WoW To Add Avenue For Real-Money Gold Buying 197
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."
Going back on their word (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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I'm mostly annoyed at the focus they've been giving PvP (as in, organized PvP, not random world PvP).
It used to be that PvP was a secondary thing in WoW, PvE was the main draw. These days if you check out just about any WoW it seems to be a lot more about PvP than PvE for a lot of the active players.
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Other way around. When WoW started, PvE was a joke (UBRS was a raid) and PvP was what it was all about, and it was all open world PvP. It was a hell of a lot of fun. Creating Molten Core was the first step to destroying all fun in the game by turning it from PvP into PvE.
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So ... you are that rogue camping flight points? And that you call world PvP? Or do you mean the Tarren Mill lag fests? ...
The only world PvP I remember is killing the people riding into Molten Core on weekends
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Well, world PvP was fun. On the realm I started my first character on there were daily attacks on Darkshire, lots of fun for everyone over level 25-30 or so. These days "world PvP" seems to be about ganking (my "favorite" being the blood elf mage + undead rogue tag teams that roam the world looking for other players to gank).
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That kind of "PvP" is a lot more common these days (or was until Blizzard decided to deploy "countermeasures").
Back in vanilla it was more about actual fights (this was back when reaching level 60 was an accomplishment in itself and a few level 50s could at least have a chance against a level 60), these days you zoom to 85 and you're pretty much untouchable by anyone lower than level 81-82...
Re:Going back on their word (Score:5, Informative)
Excuse me Mr. new pvp whore that likes to think he's been playing since beta - but hasn't.
WoW was a specifically stated PVE game. PVP was tacked on after the beta testing started. Molten Core was available at release(mostly, it was buggy, but available) and UBRS was a raid, doable with 10 men but for awhile they allowed 15 man raids.
Hell, Gnomeregan was supposed to be a raid at first, as evidenced by the fact that right up until near the middle of WotLK you could form a 10 man raid and go there.
World PVP was all that was originally intended as PVP for the game with the ability to opt-out by playing on a PVE server. Battlegrounds were tacked on by popular request in Beta.
Your point that World PVP was a hell of a lot of fun is correct: However it was only possible to have that hell of a lot of fun in a game that was almost entirely focused on the player interacting with the Game Environment and thus having incentive to protect said environment. Darkshire and Redshore battles happened because Horde would want to go gank some alliance. Alliance would show up because they were protecting their friends that were questing and the quest mobs for everyone that wanted to use them. Vice versa happened for horde as well in other locations.
Battleground Queueing once they had a few BGs near the end of Vanilla almost immediately had a large noticeable effect. Those that liked PVPing could get their fix in a BG and from the safety of Orgrimmar/Ironforge, leaving the village folk undefended and the opposite faction unmolested.
There are statements out there from previous devs on WoW that they kind of hate what the game has become with Arenas etc.
They see that the arenas can be fun but they don't fit into what was envisioned for the game originally at all.
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Not exactly. Originally you could form a raid and bring 40 players into ANY dungeon in the game. The only restrictions were that you could not complete quests (which could be circumvented by dropping group, completing the quest, and being reinvited before the 60 second timer was up) and only receiving 10% of normal experience from killing monste
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It was actually stated outright in the making of WoW DVD in the Classic collectors edition.
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Oh, additionally, Alterac Valley was always intended to be a part of the game, at least since mid beta. It was intended to be like first person DOTA (streams of NPCs fighting along a path guarded by towers, with players assisting the NPCs in taking down those towers and eventually the final base). It was also intended to be part of the game world like Wintergrasp eventually was, until they realized their hardware couldn't handle it and came up with the idea to instance it, thus creating the concept of battl
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AV was intended as a PVE raid originally. Learn more about something before you post about others "non-facts"
It WAS intended to be an outdoor raid, similar to many EQ raids. However this would have caused some inherent PVP in the zone. When BG's became a popular time killer they just repurposed the whole deal.
I mean, this shit is all even in the "Making Of" Collectors edition DVD that came with Classic, straight from the devs mouth, on camera no less.
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Now I know you're full of shit.
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Sigh, I guess I should pay attention to the "Do Not Feed" sign you should have hanging around your neck however:
The dvd is available for download in several locations. Download it, watch it, be enlightened.
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Maybe you missed the fact that a couple months after release there were about 4 PvE servers for every 1 PvP server, and the PvE servers were more crowded. The only reason PvP servers are even remotely popular now (and they still continue to be less popular than PvE servers) is that even the PvP servers are safe due to safe/sanctuary zones and instanced PvP taking most PvPers out of the world. I played exclusively on PvP servers when the game came out, so I'm fully aware of how the game was back then, but I'
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WoW didn't have any of those "fancy" raids back then, only a handful of dungeons, and most zones were in fact PvP. Only PvE zones were starter zones. Even cities were PvP.
