Alternative subscription options

[Master Factician]

Naw. I find it fine as it is.

I swear, if it was made in a day pass thing like China, I believe, then it would be more expensive overall, and complaints would flow about that as well. Just easier to pay the subscription monthly, thereby you don't pay some massive amount, and you can log in when you feel like it/are able to.

Players in China pay in 30, 60 and 180 day increments.

[Drusin]

For people who have very limited time to play, say only a few hours on the weekends, should blizzard offer a /day or /hour subscription model, something like 30 cents/hour or 1$/day, or the sorts?

I'd be cool with it for those that want it since at 30 cents an hour you are being raped lol. Right now wow is 50 cents a day (30 days = $15), if wow were the equivalent of 30 cents an hour right now a subscription would be $219 a month (1 month 730 hours, 30 cents * 730 = 21900 cents, 21900 cents / 100 cents ($1) = $219). So I would be happy if Blizz were getting extra money from people lol.

[korijenkins]

For people who have very limited time to play, say only a few hours on the weekends, should blizzard offer a /day or /hour subscription model, something like 30 cents/hour or 1$/day, or the sorts?

Maintaining a server in terms of costs has gone down dramatically over the years with the advent of VMs and insane ramp up of physical power, an AMD Epyc CPU with 96 cores / 192 threads could probably power all of the original WoW servers and still have room to spare.

So it's not like Blizzard can even justify needing 15$ from a player for the monthly upkeep alone, and it's not a debatable question that the amount of content they deliver per patch, on average, doesn't justify the monthly fee, especially with the amount of money they make on the game box and MTXes, which cost nothing to run and are insanely priced (20$ to change a name in a database, 30$ for a race change, 60$ for a char boost and so on).

So for someone like me who would only play a few hours on the weekend, paying 15$/month (the price of a quality game on sale, or 3A game for 2 months) + expansion costs just to do some PVP and quests makes no sense, even if it is cheap.

For the love of god, read the above before vomiting out the tired old "it's the price of a movie" trope. This has nothing to do with that.

They would absolutely never do that solely because they aren't looking for justifications. They're banking on people not getting as much value out of the 15/mo that they want. Adding a more efficient option that would let people only pay when they're able to play would lose them money, and Blizzard in 2022 is solely profit focused. Not to mention their entire content release schedule of gating everything behind arbitrary waits is done on purpose to keep people coming back month after month. If you could sub for a day at a time, you'd only sub on reset day and the weekends, and they'd lose a fair amount of opportunity to fleece the customers into buying essentially nothing in between.

That being said, if we're talking about justification, no part of this game justifies a subscription anymore. In the past it made sense, you were paying for something totally unique, the best MMORPG on the market by far and a social experience that couldn't be found elsewhere because social media didn't exist yet. Now it's just a mediocre game demanding a subscription during content droughts and time-gated shit.

[Lochton]

Players in China pay in 30, 60 and 180 day increments.

Last I heard they could pay daily, unless that was stopped? Didn't know.

[Master Factician]

That was changed 6 years ago.