There are also ways to circumvent the price of a sub by playing the game and buying WoW Tokens through the auction house.
I think 15 a month is negligible, especially when a free avenue exists
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It’s too little. The subscription price in the US hasn’t increased since WoW released.
It should be $40 a month if only to keep the riff-raff out.
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Alternatively, you could look at it as 50 cents per day. That’s a pretty good deal, TBH.
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Corporations have marketing and financial people who use mathematical models to set prices for products and services. For anything they sell there is a “revenue curve”. Charge too little and you are giving your product away. Charge too much and the decrease in sales overcomes additional revenue per unit.
Next thing to calculate is costs. They put the two together and they come up with a price to maximize profit.
That’s all that matters. Little else is ever considered. And this is not just Blizzard, not just Microsoft, it is every corporation.
If they don’t do this the investment firms and hedge funds who own most of the stock will be voting their proxies next time members of the board of directors come up for election.
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Wow is basically a mythic plus simulator at this point, nothing else in the game really matters.
Fellowship gives you a mythic plus simulator for a $25 one-time fee and it’s much more enjoyable than wow mythic plus.
So yeah, I think the sub fee for wow is not worth in any way.
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$15 a month for hours of entertainment is a paltry sum. I could easily spend more on one trip to the vending machine at work.
This will probably happen. I don’t know about Xbox ports or game pass but moving Battlenet to the Microsoft ecosystem is probably inevitable. They did the same with Minecraft. Of course Mojang never had anything as robust as Blizzard. We’ll see I guess.
Name me a really good Free to Play MMO that doesn’t end up costing more than $180 per year to play seriously.
Or, just a good Free to Play MMO at all, really.
Or even a Buy to Play for that matter. The only B2P which isn’t monetized worse than a subscription that I can think of is New World, but now that they have their battle pass and paid gear set slots I’d put them close to a sub equivalent, maybe a little better still. ESO? Sub is practically mandatory to play seriously, plus a very aggressive cash shop and loot boxes. GW2? You’ll spend way more than a sub on all the QoL in the cash shop.
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The only way WoW isn’t worth $15 is if you’re actually paying more than $15 because you’re outside the US.
That’s all there is to it.
I defend my own honor by not making silly statements.
The expansion price is the box price.
The store is optional.
Its only thievery if you don’t own a dictionary.
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None of which is actually necessary to play the game.
I can’t stress that enough. Also, you can convert in-game gold to gems to buy those items without spending a cent of real money yourself if you’d prefer and are willing to invest the time to make plenty of gold that way.
The only thing you have to buy in GW2 that isn’t part of an expansion are the living world chapters if you want to play the whole story (other than chapter 1, which is available for free).
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Yes. We do. 
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Of course not. So long as you want to spend all your time fighting bag space, not have gathering tools that never break and give extra resources, not have enough character slots to make every class, not have easy salvaging, have default mount and glider skins, etc etc etc.
I love GW2 and I’m fine paying money for things in it. But there’s no way I’d enjoy the game with zero cash shop purchases.
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50 cents a day.
10 cents an hour if you play 5 hours a day.
its literally the cheapest form of entertainment short of free games that have far more aggressive cash shops.
if wow went f2p expect the main game to become 100% p2w even in a normal dungeon or world content.
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I haven’t paid $15 a month to play this game in a long time. In fact, my last nine years have all been an annual subscriptions. Each of those came with item rewards with their own value. By the time I break down the cost of the rewards versus the subscription it works out to about five dollars per month. The $155 price tag is shared between what would technically be cash shop items and a monthly subscription. So for five dollars a month plus items I was going to purchase anyway it’s a great deal.
As for anyone who chooses not to do the annual subscription and who objects to the $15 a month price tag, it may be worth adding in some perspective. 20 years ago when I started my Netflix account, my subscription was five dollars per month now for the exact same subscription. It’s nearly $25 per month. That’s a 500% increase in 20 years. If blizzard did the same thing we would be paying $75 a month to play this game. They have not raised their subscription price in the 21 years the game has been out. every other subscription I have including Amazon prime is now 2X to 5X higher than it was when I started each subscription.
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Star Wars: GoH is a total P2W game. Its fun for a short time, but you always hit a wall as a F2P user.
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People will justify it being fine because it’s been like that for 1000 years, which is the worst possible logic a human can have, we’d still be slaves on farms if people had that mentality, but okay, crazy I need to say that.
I think the sub needs to go these days. Game ain’t worth it. It was worth it back then, it’s garbo now, people don’t even talk.
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I don’t think it’s too much. Don’t care what you call me.
$15 in 2004 is according to a Google inflation calculator $26.24 now. A company is never going to use that, they’re going to add some BS fee to it so realistically our sub should be around $30 a month.
Of all the things Blizzard has done to us they have never done that so I will continue to pay my sub, even if I grumble from time to time. I mean, as long as I’m having fun, of course.
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The sub needs to go altogether, whether it’s too much is an endless, pointless argument.
Also the cheapest form of entertainment is watching Youtube. So the person talking about 50 cents per day has limited thinking capacity.
Also you can just go download Cities Skylines all DLC and The Sims all DLC for free and have more fun. There are a lot of free things out there that you don’t know exists lol.
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Not remotely necessary; a paid account has 5 bag slots, the same amount as WoW (not counting the reagent bag). You can easily buy player-made bags with large amounts of space from the trading post for a small amount of gold per bag. If I am going to be putting in time to play the game seriously on a character, I will usually buy 20-slot bags, which, even if you’re bad at inventory management, is more than enough for most people.
The extra resources are meh, not that necessary, and the tools that you can buy from vendors are cheap enough that it’s a non-issue, especially since vendors that sell them can be found everywhere. Is it nice to have a full set of permanent gathering tools? Yes. Is it a necessity? No.
This is valid, as by default paid accounts only have 5 slots and there are 9 classes in total. But deluxe versions of each expansion provide an additional character slot as part of the entire package, so I consider that something that can be worked around, especially since the extra items that come with each expansion purchase are worth it and it’s not that much more expensive than the standard version (the pricey versions of each expansion are the ultimate editions, which include 4000 gems for the extra cost).
This isn’t correct. Yes, you can buy permanent salvaging items from the store, but it is also possible to throw 4 of the vendor-bought kits (one of each rarity excluding the common one) into the mystic forge to create a 250-charge salvaging kit which will last a while. It will actually save you more money that way as well, given that the permanent salvage kits each have a price you pay in currency for each salvage, which does add up.
This is fine; having additional skins is not QoL; that’s just a cosmetic.
And I know you’ll probably say, “I know all this; why are you telling me?” but others reading my post might not.
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“Seriously” is doing the heavy lifting here, since it kind of implies doing the highest end content, and most F2P MMOs that I know of also require a sub which makes it an equivalent $180 or so, but I would personally say GW2, OSRS, and Wakfu would be fun choices in this regard just from the top of my head
I specifically did not mention Path of Exile for the last one since it fits this criteria better but depends on your definition of MMO I guess and if you care about not doing SSF. Final fantasy 14 also technically fits under this as well, since it’s permanently F2P until you purchase a sub or expansion, but almost half the game is still free (Base game + 2 expacs out of 5?)
This is where I get a bit confused, you correlate the prices of the cash shop of ESO and GW2 as negatives, but WoW is also guilty of this unless you’re just ignoring the $90 Brutosaur which is pretty much an objectively luxury QoL mount.