Ok, first off, for all you blizzard fans out there who will defend blizzard even if they were eating kittens, I'll politely ask you to leave the room, because this could be something of a wake up call for you.
Before I carry on, I'd ask you to take a look at this link to one of AlphaOmegaSin's videos about the kind of direction a company like capcom has gone in, and why when he's talking about it, just replacing the word capcom with the word blizzard makes me think its the same thing.
Now before you rant and rave about this, let me just break this down. You might argue that 'blizzards a company and needs to make money'. Yes, I agree with you, like any other gaming company. But, just like capcom has been doing now, it seems blizzard have been slowly, ever to inch by inch, finding ways to bleed more money from there consumer as much as they can.
What do blizzard charge for from world of warcraft right now? Well
- Cost of the physical/downloaded game
- Cost of every single expansion
- Cost of subscription fees
- Cost of every kind of additional service like race/appearance/realm transfer
- Cost of mini pets and mounts
- Cost of transmogrifiable armor.
Now, lets take for example other mmos. Games like Allods online, Tera online, Lord of the rings, Conan. These games are free to download and have no sub fees. They do have a system of buying items from an ingame shop, but compared to blizzard and what they do, thats nothing.
Even games you buy like guild wars 2 are buy ones, no sub fees.
What gets me more, is how this has happened over years, and these additional pay for features have been creeping in slowly. you again might argue 'well don't use them if you don't want them', but just like in the video about capcom charging money for cheat codes, a features they already implemented in there games, all so they can bleed more from the consumer, its exactly the same thing.
There came a point then blizzard lost that connection with its playerbase, stopped being the awesome company that made fantasy worlds, and became driven by greed, yes, they've become greedy, no point defending this you know its the dam truth. This is where a split has happened between the developers and the consumer, there they stopped looking at them as loyal fans, and started looking at them as wallets with money in them.
I do wonder what they intend to bleed the players for next? new raids (download raids for $5 each)?, instant max level? there probably even charge us for character model updates when there finished, calling it now, this is what they will do.