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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."
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...
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.