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I thought this was a joke but it seems like it's actually legit. WoW, which has a subscription and paid expansions, just added a $90 item to their store. This is Korean MMO levels of absurdity. What do you think of this?
Imagine a parallel world where no one brought the horse armour
God dammit Todd…
The Wizard Tower was so cool too…
to me this is the wrong way of looking at it, it's like saying "imagine a world where plutocrats just didn't do pollution, imagine a world where plantation owners didn't use slave labor, imagine a world where industrialists didn't employ children"
it was always going to happen, just society has to force capitalists not to be cunts. Only way, always was, always will be, still is.
I think it's an eventuality. If not the horse armor it would have been something else. Humans are easily exploitable
It's actually more insidious. Blizzard facilitates gold buying by being a middle man. 30 days of wow subscription is $15. Blizzard sells a $20 wow token. Buyers of the token automatically sell it in game to players for gold. Players who sell their In game gold can redeem the token for game time or $15 Blizzard bucks, which can buy any virtual item in the Blizzard store. Games, expansions, and mounts such as this.
If you don't want to spend $90 in real life, you can sell your gold for 6 tokens for $90 Blizzard bucks and get the mount.
The token has been hovering around $170k all month and now it spiked to almost $360k (token price tracker). So now cash buyers can get way more gold for their bucks, and the 6 tokens exchanged for gold (to buy the mount) will net Blizzard $120.
I’ve known about the gold tokens system, it has made sense as a way to invalidate black market gold sellers, equalizing WoW gold against the US Dollar. Still don’t quite understand why the token would now sell for 170k though…? Unless you didn’t mean to use the dollar symbol.
They probably meant 170k gold in-game
Also what they haven't said is that the price is set by players of the game,. When someone buys a WoW token and exchanges it for gold, that's because a player has paid them with gold they earned for the token. These tokens can be then used to pay for your monthly subscription.
Those amounts aren't USD yeah, probably habit when writing down money. The 170k and 360k figures are the WoW virtual currency aka "gold".
There is a floor to WoW token's gold value from what I recall (it's been years since I interacted with Blizzard and WoW) but no ceiling.
Dunno how hard it curbed bots/unsanctioned gold sellers/fascist scum grassroots campaigns (no, really, look into Stephen Bannon and WoW gold it's so fucking stupid) but!
Blizzard absolutely realized and then moved to take all the money that was being left on the table from 3rd party virtual currency sales, and they apply every measure and analytical tool to maximize that profit because of course.
This mount's release is literally them inflating the price of the virtual currency ahead of real life earnings calls, because it absolutely will sell and give them the revenue infusion that the WoW token's rise in value is meant to provide for as long as they want until it's time to pump the numbers again with another mount/high sought store item.
A very similar variant in form and function to this mount was once available in-game and trade able with a rarity tuned that it ended up being sold for the WoW Token equivalent of ~$500 at the prices at the time, as there was no store version or similar option elsewhere.
It's no accident that when the price of the WoW Token is at its lowest, here comes a slightly updated and dolled up version of that same highly sought mount version.
WoW is where real economics, car ownership culture, hoarding, and dopamine treadmills collide and Blizzard doesn't just know this but have it charted on 5 year plans.
At least it's not Star Citizen prices:
What the fuck? Do people actually pay that for virtual bullshit? That's like the price of a used Honda!
There's also a pack containing every ship they've sold which you can only see/purchase if you've spent one thousand dollars in their ship store. I'll spoiler the price so you can try and guess how much it is first:
spoiler
$48,000, not counting the $1000 you have to spend to be able to see it.
Edit: I should include the source for that price since (as mentioned) you can't even see the pack until you've dropped $1k
It's intended for whales and for the 65 crew members to split. But I can't imagine they sell many.
That's still a little bit over $46 a player. So you'd have to have 65 whales agree to split it.
$46 a player isn’t unheard of, even outside whaling.
More like Scam Citizen.
I'm so glad I got clean.
Same. Actual drug addiction (cannabis) has been far cheaper than WoW was
I saw people being mad not because they are selling a 90$ mount, but because now everyone can just have it instead of grinding 5 million gold lol.
Showing off is an important part of social MMOs. If anyone can have the really cool looking thing for some cash then what's the point of grinding? For a hardcore player, what do they have to show off their prestige?
It's pretty important for an MMO to respect its most active players. Not to mention, what do new players have to look up to? To think, what do I have to get that? If the answer is "oh I just have to fork out some dough". That's kinda disappointing
It's pretty important for an MMO to respect its most active players
WoW chased them off years ago. They cater towards casual players now, and don't want the lifers.
Ok so I cackled when I saw the price on this thing but the more I thought about it, the less shitty it is. FWIW I am not a WoW lifer or Blizzard apologist. I got talked into Classic for a year then played a month or two of each expansion since before quitting but I know the background of the story. It looks way worse from an outsider perspective.
You could buy the original auction house mount for 5 million gold back in the day. It stopped being available regularly and now it's available occasionally in the "black market auction house" and it always sells for the maximum bid.
