What can I say. 3k in my currency for 120 days, or 1500 for 60 it’s just not something I can do. (This taking into account the usual extra I have to pay on top of the balance I add).
If you can afford 15 for a month you can afford 30 for two months. All it takes is you figuring out how to take 15 bucks and put it aside every other month.
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So why not just do the monthly subscription? Is there a problem with subscriptions outside of the US. I’m just curious because I’m in the US and maintained an EU subscription for a while with no problems.
That said I still see no point in making this change.
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Because last time I tried with my debit card to even add balance, I kept getting an error and to “try again later”, after roughly a week of trying at different times of the day and night, I just gave up.
If I figure how to get it done, sure, if not, then well…
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No, its not a “subscription”. It is “game time”. They now only sell game time in two month increments. This does not affect SUBSCRIPTIONS. If you want to purchase only 30 days of gametime, as a workaround, buy a 30 day subscription, then cancel it.
Can you use PayPal where you are? I’m not sure how things work for that in different countries.
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I hope you get it figured out.
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I can, but I honestly never used it.
In here I essentially use a service we can also use to pay for other more “standard” bills but we need to pay in cash or with card, but doesn’t work for subs.
Me too, heh.
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While I don’t understand why they made this change. I’m also wondering why it’s such a big deal also. Just how were people paying for their game time? Besides getting physical game cards, which I have gotten one in years. Are they game cards you can get at stores also changing to to 2 months? Because if you aren’t getting the physical card, you must be paying online for them somehow. And if you can do that, why not just get a sub. If you’re not sure you are gong to play for more than a month. You can just cancel it once it goes through, I used to do that for my son. He would only play for a month or 2 at a time. So I would do that so I didn’t end up paying for game time he wasn’t using.
I’m not defending what they’ve done here. I’m just curious as way it’s such an issue for people.
Physical cards, like at Walmart or GameStop, will have an existing inventory at the old price. This is the same thing that recently happened to Canada with an increase in game-time (but no subscription increase). WoW players in CAN were able to buy physical game time cards at the old price for a few weeks before those sold out and then the new stock of cards was at the new price.
The increase to digital purchases of game-time through the Blizzard Store went up yesterday as noted in the Blizzard blue post.
As someone else said, if ($30 for 2 months) breaks your budget compared to 2 x ($15 for 1 month), then maybe you should really consider a free-to-play game. That’s just not healthy to be stressing over such change if it really impacts your ability to pay mandatory bills like rent, utilities, food, and transportation.
Threads on this topic like this one here, that begin with wrong information, need to be deleted by the mods.
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I’m wondering about whether this is really going to be that effective, if at all, at combating bots and/or gold farmers/sellers.
While their minimum price to buy game time in a one time purchase is doubling from $14.99 for 30 days to $29.99 for 60 days, you can still effectively buy just a single month via a subscription for $14.99/month and then cancelling the sub later.
And that assumes they even use real money at all, which I doubt that they do.
Since the whole point of botting is to make gold and since they can still do that, the botters can still continue to use that gold to buy tokens off the AH to redeem for sub time directly. Thus, there may be little, if any, real money cost impact to the use of bots by this change.
Which then begs the question, why eliminate the 30 day single purchase option and force the minimum one time purchase to be for 60 days?
It increases the costs of people wanting to try the game out or come back to the game, so that doesn’t seem like it’s going to help things for the players or overall health of the game. Although if they come back and decide to quit shortly thereafter, they’ll now be getting twice as much money from folks that do that. I just wonder if that is so significant to warrant the change.
All of this really makes this dumb cow wonder why they eliminated the 30 day one time purchase option and if the rationale really is going to help in the long term, particularly since in the short term it sure seems to be upsetting a lot of folks.
