Guardian Cub Tradable - Bad Idea?

[Spoinky]

One more bad idea from the worst developement team in the history of WoW.

I have been a lifetime gamer and never has Blizzard registered on my radar until WoW, or after. RTS are boring and dungeon crawlers are something my GF plays on her phone, again, very boring.

They are now destroying WoW, so well... I will move on. I've never felt the pathetic need to buy gold and this will just sour me and many others to corporate greed.

Games shold be: Fun, innovation, art, marketing and then profit. Not the other way around.

How can you care so much for this?

This pet will be what, 10k gold on the AH? Only so many people are going to pay that much for it. Even less are going to take the risk to spend real money on something that might not even sell ingame, people will be undercutting each other to the point where it's simply not worth it.

[shise]

People seems to be blind. This is just one more test to check out how much money they manage out of this. The more people buying from Blizz store this "data switches", the more pay to play games will become... slowly... but pay to play with the time.

Proof:

-Where did all the "grind mounts" go ? there are only drop mounts and blizzard store mounts now. Totally effort/worth less to buy one. Fortunately we still have some drop mounts.. but they are RNG afterall.

-Companions... they first were around Azeroth.. now they are just at Blizzard Store.

-Diablo equipment.. out of the controvesy... you can be some uber skilled player farming an item for 1 year while some other player might get it in a 3 minutes transfer.... where is the effort there?

If you can't see it.. or you think it's wrong.. i'm sorry but you are blind and kinda naive :P afterall this is business, and they'll try to get as much money from players as they can... i mean just check the rest of real life.. i can give you tones of examples... they really know how to sell and even convince people about their "dependency" to some items (iPhone as a good example).

[melodramocracy]

Never has a pet been so utterly game breaking apparently. You all realize there's a huge % of players that simply don't care about this pet in any way shape or form, right?

[Spoinky]

People seems to be blind. This is just one more test to check out how much money they manage out of this. The more people buying from Blizz store this "data switches", the more pay to play games will become... slowly... but pay to play with the time.

Proof:

-Where did all the "grind mounts" go ? there are only drop mounts and blizzard store mounts now. Totally effort/worth less to buy one. Fortunately we still have some drop mounts.. but they are RNG afterall.

-Companions... they first were around Azeroth.. now they are just at Blizzard Store.

-Diablo equipment.. out of the controvesy... you can be some uber skilled player farming an item for 1 year while some other player might get it in a 3 minutes transfer.... where is the effort there?

If you can't see it.. or you think it's wrong.. i'm sorry but you are blind and kinda naive :P afterall this is business, and they'll try to get as much money from players as they can... i mean just check teh rest of real life...

I think most people aren't blind and naive, the simply don't care. Mounts and pets don't affect the game like say donator armor or silly stuff like that. If you join a BG or raid, the only moment your 10 dollar pet will get attention is before the start.

[Antipathy]

How can you care so much for this?

This pet will be what, 10k gold on the AH? Only so many people are going to pay that much for it. Even less are going to take the risk to spend real money on something that might not even sell ingame, people will be undercutting each other to the point where it's simply not worth it.

My understanding of people's concerns here is that this is a "Backdoor Trojan Horse" which could have an impact on the game in the long run. People are worried that it starts with a pet, then becomes a mount, then some shiny sword, etc.. etc..

Your assumption is rational, I view it very much the way that you do, there is a risk associated with spending real money to reap in game currency and prices will probably deflate quickly.

From a personal perspective, I wouldn't purchase it however, not because of the idea behind it, but because its an inferior product; other pets went to all my characters for the same price, I won't be paying a similar fee for an item that doesn't work in the same manner.

[Yumisara]

Players have the right to sell whatever they want (initially) and I'm okay with this cub being one of them. I love buying gifts for people, so this will tempt me more.

[Puremallace]

Not sure what is more shocking. THe fact this poll is 50/50% or the fact people defend the ability to pay Blizzard 10$ then sell the pet for money in AH. It is RMT guys. If you guys allow this trust me Blizzard will put more then just pets in there.

This is a NCSoft 101 how to run a cash shop. Next up because of transmogrify is wardrobe items for 10$.

http://na.aiononline.com/services/aion-store

[Crashdummy]

Do you think it's a bad idea that Blizzard is making the Guardian Cub tradable?

I really don't like the idea that this will essentially be buying gold and players will simply buy this to sell at silly prices! Not to mention it's now $10 for a pet per character as opposed to $10 for a per per account

It's not buying gold.

The problem of gold buying is that destroys the game economy because introduces gold that shouldn't exist in game. This does not introduces any new gold into the game and moreso, the price in gold is not set by blizzard.

[Fishyface]

Its not buying gold but this allows certain crafty people to skip grinding for money in wow for using their pocketbook to achieve goals in game for them. The tcg thing is a little different because there is a RL money deterrant in buying a box of booster packs (120 bucks) to get loot cards to sell to people and you arnt always guaranteed to get that mount from the box.

