If (huge if) Activision plans on putting microtransactions, I HIGHLY suspect they will put them in the game after the first content bucket has been out for a little bit AND after a large amount of the population has reached level 60 and started gearing.
The reason for this is because they know if MTX is in the game on day 1, most of us wont even bother. But if they put MTX in the game after we’ve already invested our time and gotten attached to our characters, then people are more likely to stay because they feel they’ve already spent this much time in the game, they can’t quit now.
THIS is my fear. Investing in the game, only for them to ruin it after I’m in deep.
Even if this was 100% true, it’s not (plenty of BiS or near-BiS items are BoE/Crafted) but even if it was, you have to understand how microtransactions are structured. Subscription based and microtransaction based business models both work with the assumption that they will get X dollars per user. The difference is that in a microtransaction based system, that X dollars is an average. Most players aren’t going to buy tokens, just like most players don’t buy gold from chinese gold farmers, but with tokens, or farmed gold, the sellers aren’t targeting every user. They’re targeting the whales. The whales are the ones who either can spend thousands without noticing, or can’t stop themselves from spending. They’re the ones who are going to use tokens to buy 10 million gold on live, trade it for 10,000 gold on classic, and use it to try to buy loot drops from guilds in classic (which loot trading will make totally risk free and possible, since the ML can physically hand the person the “Giantstalker’s Codpiece” or whatever in a trade window with the 10,000g.
Even separate subs won’t fix this, the only fix would be aggressive policing of the gold buyers/sellers, investigating reports, flagging & investigating large gold transfers, etc. Unfortunately, some time ago they realized it was much more profitable to eliminate 99% of their CS and instead set themselves up to personally profit from the gold sellers undermining the economy.
And good luck convincing Activision, or any company, to abandon a business model that both makes them more money and cuts their costs, just because it harms their customers.
Lots of people like to ignore those Battle,net points thing that could be easily used to cross platform gold from one game to another; I am glad you mentioned that poison because it most certainly is.
we will have a new Activision CFO and a new Blizzard CFO meaning they have to show they can make money so I can see more micro transactions coming to the game, either classic or live wow.
Yikes… I hadn’t even considered that at all. That’s actually a pretty well thought out work around. It sucks, but I’m sure things like this are going to happen.
That cod piece is bis! Lol, sure some people are going to trade gold and things like that. With a token it enables everyone to stockpile gold and buy bis/mounts/consumeables. Tokens ruin what makes classic. You work for everything. Cheaters will still cheat… but at least tokens don’t legalize it within the game like in retail.
Activision’s bottom line is hurting. BO4 is terrible, BFA is terrible, Overwatch has been put into maintenance mode, no diablo 4, Diablo Immortal is a chinese reskin so you better believe Activision will try to milk some extra money out of classic somehow.
