Atleast deathwing one is free, the crappy albatros is the one thats payed for.
Blizzard (pre-merger) was certainly more “benevolent” when subscriptions were its only form of monetisation outside of expansions (which were few and far between). It kept them in check. Losing subscribers was a significant loss in revenue, and gaining them was a significant increase.
I don’t think it’s any coincidence that Classic, TBC and WotLK are as lauded as they are and correlates with the highest number of subscribers WoW has achieved.
A subscriber count that plummeted in Cataclysm, which would’ve been the first expansion that now Activision Blizzard worked on. And a record, not even come close to being broken ever since.
Nowadays, if one person buys two store mounts. You think Activision Blizzard gives a damn if four people unsub the following month?
2 Likes
Why would they get a 100 boost when that would put them an entire expansion behind? Wouldn’t a 110 boost make more sense?
My guess is giving them a lesser boost is so it doesn’t totally equal a paid boost. It’s obviously to entice people back but I don’t think it would have hurt them to give us all a 100 char boost per account.
5 Likes
Sure, but if the idea is to entice them to start playing again I don’t see how forcing them to plod through old content is going to do that…
Wouldn’t say no to a free 110 boost. That’s for sure.
In the past if servers were really bad you got for the time they needed to fix it a day or 3 extension to your sub. Even if you managed to play while they ahd alot of technical issues. Not anymore! Suddenly it’s about being able to try to log in and thus whenever the servers are bad for more than a few hours you get told no.
So the only players getting a reward are the massive masses who already gave up and thus want them back. “It’s our 15th birthday for WoW, sub now and get a free lv 100 boost! Our existing customers? Nah they can buy a mount!”
1 Like
I’d like one for every warcraft account I have that’s not starter, well I can dream can’t I?
As far as I remember the only time we got given free days on our sub was when the servers were unplayable and the last time I saw the servers that bad were on WoD’s release when we got free game time again.
I am not here defending Blizzard but making stuff up to make them sound so much better in the past isn’t helping.
1 Like
Magazine I had did this, a year sub was € 55, first year a free € 60 game, stores? € 65 for a year. But when extended the free gifts ended. But if you did 1 year sub, 1 year store and then 1 year sub every 2 years a free, new and full priced game. So I paid € 165, with a free game. Where somebody else got paid € 175 with 2 free games. Guess what I did soon after.
Yes you said unplayable but still able to log on and to play a bit. It was a luck of the draw, I played during some of days and it was bad yet still got my free 3 days for the inconvience and bad servers.
1 Like
No I don’t but I also don’t think that Activision were to blame for the plummet in subs during Cata. I lay that blame firmly at the feet of the Devs and the playerbase that wanted old world ‘refreshed’ which left pitifully few resources to actually make a decent expansion.
It wouldn’t have mattered after that point we would be in a similar state now even had the cash shop not been expanded upon post Wrath.
Which was the whole point. Blizzard couldn’t really differentiate between the players who could log on and play and those that could log on but not do anything. So because there was a proportion of the playerbase that couldn’t play for substantial periods of time during the server issues everyone got given game time.
Heck, I got some free days when I was at sea miles from land and there was no way that I could even log on. Much the same as everyone who had a subscription during the WoD fiasco got the gametime added to their account as the servers were unplayable (again I wasn’t even in the same country as my computer when WoD released and I got the free gametime).
So again trying to make out like there were these halcyon days when Blizzard would just throw out free stuff to the playerbase in the form of gametime still exists now and to try and make out the whole activision bad, blizzard good angle is disingenuous at best.
1 Like
It’s worse they expect us to pay them to get of dead or near dead severs or cluster instead of them fixing them or just merging them. “Oh your server is dead? if you pay me € 25 per char…”
2 Likes
Well you’re correct in that Blizzard could’ve been equally as egregious on their own. They might not have been too. It doesn’t really matter because Vivendi and Activision did merge, and what I do know is that the mentality behind the game is a lot different than it used to be. It has to be.
