World of Warcraft Goes Free With Starter Edition 244
Stoobalou writes "Blizzard Entertainment has announced that its enormously popular online role-playing game World of Warcraft will be free to play for characters up to level 20. WoW has always offered free trials of one of the world's biggest multi-player online games but previous offers have always been limited to a set number of days. The new policy means that first-time visitors to Azeroth will be able to build an unlimited number of characters and classes up to level 20 at their leisure, although there will be some limitations."
Yeah, but they gimped it so bad it's worthless (Score:5, Informative)
When I first heard about this, I was actually excited. I never really got into MMO's much (I did play some MUD's back in the day pretty addictively). I've tried out a few, like Eve Online and City of Heroes, but usually got bored with them after a while (Guild Wars was the only one I played for any length of time). People keep raving about WoW, and I've been tempted to try it out a few times. But paying $50, plus buying a bunch of expansion packs, *ON TOP OF* $15 a month?!?!? Christ, why don't I just give them my house too? That's a lot to go into an MMO, sight unseen.
But the more I read about how much they've gimped this trial, the less interested I am. No chat, no auction houses, no guilds (basically no social interaction of any kind, which kind of defeats the whole point of an MMO). If it were JUST the level 20 thing, or the skills cap, or even the guild thing, I could live with giving it a shot. But basically, they've stripped it of *everything* that makes it a MMO. That's a shame. I really would like to give it a try. And I'm not above paying if I get into it (I'm not a cheapass who pirates all his movies). But I don't think this ultra-gimped version is going to get me into it.
Re:Yeah, but they gimped it so bad it's worthless (Score:2, Informative)
My guess is they did this because of the rampant spamming problems they used to have
Re:The Gold Limitation Sux (Score:5, Informative)
Why the limitation to only 10 gold coins? That seems stupid. It would seem to me that given that you can have unlimited characters under the cap anyway, that the more gold you accumulate, the more you're going to want to go out, spend it, become well-equipped, and then break through the cap and rise in the game. That means $$$ for Blizzard, so why the gold cap?
Limiting the usefulness for gold farmers.
Re:Yeah, but they gimped it so bad it's worthless (Score:5, Informative)
No, they really do this becasue of the spammers and gold farmers. I played for on and off for about 5 years. Even with severely gimped trial accounts the problems with spam and gold farming are rampant. Originally the trial accounts were not gimped this way (they were level limited, but could chat and stuff), they were forced to do this by player complaints. Ordinarily I'd be more that willing to entertain corporate greed as the motivation, but in this case I can verify that it's a legitimate attempt to prevent abuse.