I used to gift it, now I can’t.
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I used gold and didn’t buy a token myself. Maybe the price is just the going AH rate for a token? No clue. But basically when I logged in I got an option to pay for one month with gold. It states the cost is divided evenly amongst all the gold on your toons so it’s not like one toon needs to dish it out.
I agree that 2 hours at a low paying job would cover the cost of a month of gametime, but in reality you can’t just get +2 hours more than you already have.
If you’re lucky enough to have 40 hours, they won’t just give you 2 hours of overtime.
If you’re working 29 hours (so they don’t have to pay healthcare) they already aren’t giving you 40 hours.
I’m just not sure where those 2 extra hours are going to magically come from.
Yea, a lot of people don’t realize that, you can buy a token as long as you have the gold right from the character select screen.
If you need to make other arrangements, I’ve gotten multiple free days by just asking CS for them so that I can get gold from a friend.
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Can confirm. I’ve had friends do this so I can give them gold for gametime. They usually get 24 or 48 hours to allow for the transaction.
Blizzard never declined their request, and we have done this maybe 5-6 times in the past few years.
While the change was unnecessary and nonsensical, the complaining about it is overblown.
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I think they should actually raise the sub cost per month.
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Money.
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two whole extra mouse clicks
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No, they shouldn’t.
The Game Time for 2 Months is the same price (technically), as a Sub, for two months.
I suggested this, before. Give a small discount to the $29.99 Game Time. Either have it at $24.99 or $27.99.
Blizz really driving up the maui metrics with those 2 clicks. Why a single mouse click can take the average wow player 3 hours and you expect them to do 2?
You can still get 1 month with gold.
Redeem token directly for game time. It’s actually cheaper than buying 1 month with b.net balance because of tax, which would require a second token just to cover.
The only part of the change that is bad is the loss of discounts for 3 and 6 months of time.
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Here’s what turns my tailcoat I always gifted my nephew six months cause the bank we use blacklisted Blizzard years ago . I had a three month recurring and one day tried logging in and says no longer subscribed this is when Blizz still had phone support ran card three times they gave me a week free went to bank and was told I could no longer pay with debit.
So I just bought on the store six months gifted to him the way it is now pay more so he can play or put my cc on his account and cancel and repeat nope they just lost a player . Not sure why it has to be this way but they will reap what they sow
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That is extremely unusual.
I’m guessing local credit union? They must have had some issues with chargebacks.
It was the exact reasoning I told them I could read and understood the arrangement o made with Blizz but to no avail it is still blacklisted to this day almost got kicked out the office that day lol
There is also the small thing of having a computer, an Internet connection and a place to have all this stuff. To play WoW assumes a lot of infrastructure is available and is also affordable.
Blizzard is playing mind games. They want you to sign up for monthly cc withdrawals and when you say “heck with this game” forget to stop the automatic payments.
It’s the same technique that monthly subs work at a gym. Sign up at a gym, telling yourself, yep I going to do this and then after a couple of months, you stop but keep paying the sub.
You’re a customer of that bank and they almost kicked you out because you wanted to discuss THEIR restriction on how you can spend YOUR money? Time to get another bank… 
I don’t doubt that there may be a bit of “maybe they’ll forget to cancel” in their decision-making, but if you read the blue post, it clearly said after “a review … in all currencies.” I mean you can ignore what they tell you is the reason and make up your own, but if it’s a currency thing then the cost to Blizzard for converting lots of $15 USD equivalent transactions into USD is clearly large enough compared to the cost of half as many $30 USD equivalent transactions that they decided to make this change.
PayPal skims money off the exchange rate at a percentage on top of a flat-fee when I send USD to my kids in Canada, and it’s similar for any business offering currency exchange. Blizzard needs to convert Canadian/Australian/New Zealand Dollars, Brazilian Real, Mexican/Argentine Pesos, etc. into USD on a monthly or quarterly basis and there’s a cost for doing that.
What the blue post did not explicitly say is that they don’t want to give players that pay for game-time with gold discounts anymore, yet that is obvious from the removal of any discount options for game-time (while subscriptions for real currency rather than gold still offer discounts for large blocks of time). After all, why should they give a discount to a transaction that they make $5 USD net revenue ($20 token - $15 game-time) rather than force people to pay $13 USD in real currency for a discount?
So…
- Reduce the cost of lots of tiny foreign currency conversions into USD (stated objective)
- Eliminate discounts for “free-to-play” players that pay with gold
Sucks for F2P players or those like @Clunk that have a valid reason to pay for game-time as a gift rather than just get a sub, but not unexpected from a for-profit company that is pretty sure they will still reduce costs more than any lost revenue from quitters–net result increased profits.
This is a bad decision from Blizzard, I was buying my gametime on g2a for 14$ CAD, now I have to pay 18,99$ CAD for the subscription. Or, buying 60 days.
But I dont want to buy 60 days, because I don’t know if I will play next month. I’m tired of paying and not playing, so now its 1 month at time.
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You can turn subscriptions on and off like a light switch.
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