So why can f2p games have a monthly subscription but a pay to play game can not have a cash shop? The flaw in your reasoning is that there is nothing wrong with a subscription service selling additional items at an extra cost. Many companies do it that range across all types of products. Blizzard certainly isn't the first and they won't be the last.
Why should everything be free just because you pay a monthly fee?
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Just like the selling of increased experience potions impacted every ones game play? Funny how no one complains about that still. What if selling of level X is only for certain markets? What if they limit it to Asian realms? It also isn't an arduous grind to 90, even for a 100% new player. Leveling is pretty fast, and if it is an alt you can power level to 90 in a few days. Will some still by a level 90? Sure, people have disposable income.
But leveling is by no means arduous. It sounds like you haven't leveled in a while.
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But then you really don't have an issue with them selling level 90 boosts. You have an issue with the price point of the boost. If boosts are bad, they would be bad regardless of how they are given. No one complained much about people that got a Free Cataclysm license and a free level 80 just for returning to the game during that promotion.
"Man is his own star. His acts are his angels, good or ill, While his fatal shadows walk silently beside him."-Rhyme of the Primeval Paradine AFC 54
You know a community is bad when moderators lock a thread because "...this isnt the place to talk about it either seeing as it will get trolled..."
Because ever since I picked up my sub I was paying for a full access limited only by my skill - now it's going the other way round: you pay = you gain access no matter the skill. Eg. there where massive nerfs in ICC to allow players to see the content because prog. race ended and there was no lfr. - now there's lfr and they still decide to nerf bosses. And I'm for one pissed as hell bc I worked hard to get to them and now that i have a chance to do just that they get nerfed. Same deal here: I wanted a mount or a piece of gear I had to work on it to get it be it grind or progressing in skill and now i get to have something cool only if I pay them more money?
The game should be generally difficult by default with easier pathways, not the other way around.
Need more tanks and healers for lfr so buy more 90's please.
Getting to level 90 is cool? Remember that level 100 is the new max level once WoD comes out (and this boost is part of the pre-sale of WoD). It also doesn't take much skill to reach level 90, just time. Things get nerfed all the time, if you can't handle a few nerfs then you are playing the wrong type of game. You always got something cool for paying more money because Vanilla had CE pets and TCG loot. (And you didn't even pay Blizzard for TCG loot).
"Man is his own star. His acts are his angels, good or ill, While his fatal shadows walk silently beside him."-Rhyme of the Primeval Paradine AFC 54
You know a community is bad when moderators lock a thread because "...this isnt the place to talk about it either seeing as it will get trolled..."
Here i was just pinning up the tmog gear, mounts and pets as for 90 boosts... well believe it or not but you do learn some of your class while lvling. Don't believe me? Think you can learn your spec just by playing it on max lvl/reading a tutorial? Look at all those dps->tank/healer rerollers on lfr...
they are offering it in order to not shrink the leveling experience any further.
the reasonning for this is simple. currently you're done with a zone after a few quests. in order to procceed at the maximum pace (that's the human brain. do what's most efficient even if it's the most boring way) you then have to move to the next zone before you even get what the quests are about. this kills the immersion for many and makes leveling even more boring than it could be.
with the boost to 90 you CAN skip content you're bored of anyways and blizz can tune the xp-curve to the required state for the immersion at the same time.
as i see it it's a win-win scenario for everyone besides ones account balance if one really intends to skip the actually fun content.
and guess why they do sell all their "services" for 15-20 bucks?
they want people to have an option to do what is offered in an easier way (remember when you had to level a totally new toon when you got bored of the race/gender? i do as i went through that process and have been pissed of farming all i had again!), but they set the price high enough to make people actually think about whether it's worth it to take the shortcut.
if they were greedy they'd sell these services for such a low price like 5-7 bucks for everything, because at such a low price almost anyone would take that shortcut which in turn would total in more people buying these services (maybe even more often) and resulting in a higher profit.
but guess what? they don't!
I look forward to seeing the WoD threads raging about how terrible everyone 90-100 in dungeons and out in the world leveling.
Remember all those silly things that you see people doing while leveling up? Priests in melee combat, mages hard-casting Pyro, Pally tanks with a two-hander...That's what the WoD 90-100 experience is going to be like. All because Blizz is hemorrhaging subs and is desperate for cash and players are inherently lazy.
A whole lot of people level up with a different spec than they end up playing at max level. I know I did on multiple characters.
Even if you do, though, is learning how to heal a 5 man balanced around the "is this item higher ilevel than the ones I have equipped?" gearing strategy really going to teach you that much about healing a raid? Does learning how to kill a mob that autoattacks and dies in 8 seconds teach you how to counter another team in an arena? And so on and so on.
95% of what you learn about playing your character at max level is learned at max level. The other 5%, you CAN learn while leveling up - or just as easily at max level.
The reason people are playing so poorly in LFR is that most people don't consider LFR to be serious content. It's where you go to figure things out about your character if you don't know how to play yet - not where you go once you know what to do.
Last edited by Shamanberry; 2014-01-19 at 04:29 PM.
I think the problem here is that Blizzard tried to slowly introduce micro-transactions into the game and succeeded. It's been going on for years now and every time they have pushed the boundaries a little further. At first it was a services, then a few pets and most people said it's nothing and doesn't change anything.. Well, maybe they didn't change much on their own but take a step back now and take all those cash shop related topics into account. WoW is already following the F2P freemium model now.. only without the free part. You still have to pay the subscription on top of everything.
I guess you can't really blame them though, they're just taking advantage of their monopoly. If we had 3+ roughly equal MMOs on the market and lots of competition between them, they could never have got away with this.
It isn't a monopoly by any stretch of the imagination. WoW doesn't just compete with other MMOs. It competes with a broad swath of other video games and other forms of entertainment. It's a commonly propagated fallacy that entertainment products only compete with other entertainment products that fall into the same very, very narrow category. WoW still has to have at least a perceived value, dollar for dollar, that exceeds that of spending that money on other entertainment products, even if there were zero other MMOs on the market.
Gotten away with what? Charging a subscription while selling things in a cash shop? 90% of free to play games also offer subscription packages. Why does it make a difference what the base level of the game costs? Why is it only bad when Blizzard does it, but not when any other company does it? Magazines, Newspapers, Netflix, Cable Companies, Insurance, Car companies, Airlines, Amazon Prime etc all charge you a subscription fee while also selling you additional items at an extra cost.
Why is it so wrong for a subscription game to sell additional things at an additional cost?
Last edited by rhorle; 2014-01-19 at 06:31 PM.
"Man is his own star. His acts are his angels, good or ill, While his fatal shadows walk silently beside him."-Rhyme of the Primeval Paradine AFC 54
You know a community is bad when moderators lock a thread because "...this isnt the place to talk about it either seeing as it will get trolled..."
Sarcasm aside, they can do both. The problem with this shitty business attitude is that it goes for the MOST possible profit they can suck out. Which means 100% of the time they will disregard game quality if it means they make one more dollar. It's really sad seeing people perpetuating this toxic philosophy.
Are players also inherently flushed with cash?
And honestly, I would rather play with someone with the desire to play than a burnt out player who goes afk half the time because that's technically the bare minimum he needs to do to claw his way through an instance. At least the new guy will be willing to learn, and if he's not, well then he's going to be a dick no matter the level we play with him.
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Are they cutting back on developers? Because that would be the first obvious step to suck more profit out of the game, which would obviously hurt the quality of the game. Just because YOU don't like the game anymore doesn't mean the quality has gone down in general.
The majority of your posts are personal opinions you claim as facts, but that doesn't make them fact though.