My wife and I think it would be nice if when a two month time card is bought or when you pay for a month of game time that the time should only be used for each time you play on your account and not being taken away wether or not you play on your account cause like us I’m sure there are other players that don’t play every day that would benefit from the time being changed to this the game time being taken off wether or not you play is the only reason we have not played our full accounts in over 4 years
That seems great for the customer but would be terrible for the customer and Blizzard. Blizzard would get so much less money and it wouldn’t make sense as a business model and would then translate to the customers via a lower quality product or lack of product all together.
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This isn’t really a WOW Classic topic. (This is the Classic Discussion forum.)
This has come up elsewhere, but the long-time consensus is you are paying for the account to be available for a specified period - whether you play or not during that time.
One thing that came up in a past discussion about hourly rates (I think it is Korea where WOW can charge like that) is that country also has strict limits on the amount of time a Korean can play. So while we can choose to be logged in for 18 hours in a single day, they can’t.
Another thing that came up is that if you take the total hours in 30 days (24x30=720) and divide the price of game time by that ($14.99 / 720 = 0.02) it is a pittance at $0.02 per hour. If Blizzard was going to provide an hourly option, charging a few pennies is a waste of effort. Odds are it would be far more expensive - think $15 for 30 hours (or $0.50 per hour).
All said and done, though, it’s a suggestion you’d want to either submit in-game or on the General Discussion forum - and a suggestion that isn’t new to Blizzard.
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Lol they could do something like a 7 day game time card for $30 and then the average hardcore player would burn through it in about a month. But that’s not their business model and you are asking for the value of your time in game to be worth about .02 cents an hour. How is that a good valuation on the product they provide?
You’re suggesting a company that just laid off upwards of 800 employees for the sake of making their profits look better implement a system that will do nothing except lower their profits? You’re a madman!
E: That said, I have heard (no idea how true this is), that you can contact Blizzard and get them to freeze your account if you are going to be away and unable to actually play for a while.
Try this with netflix, that companny wouldn’t be around if they were to charge $$ per minute of watch time.
Try this with anny comapnny, U must be a troll or have the iq of a potato.
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If Classic turns out how I remember it, you will need to play for at least one hour every day to get anything meaningful done. I’m literally stopping playing Skyrim just to free up the time that Classic will call for.
From the perspective of the people in the board meetings, I bet ideas like this have been seen as rather extreme in MMO cost discussions for years. I can’t think of any game that has ever done it, but I can remember people asking for the same thing when EverQuest came out. There are very, very few subscription based services in general, that give access that way. It’s on the extreme end of “Lets take a profit hit to increase customer satisfaction”.
I’d love if it happened though
The layoffs are very unfortunate and I’m not defending them, but this narrative that the layoffs made the profits better just doesn’t fly. They are turning right around and hiring more people.
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I’d burn through that in a little over 2 weeks.
I don’t want to be rude but…seriously? Spend 30 more seconds thinking about it and I’m certain you’ll figure out why this is a terrible idea.
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No companies have ever done this before - ever.
They couldn’t possibly be hiring people at a lower salary and saving money that way, right?
I doubt an increase of 20% to development teams is going to be that much of a cost reduction.
Furthermore, this is more developers, and a move away from stuff like e-sports, which I thought is what people wanted.
All I’m saying is that cutting staff and hiring less expensive staff is not a new concept.
The only reason I posted this in the forums is because blizzard suggested it when I wrote them a ticket and suggested to them
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They suggested this forum specifically, or that you post suggestions to the forums (which means picking the relevant category)? We do see people post here when they don’t have active game time (as that limits posting to Support forums, here, and a couple others), but that still doesn’t make this the relevant place.
As I mentioned, though, it has been suggested before. These are on the previous forums, so can’t be added to, but it’s clear Blizzard has heard it asked for - and that’s about all that can be done:
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You and your wife have the intelligence of a potato.
No, just no.
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This response, and the way you lay out this reasoning, has been swirling in my head all day. I love your writing.