They are. They’re holding a ton of prestige.
Maybe prestige is not the best word to describe it, if you force yourself to think of it like it is prestigious to achieve a gladiator mount. (Though assuming those are not prestigious because there is another type of skill involved would be a fallacy)
That does not change the fact that those mounts hold immense amounts of value. People hunt them, people make gold through grind and skill to finally be able to buy them, people collect them.
Disregarding all of this via demoting them to a twitch drop is a decision business suits make. Not people with love for the game. And especially not people with love or respect for collecting.
Eh, not really. By a considerable margin most TCG cards were bought for thousands of dollars on Ebay. There is nothing special about spending exorbitant amounts of money on these mounts.
Rewards gained through in-game effort should be exclusive. Not something that requires luck or cash to acquire.
Those mounts ended up in people’s collections either directly or via trade ingame.
But more importantly: It does not change how valued these mounts are today.
No. Some people bought them with gold, sure, but they were mostly sold for real money. That’s how third party websites made a killing. How many Spectral Tigers do you think were bought for gold?
Twitch drops are an environmentally unfriendly scam.
Blizzard and Twitch hand out a few virtual pets and mounts, so that their viewer statistics go up. Blizzard gets some free marketing, and Twitch gets to sell more advertisements. Twitch is ripping off the advertisement companies though, because the viewer statistics are fake. Viewers aren’t actually watching the ads or even the actual streams, but rather running them in some muted background tab, because who cares about the environment if one gets some free loot, right?
I still fail to understand the logic in making people watch some streamer the same day the expansion goes live. Had this promotion been active NOW to generate attention/hype whatever that at least makes more sense.
But sure, I’ll have some self-important nitwit muted in the background while I play. Free TCG mount yay!
I can see both sides. I personally don’t want to watch someone else play parts of the game I haven’t yet and spoil it for me, so I will keep a muted, hidden tab for the rewards myself. When the expansion hits, everything is new and the excitement comes naturally for the streamer(s).
I guess the logic is that It will make World of Warcraft climb high on twitch’ list of games playing and someone clicking into it will probably see a more enthusiastic streamer discovering new things.
