Blizzard keen on WOW micro-transactions

I distinctly remember a GDC (maybe?) where one of the Warcarft devs turned thier nose up at microtransactions, something along the lines of tearing his eye lids off instead of accepting them I think.

slippery slope

This will not end well.

So they mountains of money they make aren't huge enough? One of the mountains hasn't even formed its own, personal glacier on top yet? Well, bring on micro transactions too, then.

They've surgically grafted some new udders on the cow.

I am holding out for the system of

"Level's via micro!"

Or free T10 with every 50 levels purchased XD

"VicViper - I think it was Cryptic boss Jack Emmert who said that.
Cryptic's latest game, Champions Online, features micro-transactions."

Yeah, but in fairness no-one actually believed him when he said it, Jack being Jack

Especially once it was announced that Atari were going to be the publishers...

I don't see this as the apocalypse like a lot of people are, but the amount of greed on display here sickens me nonetheless.

as long as its just pets and other cosmetic items then its fine, but if they are successful you can see the activision side of the business pushing for sellable swords

Screw you Blizz. With love a dudew that spent years of loving WoW before you noobilise the whole damn game to get desperately love from newcomers and make it so easy and so profitable by loosing whatever was making it so woth playing.

@Oli It was? cheers for fixing my memory.

Slippery slope though indeed actionFitz although it might take a while to get to maple story and the like levels.

Aren't microstransactions by their very nature meant to be, well, micro?

Didn't the Korean MMOs that spearheaded the idea sell items for like 50p (equiv.) or something? Not £9.

Genius move - I love this idea.

To all the teenage boys who will complain because they can't afford the items: get a job and contribute something to society and maybe if you work hard enough, you can afford your very own Lil KT too!

Blizzard will only release things which don't benefit you in the game, such as those they've very sensibly released via the card game loot cards. They're not stupid and they know that there will be a bunch of winging elitist children crying if they ever let people buy gear or weapons from the store.

More proof, if ever proof were needed that it is not necessity that drives companies to bilk their customers as much as is humanly possible. Industry profits could soar a thousandfold and it would make not one iota of difference to the shoddy business practices they use.

@Sildur: is that a confession that you, as a fully grown manly man - one with a job no less - are going to spend hard earned cash on an in game pet for a videogame that you already pay monthly for?

You do have a choice here, no one is forcing players to purchase any of these vanity items.

If you don't want it, don't buy it and if you do more fool you.

I don't understand why everyone is so up in arms about this.

When the micro-transactions term is used for items that cost between 5-20 quid... then it ain't anywhere near micro. That's just in general terms, since I have seen games/publishers use this term with the previous amounts mentioned.

"I don't understand why everyone is so up in arms about this. "

The essence of an MMO is your character. Up till now if you wanted the best stuff for him or her you needed to raid or PvP, i.e. its is based on skill and(or) commitment. Now this is (starting) not to be the case. This breaks the unwritten compact between player and MMO dev that in an MMO your real world status does not count, what matters is what you do in the game world.

Ans anyone who does not believe that they will not be selling badges or arena points if in 4 fiscal qtrs time is naieve to the point of stupidity.

WoW is very rapidly loosing its soul, the essence of what made it great which is a real shame.

"To all the teenage boys who will complain because they can't afford the items: get a job and contribute something to society and maybe if you work hard enough, you can afford your very own Lil KT too! "

With idiotic statements like this is is any wonder gaming is going down the DLC pan. Some people really have more money than brain cells.

as long as they stick to selling pets, mounts and other fun stuff, and not start selling equipment, I don't mind. Heck I might even buy a few mounts

So Activision's corruption is contagious. I can see now why for years small teams have been parting ways with Blizzard to start anew. Click, Flagship, ArenaNet, Red 5, Runic... and maybe more.

hmm.. I dont know about this one. The pets seem very overpriced no? like every part of so called micro transactions. In saying that there was one pet I really liked, it was the little mini dcagon lich that you got if you ordered the special edition of wotlk. I got the normal one, so if this came out for sale it would be interesting. In saying that I an not currently active in wow, so its a moot point.

I don't play WOW but if I was paying a monthly sub and they started this nonsense I would be really pissed. I agree with the posters who say this is pure greed. I don't have a problem with microtransaction if the game is free. This seems to be a case of wanted your cake and eating it too.

I remember reading an article on here I agreed with which said blizzards lead with WoW is theirs to lose, with another game stealing it very unlikely.

Wonder if this slippery slope is the start of it?

While these pets look wicked in-game they offer nothing other than that... looking cool. It's a fair bit of money for something which doesn't affect the game world at all. Get me a panda that does my cooking for me or runs off and does a bit of mining.

Smells like Activision to me

As if they arnt making enough money from Subscriptions, they have decided to milk people even more... poor poor show. The whole reason for Microtransactions in MMOs is to allow those games that cannot compete with the big MMOs to give their game out for free and still generate revenue. This just reeks... of course people can buy what they like, but its a bad precidence, and Blizzard really do not need to do this to generate more revenue... these items should be part of the game, people pay enough for it.

