“Let’s force the people who like to buy game time into subscriptions by removing the options they prefer. Now the only way they can get the pricing amd interval they prefer will be by subscribing! Then we can show how many more subs we got! People will totally do that instead of quitting!”
If I paid by buying game time through bnet balances at any other interval besides 2 months, i would quit.
I’ve never seen a company that’s just so collectively terrible at thinking.
Why isn’t this a bad change? Just because you say it isn’t bad? This is a ridiculous change and you’re trying hard to downplay it.
Blizzard provided no notice that this was changing.
Blizzard provides no option to buy 30, 90, 180 days of game time OUTSIDE of a subscription.
The game time price for 60 days has gone UP to $29.99. This is more in other regions.
Using bnet balance to buy game time is now more expensive than it was before.
People will be less inclined to purchase game time for their friends or guild mates… at $15 (bnet or usd) this was ok. At $30… this is a nope.
And Blizzard will pay the price for their hubris, doesn’t matter how many white knights come in here to defend it. They’ve already lost 3 subs from this house.
Well after 16 years of playing . This will probably be what kills the game for me . I’ve been playing since 2013 on monthly time and keep doing it that way because of my precarious financial budget . It gives me a safety margin if I have to have things like car repairs , surgeries …etc etc . Sometimes that 16 bucks might make it or break it . So you decide the many people like myself , that our money doesn’t matter . You are probably going to find out it VERY MUCH matters . Just since 2013 is like 1600.00 . That’s for one tiny person like myself and I KNOW I am not the only one in this slowly sinking ship. Let’s not forget that I have actually played since 2006 . I always wondered what would be the thing that caused me to finally quit . This is a likely candidate . I do hope the people “in charge” reconsider this blaring error . This one might be the one that might be right up there with R.ID .
At this point I honestly wonder if they aren’t actively TRYING to kill their own game because this one is going to bite them in the azz pretty hard I think
I do the same but I buy a years worth of game time (180 x 2) with my tax return just so it’s one less thing I need to worry about every month. With this change, I don’t think I’ll keep playing come next year when my sub is up.
just went to buy my friend 30 days so he could play with me… I don’t want to spend that much just for my friend to try out wow to see if he’s into it again. This was the dumbest possible change.
They know they’re in deep with the playerbase after this, but instead of backtracking and LISTENING TO THE PEOPLE BUYING THE GAME TIME they instead shove their fingers in their ears going “NA NA NA CANT HEAR YOU, We know what you want more than you do” like the wow devs do for the first 2 patches of each expansion.
I’m sure when there’s another record number of sub losses over this, they’ll backtrack.
Think critically here. Botters suffer from bans right? So they want the minimum investment per account to maximize profit and minimize losses once they’re banned (and they are inevitably banned most of the time).
If this is to combat botters, why would they remove the 90 day and 180 day options? Botters were not going for those, why would they pay blizzard that much for an account that’s disposable? The people going for those were not botters, they were committed players.
Your logical falls apart once you realize they didn’t just penalize people who sub for short amounts (botters) but also those who pay for a half year of sub and were getting a discount per month for paying for that much and committing for that long.
Also as I understand it these botters can make a huge amount of money. Probably the cost of a sub or more per DAY. This isn’t going to impact them.
And those arguments will fall flat on their face when Activision decides to make those become two month minimums as well… we KNOW this is what’s next, they have been testing the waters, incrementalism and such… the defenders of these decisions will only make themselves look gradually worse in the eyes of others, with every single greedy misstep made…
There are already gaping holes in the hull, and it’s sinking…
Archive the original post, then keep bumping this topic… when they delete this thread – and they eventually will – then repost a new one with the archived original embedded… basically, don’t let this die, keep it on the front page if Blizzard won’t… we have to expose this **** every time, basically, for posterity…
Honestly I feel like they have something lined up to replace WoW, that they’re somehow deluded enough to think this will make them more profits in practice after the fact, but it’s just that they can’t devote the resources they have to it now while keeping Shadowlands (and by extension, WoW itself) afloat…
So they’re letting it die on purpose, and what a better time symbolically to do this, than during an expansion revolving around the concept of death itself in WoW…
We have had experience playing WoW, dealing with Blizzard / Activision… we know how scummy and full of **** they have become over the years, therefore naturally, we trust them less… but many who come after us won’t have perspective – no matter how much we try and give that to them ourselves – and that’s the problem, we as customers are all easily replaceable by the next generations…
In fact, this is a major part of why I am not having children, among other reasons…
Godzilla died reading this… yoooo, are you high on something?!
Like slapping a dirty band-aid on a gushing wound… again, the bad actors do… not… care… they will just keep doing what they’re doing regardless… this does nothing to fix those problems, and will only make things worse…
Honestly feels like the ones with common sense got laid off from Blizzard, because almost everyone else still there is now a useful idiot to Activision…
Scenario 1
-I’m a kid without a credit card. I want to buy gametime to play WoW until I get bored of it. I’ll buy a 60 day game card now instead of a 30 day one. I’ll still get bored in 10 days and quit… but Blizzard gets twice the money from me now.
Scenario 2
-I’m a young adult. Game time is an impulse buy for me. A guy at work said his guild needs a tank so I’ll give it a shot and grab a 2 month game card… because I guess that’s what I need now. 5 days later I find out I’m not as good as I think and quit the game after spending twice the money.
Scenario 3
-I just want to play TBC. 4 days in I realize its not what I remember… dang, I just bought 56 extra days. Oh well.
Scena… I mean theres a lot of them. Use your imagination.
Even if all of these are contrived and unlikely… Did Blizzard really need more bad press this month?
Given your history on the forum, the “people you have spoken to” are just conjecturing and are a minority.
They did it to milk an extra month of gametime out of people like those who bought the expansion and a month of gametime to check it out. And to remove discounts.
I’ve seen people in the forums proposing that they will now be forcing players who use bnet balance to buy 2 months because that will make those players make a commitment to progression content, rather than deciding they don’t want to pay for an extra month they have no intention of playing.
People who support blizzard’s unpopular decisions often manufacture rationales based on their own states of mind, which may have nothing to do with reality. We did hear over and over again how it would be cheaper and easier to pay up front by starting a sub and canceling it every. darned. month, neither of which is true.
People I saw talking about this in trade chat were saying they were no longer going to be playing, so there’s that.
I found paying for gametime using bnet balance to be incredibly convenient. When a character had enough to buy a token that went right to bnet balance. When I needed to reup an account to play it for a month, I could do it on the website. At this point 2 of my accounts have expired. I expect to go free to play when the last one expires.
Do you have an uncle on Blizzard’s staff too? This isn’t the 80s.
Seriously dude, if they wanted to actually be transparent about this they can and would be, but they’d rather weather the bad press about removing options and expect it won’t have a negative impact on them at all.
If those were really the reasons then they should have included them in the list.
honestly i was literally about to ask them to completely delete my wow account so i never had the will to come back to this again if there was no way to just pay for one month. I can unsub any time so it doesn’t bother me as much but the blue post was very misleading. Thank you for your info <3