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WoW To Add Avenue For Real-Money Gold Buying
For some time, players of Blizzard's World of Warcraft have been able to purchase a small number of vanity in-game items for real money, but the items were restricted to the user's own account. Now, Blizzard has announced they will be adding another such item, with a twist — it doesn't become bound to a player's account until they use it, so it can be traded or sold on the game's auction house. In their announcement, they said, "While our goal is to offer players alternative ways to add a Pet Store pet to their collection, we’re ok with it if some players choose to use the Guardian Cub as a safe and secure way to try to acquire a little extra in-game gold without turning to third-party gold-selling services. ... While some players might be able to acquire some extra gold by putting the Guardian Cub in the auction house, that’s preferable to players contributing to the gold-selling 'black market' and account theft."
Blizzard has gone back on so many things they were once publicly opposed to, from PvE-to-PvP transfers to the purchasing of gold using real-world money. And it all began after Activision got involved. Microtransactions are becoming an increasingly prominent source of revenue for this company.
$25 for a mount still blows me away. That's more than a month of subscription time...for a vanity mount.
Give me a break. This doesn't add any money to the economy. It's a blob of polygons that follows you around if you pay real/fake money for it. This headline is crap.
Eve online did it first, and paid a price for doing it incorrectly...they've since apologized and said they will roll it out right.
Meanwhile, WoW is hemorrhaging users...this can only further accelerate their departure, as people find a game with more meaning...Should provide some tasty n00bs to pod...
- Pet quantity is not limited
- Pet can be bought by anyone
-> Market will be flooded with pets.
- Pet can be only be acquired once per char
- People with most assets (gold) will be playing actively
-> Market will soon shrink, when all the active players have their vanity pets.
This will just lead to very poor cash->gold conversion rate. Even though the idea is fine, market rules will favour early adopters and leave just about everybody else out in the cold. Chinese provide cheaper service, where risks involve around getting caught or not. Risks with pet selling are about the perceived value of the pet, which will be low.
I first encountered WoW when I played the US beta, almost immediately stopped playing Everquest.
I then played the European beta, and bought the game as soon as it released.
I had tons of fun in the first years, then it slowly went downhill.
Arenas suck, resilience suck, extensions are way too slow and too small.
Microtransactions suck.
and worst of all, the community at least on french-speaking servers is AWFUL.
Now hopefully this will destroy the economy of those pesky gold sellers and their endless trade spam.
I recently tried it again after several years absence. I never kept an account for more than a month at a time. Either trolls or bad gameplay drove me away. This time I canceled my account after a couple of days. After the first few days I kept having this BS thing happen where the sky would go orange and suddenly my character died. After the second time I asked WTF? Turns out it's supposed to be a bloody dragon. Well third time I tried to log out as soon as I saw red. Well this automatically kills your character. My response? I canceled my account and have no plans to ever try WoW again. The truly lifeless might get off on dying randomly as game play but I have better things to do with my time and money. There's a reason for all the trolls in WoW. Only the trolls enjoy that kind of game play. I love massive environments but the game play has always been lousy and it keeps getting worse.
When they released patch 3.2 back in 2009, they made many of the biggest-draw WoW Trading Card Game rewards non-binding and tradeable -- and sellable on the Auction House. For a while, people have been able to put in a real-world monetary investment in obtaining these 'loot cards', cash in the loot code in-game, and then sell the reward to others for gold. This was done in reaction to rampant scamming that was occurring where people were promising to sell codes to other players for gold.
This proposed little vanity pet is just simply Blizzard cutting out the middle man and selling a vanity item that can then be in-turn sold in game.
Also worth considering that if one pays attention to gold-spam in the game itself, some of the spammers advertise the sale of the Winged Guardian mount codes in exchange of gold (which normally winds up being a scam, the resulting gold then laundered and sold on some site along with the fruits of account hackings).
I can honestly say that this is just part of a bigger picture of Blizzard simply providing means to a market that a lot of the game's players are largely in denial over -- RMT is rampant, and it's gotten to the point where it infringes on the account safety of players who don't even engage in RMT sales/misconduct. The 3rd parties who do the account hackings rely on a customerbase that wants to trade in their money for gold in the game. If Blizzard surreptitiously provides a means for the ends of someone just wanting to plug down 20 dollars to make it so that they can get their flight training done and down, that takes away the power of the network of account phishers/hackers that are employed by Goldseller companies.
