People thinking a multi billion dollar company is removing a mount in the hopes of baiting a handful of individuals into buying a total of a few thousand dollars worth of WoW tokens are reaching to a degree I never thought possible. They may be removing it because few people are interacting with the content (i.e. buying it in-game) and believe it has failed as a gold dump, and want more gold removed from the world before Shadowlands, or perhaps for some other reason, but people who believe that there was a board room meeting where Bobby Kotick sat the WoW dev team down and said, âFind a way to sell more WoW tokens⊠or else!â are so incredibly out of touch with reality they need to seek professional help.
As an aside, I guess FFXIV must be literally literally the devil incarnate because they remove ALL event and holiday mounts (the holidays are pretty short, too) and make them solely obtainable through the in-game shop. Itâs mind boggling to see the amount of people claiming their exodus over this mount just to jump in a game that locks an enormous amount of glamour and mounts (and bank space) behind paywalls.
WoWâs cash shop is the least intrusive in the genre by an incredibly large margin. There are a million ways and potentially thousands of options they have that would fly under the radar and increase revenue from their shop but this is certainly not one of them.
The problem is that the 5 million price tag fit LEGION:
Legion was the âMonty Haulâ of gold, for every expansion. I probably COULD have bought it in Legion, but figured Iâd save it for last and bought EVERY SINGLE NPC sold mount, as well as player sold AH mount, which was sub 500 K instead.
In Legion, for the first time, I had the Mammoth, the AH Yak, as well as every other NPC sold mount that was below 500 K. Then I bought lots from the AH.
I took the HUGE influx of gold for granted. And Iâm someone who only played THREE mains, in Legion. Imagine how it was for the people with 50/whatever alts who were running all the gold mission board stuff?
I had herb, and mining, on two of my mains (which actually made uber gold in Legion.) Then I did those gold mission board things everytime I could.
Then they nerfed the heck out of all of that, in BFA. âMission board? Oh, here is your 250 gold totalâŠâ
The entire purpose of the mount was a not-so-subtle way of removing gold from the economy. Even relative to inflation 5 million gold was orders of magnitude higher than the Yak or the Mammoth. I was able to buy both while they were current while just raid logging during MoP and WotLK.
I am not really on board it being a conspiracy to get people to buy tokens either because the trade off how few people will get that feeling of FOMO and willing to spend is probably not that large. That said it is just a stupid decision no matter how you look at it. Creating rarity, a uniqueness for those that have enough gold to get it now? Not sure that is consistent with vendor mounts.
Of course they are, and I make that clear in my OP. No one disagrees that corporations arenât big and evil and profit driven, this just isnât how or when they would do it. People need to learn what actual predatory practices look like, rather than just kneejerking because theyâve been conditioned by reactionaries to do so.
If itâs available all 8.3 then I see it as a way of keeping the market alive. That way people HAVE to play 8.3âŠ
This is an interesting move on Blizzardâs end⊠I like it! Itâs diabolical in ways that I find entertaining. I can almost smell a really nice cigar right now omg Iâll have to get one soon
Unless you were really close or quite versed in the AH game I donât think playing the game right now could net you enough to buy it. BFA just doesnât have the gold making machine that WoD and Legion did.
And yet making things time limited is something other companies and blizzard themselves do all the time.
This isnât when? Itâs just over a month from the end of the year/quarter. This is exactly the time they have done things to spike token sales in the past.
Youâre entire post smacks of total ignorance about how large companies work.
Agree with the FFXIV aspect of your post. In general the subcription and other items in FFXIV are cheaper though. But they do put a lot more of it in their shops. You need to grind for those exclusive stuff fast if you really want them if they appear in game, otherwise its the shop or never seeing it again
Yours does far more than mine. A multi-billion dollar dollar company is not doing something like this to potentially bait outa relatively tiny amount of money from would-be whales. The number of people that would engage in something like this is comparatively tiny and would be the least effective way of turning a quick buck.
Do you think blizzard is unaware of the communities reactions to shop items?
Parroting âartificial scarcityâ and âFOMOâ doesnât make what youâre saying true.
Now, if they had decided to remove the Yak, the Spider, and some other gold dump mounts like the warframe from legion alongside this, you would have a point. There is no way this makes any sense as a cash grab. It reads much more like they are trying to siphon off as much gold as possible from the economy before shadowlands as possible.
How is removing a single item from a vendor the âleast effectiveâ way of turning a quick buck? Are you seriously suggesting there is literally not one single other way that is less effective than this?
All they did was make a small change on the PTR, make one blue post and theyâve just raked in thousands of dollars today alone.
Itâs funny, because the whales would have already bought it long ago. Itâs just people complaining for the sake of complaining. Almost all of them canât afford it and never will.
You accused me of not understanding how large corporations work and you think blizzard is concerned with making a few thousand dollars on WoW token sales?
I can think of lots of things that would be less successful than this to turn a quick buck, of course I can. I cannot, however, think of a better way to get a ton of gold out of the world economy by a specific date.
To summarize the above video, there are actual seminars made around milking the consumers as much as you possible can and targeting the minority labeled as âwhalesâ with the intent to milk as much money as possible out of them. This tactic is something the Alcohol industry has relied on for years, relying on the alcoholics who spend everything they have on drinks. Its a lowly tactic to target people who can not control themselves.
Is this what Blizzard is doing? I canât say, but its a weird decision since its inconsistent with past vendor mounts and its been done last minute and in a very sly and underhanded way. Blizzard only made a statement because their Feat of Strength was found and they were called out, I wonder how long they would have waited to say something had they not been called out.
Companies are doing this more and more by targeting what they label as âwhalesâ and gouge them for as much money as possible. Its been bleeding more and more into other games lately though its usually used in mobile games.
Its predatory practices like this that have landed companies like EA in hot water with the House of Commons over in Europe with other countries like Belgium wanting to follow suit. With EA its loot boxes, with mobile games its micro transactions, with Blizzard it feels like its false scarcity through removal of digital goods that had no per-stated limited status at the drop of a hat.
So no, its not reaching unlike what you thought possible but a legitimate issue, a disease, in the gaming industry right now.
