I thought this was a joke but it seems like it’s actually legit. WoW, which has a subscription and paid expansions, just added a $90 item to their store. This is Korean MMO levels of absurdity. What do you think of this?
Imagine a parallel world where no one brought the horse armour
God dammit Todd…
The Wizard Tower was so cool too…
to me this is the wrong way of looking at it, it’s like saying “imagine a world where plutocrats just didn’t do pollution, imagine a world where plantation owners didn’t use slave labor, imagine a world where industrialists didn’t employ children”
it was always going to happen, just society has to force capitalists not to be cunts. Only way, always was, always will be, still is.
Yes but no. Imagine before the horse armour, parents both showed love to their children and also disciplined them for doing stupid shit and also taught them the worth of a dollar. No horse armour in that world.
Imagine a parallel world where no one brought the horse armour
Redditors said the same thing
I still haven’t escaped the hive mind it seems
Humans gonna human
I think it’s an eventuality. If not the horse armor it would have been something else. Humans are easily exploitable
It’s actually more insidious. Blizzard facilitates gold buying by being a middle man. 30 days of wow subscription is $15. Blizzard sells a $20 wow token. Buyers of the token automatically sell it in game to players for gold. Players who sell their In game gold can redeem the token for game time or $15 Blizzard bucks, which can buy any virtual item in the Blizzard store. Games, expansions, and mounts such as this.
If you don’t want to spend $90 in real life, you can sell your gold for 6 tokens for $90 Blizzard bucks and get the mount.
The token has been hovering around $170k all month and now it spiked to almost $360k (token price tracker). So now cash buyers can get way more gold for their bucks, and the 6 tokens exchanged for gold (to buy the mount) will net Blizzard $120.
I’ve known about the gold tokens system, it has made sense as a way to invalidate black market gold sellers, equalizing WoW gold against the US Dollar. Still don’t quite understand why the token would now sell for 170k though…? Unless you didn’t mean to use the dollar symbol.
They probably meant 170k gold in-game
Also what they haven’t said is that the price is set by players of the game,. When someone buys a WoW token and exchanges it for gold, that’s because a player has paid them with gold they earned for the token. These tokens can be then used to pay for your monthly subscription.
Those amounts aren’t USD yeah, probably habit when writing down money. The 170k and 360k figures are the WoW virtual currency aka “gold”.
There is a floor to WoW token’s gold value from what I recall (it’s been years since I interacted with Blizzard and WoW) but no ceiling.
Dunno how hard it curbed bots/unsanctioned gold sellers/fascist scum grassroots campaigns (no, really, look into Stephen Bannon and WoW gold it’s so fucking stupid) but!
Blizzard absolutely realized and then moved to take all the money that was being left on the table from 3rd party virtual currency sales, and they apply every measure and analytical tool to maximize that profit because of course.
This mount’s release is literally them inflating the price of the virtual currency ahead of real life earnings calls, because it absolutely will sell and give them the revenue infusion that the WoW token’s rise in value is meant to provide for as long as they want until it’s time to pump the numbers again with another mount/high sought store item.
A very similar variant in form and function to this mount was once available in-game and trade able with a rarity tuned that it ended up being sold for the WoW Token equivalent of ~$500 at the prices at the time, as there was no store version or similar option elsewhere.
It’s no accident that when the price of the WoW Token is at its lowest, here comes a slightly updated and dolled up version of that same highly sought mount version.
WoW is where real economics, car ownership culture, hoarding, and dopamine treadmills collide and Blizzard doesn’t just know this but have it charted on 5 year plans.
At least it’s not Star Citizen prices:
What the fuck? Do people actually pay that for virtual bullshit? That’s like the price of a used Honda!
There’s also a pack containing every ship they’ve sold which you can only see/purchase if you’ve spent one thousand dollars in their ship store. I’ll spoiler the price so you can try and guess how much it is first:
spoiler
$48,000, not counting the $1000 you have to spend to be able to see it.
Edit: I should include the source for that price since (as mentioned) you can’t even see the pack until you’ve dropped $1k
It’s intended for whales and for the 65 crew members to split. But I can’t imagine they sell many.
That’s still a little bit over $46 a player. So you’d have to have 65 whales agree to split it.
$46 a player isn’t unheard of, even outside whaling.
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Same. Actual drug addiction (cannabis) has been far cheaper than WoW was
I saw people being mad not because they are selling a 90$ mount, but because now everyone can just have it instead of grinding 5 million gold lol.
Showing off is an important part of social MMOs. If anyone can have the really cool looking thing for some cash then what’s the point of grinding? For a hardcore player, what do they have to show off their prestige?