To combat Chinese gold farmers, Blizzard started selling gold in a bit of a roundabout way. For $20, you can buy a WoW token to sell on the auction house. This token can be purchased by a player and traded for 1 month of game time. Some players dont pay a dime to play - gold is not hard to acquire.
When this new mount came out, WoW tokens were worth about 200k gold. You'd need to exchange them for 5 tokens to get this mount. 1/5 of the original price.
Now tokens are worth 330k. 1.65m golf. STILL significantly cheaper than it was originally.
Tokens will need to rise to triple in price to match the original cost which will still be a tiny fraction of what it cost a month ago.
By far the shittiest thing about this - and I think the only real reason to complain - is that the rising value of the token hurts players who pay for the subscription purely with gold as it adds a few hours to their "working" time in game. For context, watching TV and semi-afk farming will get you like 50k/hour. You can earn way, way more if you've leveled up a profession.
The other (not so bad) thing I don't like about it is that....I hate those mounts. They're HUGE and people just AFK on them blocking NPCs I want to talk to.
The other (not so bad) thing I don't like about it is that....I hate those mounts. They're HUGE and people just AFK on them blocking NPCs I want to talk to.
TFW the year is 2024 AD and blizzard still has not properly addressed this
It hurts to do this, because you've obviously thought out your comment and you obviously like the game and want to believe the devs are doing their best. But I think your entire premise is wrong
To combat Chinese gold farmers, Blizzard started selling gold in a bit of a roundabout way
Why do you think this? Why do you grant a greedy game dev the benefit of the doubt? They're cashing in on Chinese gold farmers in all possible ways, man:
They are triple dipping, and you choose to believe they are doing it because they're a good game dev.
A good game dev would ban accounts guilty of real money trading. A good game dev would fix the in-game economy with in-game methods. A good game dev wouldn't have micro transactions in a subscription game. You want to believe Blizzard is doing this because of those evil Chinese farmers - I'm here to tell you they're profiting from this and don't have the morals to make it right.
They'll keep doing this because dipshits keep paying for it. Blame the whales.
They should abandon all pretenses of restraint and just add a literal whale mount for $500
Square Enix literally has this in FFXIV and it’s half of what Blizzard wants for their mount ($42 USD). And at least the FFXIV whale mount has in-world lore history and isn’t just an overt cash grab.
I'm more surprised that this game is still running. I haven't heard of anyone playing it in years.
There's a few at work who have admitted to still playing. Blizzard owes a lot to the very concrete social structures built around the game.
I quit after they fraudulently charged me a 6 month subscription renewal and then refused to refund it for months because no customer service reps anymore, and then the next expansion had paid early access for a huge paywall. It's a total scam now
TIL world of Warcraft still exists
It's going to sell like crazy. It's not just that it's a Mount, but it also has an auction house and mailbox that you can use anywhere at any time. The only other mount that has the AH is no longer attainable regularly, only on rare occasions for gold cap.
I am going to get it, but I'm going to use my gold in game to convert to bnet balance.
I was going to say who cares if they're selling a mount skin, but if on-the-go access to the auction house and mailbox isn't normally accessible, this seems shitty.
On the up side, it's now very, VERY easy to tell who is an idiot in the main hub cities within 10 seconds of the auction house.
Be careful judging because there will be plenty of people here who will think "anyone still playing the game is an idiot."
I'm a former player, but played continuously from release for 11 years. This is undoubtedly ridiculously expensive, but the convenience of having your mail and auction house anywhere in the world - the value to certain players is immense. I think if I played still today, it would probably be a struggle deciding whether this limited time offering was worth jumping on - I certainly don't need it even a little bit, but when I want it, this thing would be incredibly convenient to have. Maybe that would just be the addiction talking. But when you spend all your free time with one game, you do feel a sense of good value relative to things like drinks at the bar or a movie or buying 1 or 2 full priced games a month.
But truly, the utility this provides for you and your guild is immense and impossible to replicate. They definitely shouldn't be selling mounts on the shop for $90. That's fucked. But compared to some of the video game devs selling weapon or character skins for as much or more, there IS at least a unique value proposition to the player. I guarantee there will be people with it the second it releases, for better or worse.
People will buy it. And then they will wonder why content quality declines and more and more micro transactions appear in a game they bought and pay subscription for.
The capitalism will always look for the easy route to even more money, and monkey brains with need for status symbols will follow.
I think I don't have battle.net installed so they can't hurt me anymore.
That's a cool as fuck mount...
And it's not worth what I could spend to get one AAA game and two decent quality Indie Games
In line with the recent 60$ Ragnaros skin for Hearthstone. The Faker Ahri skin set a precedent and now every company wants a slice of the cake
Blizzard is scum
Unfortunately this seems to be a rising trend for AAA studios/games: Riot Said The Quiet Part Out Loud.
it's selling well too though it's actually 78$. They put Mailbox and Auction House on it which AFAIK the only mount that has both which is incredibly valuable.
If not the fuction I wouldn't mind but because the function is so valuable it's really poor form by Blizzard. I even love the mount and buy it as cosmetic but I'm not supporting this at the state it is currently.