work. But they have that kind of charismatic, alpha male CEO which is kind of bad PR. So no matter what they do, there is always a group of open source people hating on Ubuntu, irrationaly

[Alanar]

sure,its what it is,but i rly dont see the point of complaining as long as you can get it with gold like any other ingame gold mount

Ye, I guess you are right. Its more an expression of sadness.

[Rappy28]

While we're calling out bald-faced lies about FFXIV:

*Every* unique mount, including the only multi-seaters, can only be obtained in the cash shop.

You have literally zero idea what you are talking about. Off the top of my head, I can think of at least two 4-seater mounts that are obtained from literal hardcore raiding, E4S and DR Savage. Collecting every field note in Bozja and Zadnor gives you a two-seater. The FFXV event gives you a 4-seater, that still isn't in the cash shop either. In a less gameplay-related fashion, two two-seaters can be obtained by inviting a friend to the game, which is not "cash shop" either.

The sole exception so far is the 8-seater Lunar Whale which was a gift for buying this year's "Blizzcon" ticket. I'm guessing it's the mount you were thinking about when you made this false comment.

Also "every" unique mount lmfao. The meta mounts that are awarded for collecting all Ex mounts? Every single Savage mount? Gold Saucer mounts? The robot you can buy with Clusters??

Armor that doesn't look like a reskin of previous raid designs, or ones that are devoid of any real color, are ONLY available in the cash shop.

???? No idea what you are talking about here. Every tier has its unique skins, which you can dye every color of the goddamned rainbow if you care to.

The one thing you are right about is the previous years events cosmetics. Good job! But please, know what you are talking about before spewing bullshit about it.

[Snowfunk]

I don't care.
If it looks nice, I'll buy it.

[Antontein]

Nobody is forcing you to buy anything from in-game shop. Mounts, pets, toys, transmog.... all of it is optional and it doesn't effect your game play.

Thread solved.

PS: I wonder if Blizz puts a lot of items to in-game shop and earns a lot of money from those sales, they could consider remove monthly subscription....

[Athulua]

There was protest against transmogs in cash shop back in Cata, when Blizzard tried to implement cash shop "hats". And back in that times players opinion was valueable enough to abandon this idea. But not now. Game loses players and devs try to keep the same level of profit via microtransactions. Problem is - we still have B2P and P2P things in this game. What modern players (and not players too) don't understand about payment methods - is that they're usually trade off and mutually exclusive. I.e. how F2P games work? Game itself is free, but it's bad without microtransactions. It's good compromise for players, who are ready to play bad game for free. Or that program user is ready to use it for free, but watch ads instead, that involves collecting his "preferences", i.e. personal data. But currently all companies start to mix payment methods. We can see microtransactions in paid games and telemetry/ads in paid programs. And it's nonsense, caused by simple fact, that customers are stupid to allow companies to do this, instead of rejecting such products, forcing companies to fix them.

The scale is the key to this discussion.

Path of Exile sees some RMT as well. People buy exalted orbs and boosts through content such as sirius A8 etc.
RMT is against the rules and there is no way to legitimately exchange real money into ingame currencies through ingame trading.
Yet majority of players never engage into any RMT and just play the game themselves. Why risk it.

WoW has the token. The token is essentially a legit gate for gold buying. And because it is legit, it is SOOOO much more popular than 3rd party RMT. There is no risk of getting scammed, getting a keylogger planted on your pc and having your account stolen, or simply getting banned. All you have to do is to swipe a credit card and you have as much gold as you desire.

Therefore, no accomplishments really hold any value in the game. Because you can buy boosts for everything. Raids, M+, PvP rating. Literally everything, I even saw boosting for Trial of Style! Yes you can pay for ToS boost, they will invite you into a group and simply vote you a winner. This is so sad, as ToS is just a fun side activity for people that enjoy transmog... Even that is taken by industrialized boosting.

[Goat7]

If game now has F2P quality, so many players quit it and it no longer can be supported via sub fee - then make it F2P officially and remove box price and sub fee already. Game just CAN'T be B2P/P2P and F2P at the same time. It's nonsense.

Sub fee - is some sort of VIP status. And if game has micristansactions at the same time, then this VIP status is actually restricted and there is super-VIP status in this game, that makes sub fee completely pointless.

I agree but WoW players are mostly addicts and won't stop playing no matter how crappy the game is or if they are drained on microtransactions while paying that monthly sub. They just pop in that credit card, buy that 6 month renewal to get that mount and be like "thats such a really good deal". That is part of the reason why we are here with Blizzard games.

[Bruunch]

I agree but WoW players are mostly addicts and won't stop playing no matter how crappy the game is or if they are drained on microtransactions while paying that monthly sub. They just pop in that credit card, buy that 6 month renewal to get that mount and be like "thats such a really good deal". That is part of the reason why we are here with Blizzard games.

Or perhaps some people still find entertainment in the game without being addicted? Maybe some people are able to play without using the micro transactions that aren't required to play anyway?
Different people have different opinions on what they find entertaining and what they feel is value for money.