Now that every (ex)fan has had a decent taste of Activision-Blizzard, It will be interesting to see how well their next few products do.
Do consumers actually pay attention to corporate ethics any more? Time to find out.
You agree with me.
These pets will cost $10, at current prices for warcraft gold $10 will net you 8333 gold.
I don't see many players paying 8000 plus gold for one of these pets so there will still be a good market for the gold farmers/sellers.
Is it just me, or has the amount of video game related posts on slashdot risen dramatically over the last couple years. There are so many web sites focused solely on gaming, I doesn't need to creep into here as well. This is such a non-news item.
Another game lost to MTX...
If this is "the future of MMO gaming", I'm glad I got out before I had to see it firsthand.
This doesn't hurt the economy at all. No gold is materialized, so it's no more detrimental to the economy than someone buying and selling a rare item they found on a mob in the auction house. When I first read the headline I assumed you could actually buy gold or something. I don't think this is as bad as people seem to be blowing it up to be.
There isn't going to be a huge market for this item in the way something like PLEX is in EVE. It's a pet. The pet collectors out there will get it one way or another and then it will be very slow going.
Someone read REAMDE.
of saying "lets make some money before the game is totally dead..."
WoW has decreased in popularity recently and instead of trying to support or revive the game for all its gaming history they decide to squeeze the last few breaths out of it. It reminds me when Palm sold its own name, then its OS, then decided that the world is not going to end and started looking for alternatives.
This is typical short-sighted management.
I played that game way to much, so now I do not recommend it under any circumstances to anybody. I have also talked to people who have family members that had people playing too much of that game. That game and counterstrike are the two games I associate with most damage to society. I believe all the other games are harmless, but when it comes to those two games I have too many stories where things turned really bad. So, my policy when it comes to gaming is any game but CS or WoW. People can argue in any directions about if those games are bad or not, but I got my experiences and I suggest you also study your experiences about that game and make up your mind about them.
the Trading Card game featured items you could sell in game for ridiculous amounts of money and Blizzard even sanctioned that.
They are not adding gold to the game, they are simply giving another means of it moving from character to character. It is most likely that the costs in game for the pet will quickly tank which might push off a lot of buyers.
What does not bode well is that pets sold to players from Blizzard now take on the trading card game limitation of one time use instead of account wide use. This raises the cost of buying a pet for your account by 1000% or more.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
WoW's transition to F2P begins. It'll probably be a better game for it too.
Given the rate at which WoW is losing subscribers (nearly a million in 2 quarters this year), you'd think they'd refocus on things that are actually good for the game.
Alas, nope. Instead they're focused on milking the cow as much as possible. This is just another example, the last one was trying to charge people to group with their friends. Blizzard eventually backed off on that, but the push has been growing from them for a while. It seems subscriptions aren't good enough for them anymore despite an incredible lack of content being added to the game these days.
Oh well. It was fun while it lasted, but all things must come to an end.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
So I can buy and sell virtual stuff in WOW or Diablo 3 but I can't play online poker in the US except on some smaller sites?!? Maybe they can launch poker sites
T'rain did it first.
still no sig
All the time i was playing, there were always those rumors that the next MMO was the one that would finally knock World of Warcraft off its perch. All that time, I kept saying that the only thing that could kill WoW was Blizzard itself.
guess I was right, sorta...it took Blizzard being bought out by Activision, THEN killing WoW.
The silver lining?
Now new MMOs will have a chance to exist for more than a few months before they implode due to lack of foresight.
I shouldn't have to need the time and alts in order to play my character,
In many ways todays WoW is a sad, sold-out reflection of it's early self.
When I first started playing (US then EU betas and then EU live) running dungeons was fun, exciting, dangerous and sometimes maddeningly frustrating.
Today running dungeons is like a job. And a tedious, boring, uncreative menial job at that. There's no skill required- and most players won't even tolerate attempts at a more skilful-creative approaches as it introduces risk and might slow down their instance run. Why would spending more time having fun be a problem? The problem is that running instances in WoW now is not fun.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
Interesting.
