I thought this was a joke but it seems like it's actually legit. WoW, which has a subscription and paid expansions, just added a $90 item to their store. This is Korean MMO levels of absurdity. What do you think of this?
People will buy it. And then they will wonder why content quality declines and more and more micro transactions appear in a game they bought and pay subscription for.
The capitalism will always look for the easy route to even more money, and monkey brains with need for status symbols will follow.
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.
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.
This is equally as infuriating to me as the rising cost of stamps. 😐
If you are going to pretend to have scruples then at least pretend to have standards, or dignity for that matter. 😂 If you are so involved (even in the most modest terms) in the ecosystem of predatory games like World of Warcraft, to the point that you are even tenuously aware of news relating to them then you deserve all of it.
This is truly lowest of the low type of scum behavior. Take something that was somewhat earnable in-game, remove it, then put the same thing up for an egregious amount of money
It's going to sell like crazy. It's not just that it's a Mount, but it also has an auction house and mailbox that you can use anywhere at any time. The only other mount that has the AH is no longer attainable regularly, only on rare occasions for gold cap.
I am going to get it, but I'm going to use my gold in game to convert to bnet balance.
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.
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.
5 million gold costs about 220 bucks right now. If I'm not mistaken that was the price of the AH mount back in BFA, no?
90 bucks for this mount is actually at a massive bargain, we're talking 40% of what it's actually worth. Like I get it, you think it's scummy but... idk, if I still played WoW I would probably buy it - and I doubt I would regret it. That being said, I do not play anymore and will not come back for the mount lol.
Like, technically speaking they could charge double what they're asking and it would still be cheaper than the BFA AH mount.