Pet collecting and battling is something I HUGELY enjoy, and have since the day I started playing. I’ve spent a huge amount of time farming and collecting pets for myself and leveling extras to sell on the AH. For a long time after the token was introduced, that’s was the only way I could afford to play.
I Pre-purchased Midnight with the understanding that pet battling would be a feature, only to be informed after the fact that the system was being removed. $90.00 +tax is EXPENSIVE, and quite frankly not an amount of money I would’ve spent knowing this.
The Nintedon’t patent doesn’t apply to the WoW pet battling system. So this is a choice wholly on Blizzard, who has slowly but steadily been removing content over the years. Less player content doesn’t make any sense if you want people playing the game and spending money. It’s consumer hostile and completely unfun.
PLEASE reconsider this. The pet battle community is thriving, and all this does is destroy a community of players who’ve existed for over a decade. We are begging you, Blizz.
I pointed this out when we first became aware of this change. Not when we were told about it, because there’s been nothing in the Alpha patch notes about it. At some point later they did make a post on the Alpha forums, but that’s it.
I mentioned this before. Even though Blizzard is doing away with Pet Battles, they’re still gouging us by making the two premium pets available only with the most expensive subscription.
I used to buy the most expensive version for the pets.
I don’t care about that any more.
Midnight so far sounds like it’s shaping up to be a really bad expansion. Housing is its only draw, but the sheer amount of work they have to do on that, and the destruction of addons - probably in the service of letting in console players on some kind of Game Pass - and the emergency gutting of classes, brings back Warlords vibes.
Yea using battle pets as a reward for buying the most expensive version of a new expansion before announcing they were discontinhing any further pet battle content is super scammy. And with no possibility of a refund.
Big corporations have no scruples. We already knew that. It used to be legal to physically chain workers to their work stations. Only laws and regulation stopped it. They didn’t stop using 5 year old children for labor out of the goodness of their hearts. This is meant as an extreme example of what companies get away with if they can not comparing pet battles to human rights violations.
Anyways. We just have to decide what we’re willing to put up with and if we’re OK with our money going to a particular entity. Whether an individual, the government, or a corporation. I’m not sure if I will sub to Midnight. I always buy the deluxe version but I wait til the last possible minute to decide. Removing content I really enjoyed kind of sucked the wind out of a new expansion for me. I’m not sure if it’s enough to totally kill it for me yet. But it sure puts a huge damper on any new xpac excitement.
I’m with you in general, but this wasn’t planned, and being hyperbolic misses the mark.
One thing about big companies, big teams - the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. That’s just the normal state of things.
By discontinuing pet battles, they have made those pets in the Epic edition almost worthless, which is going to hit its sales. Not a plan to scam us, but a screwup that is going to lose some revenue. Not a lot of revenue, probably, but a loss nevertheless. If it was planned, they would have shifted around the extras with each tier, put the mount in the Epic edition, maybe.
No, this is two separate decisions made in separate places by separate people - dev and marketing, I presume - who didn’t know what the other was doing.
The pre-purchase, especially if you spent an extra 40 bucks on it, is reminder that they do want our money and as soon as possible. Evolution of pet collecting cured me of buying the Epic editions so I could get pets with it, realized were all those other pets I’d never have either because I don’t raid or PvP or involve Achievements I couldn’t handle any more.
Some humor in one of the Epic rewards, early access to Beta. Beta traditionally is when companies test their new products for bugs before releasing it to the general public. We always had to do it by hiring, and paying testers, to try it out. Blizzard gets customers to do it for free, plus pay Real Money to be allowed into Beta a few days earlier than other WoW players.
Article from Bloomberg Financial News …
Microsoft is asking its Xbox gaming division to produce profit margins that are well above the industry average, ratcheting up pressure on its video-game makers during a difficult time for the field at large.
Blizzard has always done Betas this way, though. Before the public alpha, they do a lot of in house testing with their “friends and family” program, too. And, yes, preordering does get you into the beta from day one, but they also invite people over the course of time that have signed up to beta test things (some people really enjoy testing stuff). And, when we get closer to pre-patch, they’ll probably do some sort of open beta for whoever wants to try it out.