I'm increasingly uneasy about the whole WoW pay-per-pet thing but I'd just like to say that in the article that Eurogamer took this from they (Blizzard) never mentioned "micro-transactions". They mentioned digital sales for WoW but it was Eurogamer who decided to call them micro-transactions while, as others have pointed out, they are far, far, far from micro.

I don't have a problem with digital sales of vanity items as such. They do seem to be better designed than most of the current pets though IMHO- which is kinda concerning. As long as they stick to the subscription model and only sell vanity items that are of the same quality as drops available in game I don't think we've got anything to worry about. I think it's more than reasonable to be cynical though...

There is some method to the madness. I mean, the last report on the state of WoW's active subs base is something like 8-9 million users. That sounds like a lot, but this is low to the height it had in Burning Crusade when it had close to 15 million users and the infrastructures to handle it. Now it's nearly half capacity and obviously, financially it is hard to keep such things running.

So why not scale back the infrastructure? Well, for one, that would be an admission of defeat and Blizzard and Activision are not ones to admit they have done anything wrong ever - I mean, all those ideas and mechanics they thought up on their own terms and absolutely did not steal from other MMOs who did them better (because they were more essential in those games). Another thing is I don't think even Activision-Blizzard really believe it could be the end of the cashcow - they probably believe it is a minor dip and that the users will eventually come back and they need to be able to handle those who return. Or perhaps another explanation is they simply can't scale it back - that the services and structures in place are paid for now for a period of time and there so they have to keep pumping money into things which are now simply wasted money?

Whatever the explanation, I always said the explosion of popularity of WoW was the exception and not the rule, and that it wouldn't last forever. This is a sllippery slope, and I can sort of understand why they are doing it. But in contrast to that understanding, I can't see them stopping with a few exclusive things. WoW is a game about being up-to-date and having the latest thing, it always has been, it's why in Burning Crusade with all those pimp-ass epics and legendaries (Dual-Warglaives which my rogue had was the ultimate in pimpage at the time, you walked though Stormwind with those people knew you meant business!). Only now instead of effort, it seems to be going down the road that to have the pimp stuff you'll have to fork out for it in real money. Which means that in-game effort becomes a secondary point, and that is really a bad way to implement new goods - sure, they may not be NECESSARY, but nothing in the game is necessary really. You don't have to do anything, but it's getting the newest pimpiest thing that drives many players and why this announcement will be frowned upon by whatever hardcore playerbase that WoW has left.

It used to be the case that someone in the awesomest looking gear was by definition a great player, someone to look up to, respect admire and ask for advice. The danger is that in the future, the person with the awesomest stuff, pets and mounts will just be the person with a bigger bank balance, and may not necessarilly give two shits about actual game content.

If there are people daft enough to buy these things; let them! Even if they -do- offer armour and weapons through a micro-transaction store, they will be so pricey that few enough people will buy them to make any difference to your gameplay.

A shit PvPer in decent store-bought gear is still a shit PvPer.

Ordinarily I would agree with you Nostrus, believe me. I may dislike the way WoW is headed but I did spend a lot of years in that game and I don't regret the time I gave there in persuit of pimpage. However, the PvP system isn't quite what you think it is.

Arena, and soon to be all PvP, is ranked somewhat by a rating. The difference is if your rating is very very high, you are obviously very good at it and are pitted against like-rated people to make it fairer. Same goes for the lower rated people.

The lower rated people are not always those who are rubbish, they may be people who have just begun their PvP road. Either way, at the lower rung of rated battles, any PvP epic can be an advantage - and if paid for, it would be quite an unfair advantage as well.

It's a slippery slope, and I hope it isn't going to happen, but paid-for PvP Epics would spell the end for PvP in Warcraft. And since that is the group Blizzard have spent the best part of three years trying to appease, that would be a crippling disaster. I mean, what is left then? Oh yes, their PvE audience who has spent the last few years wondering what happened to the game...

I don't dislike WoW. I wish I could. But I think Blizzard made some poor choices in what to focus on and how they did it, and now with Activision it seems more and more like they're trying to bilk us for every penny we have. As has been said before, this whole micro-transactions thing was originally intended to fund smaller or free-to-play titles and still keep the developers financially afloat. But it's another aspect that Blizzard think they can weave into a cloak that has borrowed so heavily from everywhere else that I'm not sure Blizzard remember what the cloak looked like originally. That the game now is so unrecognisable from the game I fell in love with all those years ago pains me, and with so little of the original fabric left I think hope that Blizzard can regain that magic fades with every passing day, every announcement and every single kick in the groin they give their playerbase.

It's a pity really that there isn't anything quite like that WoW of old... it really was the dogs bollocks back then, unlike the bollocksed-up dog it ended up. Cataclysm could change things but forgive me if I don't hold my breath, I'd love a second coming but I'm not going to be first in line when the shit hits the fan.

It used to be the case that someone in the awesomest looking gear was by definition a great player, someone to look up to, respect admire and ask for advice.
I always adored this notion.