/moo 
“Review … of all currencies.” – My best guess as to why they made this change is that they lose too much potential profit when converting a ton of very tiny transactions into USD on whatever foreign currency exchange they use. Brazil in particular pays much less than $15 USD/month so their transactions likely cost Blizzard the most. Similar principle to why some small mom & pop stores require you to spend at least $20 if you’re going to use a credit card–there’s a minimum processing fee that hurts their bottom line for very tiny transactions.
By increasing the minimum transaction for this type of purchase, Blizzard pays a smaller foreign exchange fee or can negotiate a better bid/ask spread with their market maker.
I think the issue of eliminating the non-recurring 30 day game time purchase is a separate one from all the foreign price changes due to currency reviews and exchange rates. People have suggested that the real motivation of eliminating the 30 day purchase option is to make it more expensive when a bot account gets banned.
My point in asking that question is that I doubt the botters are using real money at all, since you can bot, make gold, use that gold to buy game time, setup new accounts to replace banned accounts, rinse and repeat across multiple accounts. Once the operation is up and running, you never have to input real money into the system except at the very start.
As for adjusting for exchange rates, they have been doing that a lot lately, and not just with Brazil earlier this week, but today again with Russia. I think that is more motivated at rebalancing based on foreign currency exchange rates that effectively provided a discount to residents of foreign countries when measured in US dollars. Since we don’t know what those rates are that Blizzard itself gets charged, it’s easier to effectively make those adjustments to also include price increases while claiming that they are not raising prices.
And in all those counties, they can still have recurring subscriptions on a monthly basis, and incur exchange fees each month for each of those subs, none of that is being changed. Whether that really is a significant impact overall depends on how many foreign subs are via one time purchases vs recurring subscriptions, and only Blizzard knows those numbers.
At the end of the day, it seems the financial folks at Blizzard have been working overtime, both in foreign countries and in the US, to wring every last dollar that they can from the player base. I think that’s clear to everyone paying attention, and it isn’t a great look, particularly since they are doing it during a pandemic, after multiple rounds of layoffs across their worldwide offices, and right after given the CEO a $200 million stock bonus.
I know that Blizzard, like all companies these days, faces lots of challenges when it comes to finances. But I’m starting to wonder if they (1) they don’t care much about the optics, (2) they laid off their PR people, and/or (3) they are just rushing to get all the bad news done quickly (ripping that band aid off in one go) and hopefully put it behind them sooner than later and hope things improve as the year goes on.
/moo
And it feels like a total scam to have to repeat that every month, especially when you were able to pay the way far more people than those who used cards used to pay: through gold converted into bnet balance.
An awful lot of posters who support this change are pretending that buying tokens with gold to convert into bnet balance isn’t a thing and never was. I wonder why…?
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I’m not for/against the change, but those using gold to buy game-time did get screwed on this IF they were accruing a bNet balance sufficient to get the 6-month game-time at a discount over the 30-day game-time option. All those discount options are gone now, but Blizzard likely doesn’t care much about those that purchase game-time with gold as the correlation with their profit margin is secondary.
It would be interesting to know if those using gold for “discount” 6-month game-time were a majority or a small minority. I just always assumed most playing with gold farmed enough to buy a token and immediately redeemed it to add 30-days game-time to their account balance. It takes some discipline to farm enough gold to buy a 6-month game-time and I would think delayed gratification is not a trait that the majority of players would have.
I have 5 accounts. I kept bnet balance so I could renew when I felt like it without having to log into a character that I know happens to have gold to buy a token on the right account, because that’s far more recordkeeping than I wanted. Having bnet balance meant I could renew at any time, including if I had let an account lapse because I wasn’t expecting to use it for a while. I bought a month at a time expecting there would be times I wouldn’t want to have all of my accounts active.
Well, i am sure they thought that decision: 2 months/$30.
People cannot do much in one month in an MMO: you could barely get to level 9 as a new player. Even if the best of best could level to 13 or 14 by playing 24 hours per day, two month is now the minimum.
You have a choice to make: you do it or not.