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Um, PVE servers in which there were no PVP zones if you didn't want there to be outnumbered PVP servers 4 to 1 at release and were MORE CROWDED. In fact the most crowded PVE servers then are still the most crowded servers today. There is no PVP server that suffers from queue times to log on, meanwhile its a common occurance on some of the PVE servers.
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Not true on EU at least. The most crowded servers are the ones with many decent guilds, and these have long migrated to PvP servers. This issue has been massively bemoaned by people who wanted to join good guilds, but couldn't because they rolled on a PvE server and couldn't migrate to PvP. Open EU forums from the time before PvE to PvP migration was allowed, and you'll notice that they couldn't go a week without new thread on "I want to join a good PvE guild, and all good PvE guilds are on PvP realms" topi
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From forum announcements on the US side. I never paid attention to the EU so you could be right there - I wouldn't know.
I was playing since beta.
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Except that it was mentioned in the NAME of the zone that it was PvP (contested area).
Still is in fact.
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I don't see how you can possibly see the game as being more PVP focused now; they've more or less completely given up on organized PVP balance, and even specs that were traditionally balanced for PVP first (ex. Frost Mages, Arms Warriors) are now changed in favor of PVE over PVP.
It used to be that the game was designed for PvE with PvP being something you could do on the side (as in, world PvP, no battlegrounds or arena, no ladders or such things). And if you look at the players there are a lot more players who play for PvP these days, it used to be that PvP was something you did when you had some time to kill ("hey, let's go to hillsbrad!").
[...] totally worthless with no hope of a fix in sight (Tol'Barad).
The worst thing about Tol'Barad was the win-trading that went on before they "fixed" it. Lots of annoying gankers who got their first full set
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No new gold was created when gold farmers that hack accounts send gold from point a to point b, and it's general knowledge that it ruins the game.
On the other hand, this item will become so common that it'll be useless as a source of gold in no time.
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Gold DKP probably isn't going to be affected... (Score:2)
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-t
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It's not important. A vanity mount helps no one, it's not pay-to-win, no one should be upset about this.
I've always thought the best way to get rid of gold sellers is to have the games get into the business. Again it's no big deal because gold is trivial to come by. Who cares if a noob gets some money? If players don't like it they can avoid buying the items. People take games too seriously treating everything as a competition instead of having fun.
Your premise is faulty. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Your premise is faulty. (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, in the beginning of a new expansion, dungeons are challenging and require skill. And that makes people kick anyone that doesn't meet their gear requirements.
What "ruined" wow wasn't blizzard, it was the players. In the beginning, everyone was the same. Ignorant and in crappy gear. Nowadays there is this huge pit between the new guy and the old one, leading to elitism and the behavior you expressed. And these guys outgear the dungeon by so much (remember, it was designed to be beaten with crap gear) that there is no need for any kind of organization
There should be different levels of gear, but with smaller benefits from one tier to the other, so that nothing becomes trivial after you get some "epics". Easier would be ok, trivial is, in my opinion, what killed Wow.
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And yet at the beginning of WoW you could get on the early raids (UBRS, Scholo and Strat) with a mix of blues and greens: which is quite reasonable.
People didn't need to know the instances because -in complete contrast to today- people were willing to talk to each and, shock! horror! explain any upcoming tricky fights.
These days -and repeating your initial point- you are expected to be over-geared and to be have studied every patrol and boss fight.
This has become a necessity because Blizzard has made too ma
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Ulduar was beatable with no epic gear.
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You missed the point. Every dungeon is beatable by people that just turned 80 (in blue/green gear). In that kind of gear you will have a challenge is quite a few of the new raids. But then, after 10 or so runs you get way better gear and you're able to run through content (and kick people that isn't as well geared as you).
Gear should make you better, but wow makes the difference between the different tiers way too big, so in the end you'll steamroll pretty much everything.
In UBRS you needed tactics because
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Actually, I think the power difference between tiers of gear is OK, but what needs tuning is the way the random dungeon grouping handles people with different levels of gear.
For example, right now it is perfectly possible for DPS in mostly 378 gear to be put into a dungon with a tank that has gear barely meeting the level requirements of the dungeon. This leads to a situation where the tank is being screamed at to GO GO GO and they aren't learning anything other than that well geared players are often dicks
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This is
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two problems with your approach:
First, it already tries to group you with gear in mind. When everyone is missing tanks though, it then allows a few undergeared tanks to slip through so that the queue times don't become ridiculous.
