Referencing the recent Hearthsteel post made today.
I think most people at this point has accepted there will be some housing stuff on the store. The point of no race/class decor on the shop is good since that was one of my big conerns. The issue of Hearthsteel as a currency is contentious however.
The one thing I think players hate the most is being lied to directly.
This was one of the first things we heard the community discussing. Why bother when we already have a Battle.net balance? It’s important to note that when dealing in transactions involving real money, a more deliberate and cautious process needs to be implemented to provide appropriate financial protections for both parties. This can be an inefficient, inconvenient, and often tedious process when a player wants to purchase multiple items.
Smaller Housing items in the shop are often low cost and players will want to purchase multiples of them to complete a set. As an example, you may want a full set of chairs to place around a dining table, multiple place settings for your invited guests, or even many candles to help decorate the room for a complete look. Using an in-game currency can help make the process of obtaining many of these types of inexpensive items more efficient.
We weren’t born yesterday. Nothing about a secondary currency one buys to have to buy something in the shop is efficient. The most efficient thing is just buying things directly. Adding an additional step in this process will never make something more efficient or more convenient.
We all know the point of virtual currency is to obfuscate how much is actually spent and create bundles where you buy let’s say 2000 hearthsteel and a savings bundle costs 2100 so you need to get just a little more or buy the 3000 hearthsteel bundle. We’ve seen it in Diablo, we’ve seen it in countless gacha games, we don’t want to see it here.
I assume this is a decision on the financial side of Blizzard and not a dev so they may not even read these forums but I hope the sentiment carries through. Just remove Hearthsteel. Let’s be honest people were going to buy the decor anyways. The EU consumer protection laws are headed towards getting rid of virtual currency in video games for a reason and can’t be passed soon enough.
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One of the solution to reduce an issue they talk about would be to either already be selling stuff in bundles or to simply not need to buy many of the same piece which feels is a bit terrible to me even for non-shop pieces. Make the basic cost higher if needed but doing some back ans forth between vendors isnt that exciting.
There’s definitely plus value to a kind of currency like this, either for special sales or bundles if you buy more in one shot.
This type of design is more predatory (as it wants you to buy more in one shot and expected to a certain point) to me and I think generally there would be more value for players and the game to keep selling stuff for gold when the wowtoken exist so the flow of money goes the other way and still cause purchases as people would need gold with the added benefit to burn gold which a shop currency doesnt do. This was also a problem I had with the new brutosaur mount and with the logic of buying with gold bnet balance for ingame stuff.
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I hadn’t even thought about WoW tokens. Their existence makes Hearthsteel completely pointless from a player PoV, leaving it to purely benefit Blizzard by being predatory.
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Yeah this whole thing is a blatant excuse to be even more predatory with the micro transactions in a game where we are already spending money monthly just to play. This is becoming borderline free to play game level of micro transactions.
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This is clearly Microsoft driven. The only thing that will make them change their mind is a massive un-sub campaign.
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Microtransactions for everyone! This is just another Microshaft money grab, much like that stupid bronto. They know people will do it, and that there is going to be enough people that are willing to do it that makes it worthwhile. Again - see the bronto.
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What’s unfortunate is that Midnight is set to be one of the most friendly expansions for new players released in a very long time. Blizzard has put up a ton of work to make it an (almost) foolproof “best time ever” to get into WoW - yet due to MSFT’s corporate greed, I think many new players will be turned off by the flippant disregard to player preferences when it comes to monetization.
WoW will now have an insane combination of subscription fee + expansion purchase + in-game store benefits & items + WoWToken + virtual currency for home items. Like usually games get away with one maybe two of these for their profitability strategy…
The players who will respond the hardest to this are the exact new players that Blizzard has been working so hard to obtain. Will they make money off of hearthsteel? Yep! But they’ll never know the counterfactual of how many players decided that the game is just a cash grab and never decided to play altogether.
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