Vescere bracis meis.
I don't play WoW, but I was pretty big into Guild Wars back in the day, particularly the in-game economy. Won't the in-game market value of this pet plummet once everyone's buying it to change it into gold and flooding the auction house with it? Seems like something that'll only be worth it (that is, worth it to someone who would pay for in-game items in the first place) for a short while.
WHO NEEDS SHIFT WHEN YOU HAVE CAPSLOCK/ DAMN1
Real money you say? Nation states might have some interest. :-)
I'll admit that I have played this game since inception, in 2004. That being said, there were dungeons that were damn near impossible to complete, without 40 able minded players. That was a stretch, and it felt like a real accomplishment. That's because it was an accomplishment... it took hard work, and often times took great critical thinking.
The game today has become a cash cow for Blizzard, and their policies show that. From faction changes, to PvE/PvP trasfers, to 10/25 man steamroll dungeons, to now monetizing (and cashing in on) something they deemed a violation of the ToS... a week prior.
They have taken the hard work, and dedication required, and replaced it with money bought goods.
This is an honest question here, but are they creating a type of stock exchange in WoW?
Something witty.
There is always going to be gold buying and selling in WoW. On most servers you can easily buy game time cards codes for gold which people buy in the real world for real money. So it is easy to say that this is another example of Bliz caving, but it is just acknowledging the reality of the situation, and giving players a legal way to do it that isn't illicit, much like legalizing marijuana - it is going to happen no matter what stance they take, it causes dubious hurt, and it might just as well be legal to some reasonable degree.
When people mention how this is implemented in Eve (my game) - they often forget to mention that it allows the isk grinders to play for free. So - for two players, CCP gets both subscriptions, one player gets to 'pay with isk to play' and one player essentially pays for two subs. Everybody is happy.
I work hard I'm not going to work in-game. I'm most certainly not going to try and compete with unemployed guys who play 18 hours a day. If I can help them by paying for their game time in return for their in game money I think it's a fair deal.
There's a little more analysis on the wow insider piece from yesterday.
To be clear. There is no regulation or law forbidding you buying anything by using a 3rd party in the real world. The only restriction is the contract you may have with the game provider, restricting what you can buy and from whom. But there is no restriction beyond that.
Many will have you belive it's illegal, or piracy, or something like that. But don't be fooled by their use of buzz words. It is nothing more than their attempt to control the potential market. It is true for WOW, EVE Online and others.
Wow is a different game now anyway. Its more like watching a movie unfold then playing game.. some of the major quest boss's you can literally stop pressing buttons and just watch the npc beat the boss for you. Wow vanilla was great, burning crusade was still decent.. after that.. they made the game too simple so now a 3 year old play. the game has been dumbed down to the extreme. sad. I used to love wow..ask about 3 years of my life..lol
They didn't do this to 'add an avenue for real money gold buying'. They don't need to -- that already exists, as they've pointed out in several posts. TCG rewards are Bind-on-Equip already, and sold on the auction house for significant money. Its not that hard to buy or obtain one of those and sell it in game for solid gold returns.
Personally, I'm not a fan of this because I think for $10 it should show up on every character for the account its applied to. This way you're paying $10 for a one-time pet, and that seems vastly over-priced. I could care less that you can buy it on the auction-house. The idea that this will be some easy way to convert real life money to gold is stupid. You can't predict what price you'll get so you may end up getting a really lousy return on your $10 investment. Or you might make a fair bit. Who knows? Either way, its a fair way from converting money into gold efficiently. This is a classic example of making a mountain out of a molehill.
Wood Shavings!
- Godai
This isn't really a legal avenue for *gold buying*. Instead it's an avenue for purchasing a vanity pet that you can sell to other players for in-game gold. The difference is two-fold:
1) No gold is added to the economy in this transaction, which means this process doesn't add inflationary pressure.
2) There's no guarantee of value on the pet. These things are going to flood the marketplace, as people buy them for resale. Who knows what the final market value of these things will be?
Blizzard could have just instituted some kind of $1 = 1,000 gold transfer, but they didn't. This will be at best a minimal gold buying avenue (I don't predict the value of these pets to be all that high in the long term.
