Idiots keep spending money, corpos keep taking these monies.
A feature that costs Blizzard nothing, given an obscene price larger than any game or expansion they’ve ever sold, dangled with rationality-undermining time pressure, and using some bullshit tokens for artificial scarcity.
Only legislation will stop this.
Nothing inside a video game should cost real money.
If we allow this to continue, there will be nothing else.
Only legislation will stop this.
Disagree. Let the whales waste their money, I have plenty of other options. In fact, indie gaming is better than it has ever been.
I certainly don’t like that type of revenue model, but I don’t think it should be banned, especially since the alternatives are plentiful and growing.
You’re a libertarian who has personally told me corporations have unlimited right to manipulate people out of their money.
Sorry if I’m misremembering - you might’ve said “exploit.”
Not unlimited, but certainly a lot of flexibility. As long as they don’t commit fraud, I think they should be allowed to provide whatever services their customers are willing to pay for.
That said, I won’t participate, and I’ll be vocal about calling out their terrible business models. But I won’t go so far as to suggest legislation to solve a “problem” of adults making poor choices. People should always be free to make stupid choices, provided those choices don’t hurt others. I am sympathetic to some limits around kids, but those limits shouldn’t apply to adults. So maybe slap an “M” rating on a game if it has microtransactions or something and restrict direct sales to underage kids (enforcement should be lax though to avoid privacy violations).
The indie game scene is vibrant, and there are still plenty of AAA games without that nonsense. So play those and send a message to these companies that non-abusive games are absolutely still wanted. Also, be vocal about these exploitative practices by companies to convince others to avoid their products.
Choice does not excuse systemic abuse for profit. People choose scams all the time. That’s how they work!
As previously mentioned, fuck them kids. This is about abuses committed against adults. This is about the central nature of games, and how they invent value, of a sort completely incompatible with cash money. The exchange rate between enchanted scimitars and hamburgers is nonexistent.
There’s no technical reason to connect remote auctioneering to this… horse. Blizzard does it so they can gouge people you’ve given a derisive label. Every player is affected. Every player knows this is possible, and the overwhelming majority of them are denied. The game was made objectively worse for them, through their engineered dissatisfaction, specifically to bilk some tiny fraction for unreasonable quantities of money. Enough money, per person in that tiny group, to make kneejerk excuses like ‘just boycott!’ utterly useless.
Being vocal doesn’t matter - the money talks louder.
Only legislation will fix this.
I don’t think you disagree with that. You don’t want the problem fixed. You’re denying the problem is a problem, even as you describe “whales” like you’d describe “problem gamblers” or “scam victims.” So what if they made bad choices? You didn’t. It was easy, apparently. Good choices abound! Therefore, rampant exploitation of human frailty doesn’t count.
Nothing inside a video game should cost real money.
I wouldn’t go that far, otherwise you would also kill off essentially third parties producing content a la Second Life or the asset stores in various game engines as well as services provided by players to other players.
Developing a video game is not “inside a video game.”
When somebody’s playing raid sherpa or whatever, pay them in gold.
Even if stopping this cuts off some legitimate niche - that beats letting it swallow the entire industry.
I already disrespect WoW and Blizzard players in general. This is entirely in character for them.
They’ll keep doing it if it keeps working
I guess if this was all I did outside of work and sleep, I’d probably buy it. Mailbox and auction house access is priceless.
But, I got shit to do and mouths to feed, so, I don’t WoW no mo’.
Mailbox and auction house access is priceless.
Create the problem, sell the solution.
There’s no reason not to let all players access their mail and auction house anywhere through the menus, except that Blizzard has decided to paywall that ‘feature’.
These headlines keep saying $90 mount but it’s basically “$90 access the mailbox and auction house from anywhere, and also get a mount”.
But that’s worse!
But also, isn’t the reason these WoW Tokens are low is because people are trading their in-game gold for it instead of actually paying $90 cash??
Yep! People will buy WoW tokens from the auction house with gold, and they can either redeem the tokens for $15 of shop balance or 30 days of game time. I like making gold in game, so anything I’ve bought from Blizzard over the last few years (including WoW expansions and other games) has been with gold.
The price of tokens went up by about 100,000 gold after this mount got announced and they were selling out fairly regularly for the rest of the day. It seems to have stabilized now, though.
Where do the tokens come from?
Are people buying them from Blizzard for real cash and then listing them in the auction house?
Yes, people pay $20 to buy a WoW token from the cash shop which then gets sold on the in game auction house. That person gets in game gold (the amount fluctuates), and the person who bought the token from the auction house gets their choice of either $15 of shop balance or 30 days of game time.
Sounds for me like Blizzard have taken over the role of the gold sellers themselves and with the same ethical standards.
It’s kind bad that it’s only for a limited time. People who are not paying now will have a mechanical disadvantage that cannot be overcome.
I wouldn’t mind as much if this was always available, but locking it up after a time feels like it’s selling limited time cheats.
I think it will be common enough that they can easily access an auction house when they need it in the world. They may also introduce another one in the future, but at a higher price.
Typically prices go down, not up. This is already the cheaper version.
As an occasionally returning player, I think the ah access is massively overrated. What is it that people are buying from there that they can’t buy in the capital, but at the same time must be available on the road?
I have need for an auction house off road maybe once a month? Probably less often. And when I do I can just log onto a banking alt located right at an auction house, mail it to my main and grab it from any mailbox (engineering has portable mailboxes too by the way).
For farmers this effectively eliminates the need for an auctioneer alt. Now instead of sending mail to your auctioneer, you can now farm and when your bags are full instantly list it on the auction house. This is especially important on early markets (lets say new patch or expansion) as the prices go down quickly. This feels very much P2W for a full price game with a subscription.
Booooo.