Subscriptions are no longer a crucial part of their business model, and keeping everyone placated is less of a priority than keeping ~10% paying beyond their own sub. This wasn’t the case prior the end of WotLK, because the means to do so didn’t exist.
I more so blame the content drought that occurred in the middle of the expansion, though I don’t remember why that was, I’d only be guessing.
Though I do believe that drought was 6-8 months without even a small patch of content, people got sick of waiting and millions never came back again. It didn’t help that the expansion itself was underwhelming on its own too.
The raids were phenomenal though. I won’t take that away from Cata.
To be fair the first “store pets and mounts” were introduced during Wrath and I think that the plans must have been in place when Vivendi still owned Blizz and it was just exacerbated by Activision.
As for Cata I recall it plummeting from the beginning with ‘too hard’ heroic dungeons, the disastrous underwater realm (I know people loved it in hindsight but at the time it was a proper whingefest on here) and just the bad zones overall.
However we digress from the current shady policies and are in danger of getting slapped wrists for derailing the thread.
1 Like
I’d agree with that. Mid-WotLK was when things started to change, which would coincide with the merger. Some big WoW personalities also in hindsight thought that too.
Though for me personally, it was the pre-patch that really hit that home. That’s where classes got massive overhauls, talents were reworked, abilities got pruned and a lot of the “old stuff” people came to know got removed. Or “polished” (I still remember hating that Holy Power bar thing they did with Paladins). Certainly there was a change in leadership and direction from there on out, but that might’ve been because the pre-patch made it even more obvious.
Nah, it’s just funny to pop back here sometimes 
1 Like
albatros? the one for 1000 dubloons? yeah, 1 “expensive” mount is ok, but there are loads of mounts this expansion that cost a lot of tokens or gold 
activision merged with blizzard on 2008-07-09. now, this would have been before WotLK came out on 2008-11-13, but most of the “good” stuff about WotLK would probably already have been planned out mostly, so it would have been hard for activision to tamper with it.
but the celestial steed came out 2010-04-15. so that was only 8 months before cata came out (2010-12-07) so activision could have possible gotten their dirty little fingers into the pie by that stage. so its quite possible that it is more activisions fault than vivendi.
so this is not exactly derailing the op, cause its activision blizzards MO now, as it was with the celestial steed.
apparently 140,000 people “queued” to get celestial mount, making $3.5M just for that one mount. that does not include the many purchases of celestial steed which im sure have been made since the release day.
https:// www.gamesindustry. biz/articles/over-140-000-gamers-queue-to-buy-wow-celestial-steed
its no wonder why blizzard would rather release a store mount every now and again rather than put effort into varied content
i wonder how many people will get these mounts straight away? will it be another easy $3.5M+ in blizzards pockets while the game falters?
this is one of my top 5 complaints about the game maybe, along with “impossible” grinds (overall), terrible rng, no love for collections, and no “endgame”, as in final goalposts.
For being a loyal paying customer this is what I “get”:
Wizen, Celebrate 15 Years in Sculpted Style with New Mounts
Celebrate 15 years of conflict and camaraderie in Azeroth with a pair of majestic alabaster mounts, living stone tributes to the loyal flying creatures that have long served the Horde and the Alliance—the Alabaster Stormtalon for Alliance characters and the Alabaster Thunderwing for Horde characters.
>>>>> BUY NOW <<<<<
Celebrate the WoW anniversary with your favourite faction. Check out our new World of Warcraft arrivals in the [ Blizzard Gear Store ]
>>>>> SHOP NOW <<<<<
2 Likes
selling point of BfA is Legion.
nice!
3 Likes
Jesus… an uproar for a 100th lvl boost. Wow.
Why do you want a 100lvl boost? useless for allies, need to do last 20th level?
If you play since 1452 you have a main or many you currently use… so WHY THE HELL you want a boost to 100???
1 Like