On the other hand, the bigger deal is what the article missed- with all the previous vanity pets, $10 got you a pet that you could use on all your characters (Bind to Account). This new (Bind on Equip) pet means that you have to pick the character that gets the pet. That is somewhat disappointing, as I have a fair number of alts that I could conceivably give this pet, but I'm not going to spend $50 doing so.
It's funny to see how many different tangents people get on when the issue of WoW comes up. It should be pointed out that none of the items Blizzards sells in it's store has any effect on gameplay. Sure, you can take issue with the game itself all you want. You could also point out the fact that it's losing users, but it's a decade old game. I would be concerned if it were still growing at this point. Nobody is forcing you to buy any of it. Take issue with the game itself all you want, but the real money store is probably the last thing that is doing the game any harm. The in game markets are self policed and the value of these items will drop enough that it just won't be worth trading $10 any amount of gold.
> Origin discovered is that in an unlimited space world you get weird goddamn behaviour from people. I remember them citing examples like one dude who stockpiled a 100,000 shirts in his bank. People are strange!
If database storage space is not an issue, then wtf does it matter what people do with their bank space?
A game that WANTS people to collect lots and lots of pointless items, quest items, tiered armor, crafting mats, etc SHOULD provide a means to store it all and encourage them to collect as much as possible. Forcing me to throw things away goes against their profit potential because now I don't want to collect everything I possibly can. The entire point of playing addictive collecting games is to collect!
For me, certain items have sentimental value and I will not throw them away because it would be throwing away a memory. One that is refreshed whenever I peruse my bank, reliving all the memories stored in there.
Suckers are going to spend $25 on a mount that will flood the AH. What costs 20K gold on Saturday will be 2K gold the following week. If you don't already have 2K gold on your toon, then you're doing it wrong. What worries me is Blizz moving this model over to gear. When that happens, I am out.
Anyone who really loves MMORPGs would have played Everquest 1 or 2. Wow is for children who want to just KILL THE FUCK!. None of them *really* know how to raid. Bring on Everquest Next.
Scale instances to the gear level. There is too much content already. I've been playing for three years and haven't seen half the raids. From WotLK I have completed Naxx and NONE of the other raids. My guild was too small to tackle content regularly. My guildies were great, helpful people who were excellent people. What? "find another guild" you say? Are you seriously indicating that something that is a *game* should motivate and encourage affiliation based on performance and not on friendship? I'd be happy to go back and spend time in older raids if they were challenging. Put together a group, figure out the average iLevel and then scale the damage and healing for the instances. Bam. All content becomes fresh.
Allow raid compositions of more/less than 10/25 players (and scale the instance). "One raid member can't make it tonight?" you're fucked. "Oh, you have one too many" Too bad, benched.
Allow players to create instances and content. If it is about providing enough challenging content to keep players interested (and it should be... I can't take another random Zul) then Blizzard needs to get over its love of canon/lore and simply release tools that allow players to create their own instances. Yeah, the story lines won't remain consistent but so what. Limit what can drop in the player instances and have a system for obtaining Blizzards approval. Then you would have more content, faster than any player could keep up with.
Get rid of the dependence on guild membership to tackle content. World of Warcraft is clearly designed by individuals with a juvenile high school mentality. guilds are just popularity cliques.You want to raid? You must have a guild to be successful in end-game content (which EVERYONE pays for but few people get to see in a timely fashion). If your guild falls apart, or is great people but too small, or you can't make the 80% attendance requirement, or your employment schedule shifts and takes you out of your scheduled night... you're screwed. no raiding for you unless you find a new guild. Make changes that de-emphsize guild membership as a requirement for experiencing game content. Provide power to the individual to choose content.
Forget about the damn chinese/gold/gear farmers. Drop the whole idea of raid locks. This is put in to prevent people from farming content and becoming geared "too quickly", whatever that means. SO FUCKING WHAT? I don't care if somebody else is getting a free ride. How does their success diminish my ability to play? Why punish me so that I can't honestly grind gear at my pace? If they're geared but they can't play I'll just avoid them. There's no rational reason concerning game play for lockouts. Yes. it prevents guilds/groups from farming gear for new players. But So what? Again another punishment for honest players. It could also be implemented better. Progression can be controlled through iLevel limits for instance entrances and also through content dependencies instead.
