I spend like 6 hours a month farming up the 1 token I need for a free month of WoW. I’m just a player who doesn’t want to spend money on WoW.
It’s too bad that Activision-Blizzard just fired a lot of their support staff in favor of more profits and more automation. Even our favorite CM here was let go without warning.
We would all rather have better support staff, but ActiBlizz wants to spend money on new games and expansions.
Those employees weren’t fired, they were laid off. Huge difference.
But yes, it DOES suck.
A lot of them were even given the option to quit with a years salary. Blizzard saw what was about to happen before it happened.
The long term is that Acti-Blizz wants more money, so they want to spend less by cutting where they think can get away with it, and earn more by producing more.
There is no “Auto-Ban” or auto suspension. The only auto punishment is the squelch and that comes from multiple people reporting you.
As a business owner, those are two very different results. One involves me paying out money. The other, doesn’t.
That makes no sense. People who only want to play a 15 year-old version of the game have to pay more than they did when it was relevant?
maybe they might be able to introduce a system where you get live server access at $15 a month (more like $20 now) until the next expansion, and if you do not have a new expansion tied to your account the price goes down.
so say, you buy BfA, and Classic is $15 a month, then the next expansion we’ll call wow2 you don’t buy, but you enjoy classic. So you pay $12 a month. Or whatever.
Cool story man
No. You’re paying $15 for retail and Classic is just a bonus.
You’re paying $15 for World of Warcraft, and it now comes in more than one flavor.
For months, the people who “have spent ten years lobbying for Classic” have been trying to distinguish Retail and Classic as separate games, with separate subs and separate costs. But it’s just the same game with two different options, and always has been.
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Blizz had a record year of profits, but yeah, they saw what was coming. Sure.
At the end of the day the result is the same. The person no longer works there.
Yeeah and if it’s going to come in more than one flavor, then we should expect each flavor to have decently staffed teams to deal with issues rather than Blizzard prioritizing some kind of automated, set-and-forget approach to managing classic. That’s all I was attempting to drive thru with this thread. Combining the games into one service was a good move that I support, especially considering that both a lesser independent sub model and a flat box price model for Classic would incentivize players to play classic over retail due to the cheaper price.
All we ask of Blizzard is that they remember that they are in fact charging 15/month for classic. Like the gentleman above said, if you go out to a restaurant and the $15 salad comes with a free steak but you can’t buy the steak a la carte, then you are paying $15 for steak. If I was paying 15/month for classic alone I would expect a team behind it, not an algorithm. It’s only a bonus to retail players, not returning oldies who want nothing to do with retail… and there is a lot of them. Cheers
This is the same type of argument that was thrown at me between the announcement of Classic and when Blizzard announced that the sub was shared.
“You don’t go to a restaraunt and buy a diet coke and expect to get a vanilla milkshake for free.” I tell them that they’re getting full access for one price, and they insist on saying they’re paying only for the vanilla milkshake.
You get access to a buffet and they’ve added another item. You can eat your fill of whichever you want. If you want to eat nothing but salad, you can eat nothing but salad. If you want nothing but steak, you can get nothing but steak. If you just came for the chocolate fountain. You can mix and match.
However, there is one staff, one building. There may be two different stations, manned by a different crew, but these are not two restaraunts.
The same is true of Classic. It’s just World of Warcraft. Whichever you decide on spending your time, Blizzard’s back end is the same. One service. One customer service staff.
The philosophies of classic and retail are different. Blizzard has found lots of ways to subvert having to deal with lots of tickets and server issues, but if you apply all of those new ways to classic WoW, they can be game breaking. Classic WoW isn’t something that can be automated without breaking the game. It requires a staff for things like reporting and loot dilemmas if it is going to be available at the Blizzard buffet.
A lot of it absolutely can be automated, and all for the better. Spamming was a thing in Vanilla. Being able to report en masse is more than welcome, with temporary ignores. Silencing a person who gets reported too often is not okay. Blizzard should change this.
You may have issues with the loot dilemma, Blizzard is currently listening, and made changes. 5-man loot trading is out. Raid loot trading is in, and only for soulbound items. That is a much better system than a master looter accidentally giving loot to the wrong person and having to submit a ticket and wait six hours for action to be taken.
For many here, Classic is a relaunch of a game, and they weirdly hope that they can mulligan and have a do-over of the last 12 years - change how expansions worked and have an alternate universe. For others, it’s a museum, and you don’t want kids climbing over the fences to muck about like they did in 2004.
At the buffet, there still needs to be tongs to handle food, a sneeze guard, sanitary conditions. All the same.
LOL. That was great logic. I loved it. ![:joy:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/joy.png?v=6" ":joy:")
They are probably running VMs now on bigger boxes vs using single machines per server – but the rack space is still expensive.
Don’t forget, Moore’s Law is dead. We have shrunk transistors to the point now where electrons are quantum tunneling through transistors. When quantum computers hit homes, we will see another big jump – but for now Moore’s Law is done.
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Is it bad that my brain immediately conjured an image of a rotten apple with vanilla frosting and me daring myself to take a bite?
the metaphor has officially been taken too far.
Only if you ignore the financial side of it…