Celestial Steed has gone up for sale at the Blizzard store, receiving over 100,000 orders. With pets going for $10, and mounts $25, Blizzard is finding that selling extra content is working to offset the loss of regular users they have experience in recent months.
June 20, 2010
#1
Blizzard, since the initial creation of World of Warcraft, has been all about the short-term.
Don’t fix the issues that have driven a sizable portion of their player base away, but instead sucker the lackwhits into wasting ADDITIONAL real-world cash, for a stupid mount. Does it offer 310% movement? Not a chance, UNLESS you have already bent over backwards wasting your life away in the arenas, or some other raiding nonsense. Nearly two month’s worth of gametime cash, just to buy a mount with a different “3d sprite” to fly around on, that offers no other benefits? Ha, not for how hard I work to earn my cash.
Starcraft 2 and Diablo 3, sure, I’m willing to pony up the dough for them. As for World of Warcraft, it started going downhill about halfway through Burning Crusade.
The patch that added IQD was brilliant, but adding Arena Gear Ratings was not, along with another half-dozen Paladin and Rogue buffs. Lets keep the no-life elitists, living in mom’s basement, in the best gear, while the rest of the working world exists as fodder in PvP, and flame-bait in PvE, mindlessly adding to Blizzard’s “Mountain fortress of cash”. /golfclap
“Riding the cash cow” – newest Blizzard business ethic for World of Warcraft.
–DKnight
July 9, 2010
#2
Well said my DKnight2066 friend.
But… I like playng wow, so thats why I kicked retail and went to play on pservers.
I think pservers are something that blizz will never: less grind, more fun and less “no-life elitists, living in mom’s basement” xP
But.. but… but… all the bugs and stuff D: D:
Go to pservers and you’ll know that you can live with that while you play a game where you dont have the feeling you’re working or that you have to “make your money worth”.
July 20, 2010
#3
At the end of the day, does it really matter if they provide something like this? I currently don’t play WoW (subscriber to Aion at the moment) so my opinion may not be valid, but if they produce something that people clearly want and are going to pay money for is it an issue? Obviously yes if other things are overlooked (again as a non-player I don’t know the context) but in Aion for example you can buy a magazine subscription for about $40 and you get some special wings with extra flight time. I bought it because if I am paying to play a game I don’t mind dropping some extra money to make that game more enjoyable.
Installing WoW as we speak though, so maybe I can see how the problems compare and write back with a more critical view!
July 21, 2010
#4
@ Syphon Blaze – To respond to your question: No, I’m totally cool with Blizzard offering whatever additional “perks” people want, for a moderate additional fee for taking the time to program them.
The focal point of my consternation, and anger at Blizzard, is their present business model for World of Warcraft in terms of game balance and adding new content.
Gone are the days when you could hop into PvP in the Battlegrounds and earn the same epic gear as everyone else. Add to this the latest restriction where, even if you do submit yourself to the torture of the arenas, your Team Rating in 2v2s can NEVER count towards your “right” to spend Arena Points (you have already earned) on epic Weapons, and a number of other Armor pieces.
To sum it up: You dedicate whatever time real-life allows to earn the points Blizzard feels are a fair cost for a piece of Epic PvP Gear. However, unless you somehow are matched, consistently, against classes you and your 2v2 partner aren’t designed to be weak against, your losses will outnumber your wins, and thus you are suddenly disallowed from spending points already earned via honest participation in the Arenas.
Now, to speak fairly on this issue: There were guilds back during Burning Crusade, when level 70 was the cap, who offered “Arena Point Services”.
In Short. You paid them 4k gold, or higher, and they gave you a spot on their top rated 5v5 team. They would keep playing and “carry you” to enough wins to earn however many points you still needed to complete your PvP Gear Set.
Obviously this exploiting generated alot of income for a number of guilds, along with “Amani War Bear” runs, costing up to 8k gold per run, just so you could get that stupid thing before the upcoming patch removed it forever.
My final point however, is simply this: People were going to exploit that weakness in the system. Get the gear faster rather than slower, via paying off a guild. But in the end, without a Rating System in place, eventually EVERYONE would get the same gear and be able to face each other on equal ground, thus keeping the game more fair than it is at present. Blizzard “patched an exploit” by ruining PvP for the majority of everyday PvP enthusiasts like myself. /golfclap
What I find to be the most tragic part of this issue, is that nowadays people in WoW think that the game fair. So many new people started playing AFTER Burning Crusade that they have no idea how much more balanced the game actually was when people like myself were Raiding and PvPing regularly.
–DKnight