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World of Warcraft and UDE Point System Fiasco
Richard Manley writes "A report on the card game trinket fiasco. When the UDE (Upper Deck Entertainment) point system finally went live, I would imagine most of the people that logged in felt the same fury I did. Blizzard knows the lengths that its fans will go to get trinkets (look at the price of Murloc cards on eBay), but their arrangement with Upper Deck simply takes advantage of the good will many fans have shown." From the article: "This means that in order to get these trinkets, one would have to purchase 9 BOXES of cards for the fireworks and 21 BOXES of cards for the ogre. What does this mean? Want a fireworks trinket? Sure, it is only going to cost you $900.00. Want an Ogre trinket? No problem, it is only going to cost you $2,100.00. Bear in mind that these items are purely for show off purposes and give no in-game advantage to players." Having been through the Magic: The Gathering addiction twice, I've decided staying away from this Collectible Card Game is a good idea.
The context is a crossover for marketing. Blizzard (who publishes the WoW online game) contracted with Upper Deck (a card manufacturer) to publish a WoW collectible card game. As a draw for the online folks, they put 100 "points" in each pack of cards, with a promise that those points could be used to purchase items in the WoW online game. So, a lot of online-WoW players ponied up for the cards to get points, before the points and rewards were announced. When Blizzard announced how many points each trinket or doodad cost, the points were so high that people would need to buy thousands of dollars worth of cards before they could amass enough points to get anything but lowball stuff like screensavers/wallpaper. WoW players who bought cards just for the online points are now understandably bent out of shape about it.
Virg
If you expect to open a pack and get a fun trinket in game, what would stop every wow player to open just one pack and get it? Then it would not be special.
- You get 100 points per pack.
- You can get a nice amount of points in special tournaments (probably more than 100 points and less than 5000).
- You can get omg lucky! and open an special Legendary Loot card. It gives you a code for a special reward in game. Turtle mounts are reaching some high prices...
So this is more a problem of children crying GIEF NAO!
WoW isn't the most popular by a long shot. Take a look at the numbers for Lineage, and you'll see what I mean.
Latest numbers from http://www.mmogchart.com/ put Lineage and Lineage II combined at about 3 million subscribers. WoW is at about 6.5 million and on their website they recently claimed to be over 7 million. That sounds like a pretty big lead to me.
Ain't it a shame when facts get in the way of making a point? What was your point anyway?
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
I run a retail game shop so I will explain:
UDE (Upper Deck Entertainment) Released a card game for WoW last week, it is one of the better CCG's (collectible card game) we've seen in a long long time.
In each pack of cards is a 'FREE' UDE points card, it is worth 100 UDE points, which are good for redeeming UDE merchandise and in game WoW items.
The submitter (and invariably slashdot) have a pretty tainted view of things, since this item is free and is there simply as a value add to the card game, they of course make no mention of the 'loot' cards you can pull in the set that give you in game mounts one of which is currently ebaying for $250~300.
Only complaints about the free item they put into the card packs, which reward the CCG game players for purchasing the packs.
Any WoW online player that bought the packs only for the possibility of getting online items is a huge and total fool.
People want to complain when a product that wasn't meant to be used in a certain way doesn't work the way they want it too as is the case here.
This is a CCG rarity and scarcity are a factor for people who play a game like this, you either grok that and are okay with it and play the game or you don't.
Also as another note, this game is so good it's sold out within the week at 100's of stores across the country (including mine)
I can tell you, since I sold 90% of the product at my shop no one there even cared about the points (or if they did, it was an after thought)
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