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.
Ok so I cackled when I saw the price on this thing but the more I thought about it, the less shitty it is. FWIW I am not a WoW lifer or Blizzard apologist. I got talked into Classic for a year then played a month or two of each expansion since before quitting but I know the background of the story. It looks way worse from an outsider perspective.
You could buy the original auction house mount for 5 million gold back in the day. It stopped being available regularly and now it’s available occasionally in the “black market auction house” and it always sells for the maximum bid.
To combat Chinese gold farmers, Blizzard started selling gold in a bit of a roundabout way. For $20, you can buy a WoW token to sell on the auction house. This token can be purchased by a player and traded for 1 month of game time. Some players dont pay a dime to play - gold is not hard to acquire.
When this new mount came out, WoW tokens were worth about 200k gold. You’d need to exchange them for 5 tokens to get this mount. 1/5 of the original price.
Now tokens are worth 330k. 1.65m golf. STILL significantly cheaper than it was originally.
Tokens will need to rise to triple in price to match the original cost which will still be a tiny fraction of what it cost a month ago.
By far the shittiest thing about this - and I think the only real reason to complain - is that the rising value of the token hurts players who pay for the subscription purely with gold as it adds a few hours to their “working” time in game. For context, watching TV and semi-afk farming will get you like 50k/hour. You can earn way, way more if you’ve leveled up a profession.
The other (not so bad) thing I don’t like about it is that…I hate those mounts. They’re HUGE and people just AFK on them blocking NPCs I want to talk to.
The other (not so bad) thing I don’t like about it is that…I hate those mounts. They’re HUGE and people just AFK on them blocking NPCs I want to talk to.
TFW the year is 2024 AD and blizzard still has not properly addressed this
Oh yeah, I actually remember that from the last time I relapsed (Legion). I was wondering if I hallucinated that workaround… But it’s still just that : a stupid workaround. It baffles me that it is seemingly impossible for them to implement a keybind that targets the nearest “interactive” npc in range
It hurts to do this, because you’ve obviously thought out your comment and you obviously like the game and want to believe the devs are doing their best. But I think your entire premise is wrong
To combat Chinese gold farmers, Blizzard started selling gold in a bit of a roundabout way
Why do you think this? Why do you grant a greedy game dev the benefit of the doubt? They’re cashing in on Chinese gold farmers in all possible ways, man:
By allowing their accounts to exist instead of banning and moving on
By controlling the value of gold with a cash shop, ensuring economy is in their favor
The cash shop also brings them monetary value.
They are triple dipping, and you choose to believe they are doing it because they’re a good game dev.
A good game dev would ban accounts guilty of real money trading. A good game dev would fix the in-game economy with in-game methods. A good game dev wouldn’t have micro transactions in a subscription game. You want to believe Blizzard is doing this because of those evil Chinese farmers - I’m here to tell you they’re profiting from this and don’t have the morals to make it right.
To combat Chinese gold farmers, Blizzard started selling gold in a bit of a roundabout way. For $20, you can buy a WoW token to sell on the auction house. This token can be purchased by a player and traded for 1 month of game time. Some players dont pay a dime to play - gold is not hard to acquire.
To combat Chinese gold farmers, Blizzard started selling gold in a bit of a roundabout way. For $20, you can buy a WoW token to sell on the auction house. This token can be purchased by a player and traded for 1 month of game time. Some players dont pay a dime to play - gold is not hard to acquire.
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
End game content - the stuff that “makes” wow - is tuned for active players, not casuals. They are catering to casual players in a way that doesn’t significantly affect hardcore players…unless you think there should be huge barriers of entry to the most basic things?
What a load of nonsense. Wows endgame raids and dungeons are the best and most active of any MMO available and those are exclusively for the active players
Access to raids and gearing for success in those raids is easier now than ever before. Just getting access to a raid used to be a time consuming endeavor. Do you remember attunement? Or leveling lock picking on your rogue for a week so you could circumvent a key that was unavailable? Or finding a 5 person group who was able and willing to complete a dungeon and then traveling through hostile territory to get to the entrance? All of that is gone. It’s gone because they hope to entice more casual players, despite the fact that those things were challenging, and fun, and added a lot of uniqueness to each person’s abilities and experiences.
What? FF14 is currently running laps around wow’s sub numbers, wow hasn’t been the most active MMO available since before bfa and the bootlicking cratered it.
I’d really love to know where you are getting your numbers from. I find it hard to believe that the game where the last expansion is tanking in the review score as compared to prior expansions is beating wow
What did you expect to happen after Diablo 4 immortal?
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.
Transactions are from two parties, if the product didn’t sell they wouldn’t keep doing it. The product wouldn’t exist if it failed to sell in the first place.
Plenty of shitty products in the world that never get sold, and then stop being produced.
Square Enix literally has this in FFXIV and it’s half of what Blizzard wants for their mount ($42 USD). And at least the FFXIV whale mount has in-world lore history and isn’t just an overt cash grab.
Gee, for the same money… a digital brontosaurus for Orc Game that you need to pay a recurring subscription to actually use, can be taken away from you at any time, or one day the servers may simply be turned off erasing not only your “investments” but also your years of “work.” Or, I don’t know, a CIVIVI Hyperpulse with a groovy pattern welded blade that also happens to be a physical object you can actually hold in your hands and keep forever. Just to pick something out of a hat.
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.
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.
You are correct. Token value is decided by players on the auction house, not Blizzard, though I’m sure someone will argue that they are capable of manipulating the AH and therefore they are driving it up
They are capable of it, but I don’t really see why they would. Making the tokens cost more gold would mean less people willing to buy them on the AH and therefore less people selling tokens. I think the prices have just exploded because of the mount releasing. As someone else mentioned on here, I believe Blizzard just sets a minimum price for tokens.
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.
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