The acquisition of Activision Blizzard by Microsoft is now almost certain. Even World of Warcraft will soon be offered under Microsoft. Whether World of Warcraft will become F2P remains to be seen, as Microsoft has not yet commented on this game.
In any case, many things will change. What do you think, will WoW change for the better or for the worse with the acquisition? I look forward to hearing your opinion!
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May or may not happen 5-10 years down the road. Either way, it won’t be the end of the world, although I’m sure some people will act like it.
But if it does happen, I’d suspect it’ll resemble ESO’s business model where you can access everything via a sub, but F2P players will have to buy coins to get access to additional content and dungeons. I mean, the Trading Post is pretty similar to the Endeavors System, so make of that as you will.
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I too enjoy offering completely random speculation without basing it on anything.
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I don’t see a problem with people being able to fully try out the game before buying DF, but that’s just me.
I dunno if there’s a botting problem right now either, I just never see any bots but I’m also on a pretty popular server, and I assume that would be the only argument against it.
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As I have said in every one of these threads…the Microsoft acquisition of Bethesda had no noticeable immediate impact on ESO, so I expect it to be exactly the same for WoW.
It is hard to attribute the longer-term ESO changes to Microsoft or just the fact that it is an aging game with a declining player population.
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It’s all fun and games until they add in a lot more micro-transactions.
If it’s F2P, the money to help sustain the company is going to have to come from somewhere else.
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Duskwood unlock - $4.99 (+tax)
You finally hit 60?
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Azure Span unlock - $18.99 (+tax)
Thaldraszius (not including Valdrakken) unlock - $19.99 (+tax)
Valdrakken (only) unlock - $9.99 (+tax)
Dragon Riding unlock - $4.99* does not include model or color changes (+tax)
That and more bots would flood in, adding hundreds of thousands to the bots we currently have (Look at Lost Ark for example)
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yea im sure this will happen
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Ya never know, Diablo Immortal set a pretty unhealthy precedent.
“The more you spend on this F2P game, the more powerful you become! Also, gamble on these lootboxes!” The amount of money people spent on that game was…egregious (fancier word for redonkulous).
That’s a pretty wild claim to spout in your title with absolutely no supporting evidence…
…however, I don’t see a world where WoW doesn’t get put onto Game Pass in one form or another, so…
Only a few ways I see monetization changing, if at all: removal of the cash shop, removal of the subscription fee, or removal of box prices for the game and expansions.
Another one of these baseless speculation threads, lovely.
I don’t see it going f2p but if I were them I would expand the free trial.
Like in an expansion or 2 have all free trial players start on the Dragon Isles and they cannot leave it. Then put restrictions around that. Like can only make a character on less populated servers, no allied races, only 1 character per server, and stuff.
Dragonflight would best be served in the future as the starting point for getting players to play. Like FF14 I would make the trial unlimited but they would be entirely restricted to the Dragon Isles and cannot get off it unless they pay.
Naturally they cannot trade gold, have a gold cap, and cannot sell on the auction house and can only trade items that dropped in a dungeon and still on a timer.
But that’s years off. Let’s see how WoW looks then.
Positive it’ll get better - by a very small fraction. That’s all. F2p for a month isn’t bad offer up, but they better have the product to keep players engaged.
ESO isn’t on the game pass…And it’s even buy to play with a sub option.
Fair point, but ESO is also a much more modern MMO that probably has higher operating and development costs. I wouldn’t be surprised if WoW’s servers were just one or two stacks per region (with a backup here and there) and we’ve just been paying for Bobby’s yachts this whole time.
They should bring wow to gamepass
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That would be amazing tbh
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Odds are, nothing will change. WoW is still a money printer for Blizzard, even with a lower sub count. Microsoft would have no incentive to change anything about it until it hit a point where it wasn’t returning them money, which at that point going F2P isn’t a bad option.
I do think it’d be a benefit to the game to expand the free trial to something more meaningful than level 20. Expanding level cap to the end of Chromie Time but locking them into whatever the default expansion could be one way to increase the portion of the game new players could get a taste of
