Slashdot Mirror
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.
THAT is what was meant with "WoW To Add Avenue For Real-Money Gold Buying". Just as there are plenty of people with real-world money to spend there are plenty of people in-game with too much gold to spend, to them it makes more sense to just throw some gold at it rather than buying the pet using real money.
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
This is more along the lines of a PLEX, not the Noble Exchange or Aurum. That was done properly and was in place way before Incarna was planned.
The Amarri pray for god, the Caldari pray for profit. the Gallente pray for peace, but the Minmatar pray their ships hol
Its pretty god-awful everywhere. The Community doesn't exist anymore. What you have now are a bunch of gamers better suited to playing FPS's that thrive on instant gratification and barely even interacts with the community.
Those that do seek some sort of pleasure out of it for the most part. These consist largely of trolls etc.
There are a very very few like myself, and perhaps yourself, left that are genuinely helpful and relatively patient.
Most of us have quit already, I know I have.
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
T'rain did it first.
still no sig
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.
You "kept having?!" Players are actively seeking out the areas where Death Wing is flying over because it earns you an achievement. ;)
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.
I have many characters and I think I have seem Death Wing about three times since the expansion came out. You are either very lucky or very unlucky - depending on how you see it. Really, dying from a fly over by Death Wing is not a problem.
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.
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
People had no problem with the PLEXes after a while. PLEXes allowed things to work both ways - players could earn in-game money to buy game-time cards (and thus not spend real money), and people could in turn spend money to buy PLEXes and sell them.
It was a very simple tradeoff. Do you spend 30 or so hours grinding ISK to save $15? If that's worth your time, great. If not, you can switch things around and save time grinding for ISK by buying PLEXes.
When they added a new currency which basically turned into a cash-only shop (in a paid MMO), that really irked people (and for good reason).
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)