The current prices of game services are pretty wild when looking at what it actually gives you. I’m not claiming that these services should necessarily be free (although, hey, I wouldn’t decline that) and obviously some amount of work went into developing these services so payment is not unreasonable but these prices are just insane.
Name Change - 10$
Appearance Change - 15$
Race Change - 25$
Character Transfer - 25$
Faction Change - 30$
I’m not going to claim to know the inner workings of their systems, but these prices seem quite unreasonable considering the game itself has an upfront cost on each expansion, and you are paying monthly to play.
Name changes are 10$? That is pretty wild for something that seems to be a straightforward DB update.
Appearance Change is something I already can somewhat do in the Barber for in game gold, I can change my hair for free, but skin tone will cost me a month of game time?
Race Change 25$? What on Azeroth is that about? Nearly 2 months of game time equivalent cost so I can change from being a dwarf into a night elf?
And the last two I’ll lump together because they’re both baffling from my perspective, and add a caveat, a faction change costs more than a server transfer. More money to go from Horde to Alliance than to have your entire character swapped over to another server.
Please, this has a personal plea to it and some obvious personal bias. The characters I made years ago are on Korgath, which is now listed as a ‘low’ population server. It’s downright abandoned. Auctions don’t sell, trade chat is all but nonexistant, and seeing another person from my same server is like finding a unicorn. I have 8 level 120’s. It would cost me around 200$ to transfer them to a server that feels like it has a community again.
Please Blizzard take a look at the costs of these services, especially server transfers.
I think they are high so everyone doesn’t go out and frequently make changes on all their characters. Guess they figure your serious if you pay the cashola.
This seems like a weird way of looking at it, through no fault of my own the experience I’m having is made much worse (due to the nonexistant community on the server), and it’s also up to me to pay more money to make it better?
I think they are high so everyone doesn’t go out and frequently make changes on all their characters
There can be a cooldown on the service, I don’t see why that would be an issue. If you could only transfer a character once a week or something I’m sure that would be fine.
Honestly, the services are meant to be a deterrent. You could argue that they could put a cool down on it, but understanding that a business makes decisions to provide more money. These are premium services that you don’t need to be able to play the game.
The appearance change I feel should be removed (or have it only be gender and be, like, $5 or something) but the rest of it I understand why it has the price that it does. I think the monetary gate is more effective than a time gate.
Again, premium service. You’re paying to skip the rest of the game, so you’re effectively paying for a new game at that. You don’t need it to play properly, you want it to be able to skip content. Shadowlands should improve the leveling content so it might not be as needed, but some people value time over money. I’ve paid $60 for a boost because I simply cannot stomach the leveling anymore, and I don’t regret it.
They could reconsider the prices, but as of now people are willing to pay it, they have no reason to. In the future, though, I would love for deluxe expansions to give Blizzard balance equivalent to a character boost rather than just a boost in case you’re someone who doesn’t want or need more boosts.
like with most games (especially mobile ones) they make things so crazy expensive to try to curb how many people are actually buying it without losing money on lost sales. in some kind of attempt to balance between those that couldnt afford it no matter what and being left out of the crowd, while still making a decent profit
i used to complain about this myself, until i worked on a few games and then it made a lot of sense.
out of 100 people, if you make it cheap enough for 98 of them to buy, you have 2 that might just quit or feel like they are not worth anything. if you make it expensive then the ones that cant or wont buy then can go “hah, dummy paying all that for something so trivial” and that pricepoint can make up for 90% of the lost income out of en mass buying
All of which can be changed by making a new character of whatever Faction/Race/Name/Gender you want on your server of choice.
This is very common practice when you have clients who want a service you don’t want to offer. You make it so expensive only the most dedicated take it.
This doesn’t have to be a hostile confrontation though. Why would they not want someone to get off of dead servers? And what on azeroth would be their reason to stop people from changing their skin tones lol
To keep those realms from being completely dead. Not the best answer I know, and more connected realms need to happen. Ion touched on this briefly in his interview with Sloot. It seems this team is focused on bringing back that community culture that Classic has, but didn’t specify how.
You can change everything in the barber shop aside from Gender. That’s the only reason Appearance Change exists for.
The idea is that they do NOT want you to willy-nilly hop around to different servers and change your name/race. The idea is that people know who you are and you have a level of reputation. While that isn’t a thing as much now as it was before, it’s still a thing on some level.
For the appearance change, I honestly have no idea what isn’t included in the barber’s list of cosmetic changes, available cheaply in game for gold. Possibly only swapping a character between male/female?
They tried having a cooldown. It wasn’t the deterrent they thought it would be.
If you want to see what damage transfers without restrictions/cost can do go look at Rift.