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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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.
People would buy them regardless.
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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.
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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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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You did not consider the massive downsizing and loss of multiple departments
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My impression is that they seem to be doing these offers more often.
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.
That’s not because they’re struggling. It’s because they know people will buy the mounts, so they put out more mounts.
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.
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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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?
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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I don’t have an issue with the store mounts, but it would be nice if:
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Blizz allowed store mounts to be attainable in-game
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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?
$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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Would someone please think of the wealthy corporate executives and majority shareholders!
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The best mounts should be ones earned in game no excuses, it ruins the game when you can just buy all the coolest stuff.
I agree with you, and would rather it had been made available ingame - but, there are a lot of gorgeous mounts to be earned by play. I mean, a lot.
I had not purchased a store mount for a long time but when I saw this one, I admit I fell in love. It really is beautiful, and I hestitated. But I thought, what the hell. I had the money in my bnet account from old gold I’d deposited, so in a way I did earn it ingame, just in a somewhat different way. And I thought well, why not, put the gold to a use that will give me pleasure. People used gold to buy that big auction mount, to pay for their subs (which I mostly do) and so on. It’s not something I will make a habit of because I earn plenty of mounts as I play. But ultimately is purely a matter of choice.
Buy or buy not, as Yoda might say.
Eh. Thats very subjective, but most of the Shadowlands mounts we have gotten so far DO look very good. Like you cant deny that the Moth mounts are just as good as anything on the store.