I took my mage to rank 14 back in the day and it still earns me a ton of respect when I log in, even by high ranked arena players. It's frankly due to a completely misplaced romanticizing of the original game, because obtaining rank 14 involved little else than spending a silly amount of time AOEing the zerg in numerous AVs.

I played in a PvP guild back then and we didn't care much about PvE yet we still completed MC, BWL and Naxx with very little effort aside from spending a lot of time on it. People with time and a relaxed attitude towards loot distributiong was really the common thing in all those "amazingly awesome" guilds back in vanilla. I've been met with disbelief before when I told people about how we used to summon in guild members to get loot on specific bosses on raids they havn't even been on, or how we never used a DKP system or anything like it. We did it to have fun, we weren't the best players and yet we still finished it all.

If we were playing today I doubt a whole lot of us would reach high arena ranks. I doubt we'd ever get a world first. I'm unsure if we'd ever finish a 25 man raid on hardcore. Heh.

The game has a much higher difficulty level today than it did in vanilla. What's changed is that you nolonger need to quit your day job or your family to compete.

That being said I do think it's a waste of time and eve-online rocks it's pants off by miles.

"because obtaining rank 14 involved little else than spending a silly amount of time AOEing the zerg in numerous AVs. "

Ahh, the nostalgia of AV of old. I admit in the original I was a dirty little Hunter whore and stood well back and basically raked in the credits for minimal effort (my original Hunter is High Warlord as well). I remember it more fondly that Battlegrounds back then WERE BATTLEGROUNDS, and I remember the days that AV went on for a week without anyone winning. I remember the hassle of collecting resources (not just a new novelty) and summoning the elementals for a serious bit of fun. It was glorious. It's also sadly now extinct and it's zerged in five minutes now.

I think most new players would be shocked at the game we used to play. When having an epic mount was the height of pimpage. At the old Naxxramas 40, which was so exquisitely designed and paced it was amazing - compared to the trash it became when they started to tweak it for smaller raids. When engineers used to make obscene money from the Core Marksman Rifles (I sold many for 2000 gold a piece). When people had to choose what to focus on. On the old AV. That there were PvP battles before they added the Silithus campaign - usually set up between Tarren Mill and Southshore. When we didn't have welfare epics, or even most of the events schedule and we had to make our own seasonal events. It's a different game, I wouldn't say though it was harder however. I did keep up, when I left not long ago it was a few weeks into the Call of the Crusader patch and I was already in tier gear from the colliseum. It's not harder to do, but you don't get time to enjoy it. There's so much fiddling and pushing and tweaks and nerfing this and buff that every single week that really it is harder to keep a groove as it were because it feels rushed. That is the word that sums up WotLK for me. RUSHED. It's been strapped with rockets and has whisked by so fast that it is hard to really feel anything for it.

I don't think many of us really gave a crap about world firsts or server firsts. A lot of these achievements and extra raid options have basically been the garnish to disguise a very burned burger - it's barely edible but they're hoping the extra relish, mustard and gherkins will destroy your tastebuds before you get to the charred mess that you were meant to be paying for. I wasn't convinced, but others were. Trying to get firsts, or beat someone else, made the rushed feeling even worse. People were talking in general chat not about tactics but who was where - just so they could engage first. I like guild rivalry but in this instance it led to schoolboy errors that any old raider - hell, anyone who ever played the original game, no, anyone who has a modicum of common sense - would cringe at. Not that you need to discuss tactics or anything though because it's all been done for you already on PTR, people have relentlessly blasted it already and done a point-by-point breakdown of every raid boss possible. Even leading raids (and I am an oldie, I prefer to learn by doing not by reading), everyone was immediately clued up on what to do, even if they hadn't done it before. That kind of defeats the point for me personally.

The game is different, it's a world away from what it used to be. That's not to say it's all been for the worst though. The colliseum "event" preceeding the raid patch was actually rather good fun (although wish it had been phased like the Isle of Quel'danas), and it was certainly nice to see them try some interesting new mechanics like the drake fights. But I liked it when it was simpler it must be said, and I certainly do not approve of this expansion-a-year thing they seem so desperate to try and meet. It's simply not worked I think, and I don't really see the issue with it being every 2 years and the content being a little more spread out. It gives people time to appreciate what they're doing and I think would give the developers a bit of a breather to clear their heads and really give it the beans on the next push. I can't imagine what the developers have gone through with WotLK. Did Activision-Blizzard pump pure caffiene into their veins or something? Because they really couldn't have had any real sleep.

All MMO's are a waste of time, it's whether you had fun doing it. And for the majority of my WoW time, I had fun. Therefore I do not regret it one bit. But I've slunk back to single-player fodder, some new-ish RPGs, because say what you like about the state of rpgs in general but at least I'm not being rushed through like I'm on a turbo-charged bicycle. It's fun for the first few seconds but then you realise this is only going to end up with a broken bike, broken bones, lots of blood and you'll have a hard time explaining how it all happened...