This allows for a cheap and guaranteed way to get something worth selling to the playerbase and in doing this you have given a f2p style choice to people , which is "instead of spending a week farming gold for me epic mount i can just shell out 30 bucks and get it right now yay!" Not to mention you could also buy the newest BoE epics with selling those cubs.

The slippery slope gets more slippery.

The march towards pay to win has begun, they wont do it directly but before long the cash shop is going to be a monster and end up changing wow completely.

[Kisho]

Proof:

-Where did all the "grind mounts" go ? there are only drop mounts and blizzard store mounts now. Totally effort/worth less to buy one. Fortunately we still have some drop mounts.. but they are RNG afterall.

-Companions... they first were around Azeroth.. now they are just at Blizzard Store.

Tol Barad pet and mounts. Molten Front pets and mount from the achievement. Mounts from Uldum reputation. There will be mounts and pets from the new Darkmoon Faire. The mounts and pets are there, you're apparently just too blinded by your irrational hatred of Blizzard to see them.

Yet again when something like this pops up, people over-react and exaggerate. The honest truth is this: being able to buy in-game benefits isn't a bad thing. I'm serious. Allow me to explain:

There's a popular expression that is very appropriate for this topic. 'Time is Money'. Because that's exactly true: time is equal to money. All that matters is which you value more.

If you value your money more, then you will spend the time to grind for stuff yourself.
If you value your time more, you'll pay money to get items and things instantly.

Both approaches are perfectly valid means of progression. If you want to spend the time and work on your character, great. Go ahead, have fun doing so. But if you want to spend money and jump right in at the end? That's cool too! The outcome is exactly the same either way.

If anything, this pet is the better implementation of the above philosophy. Previously pets were BoP, so you could ONLY spend money on them. Now you can choose: grind gold with your time to buy it, or spend $10 to get it instantly. Either approach is a fine and valid alternative.

There's only two reasons why people could complain about this pet, one valid and one not so valid. The valid one is how you only get one copy of the pet, instead of one for every character on your account. Valid, reasonable, yet there are two counterpoints to this. The first one is that you've got the BoE aspect to counter balance it. Not all items need to be exactly equal, nor should they be. Because of this BoE aspect the new pet is appealing to a different sort of market than the previous pets, which is completely ok! The other counter point is that generally speaking, people have 1 character that they try to get all achievements/mounts/pets on, so should only need to buy it once to get it on that character anyway. People who want everything on every char are very much in the minority.

The not so valid reason to complain is that people care far too much about other people. They care that someone else simply bought an item, when they supposedly worked their asses off to get it. To this, the answer is simple: Grow up. Stop caring about what other people say or do, and just focus on your own gameplay. Other, random people you will never meet or interact with simply do not matter.

At the end of the day, these mounts and pets do not provide any form of in-game benefit. They give you an extra point towards the mount and/or pet achievements, both of which can be achieved completely without buying any pet or mount from the pet store. That's all. Claiming this is a 'slippery slope' and that we'll soon be buying full sets of epics from the store is frankly ludicrous. Keep calm and carry on: Blizzard aren't killing off WoW just yet.

As a small side note, please do take heed of the part where they say they're responding to player feedback with this new pet. The playerbase WANT this pet to be BoE, and a significant portion of it at that. If you don't like it, seems like you've been outvoted.

---------- Post added 2011-10-11 at 02:47 PM ----------

Oh, and another thing: this pet is an absolutely brilliant method of sharing out the wealth. There has been a growing problem where some people in the game have ridiculous amounts of gold, while the majority of the playerbase barely has 1000 gold to their name. With this pet the players who have millions will simply buy the pet for gold, while the playerbase who has barely thousands will be able to buy it for real money and get some of that gold from the millionaires. An absolutely brilliant method of sharing in-game wealth. Kudos to Blizzard for creating a solution to that problem: let's see if it works.

[Anjerith]

Which would you rather buy for 10 bucks? a pet that EVERY ONE of your toons you create from now until the servers shut down gets, or one pet that only ONE toon can have?

It's pretty clear that this pet is designed to be bought as an item to sell on the AH instead of an item to buy for yourself or a friend. Most people are not going to buy a little pet for 10 bucks for only one toon, they're going to buy it to sell it for (what they hope will be) tons of gold.

I would rather not buy any pets at all, plenty in-game that I never use anyway. That said, most people play one character more than others and are more apt to use pets on that character. I know I only use my Baby Core Hound on one character but that is because I summoned him once to use as a raid marker and thanks to the no-despawn pet fix he is still around.

