For those who are unhappy with the store mounts

Community General Discussion
1

So I’ve seen some Youtube videos complaining about the new store mount, and this is something I don’t see anybody talking about, so I’ll bring it up here:

When WoW launched in 2005, it came with a subscription fee of $14.95/mo, or… IIRC, something like $76.something for 6 months, which lets you save a little.

It is now 2021, and we’re coming up on 16 years of WoW if I did the math right, and to this day, $14.95 is still the asking price. However, the economy RL has changed, and changed drastically.

In 2005, CA’s “Real Family Median Income” was roughly $81k and in 2021 it’s about $91k.

I wanted to find “Livable Wage” instead, but I could only find 2021 numbers and could not compare them to 2005’s due to a lack of data on that.

The point I’m making is this: It looks like the cost of living probably rose 10-20% since 2005 but yet the game’s asking price (and, thus, income) remains the same despite rising costs of everything RL.

This means that salaries go up, cost of equipment goes up (especially with today’s PC parts market being out-of-this world), cost of internet access goes up, fuel costs go up, everything goes up.

But, WoW’s subscription model remains $14.95.

The reason why it can stay this price despite all the costs going up, I think, are partly because Blizz is making more money elsewhere rather than passing the rising costs off onto the customer. They know nobody wants to pay more than $14.95 to play WoW, but yet they have to recover the expenses somehow (the shareholders sure as heck don’t want to pay for that).

So, they explore other avenues to make more money from the game to offset rising costs, and I imagine that the storefront is part of that, offering aesthetics for extra real world money knowing that some people enjoy the game enough and have enough disposable income, that they are willing to fork out an extra $20 here and there for something cool looking.

I’ve also seen the complaint “but the store mount looks better than the mythic mount!”

Well, if the store mount DIDN’T look good enough, would people buy it? Probably not. Would YOU pay $20 for some bland reskin? Of course not.

Meanwhile, Mythic is cleared by what, <10% of the playerbase? Most people won’t even see the mount while it’s current content anyhow.

These are just some points that I feel are left out of these discussions, and I think that they really need to be said TBH.

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2

Blizzard now (in their own convoluted way) sells gold, they’re still making good money, better money than ever actually so i wouldn’t go crying a river for them just yet. Make no mistake, corporations exist for one reason, to make money.

I don’t begrudge them the odd store mount here and there, i just think it’s a shame that all too often it comes at a cost, the cost of the mounts we earn in game being pretty mediocre by comparison.

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3

Obviously, a corporation exists to make money, I don’t think anybody would argue otherwise.

My point is, they need to make enough money to please the shareholders, and the shareholders are going to want more, and more, and more money and so Blizz needs to keep doing things that keep the game profitable.

I doubt any of us want to see the day they raise subscriptions to $19.99. I’d rather see store mounts and WoW tokens than $19.99/mo.

As for the other mounts being mediocre, well, again. If you’re going to ask people to pay $25 for a mount, it better be good and it needs to compete with stuff you find in-game. If it doesn’t, nobody would buy it.

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4

Don’t like them don’t buy them. Very simple.

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5

Of course store mounts need to be good, i just don’t think that it needs to be a case of either-or. The mounts we earn in game can be awesome too, they don’t need to look crap just to make the store mounts look better. The reason that they don’t put as much effort into the mounts we earn is just about being tight with resources.

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6

This is usually the best answer, yeah.

Most MMOs have a storefront these days, and usually I find myself just… not caring, so long as it’s just aesthetics, and maybe level skips.

See, that’s the problem though. If the in-game mounts were buffed to the point they are as good as the store mount, then… the store mount is suddenly less attractive and thus not as profitable.

7

People would buy them regardless.

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8

They’re making more money now with far fewer players. Store mounts etc aren’t about offsetting costs, they’re just 100% there to make more and more money.

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Nice wall of text, OP. I don’t care about store mounts and won’t extend my subscription beyond my usual payment period in order to get them. Clearly you are highly invested in something only a few players care about to write such a long post that says next to nothing.

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10

If you actually think that they are struggling to make money after a AAA asking price, a monthly subscription, and Bobby Kotick only getting 3 yachts this year instead of 4, you’ve been bamboozled.

I’ll never understand people that support store mounts. Imagine giving a company the leverage of a profit incentive to make the in game content worse.