And second, the problem I was addressing is exactly that no one should be able to "blast through" a dungeon. Gear nowadays makes everyone too strong, so they can, but on the 10th unchallenging dungeon run they quit for the day, or the week, or even forever. You need to challenge yo
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Before MC there was no chance to be THAT elitist. Blue gear was actually EPIC and not THAT better than the rest. Elitism existed because you were good, UBRS gear would give you an edge, but you weren't out of everybody else's league.
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I don't think you've tried raiding recently... With the lobster bucket and flask cauldrons, combined with the gold earned from "guild challenges" and selling BoE raid drops on the auction house, no raid with moderate progression should ever have to farm mats (assuming someone else is actually posting them on the auction house). The raid bank should be able to afford nearly all of the guild's flask/food buffs, and probably even potion buffs if people are conservative with them (only using them on progression
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Even when I was in WoW in the early days (just before BC) it often felt this way. And I wasn't even in end game. At middle levels players were too afraid to take risks lest an instance run not succeed the first time despite the near lack of penalty for failure. The game was clearly treated as a job to some of these players. The PVP tiering by level I think encouraged this, so that competitive players felt compelled to get the best gear while they were still level 19/29/39, etc. I have seen this drive a
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If you do the dailies for rep grinding then at level 85 gold is really just something to keep score unless you just have to buy the most expensive stuff in the AH instead of waiting for it to drop, or if you want to buy all the stuff you need to get that skill up now.
If you don't have the time to learn how to play your character well enough to do a raid then it's true you won't have enough gold to buy the stuff to
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Too bad these items are all permanent mods to the account. It means that they'll be great money makers for the early investors. As more and more people buy them through gold demand will drop and the amount of gold you can get for them will drop as well. Eventually it will reach zero as there's no longer any players that want the item. So this sort of transaction really isn't going to help that in the long run.
Compare that to EVE's PLEX, a consumable, which means demand will be kept up and provides a much mo
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"$25 for a mount still blows me away. That's more than a month of subscription time...for a vanity mount."
What's even more mind blowing is that there lots of stupid people who will just keep paying like gambling addicts.
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I agree that some implementations of microtransactions suck but think about this:
Do you play WoW every single day? I don't.
In order to play WoW at all I need to pay for a 30 day subscription. But what if I only want to play for a few weeks every few months?
Shouldn't there be a way for me to pay for my WoW game time in smaller chunks than 30 days?
If Blizzard offered a way to pay 'by the minute' would that be bad for the game?
I can imagine that some would argue that this would encourage the 'casuals' and rui
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Yep. I stayed out of WoW, so my first experience under Activision was StarCraft 2, and man did the experience suck. The game was fine, but the policies and other crap associated with battle.net 2.0... damn.
I suppose Activision's already running out of blood from Blizzard, so they need fresh blood to squeeze mon
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Know your WoW terminology. It's called TRH, short for "That Retarded Horse".
http://www.warcraftmovies.com/movieview.php?id=146009 [warcraftmovies.com]
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When that mount came out it was the only mount that altered based on your flying skill.
What did this mean?
If you had regular riding it functioned as a regular 60% mount ground.
If you had epic riding it would function as a 100% mount on ground.
If you had flying it would function as a 100% mount on ground and a whatever the basic flying speed was.
If you had epic flying it would function as a 100% mount on the ground and a 280% flying mount.
If you had a mount with 310% movement speed that mount would function
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RMT is questionable as to how much money it adds to the system. If they acquire the gold through methods that don't involve hacking or selling vendor trash then it may not add gold either. You could argue that money for RMT gained through auctions can possibly increase the gold supply (as players may farm stuff that creates gold just to buy the stuff off the auctions) but that is an indirect increase in supply at best.
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Not unless those items can be sold to vendors.
Money being transferred from a NPC (who has limitless funds) to you is a "faucet".
Money transferred from a player to a NPC is a "drain" or "sink".
Money transferred between players has zilch all effect on the total amount of
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What you call incompetence, I call optimization.
Now I could spend 16 hours grinding the money or I could spend $50 to buy gold.
Let's see...... I get paid more than $3.13/hr. Yep, buying gold makes a lot more sense.
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In most cases you don't leave a game "because there's something better to do". You leave it because you get bored with it, or some major feature annoys you enough to get you to quit.
I would imagine that pay-to-win would certainly qualify as "feature that annoys you enough to quit" for many people.
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For me, it was trying to be a tank or healer in the cesspool that is random cross-realm LFG. (And since they took out the "same-server-only" option, don't start up with "form your own group". It doesn't work any more.)
It was like empirical proof of the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.