[noteworthynerd]

While I can usually understand and thus defend Blizzard's actions, this just seems like a bad idea... It is essentially sponsored gold selling/buying, but instead of a person directly buying gold with real-life currency, they buy a pet with real-life currency and then trade it for gold... I'm justifiably concerned that this is only opening a door for other things that could ultimately culminate with being able to buy gold directly from the Blizzard Store.

[quras]

That's what you get for sticking with a company that decided to put in D3 RMAH.

This ^

Plus both the RMAH and the cub are just testing grounds. People are going to embrace the "real Money" cash options and like every other company before them. They will run it into the ground. They will put it to the extreme and do their best to find the boundry of the gaming world and what money they can squeeze out of each person.

It's no longer about making the game. It's about making the game that milks money out of it's players in small increments so it wont seem so intruding.

WOW and the future of blizzard will be games that not only charge a monthly fee, but will have a massive cash shop that provides as close to as possible advantages but will do everything they can to hide it or simply just call it something else.

At this rate, I'll never buy another blizzard game just on principles alone. Not cause they don't play well, have interesting stories or nice to look at. It will be cause of what you are seeing them do as of late with WOW and D3.

These are the first steps...

[Slowpoke is a Gamer]

This ^

Plus both the RMAH and the cub are just testing grounds. People are going to embrace the "real Money" cash options and like every other company before them. They will run it into the ground. They will put it to the extreme and do their best to find the boundry of the gaming world and what money they can squeeze out of each person.

It's no longer about making the game. It's about making the game that milks money out of it's players in small increments so it wont seem so intruding.

WOW and the future of blizzard will be games that not only charge a monthly fee, but will have a massive cash shop that provides as close to as possible advantages but will do everything they can to hide it or simply just call it something else.

At this rate, I'll never buy another blizzard game just on principles alone. Not cause they don't play well, have interesting stories or nice to look at. It will be cause of what you are seeing them do as of late with WOW and D3.

These are the first steps...

So... name me one "cash shop" game that was run into the ground because of the "cash shop"

[tacoloco]

What makes you think they do not? Everything points toward that they do. And, why would they let anyone else make money on their game?

NOTHING points to Blizzard selling gold, except to people who have already decided that Blizzard is up to no good.

I realize Blizzard doesn't do enough to eliminate bots. But that is not evidence that Blizzard is in the business of selling gold.

This pet is just one more thing for people to latch onto as proof Blizzard is trying to screw it's customers. And it's just fucking stupid.

[HolyBulwark93]

I don't like the idea of it being tradable but as long as there are very few in the AH, I won't mind. I think the only people who buy pets use them anyways so I hope it doesn't become a huge gold making deal.

[Slowpoke is a Gamer]

NOTHING points to Blizzard selling gold, except to people who have already decided that Blizzard is up to no good.

I realize Blizzard doesn't do enough to eliminate bots. But that is not evidence that Blizzard is in the business of selling gold.

This pet is just one more thing for people to latch onto as proof Blizzard is trying to screw it's customers. And it's just fucking stupid.

Maybe it's just the fact of where my roommate is employed (powerleveling/gold selling site), but WoW is good on bots.

I hardly see any bots outside of BGs. But other companies (NEXON) leave bots going for weeks before banning.... for under a month.

[shise]

@ Kisho. You didn't get my point. I don't care what people buy or not, and the "time is money" is true, but sad, as we move and do everything around money, money is the current God, where God and Religion means mass control, that's the sad point, and it's bad just that WoW is also turning into that. I don't mean anything else... i should have wrote it in a better way i guess.

And about the gold balance point, it's good, but it's just a collateral effect which, afterall, wont be that great. Those pets might sell for 10k and drop to 7k or so... anyways 10k is not money in this expansion.

[Baz]

itll be like 100K gold the first week then like 8k...$10 = about 5k gold i thought (not sure) so isnt blizz just selling gold...?

[Slowpoke is a Gamer]

@ Kisho. You didn't get my point. I don't care what people buy or not, and the "time is money" is true, but sad, as we move and do everything around money, money is the current God, where God and Religion means mass control, that's the sad point, and it's bad just that WoW is also turning into that. I don't mean anything else... i should have wrote it in a better way i guess.

And about the gold balance point, it's good, but it's just a collateral effect which, afterall, wont be that great. Those pets might sell for 10k and drop to 7k or so... anyways 10k is not money in this expansion.

But Blizzard is a company. And the bottom line of a company is called profit. Profit is the measure of a good idea. A company that cannot make a profit, cannot pay the bills, and like us, winds up on the street without posessions.

If you were looking to buy stock, you wouldn't buy into a company losing money, because in a few months your stock would be likely worthless. Companies create stock to fund ideas.

So profit = important.

---------- Post added 2011-10-11 at 09:37 AM ----------

itll be like 100K gold the first week then like 8k...$10 = about 5k gold i thought (not sure) so isnt blizz just selling gold...?

For the first week, but after the price drops, nope. Most sites sell 10k-20k for $10-$15.