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11

You did not consider the massive downsizing and loss of multiple departments

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12

My impression is that they seem to be doing these offers more often.

13

They definitely are. We’ve had two of them this year alone.

I’m just tired of the complaints. I’m not “invested” in anything, but I do get tired of seeing all the complaining when there are better things to complain about.

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That’s not because they’re struggling. It’s because they know people will buy the mounts, so they put out more mounts.

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I buy a store mount maybe once a year usually when they’re half off. They are some of my favorite go to mounts despite the lack of flex appeal.

I also tend to buy a token a month if I can afford it. 20 bucks doesn’t get you much anymore seems I lose more than that runnin for the bus.

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While I, myself, just say ‘screw it’ and pay the $76 for a 6 month sub and I get mounts like this for free.

I mean, one day of work pays for 6 months of WoW. And that’s even after food expenses, a lot of times.

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17

People need to get over the fact the store exists. It’s standard in the genre now. We are never going back to not having micro-transactions, and frankly, they’re the healthiest way to get that extra funding the games need to do well. WoW’s shop is still smaller than actual, still sub based MMOs, that have shops. Sadly, it is more expensive too, in many cases.

The issue with WoW is that so many of the shop mounts, a freakish amount of them, literally look like vendor mounts, to the point you can pin-point what zones and reputations they could from from. Models ripped from “future” content that takes away the chance of people being able to obtain regular versions of them in game, especially in different colours.

Shops should be used for fan service and OTT stuff. I actually didn’t mind the Fae Dragon PJs because it was a fan-service item, something like that feels like it belongs on the shop. The Grinning Reaver? Why wasn’t that a reputation mount? Celestial Steed? Clearly could have been a drop from Algalon.

If they weren’t pulling stuff like this, it’d be fine. But they aren’t.

Also, the new Pheonix should have been a bundle. Both mounts, faction exclusive, for the one price. But it’s not. So … okay?

18

Yeah. People who are tired of complaints post complaint threads and lots of complaining responses in those threads, because you can never complain enough about threads that you don’t have the self-control not to open, eh?

If you weren’t invested in this you wouldn’t be spending so much time trying to justify an increase in the number of 6 month promotions instead of, like, playing the game you are trying to convince us you enjoy.

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19

I don’t have an issue with the store mounts, but it would be nice if:

  1. Blizz allowed store mounts to be attainable in-game

  2. Blizz put as much time and effort into in-game mounts as they do the store mounts.

I understand store mounts have to look good in order for people to buy them, but we’re also paying for an expansion and a subscription. Blizz has shown they can do better artistically, so why not gives us more than just recolors/reskins?

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$15 is industry standard and assuming that they have at least 2million subs + whatever they make in China , Blizzard has no justification for raising the sub price. In fact, many other modern mmos have been lowering the sub price. The price of living has gone up but other innovations have made certain things cheaper. They’ve basically offloaded all their CS at this point and automated a lot of the process.

I mean, come on people, $180 a year for a game is a premium price at this point. The simple fact is that, Unlike when wow came out, all new games have online services/servers and all new games have continued development now. Yet, somehow, those studios subsist on much less than $180 a year per player.

Having more than $30 million a month in revenue on subs alone is a metric ton of money and “let’s make the shareholders richer” is a poor excuse to diminish the product that we all are already supporting monthly with money. Bobby doesn’t need a bigger bonus. We need a better game.

Truth be told, though, I don’t care about cosmetic cash shops. The issue I see with the cash shop is not that they offer it, it’s 1) that instead of just being unique or cool looking items, the mount and products they offer on the cash shop are a much higher quality of product than what they actually offer in game. 2) bundling these items with the 6 months sub on the first day of a patch comes off like a predatory loan shark, 3) the token has profoundly impacted how the game works and in a negative way.

I should also note that obviously a lot of games have cash shops now. FFXIV has a sub and a huge cash shop. But there is another layer here that gets ignored, and that’s player perception. If players believe the devs have good will, they don’t view the cash shop as negatively. FFXIV players have a much more positive perception of the game and devs, and they have less complaints about the cash shop. Probably because when you feel good about a product you feel better about spending money. I’ll pay a premium price at my local coffee shop because I felt good about the product and the people. And therein lies a 4th problem, where wow players don’t like blizzard at this point. Their is very little communication and there is no good will. So when these products come out it’s easy just to focus on how scummy the whole thing feels instead of just fawning over some cool new mount.

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