Not that this effects me in anyway but… WHY?
Clearly this review they conducted did not involve players. More options is usually better, so what is the reason for the change that this review lead to?
Then why change it in the online shop as well? Also, as others said, there were no 90 and 180 day cards. So retailers only want them to offer one card even though they were only offering one card?
The finance people did an survey and eliminated the un-popular SKU. I hear you. But it was likely all about reducing inventory.
You still aren’t making sense. How can you reduce inventory when 2 of the 3 choices were only available in an electronic form? And if it were just to reduce, why did they change it from 30 to 60 days? That reduces nothing - one option before and one option now for physical play time cards. Making entirely new cards costs money so this is not a cost-cutting measure regardless of how desperately you all cling to this.
Why do so many of you have an issue with Blizzard wanting to make money that you need to explain it this way?
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Blizzard doesn’t care that much about retail outlets and any inventory management issues they might have (likely none in this case as gift cards in different denominations for Amazon/Starbucks/Wal-Mart are plentiful). Blizzard is a for-profit company, so anything they do like this is about their bottom line. See this earlier reply.
This is about:
- Reducing the cost of lots of small foreign currency conversions,
- Denying discounts to F2P people that use gold to accrue bNet balance (as well as cash game-time buyers), and
- by implication of #2 driving people that want a discount to sub with cash via PayPal/credit card (gold can’t get you a discount anymore).
All three of those things increase Blizzard’s revenue, so it’s the most likely answer given that their vague explanation was “review … of all currencies.”
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The real questions is do they really need to make more money?
In truth they make more than enough money for the game but they deliver A half baked product.
The change to game time was not needed. More moves in anti-consumer.
The reality is Blizzard has other ways to make more money. The change is trying to herd players to atuo sub.
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Always… did you miss the for-profit company that answers to shareholders part?
I agree about the both parts here, but if this is the change they made at this time, you can bet that “The finance people did an [analysis]…” and found this was the easiest way to increase profits.
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Did Blizz steal business plans out of EA’s dumpster again?
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I think this is in response to me asking “Why do so many have an issue with Blizz wanting to make money”.
If so, as I posted elsewhere, Blizz fans in GD will say we should be glad to give Blizz our money as it could improve the game, but when Blizz does unpopular changes like this (obvious money grab) the same fans will try to explain it as anything other than a money grab. They acknowledge the game isn’t that good by saying they need more money to improve, but when Blizz obviously tries to get more money? They don’t seem to like it. Maybe because they know it’s not going to improve.
This I think will cause them to loss money but hey who am I to stop them. All they did was piss people like me off and we’ll be the ones leaving . I sure as hell less likely to 30$ ever 2 months as I am to pay 15 per 1 . As far as subbing not gonna happen my finances are way too close at the end of the month to risk an overdraw
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I agree but like always Blizzard ignores the human elements.
Yeah i am sure it will cost them more than what they believe to gain from it.
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Never was a bot issue. The issue was that people who don’t intend to play for more than a month don’t like being forced to pay for a second month they’re not going to be playing.
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Bots will be a problem for a long time and probably never will go away.
As i have said before this will help bots because less players to report. And no this does not mean more bot armys
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This is true!
However, apparently some streamer(s) with a big following speculated (or authoritatively asserted) that this change was intended to address bots-farmers and their mindless followers will believe anything the streamer says. Lots in this thread seemed to have bought into this bad hypothesis, but if your favorite streamer says it true, then it must be so. Who need logic and critical thinking?
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Just so we’re on the same page, I don’t believe it has anything to do with bots either. These people that are making this wild claim are just that… wild.
i agree with you but i feel they want the profit over the people who play
Please revert this change.
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Forcing people to commit for 60 days. I’m assuming some kid in marketing thought this would be a great way to eek a couple extra months out of people / make the statistics look better for those big wig execs and shareholders.
I’ve never been more done with Blizzard as a whole.
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This is an A/B testing. We have a lot of theories about this change, but the simple fact is that they’re trying to profit.
If you are really against this kind of change, what about stop wow for a few months ( maybe until 9.1 ) ?
I saw that brazillian players just made some “manifestation” and logged out for 4 hours saying that devs would see the logs… and that was really stupid.
If they can increase the profit even with less players playing, they’re ok, they’re the financial team, not the developers, they don’t need to make the game good or look at players’ smile, they just want to keep their jobs giving more money to the company.
Just be aware that if you yell, cry, play less or more, troll, beg or do anything but stop giving money ( services and subscription ), you’re interacting strictly with the wow community, not with Activision’s financial team.