It is such an expensive game that my total expenditure since paying for BfA is…wait for it…£0.00.
Yes you read that right, £0.00. Havent personally spent one solitary penny on the game due to the tokens…Yes Yes I know someone has to buy them, but for me personally it is £0.00.
How can that be deemed as an expensive game?
Where are the micro transactions that are essential to the game? Nowhere to be seen, nothing in the shop is anything but cosmetic, they are there for you, as a player to purchase if you choose! If you decide to buy that nice shiny helmet in the shop, or that lovely looking mount, it will have no direct bearing on the game you are playing, simply making you look nicer.
Oi! I am offended!
I don’t know. I’d say the WoW Token is quite essential to the game, because there is nothing you cannot get in WoW, so long as you have enough gold.
And then there’s a discussion to be had about the various character services, be it the server change, name change, race change, faction change, or what have you. And they all cost money, regardless of people paying a subscription.
And Blizzard have this recent habit of offering pre-purchase of their expansions, namely a Digital Deluxe version, so you get access to certain content in advance - which, depending on the player, can be quite essential. Getting an early dip on the Void Elves felt pretty darn essential to me, considering the fact that I wanted to play one.
But maybe it’s all in the eye of the beholder.
and none of which are essential to improving your character in the game, they are an option for you to utilise if you want to, I have when I moved my characters to another realm, that was my choice, I could have stayed where I was and still played the game.
As does most other games out there, except the other games also charge you for extra skins for a weapon, or extra weapons etc, now they are Micro transactions!
The WoW token is a purely personal choice, it is in no way essential to playing the game. I use the token for my game time, if it wasnt there then I would use the traditional method, it isn’t essential at all, it is a convienient service.
That is your choice tho, it isn’t essential to the game itself, it may be to you, but not to the game in general.
I kind of feel like you’re applying a very specific, narrow-minded definition of what constitutes “essential” to this little exercise.
Fact of the matter is that WoW has quite a lot of microtransactions for being a subscription-based game.
And most players will find some of them difficult to get around at some point in time. Either because they discover friends playing on other servers or the opposite faction, and therefore have to make use of the relevant character services, or in my case because a pre-purchase option provides early access to a desired gameplay feature, or because someone really wants a big dinosaur mount and the WoW Token is the only realistic way of acquiring the gold.
You may not deem those microtransactions essential to the game, but Blizzard are doing a damn good job of making sure that players will find it difficult to completely avoid them.
No, i am using essential as it is defined, something that is required for the game to be improved upon. Nothing you have given yet is an essential aspect for the game, we are not talking personally here, as that is different, and not the topic of this thread.
None of which are not cosmetic, purely an option for the player if he/she wishes it, No transactions in the shop will allow you to improve your player, short of making him look a little bit nicer to look at.
A good example of this is the ship model, it doesn’t float because then that could have been deemed unfair, being able to purchase a mount that floats!
Total rubbish, if I don’t have friends on a realm, then if I couldn’t afford to change, then i’d either
1…Make new friends.
2…Make a character on the realm with friends.
Blizzard aren’t making this difficult at all, they could have just left it that there weren’t any character services. It is a service that they offer, again it is not in any way shape or form essential to the playing of the game, but merely a service they supply, a service that, you as a player decided whether to utilise.
The WoW Token, again.
Buy WoW Token.
Sell WoW Token on the AH.
Use gold to buy BoE epics or get boosted in raids.
Your character is now improved.
Want to improve it further? Buy more WoW Tokens.
Rubbish.
If I play Hearthstone or Diablo or StarCraft II or whatever, and I want to play on the US servers, then I can just change servers and do that. It doesn’t cost anything. I am free to move around and play globally whenever I want to.
With WoW it’s different. Here Blizzard have seen the opportunity to monetize the ability to connect and play with other players who are located elsewhere than you.
That’s not an offer, that’s a ransom.
It isn’t essential tho is it? You arent restricted in your gameplay if you don’t buy one? There isn’t a point in the game where it just stops and states ‘Sorry but to go further you need to purchase a token!’ They are a choice for the player.
You still have to play the game regardless of how much gold you get, and boosts have been around since ‘Classic’ so you cannot blame the token for that.
If you got the gold and then gained the gear by not playing the game, then that would be different, but you are still playing the game, in the manner you choose.
No thats an offer, you decide whether you wish to take it or not. WoW US and Wow EU and the other areas have always been seperate entities, since the time the game was released, there is no change there whatsoever.
You seem to be trying to find fault with Blizzard regardless of their practices being this way since launch.
And failing.
But then the discussion gets silly, because under that definition a free-to-play game like Fortnite has a ton of microtransactions - but none of them would constitute being essential as they’re cosmetic of nature.
So if a free-to-play game can exist without essential microtransactions, then why am I paying €10 per month for a subscription in order to play WoW? ![:thinking:](https://d1bg94bbsh66ji.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/thinking.png?v=6" ":thinking:")
It’s a bit difficult to see what that subscription money goes toward. Or what it prevents the inclusion of.
Subscription fee prevents games from using ingame cash shop, so everything can be acquired in the game.
Imagine wow without a sub, you will see trinkets and bis wep in there.
But WoW already has a cash shop, and the WoW Token lets you acquire anything in the game through it - there’s nothing in WoW gold can’t buy.
So that is already the reality of WoW.
I want wow to carry on, cause it supports my mental health. I need some stability anchor in my life, and this game is one of the most stable things I know and can rely on.
So I am ok with parting with few euros, but I don’t think there are many people damaged like me.
ES:O does not have 11 million active players. It has 11 million accounts created.
The estimated number of monthly active players on PC/Mac is currently around 900k while their last ‘official’ count was 2.5 million active users back in 2017.
More than you think… I am a survivor of physical and sexual abuse from my childhood… and even now in my 40’s it still affects me… doesn’t take over anymore though… and while wow isn’t my crutch it’s very good for keeping me focused.
((hugs))
I like that about this game ![:blush:](https://d1bg94bbsh66ji.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/blush.png?v=6" ":blush:")
Hugs ![:hugs:](https://d1bg94bbsh66ji.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/hugs.png?v=6" ":hugs:")
They doubled their players recently and their servers are struggling to the point they are sorting it…
Google PC-EU Server Update - April 11
Wow should go free to play, the game is that bad.