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It does tbh. Before I quit in the beginning of this year, I did form dungeon groups quite a lot, since I cba to tank (I was a death knight main since the beginning of wrath). I had the gear for since I was offspec tank in raids when needed, but I was DPS main and I preferred to have fun seeing who could win on meters.
As a result our runs were always extremely fast, and we rarely had problems getting people to fill most spots. We may have sometimes needed to grab one person from LFG tool, but that's not much
Eve did it first... (Score:2, Interesting)
Eve online did it first, and paid a price for doing it incorrectly...they've since apologized [eveonline.com] 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...
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No. This is more like the Noble Exchange. Its a vanity item that can be traded for in game currency. PLEX are not a vanity item as they have a use that consumes them.
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It's not that they don't want to admit it, they are just happy about it. Someone who just spent some $ for his internet spaceship is much more likely to be an idiot that flies around without support. So they make for some mighty fine killmails.
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additionally, you still need to build that stuff.
capitals just dont drop from the air. first you have to get "some" veldspar and stuff.
so basicly even if the player pays in eve to be a rich kid, he still needs to wait for skills, and somebody else needs to mine and build his ships.
money is gone fast in eve if you got no clue what you do.
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Aye. You can't ignore all the underlying economic activity that has to happen in EVE. Mining, Refining, Construction.
Even if you can buy a super cap it will still take 6 weeks just to built it so unless people have super caps lying around they're will to sell it's not an instant transfer.
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Yawn, mostly we don't care, because we can band together and blow up those scaps. Made even easier after the coming nerfs to super-caps.
At the same time, the other reason we don't care is because PLEX does not magically add ISK to the game. So it has
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You've got these trust-fund babies out there multi-boxing on high-end computers
Oh please. I used to run two instances of Eve on the same medium range box at the same time. MMOs aren't about how much money you have, they're about how much time you can devote...and always have been. Well...actually gold sellers make it about how much money you have. But hardware has never had much of an effect on MMOs.
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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
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Eve did what first? Allowing you to buy ingame items for real world money and then turn around and sell them for ingame money? Nope - Puzzle Pirates did that first with the Doubloon Exchange back in 2005.
This won't hurt the economy at all. (Score:2)
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 a
Sorry, that happened well over a year ago (Score:2)
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
And so (Score:2)
Blizzard has lost their way (Score:3)
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.
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It's all about priorities, activision wants a return on investment and will do anything to get it. In the last year they have lost 1 million subs, went from a 2 raid to 1 raid per tier citing time issues. They excuse lack of storage space due to DB size. They still have some of the longest maintenance in the industry. It's a death spiral right now and they are still making piles of money. All the competent staff seems to have moved onto there next generation project.
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I'm confused. When did we get two raids per tier?
1.0 - Onyxia & Molten Core (1 tier, 2 raids)
1.6 - Blackwing Lair (1 tier)
1.9 - The Gates of Ahn'Qiraj (1 tier, unless you count the 20-man)
1.11 - Shadow of the Necropolis (1 tier)
2.0 - Magtharidon, SSC, Gruul & TK at launch (2 tiers, 4 raids + KZ)
2.1 - The Black Temple (1 tier)
2.4 - Sunwell (1 tier)
3.0 - Sarthion, Malygos & Nax (3 tiers)
3.1 - Secrets of Ulduar (1 tier)
3.2 - Call of the Crusade (1 tier)
3.3 - Fall of the Lich King (1 tier)
4.0 - Thro
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They promised multiple raids per tier in cata to compensate for the new shared lockouts. Shorter raids and more of them. They claimed not enough time to finish the other 4.3 raid.
The void storage stripping everything off is a storage issue as in they do not want to keep those extra attributes. The keyring removal was explicitly stated as an issue of space http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/2548839953 [battle.net]
The cata mantra was smaller faster patches with more content. So far were at best on par, and lookin
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It wasn't to "compensate for the shared lockouts" it was so that you weren't staring at the same fucking background all week. I guess they figured if they just made little raids you wouldn't be in there long enough for it to be as draining.
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Item ID is a 2 byte value in the game. So every item: 2 bytes + 2 Bytes for enchantment + 3 x 2 bytes for gems + 1 byte for reforge... let's say 2. 12 bytes per item total. Player's can have about 100 bag slots and 200 bank slots for a total of 300. so 300x12 = 3600 bytes/toon. 50 toons max... 180KBytes per account.
But yes. I agree. Let a player's storage hold more... even if 1 player takes up 1 Megabyte of storage then you can fit 1 million players on a single terabyte hard drive. If blizzard's hard up I'l
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Just wondering, if WoW is losing subscribes so quickly than what's replacing it? What are the upstart alternatives, and what's so good about them?
