Buy wow token with gold earned in game. Redeem wow token for Blizzard balance. Buy your favorite mount from cash shop.
There you have it. Blizzard has a lot of problems right now but cash shop mounts isn’t one of them.
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You’re still not getting it through in-game means. You’re still buying it out of the store.
If you actually think converting gold to bnet balance is the same as actually putting content into the game to do and earn mounts … yikes.
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While it is technically true I wouldn’t say it is the same idea. Someone is still paying extra money to Blizzard for you to get that mount. I do not care particularly in anyway, I agree Blizz cash shop is not really a problem, at least for WoW. They do not have a lot and at least so far they have not put something up there that gives some huge advantage in the game, like say if they put a mount that moves faster than the rest or something like that.
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I mean, essentially it’s like buying other mounts that are simply bought for gold in the game, but with extra steps.
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It’s store, not sore, Blizzard don’t have sores, they have a store.
Plus, your comment strikes me as “You don’t have to buy the microtransactions, it’s optionial, you can still get them in game” defense people like to use to justify microtransactions being in a game.
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Cash shops shouldn’t exist in a full-price game with a monthly subscription fee. Period.
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This is true.
GD will fight you on it, but it’s objectively true.
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GD will fight me on anything.
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I like how you made fun of her typo and then proceeded to make your own spelling and grammatical errors. In any case, micro-transactions aren’t problematic in and of themselves, it’s usually how they’re implemented in games that creates the issue. In WoW, it’s just an e-shop that sells vanity cosmetic items, and with the way the game economy works given the Token system, pointing out the option to use in-game gold actually does make it moot to complain about.
The day WoW implements RNG loot-boxes in the e-shop, then I’ll feel inclined to worry.
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Nothing they offer in the shop gives you an advantage over other players though.
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This might be more of a philosophical approach. You pay for expansion and pay monthly on top of it, essentially it comes down to whether or not you agree a company should keep trying to make additional profit beyond that through the same game. Many people would prefer for the upfront cost knowing that stuff is not gated behind paywalls as it gives the belief that they are intentionially pulling good stuff that would go into the game to instead go into the cash shop.
While that is not exactly something I find common with WoW, as I said earlier the cash shop is pretty limiting in comparison to other games, It would be remiss of me to not point out that something like this did happen, they did make constant reskinned boring mounts during WoD and put the unique stuff exclusively in the cash shop.
This subject really did not need another thread.
Exactly! They’re just cosmetic things. The ONLY slight advantage you could possibly gain is the mount count for the achievements *like Mountain o’ Mounts), but that’s so small and doesn’t really do anything for you other than 10 achievements points and another mount.
If blizzard lowered the cost of mounts/pets/cosmetics and added more options, I’d be spending more $$$ total. So far I have 3 mounts and 2 pets at a total cost of $87.20 (one mount was from this xmas sale). If this sale was permanent (with more options) I’d have spent over $300 by now instead of under $100. (That’s just me, I’m a sucker for cute things.)
If mounts were $15, pets $5, and cosmetics $5 I’d be broke. But So very few things on the shop are actually worth their price tag. (Moonkin Hatchling and Vulpine Familiar were well worth it to me personally.) I’m only just NOW considering buying some of the other mounts/pets/helms now that they’re on sale. If I don’t buy them now I’ll just wait for next year’s sale (if the helms are still gonna be there next time.)
How do you obtain the $ money only mount in game? :>
In a Free to play game? Yea. MT there are fine cause… well it’s a f2p game. It’s free to get in, and the MT’s are there to make money on the side.
Except this isn’t a free to play game. Think about this then; how much did you pay to get in the game in the first place? if the answer is higher then 0.00, it’s not a free to play game.
Also, the Eshop isn’t just cosmetic items, but services and wow tokens (which can be indirectly converted to gold).
I bring up the “You don’t have to buy, you can still play for free” example of people who defend microtransactions, cause one of my second favorite R* non GTA franchise (Red Dead Redemption 2), is following in it’s footsteps of GTA:online’s monetization for it’s Online counterpart. While it doesn’t have the microtransactions now i don’t think, the economy i heard is terrible. Either Grind it out or Buy the loan shark cards. And WoW Tokens are pretty much the same way.
The only difference with them i guess you can say, is you can buy games and other stuff on the blizzard store by just playing WoW, which admittedly is a good and bad thing. It’s good that their taking the extra mile with that and make it more tantalizing, even somebody who was first skeptical of this being thinks it’s a good idea, play the game to get more games. But what made me skeptical is that this might/already have negatively impacted on wow and it’s economy. And despite WoW tokens being low right now, i feel like their new design challenge is now “how to better pace the gold the player receives.”.
Fine, if you want to play around with the Auction House, and get rich, and make it your literal job and get stuff for… “free” from Blizzard, Have at it hoss. It’s just not my idea of fun nor an idea i should support if other devs does this.
Meant to be ironic for a laugh.
Edit: oh hey, OP fixed their title.
Putting aside the fact that WoW is a subscription based game with an initial box cost… a cash shop has absolutely no place here in the first place.
This is faulty reasoning.
It’s like you’re intentionally blind to the fact that someone spending $20 on a token worth $15 is, in fact, making Blizzard 30% more cash for every store item purchased in this manner.
“We don’t just want tons of money. We want all your money!”
Is what the trifecta of Box Cost, Sub fee, Cash Shop being used to monetize WoW says to me.
But the worst part is… this new “See You Later” is part of a pattern of boarderline (they’ve certainly crossed it at this point) predatory practices you run across in the free-mium game environment. These aggressive and often morally questionable practices are most often justified in that business space as the only feasible way to recoup costs and produce a profit. A necessity.
However with Blizzard and WoW, We all already pay an initial box cost and Sub Fee. There is no way in heck you are going to get me to believe that WoW needs to resort to such low down methods in order to produce positive accounting numbers. I’m sure their figures, reports, and projections would be sitting just fine even if they had not pulled this latest marketing maneuver.
Player’s good faith and respect for the company on the other hand… undoubtedly suffer from this move. Anyone and everyone who sees this as it is, has lost some portion of trust in Blizzard.
Nowadays, I don’t think they care very much about treating gamers with integrity or making their games as fun as possible.
I don’t think anyone denies that this is Blizzard trying to increase profit. It’s just that the e-shop doesn’t really ruin the gameplay. It’s just a baker’s dozen of cosmetic items. Your argument presupposes that the only ethical thing for a game company to do is make only what it needs to run.
As for the Token system, that’s just how the cookie crumbles; the tokens cost more, but they provide the consumer gold, and the person who buys it with gold game-time. They also offer a way for people to convert their gold into BNET credit to buy these items.
There really isn’t much difference than collecting enough gold and buying a mount from the auction house, the bmah or the store. I know some of you just really hate this idea of the store but your arguments don’t even make much sense anymore now that everything can be effectively bought for currency earned by playing the game.
It always amazes me how some people can boast about rolling in tokens when the time required to farm that amount of gold is more than most people spend actually playing the game in a given week.
If you enjoy it, more power to you, but the activities involved in farming gold don’t make store mounts “easily obtainable in-game”.
If those activities were fun, there really wouldn’t be a market for tokens in the first place.
Doesn’t matter. It tells the developers that instead of developing content to be put into the game to be earned by players, they can take those items (whether they’re purely cosmetic or not) and put them on a cash shop for extra money, because whales will buy it.
It takes away content from the game, and adds it in a la carte for profit.