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 ~$500 at the prices at the time, as there was no store version or similar option elsewhere.
It’s no accident that when the price of the WoW Token is at its lowest, here comes a slightly updated and dolled up version of that same highly sought mount version.
WoW is where real economics, car ownership culture, hoarding, and dopamine treadmills collide and Blizzard doesn’t just know this but have it charted on 5 year plans.
it’s selling well too though it’s actually 78$. They put Mailbox and Auction House on it which AFAIK the only mount that has both which is incredibly valuable.
If not the fuction I wouldn’t mind but because the function is so valuable it’s really poor form by Blizzard. I even love the mount and buy it as cosmetic but I’m not supporting this at the state it is currently.
There was a green mount similar to this one they added in BFA for a large sum of gold. But they claimed to dislike how it encouraged so many people to play the market and removed it.
They did not remove it, people still use them all the time and it’s available on the “black market” (an NPC that sells normally unavailable things) every so often. The mount was just an enormous gold sink for people with a ton of money.
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.
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.
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.
Edit: I stand corrected, you can purchase tokens and turn them into game time, but I didn’t know they could be turned into $15 battle net balance. This mount does, indeed, cost less gold than the original Brutosaur (or did before token prices skyrocketed)
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