World of Walkcraft. Get rid of the damn corpse runs. No reason for them. At the very least when you die just cause the respawn at the instance entrance. Waiting/walking is not "fun". Nobody loves those zones were the graeyards are super far away. That run back really lets you relax and get in touch with yourself. Helps you contemplate your mistake and improve too.
Remove all the penalties for dying. Yes. I get the durability penalty. that makes sense as providing a major, reliable and continuous gold sink to maintain the stability of the economies. But rez sickness is stupid. more stupid is the "oh, you died again quickly? PENALTY BOX!" The disappointment of dying is enough of a punishment. Dying frequently is its own punishment. The time lost to rebuff, wait for mana, instant boss/mob reset is enough. Waiting for 2 minutes after Bloodlord Mandokir kills you is just stupid.
Random Raid Finder. Yes. I know this is coming but it's coming wrong. It will only allow grouping for lower level raids and not the current tier. Why? Stupid. Just another limit enforcing
I will never live for sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
It still gives an advantage to those that are willing to pay real money for game money. No new gold is created, but it does allow people to pool the existing money by buying multiples of the pet and selling them to accumulate wealth. Since gear can be bought with gold, this will give the players that are willing to spend real money an advantage over those that are not willing to or cannot afford to.
For what it is worth, obtaining BiS gear is no longer that difficult to do, thanks to Blizz allowing BoP gear obtained in raids to be traded among raid members for up to an hour after the end of the raid. Both my 'locks (undead and human) have four pieces of Tier 11 gear, thanks to heavy and frequent abuse of this benign rule change designed to reduce the number of in-game petitions to reassign BoP gear that was mis-assigned by the lootmaster. Thanks to this rule change, it is possible to offer a shit-ton of gold for that Tier item that somebody out-diced you for, and I've rarely had somebody refuse a high five-figure offer. When the phoenix dropped for our pug 25 man two years ago, I offered 100k gold to the roll winner, who didn't even hesitate. That is the rarest drop in the game, and this guy sold it for the equivalent of 5 Titansteel cool downs. Also, look up "gold DKP" raids on any wow forum to see how pugging end-content raids is an efficient and very cheap way to get BiS gear for even toons you only leveled to get their trade skills up.
So, yeah, having more gold helps on these gold DKP runs. But -- and this is where I think you are wrong about more gold conferring an advantage - you are ignoring the Tier sets. More gold does not confer an advantage to players because of the Tier sets. You can't buy Tier items with gold (gold DKP runs and the change to the BoP rules in raids being the exceptions, as I noted above, but which are pretty limited exceptions.) Last time I checked with elitistjerks, at least for my class ('lock) the Tier sets are still considered BiS for all our specs. You can buy some good gear for gold; outside of raid drops, you can't get a better trinket than the darkmoon card-based ones, or for clothies, the tailored pants and belt. But nothing you buy for gold confers anything beyond the base stats on the item. Tier gear, which are BoP, class specific, and can only be obtained in a raid, have cumulative bonuses on them which do confer a significant, non-trivial advantage in PvE.
I have no problem with this at all. People buy gold anyway; better Blizzard gets the profits than sketchy, might-steal-your-account-later trade-channel-spammers. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that I like this model way better than the previous one, where there are vanity items you can *only* buy with cash. If they did that with raid-tier gear, I'd quit, full stop, right now. If they used *this* model with raid-tier gear, on the other hand, I'd actually think it was sort of neat. (Kingdom of Loathing, my favorite game ever, basically survives on that model, though granted, it's different in that it's otherwise free to play. I give them about as much a year as I give WoW, though.)
The most disappointing thing about WoW is not that Activision/Blizzard is trying to monetize what they have, it's that after 7 years WoW is still a character progression treadmill just like the MMOs that preceded it. If it was possible to break out of that model then WoW, with its revenues 10 times greater than those of blockbuster MMOs, then WoW would have done it by now.
It's like the quest for a machine to travel back at time: If it were possible to invent one, someone in the future would have done it and brought it back to demo it.
Or interstellar space travel: If it were possible, one of the other planets in the universe would have developed it a billion years ago and have reached Earth by now.
Yes, the WoW is now using their strong fan base to get more money. Good for them.