I met a player the other day and they spend all of their time grinding the Dailies to earn enough gold to make their game time free. But that doesn’t sound like fun to me.
To be clear they’re not doing that because they enjoy doing it, they’re doing it because if they don’t they cannot afford to play WOW.
But they’re getting burned out.
Even though I live on a fixed income, disabled vet IRL - I still wanted to gift them 6 months of game time. I’ve done it once before for another player, where you purchased it and emailed them the code. Now though it seems like that option does not exist anymore. And you can’t even purchase a WOW token and gift them that - that says something to the effect of you can only sell it on the Auction House (AH) if you purchase it.
Maybe this doesn’t seem like a big deal, but this removes the ability to gift other people time to play WOW - leaving only the Subscription option.
I also submitted a ticket - kindly asking for help - resolving this issue.
(Note: there’s an option to “gift” under the option to purchase. Clicking that brings up a whole form on how to send it to the person you know.)
Edit: Sorry, I know it’s not six months’ worth but it’s 60 days. Just … gift it more than once. Or give a smaller gift. It’s still a way to give game time.
Went right to the 60 day game time and it still has the gift option in the store, pretty simple to gift someone game time. Corrected to say 60 day vice 30 day game time.
It shouldn’t take a month to make 200k unless you are very unfortunate. Rather than giving them a fish, perhaps you can help them find a more productive farming method. I recommend alchemy. Now that more people a raiding the potion market is thriving again. Str pots are 85g per on my server.
Correct. A couple years ago they removed all the game time options from the store except the 60 day option. They never exactly explained why, but I suspect it had to do with streamlining product offerings, but also some fancy fraud that was going on.
You can still get the 6 months for yourself with a subscription, but you can’t gift it.
Here is what you can do. When this change went through I made a chart about how to get game time and with what payment methods.
For ease of viewing here you go!
There are several ways to pay for game time and they have changed during the past year. You can no longer buy single blocks of 1 month game time as a stand alone purchase.
Description
Cost (USD)
CC
PayPal
Debit
Bnet Bal
WoW Token
1 Month reoccuring Subscription*
$14.99
X
X
X
3 Month reoccuring Subscription*
$41.97
X
X
X
6 Month reoccuring Subscription*
$77.94
X
X
X
WoW 30 day game time token (with gold)
Gold
60 day Game Time Card/Block
$29.99
X
X
X
X
Battlenet Balance (your account)**
Flex
X
X
X
X
Gifted Battlenet Balance
Flex
X
X
X
*If you don’t want your Subscription to automatically renew, wait for it to clear the payment (several days), then cancel the Sub on the account. You can do this every month if you like.
**Check the Bnet Balance article for Restrictions and use https://us.battle.net/support/en/article/25904
The wait time on tickets is 3-4 days right now. You won’t get any help on this I am afraid. The GM/Billing folks can not change the system. There is no way to gift them 6 months unless you gave them 3 x 60 days of game time. That has no discount for the 6 month duration like a sub does though.
Did they ever give a legit reason for removing the 30-day option to buy game time? Weird decision removing that option imo. Sure you can subscribe, and just cancel I guess, but that would get annoying after awhile. I just buy gametime cards from Wallyworld, Target etc nowadays. Still 60 days, but at least I know they won’t bill me, if were to forget to unsub at the end of every month, or two lol.
Just raising average ticket price and extending sub times. My guess is they looked at how many people were buying a month’s time whenever a patch dropped and thought this would help boost the revenue from that.
I don’t think that was the only reason. They don’t sell the 1 month time cards anymore, only the 60 days. Standardizing it was part of things.
I THINK it had more to do with the one month being somehow involved in a lot of fraud. There were also changes to lock location and currency so that people could not try to pay for things in a lower cost currency when they did not live there. All sorts of shenanigans were afoot. I think. Blizz has not really discussed it though…so I am left to put pieces together.
That is about stupid as all get out I can’t buy a gift of 6 months sub for a friend in game…no wonder players are still leaving this game…its my damn money and I should be able to spend it as I see if I want to help out a bud with 6 months sub and maybe get them a mount they can’t afford is total BS to not be able to do so…
This people were using gray markets to spin up new accounts to fuel botting and cheaper multiboxing setups. A certain South American country was what alot of them used to claim as their standard currency. Easily was 20% when compared to the dollar.
If people in the Balkans and Turkey (longstanding currency issues) can find reason enough to spend money on wow, trust me people are not short on cash to spend on the game in many other areas. They just choose not to because they don’t feel like the game is rewarding enough for the effort given, especially when compared to other mmos and games on the market.
If you already have a computer that can play wow and have internet, you are not short on cash. As compared to the aforementioned as well as those who reside countries typically associated with currency farming in games to provide for RMT services just to make a living.
I could careless about damn Turkey or any other country…I am talking about having a close friend in the USA who purse strings might be tight and being able to gift them a 6 month sub if I want too…its my damn money and if I want to spend it on a friend I should be able too…even when I was very tight on money few years back I helped a fellow guildmate with his sub …yes just a month payment but I bloody still helped him…
We will be lucky, if we are not paying $15 just for fries eventually lol.