[Daieon]

Store cosmetic items are a necessary evil (and I use "evil" loosely) so they don't feel the need to make a profit off of purchasable player power. That's it, that's the whole thread.

[SinR]

Store cosmetic items are a necessary evil (and I use "evil" loosely) so they don't feel the need to make a profit off of purchasable player power. That's it, that's the whole thread.

I agree 100%.

Clearly people would prefer no store at all. However, I'm sure they'd gladly take pretty TMog gear that has no real impact over actual player power in the form of gear.

[KOUNTERPARTS]

Alternatively, stop being consumed by anger and hate when other people spend their money on things that 1.) do not affect you and 2.) do not affect your game play.


...inb4 somebody says "SPRITE DARTER TRANSMOG TOO BRIGHT, BLINDING ME WHEN PEOPLE HAVE IT IN RAIDS, GAME LITERALLY UNPLAYABLE"

[mcnally86]

Totally, I am super happy whoever wanted to restrict transmogs is not in charge anymore. Every patch in SL has made transmog better with less restriction. It feels like the tipping point was legionaries. Remember they had that really complicated was to unlock the warglaives for transmog that involved beating BT timewalking on a character that had jumped through multiple burning hoops? How dare anyone want to use a cool weapon appearance! Now you can wear 2 different shoulders while killing someone with a fish.

I am still waiting for fishing pole transmogs and holiday gear being unlockable for all-year like the Lunar New-Year cosmetics but I feel like that is coming.

[Sin of Pride]

I agree 100%.

Clearly people would prefer no store at all. However, I'm sure they'd gladly take pretty TMog gear that has no real impact over actual player power in the form of gear.

Looks at the pages and pages of ads for boosting.

Sometimes I have to marvel at my ability of deduction. It surpasses the common man's by leagues.

[cybernoid]

Blizzard will not turn WoW F2P. They learned long ago that they can stick their fingers into both pies. They figured out that you can charge people a $60 box price expansion every 2 years AND $15 a month AND sell them $25 race changes AND sell them a $25 mount once every 3 months. Also, as a matter of pride, Blizzard doesn't want to admit that their game is dying. When the game's population began to decline, they refused to merge servers, as that would be an admission of defeat. They instead let servers to continue to depopulate and forced people to pay $25 to transfer off of their dying servers. When subs plummeted after a brief surge with WoD's launch, Blizzard tried to obfuscate the true status of the game by no longer publishing subscriber counts. To go F2P would be to admit that they are scrapping the bottom of the barrel and would greatly damage Blizzard's prestige.

As a sidenote to that, it's noteworthy to mention that they intentionally broke census addon functionality that used to work the same since 2004, in a way that it was no longer possible to gather realm character data via automated /who queries (which is essentially what CensusPlus addon did). Later on they masked Auction House seller names in their Auction House API as well.

While I'm sure both these changes can be nicely dressed up as anonymity/privacy changes, that's plain bullshit; they just needed to obfuscate things further.

[SinR]

Looks at the pages and pages of ads for boosting.

Sometimes I have to marvel at my ability of deduction. It surpasses the common man's by leagues.

Because Blizzard is totally selling M+ and Mythic Raid gear to players directly.

[Magnagarde]

It is no big deal.

[Sin of Pride]

Because Blizzard is totally selling M+ and Mythic Raid gear to players directly.

Well keep at it... the journey to enlightenment starts with but a single step.

[jlrm365]

No it doesn't.
Nobody is forcing anyone to buy them.
Let them be there for those who want them.
I haven't bought any and you don't need to, either.
If you want to make a real statement, stop playing.

[Coolit]

Get used to it. As more people quit retail for good expect more shit to be added to the cash shop for the whales to keep their profits up.

Exactly, with the player base in major decline more and more liberties are going to be taken with the cash shop to makeup the shortfall.

[khazmodan]

Yeah it sucks. But you know whats worse? The wow token. But nah, people dont go crazy about that. Atleast cosmetics dont affect the game at all, but the wow token has infected so much of how things work in game.

This is absolutely true, the token creates a snowball incentive to design the game around getting people to buy the tokens which leads to less people playing the game which leads to more push to design the game around players buying the token, Reductio ad terminus. Quality of game drives willingness to pay more for game and that is why WoW is falling in profits even with them trying to sell soooo much more than they were 10 years ago.

- - - Updated - - -

Of course this happens. Most people here always defended Blizzard when they added more and more shop items. It’s kind of hilarious that it’s taken them this long to start going all in. I hope they start selling actual gear soon. Maybe $250 for a full tier set. WoW being a free to play game after all and they need to make money SOME way! Oh wait.



You would make Bobby Kotick shed a tear of joy.

I would prefer training dummies with either Bobby "nodick" Kotick's face or Ion Hazznoclue's face or J. Allen Bricksforbrains face. Another option would be a 3 training dummy set that asks "do you guys not have phones?" as they look at you with that short bus smile.