Each character is quite cheap, but millions of them add up. A character is not a couple of bytes. Data needs to be store for every item the character has, every quest it’s completed. any titles or achievements. It’s still relatively small but you store enough of them the costs add up quick. I know what my single team pays for data storage and while each piece of data costs effectively 0, the sum of them runs tens of thousands a month.
EDIT: I should add that character storage is what we call “warm” storage. The characters need to be accessible immediately. This is the most expensive kind of storage. Moving them to cold storage would be much, much cheaper but a player would have to wait a certain amount of time before they could play.
Iirc technically you had to buy Vanilla, TBC, and Wrath to play Wrath content. I started in Wrath as well and while there was a bundle for Vanilla/TBC you had to have TBC to play Wrath.
They’re not paying for space, they own it. Its a big game changer when you own the infrastructure like they do, its actually one of the advantages Blizzard has in the market place vs their competitors, they’re not renting space from Azuer (MS) or Amazon or any other big outfit, they legit own it.
I mentioned cost because the fella I responded to used it as a crutch to justify the price point when it has nothing to do with the price point.
As for the price point, its ridiculous. 5 bucks, ill take a few, 10 bucks I might take 1, 35 bucks forget it. It’s not about the money, its the value for money ratio and im just not willing to spend AAA game dollars on a character copy.
I think you’ve done enough dumbing down to last yourself a lifetime. Try smartening up a bit.
You said no other game offers a similar service for free, thus justifying its associated cost… then said anyone who doesn’t like that it isn’t free should go play another game.
If the complaint is that it isn’t free, and NO OTHER GAME DOES IT FOR FREE, what other game should we go play, exactly?
In your reality, do you account for the fact the service is rendered regardless of whether you pay or not?
Not sure if you’re aware of how this cloning thing works, but your character already exists on both versions of the game regardless of whether you’re paying money or not. You’re literally paying $35 $15 per character for permission log in on both.
You might have a valid argument if your character wasn’t cloned unless you paid.
“All the characters that you created and played before servers come down for the patch will appear on the same realms. You’ll see those realms listed in both Burning Crusade Classic and World of Warcraft Classic games. That means you’ll see all your pre-existing characters in both versions of the game.”
Shadowlands has a monthly cost, and you are paying to access THAT.
Classic does not have a monthly cost. You are still paying for Shadowlands even if you don’t play it, and you get access to Classic Realms as a “free perk” as part of the subscription.
You can paint it as “I only play Classic, therefore I’m paying a month fee for THAT.”, but Blizzard will tell you that you are wrong (and they have, BTW).
It costs money to maintain those copies. They are maintaining it FOR FREE until you decide you want to use “the other one” and then they ask you to pay for something that up until that point you WERE getting “for free”.
$35 WAS a bit high, but free? Yeah you should have known better.