It’s pretty important for an MMO to respect its most active players. Not to mention, what do new players have to look up to? To think, what do I have to get that? If the answer is “oh I just have to fork out some dough”. That’s kinda disappointing
It’s going to sell like crazy. It’s not just that it’s a Mount, but it also has an auction house and mailbox that you can use anywhere at any time. The only other mount that has the AH is no longer attainable regularly, only on rare occasions for gold cap.
I am going to get it, but I’m going to use my gold in game to convert to bnet balance.
I was going to say who cares if they’re selling a mount skin, but if on-the-go access to the auction house and mailbox isn’t normally accessible, this seems shitty.
The thing is, they won’t be able to sell a Mount like this again in the future. This is kind of a “break glass” type of situation.
I think it’s a terrible decision because of this. The whole point of hubs is to get players together and interacting. Putting AH and mail around hubs requires many players together. Giving folks a mount means the hubs stop being hubs and contributes to the continued decay of the multiplayer aspect.
Take this with a grain of salt. When I last played hubs still mattered. If that isn’t currently the case this is just old fart complaints.
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That thing is still earnable every so often in game if you catch it on the black market
Lol, that is not realistic for most players. The original 5 million gold was not realistic back then either.
Yeah it’s always been a status symbol. Nowadays it isn’t even that useful because they put auction houses in the expansion cities anyway, so it’s basically just a status symbol for people who spend WAY too much time on the auction house. This mount isn’t even half as P2W as people would have you believe.
I’m more surprised that this game is still running. I haven’t heard of anyone playing it in years.
I quit after they fraudulently charged me a 6 month subscription renewal and then refused to refund it for months because no customer service reps anymore, and then the next expansion had paid early access for a huge paywall. It’s a total scam now
I had jumped back in when tbc classic was released. I wound up on a dead server. It made end game content essentially impossible. I was hoping to move right into wotlk classic at release as that was my jam back in the day. Except they weren’t going to include the dungeon finder or cross realm groups meaning it would still be a dead server with no chance at end game content. I was done with pointlessly dumb leadership. Unsubbed and found a private server that hits all the right buttons.
There’s a few at work who have admitted to still playing. Blizzard owes a lot to the very concrete social structures built around the game.
It’s one of those games I’ve always been interested in trying, but the idea of paying a subscription for a videogame makes me uncomfortable for some reason.
It’s not the same amount as its heyday, but it’s still the most popular MMO. Hell i picked it up last expansion after not playing it for ten years and still have a good time, for now.
I will never buy this mount though. I refuse to pay more for a game that costs money to buy and a sub to play. What’s unfortunate is you can really tell blizzards priorities now. Content is severely lacking, every patch has quite a few bugs, and it really feels like they have a skeleton crew working on the game while milking the remaining population. And so many people are totally okay with that. If there was at least another decent MMO out there I’d drop wow and play it. But the MMORPG space is sorely lacking.
TIL world of Warcraft still exists
On the up side, it’s now very, VERY easy to tell who is an idiot in the main hub cities within 10 seconds of the auction house.
I’m a former player, but played continuously from release for 11 years. This is undoubtedly ridiculously expensive, but the convenience of having your mail and auction house anywhere in the world - the value to certain players is immense. I think if I played still today, it would probably be a struggle deciding whether this limited time offering was worth jumping on - I certainly don’t need it even a little bit, but when I want it, this thing would be incredibly convenient to have. Maybe that would just be the addiction talking. But when you spend all your free time with one game, you do feel a sense of good value relative to things like drinks at the bar or a movie or buying 1 or 2 full priced games a month.
But truly, the utility this provides for you and your guild is immense and impossible to replicate. They definitely shouldn’t be selling mounts on the shop for $90. That’s fucked. But compared to some of the video game devs selling weapon or character skins for as much or more, there IS at least a unique value proposition to the player. I guarantee there will be people with it the second it releases, for better or worse.
People will buy it. And then they will wonder why content quality declines and more and more micro transactions appear in a game they bought and pay subscription for.
The capitalism will always look for the easy route to even more money, and monkey brains with need for status symbols will follow.
It should have been a flying whale.
Like the lunar whale from FFXIV? What a waste of 40.
I think I don’t have battle.net installed so they can’t hurt me anymore.
What did you expect to happen after Diablo 4? lol
What did you expect to happen after Diablo
4immortal?After Diablo Immortal I knew not to purchase Diablo 4 in the first month. After how profitable Diablo Immortal was of course this was going to be the way Blizzard continued to go.
This is why I’m more and more playing Indie games. The game has to be made by someone who wanted to make a fun game, as anyone with a profit incentive is just going to make Candy Crush and for some reason people will pay for it.