Old news... (Score:2)
T'rain did it first.
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Nope, I suspect a lot of people noticed it.
I wonder if Neal Stephenson applied for a patent on business method ;)
Market value? (Score:3)
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I played Atlantica (among other f2p games) which basically had exactly what WoW is adding now, although the game was f2p so it was at least somewhat excusable, I can't believe they have the balls to do this for a p2p game.
Basically what happens is the item will be worth a ton when it first comes out. It won't tank quickly, but it will gradually become worth less and less as the new "shininess" factor wears off.
Then Blizzard will replace the item with a new "more shiny" item. The current shiny item will drop
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Which is exactly why Blizzard thinks it's "ok". It's regulated by the in-game market and so it has a cap on value and works properly within the system. Normal gold buying is disruptive because it works outside the market and encourages people to play in an abnormal way (even ignoring all the scamming and account stealing it generates).
I don't necessarily agree with them, but that's likely Blizzard's logic. And if it stops a couple people from buying gold from third parties, that's to their benefit, too.
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Correct, however, nothing is preventing Blizzard from increasing the number of available items that can be traded once the market for the Guardian Cub is saturated (easily determined by their sales figures for the pet).
Blizzard is going very slowly to test the backlash from the community, so they're starting with one item. Worst case scenario, there's only ever going to be this one pet that can be bought and traded in this way. Minimum possible impact. Blizzard is just playing it safe.
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And yet, if those expectations are higher than the function of supply of the item and demand for it, you'll either be stuck without your $10 and nothing to show for it, or you'll adjust your expectations downward to realize some gain.
I imagine you'll see the same kind of sinusoidal price movements for this as you see for other WoW items, with high prices inducing more people to get one and list it on the AH, quickly overwhelming the demand and tanking the price.
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In order to keep the entire game viable, you have to insure that the freeloaders (those who use in-game money to pay for playtime), are few and far between. From everything I've seen of WoW, gold is just way too easy to come by.
This is incorrect. Nobody is paying for game time with in-game money, the game time is always purchased with real money but may be transferred to a third party to apply to their account. That may be a gift, tax, sale, whatever, but someone paid cash for that 30 days game time it's jut not necessarily the person who actually uses it.
WoW gone soft... (Score:2)
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 no
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Good God (Score:2)
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
Overreaction (Score:2)
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 in
The only issue is precedent (Score:2)
WoW improvements (Score:2)
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
Re:Sensationalist Bullshit (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Thank you for explaining that, I was totally lost as to what the hell the description was trying to convey.
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Player B sells pet to Player C for real-world money and resumes mining
Player C becomes new Player A
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Why would player C buy it from player B for real money, when they could buy it from blizzard for real money?
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There is a finite (and very small) supply of valuable TCG cards. There are an infinite number of these pets available in the Blizzard store.
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Obviously blizzard is establishing some of stimulus package for Orgrimmer. Those lazy ass trolls keep up with the protesting out the front of the AH there's gonna be trouble!
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You'd be surprised at how much gold a lot of in-game items are worth at the auction house.
There's been heavy inflation going on for quite some time, items comparable to what used to be very expensive 2000G items are now selling for 20-25kG on many realms ("comparable" when compared to what the current top tier of equipment and items is).
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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.
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March '05 I made my account. It was a blast, and you're right, there used to be community. People would talk (or more often flame) in general and you could have a name on your server. Sooner or later that disappeared with cross faction BGs and instances. Up until a couple of patches ago, the guy you just did UBRS with you'll never see again most likely. Even if you did become RealID friends and started queuing together, you still won't get the same friendship as someone on your server.
I log in here and ther
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I'd say, try EQ2, or if you want something retro, EQ1. Yes, these games have been around a while, but they do have a solid sense of community. At the minimum, you know the trolls and the trolls are actually trying to use their heads to try to heat up 1-9 or PR chat.
Yes, EQ2 has items you can buy in the marketplace, but it is limited to mounts, XP potions (double xp for a period of time), a rent-free house, appearance gear, and the ability to buy added character slots.
Of course, EQ2 isn't perfect, but I pl
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Or we went back to EVE, which, as much as it can be a cess-pool of griefing, also has its fine share of upstanding members. And since there is no "level to 85, win arena matches, get I WIN button to use in world PvP or BGs", the short-attention-span folks don't last long enough in EVE to be more then a mosquito bite.
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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.
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Like anyone goes to the Hinterlands anymore.
And, for the record, I fucking HATE troll lore. Lamest race in the game by a looong stretch. And yes, I am including Goblins in that analysis.