Wednesday, March 4, 2015

Will the WoW Token Hurt the Game?

In case you had missed it blizzard is releasing a new game time token which people can buy with real life cash and sell in game for gold with the next coming patch, tentatively 6.1.2.  Of course something like this has people talking and I am no different.

I would love to share more information on the topic but there is little available to share.  We do not know how much real life cash the token will cost and we do not know what the in game exchange for selling it will be.  None of that has been set yet. 

What we do know however is that these will not be sold on the free market.  Meaning that the in game sale price will be set by blizzard.  No buying and selling and undercutting on the market at all.  Just a simple as you buy it with real cash and it enters the sale pool with everyone else that purchased one for a preset price.  When yours sells from that pool, you get the gold.

As an added plus people who have expired accounts will be able to buy this off the auction house.  While normally the auction house is off limits to someone with a trail account you will be able to buy this one item off the auction house.  So if you had some gold reserves last time you played you can log in even without a current subscription and buy this item with gold and now have an active warcraft account with absolutely no cash out of pocket.

Part of the idea as presented is that this will allow people with more free cash than free time to effectively buy gold in game legally with their disposable income and those with more free time than free cash can make gold in game to buy this item off the auction house so they can effectively play with no out of pocket expense.

From a business standpoint I see this as a huge plus for blizzard.  They could very well end up with more paying players.  The people with cash effectively paying for multiple 30 day passes each month and the people without cash buying those months in game for gold.  Everyone playing will be a paying customer even if player A pays with gold and player B pays with cash someone paid for those 30 days somewhere along the line.  So it seems that for blizzard this could be a huge win.  Adding the ability to buy the game time for gold while not even having an active account is even better.  It allows people that might want to come back but have not the chance to do so to be capable of coming back with no out of pocket cost if they had the gold reserves from the last time they played.

So from a business standpoint, as I said, I think this is a huge plus for blizzard.  But will it hurt the game for us the players?  Lets face it. As much as I want the business end of blizzard to do well so they keep making the game I enjoy the bottom line is I want to keep enjoying it.  If adding this to the game somehow negatively effects my game play either directly or indirectly than no matter how good it is for blizzard the business it could be bad for warcraft the game.

So do you think it will hurt the game?

After they announced this the other day I did a quick google search for gold sellers.  I wanted to see, in terms of the current market for gold, what the 15 dollars would get me if I were to buy it from a gold seller.  Prices varied but the average seems to be that 15 dollars would get me around 20,000 gold.

In the grand scheme of things 20,000 gold is not really a lot of gold in the game.  Sure it would have been a small fortune when I was new or even a few years back but from where I stand in game now 20,000 is really nothing special.  I can make that each week just logging in and doing my follower missions and nothing else.  20,000 is nice of course, but I am not exactly sure if it would be worth 15 dollars to buy it.

We do not know what price blizzard is going to set the tokens at, and they will be setting the price, not us, but I would not be surprised if they, like me, look at what the current fair market value for gold currently is and find that 20,000 will be the starting price.

I fit neatly into the category mentioned earlier of the person with more free cash than free time.  So this should be something that appeals to me.  But at 20,000 per 15 dollars it surely doesn't.  For me personally at least.  Add a zero there and blizzard just got me to waste a few bucks.   But there is a balance, who is really going to have 200,000 to buy 30 days time, very very few.  As a matter of fact, even at 20,000 very few people would be able to afford it if the warcraft wealth numbers are to be believed.

But putting my own greedy desires for large numbers of gold for my cash aside and saying that it will move at fair market value and with the majority of the player base considering 20,000 as a lot of gold, I can see many people using this as a way to make gold.

And that is where the question comes, will this hurt the game.

We have already established that to someone like myself, with both cash in life and in game that I will participate on either end.  I will pay for my own game time and and I will not be selling these.  So it should not affect me at all right?

I don't think so, and that is what worries me.  It should not impact me at all as I am not participating in it but I fear it will have an impact on me in a major way.

Blizzard has already stated that they will be "adjusting" items for sale in game such as those that come from the black market auction house and raid drop bind on equip gear.

I believe the reason they are doing this is to keep the game from turning into what some might consider a "pay to win" sort of game.  If they had great gear coming from the black market auction house and bind on equip items for a fair amount of gear slots people might feel as if they "had to" buy them meaning they would feel like they need to sell game time to make the gold to buy them.

So by limiting the number of BoEs and top items on the BMAH they will push away the idea of the game becoming "pay to win".  In theory anyway.

I have two issues with that, the first being I really do not care if someone uses cash to buy gear.  I couldn't care less if someone was capable of buying full mythic gear in game.  I will still wipe the floor with most of them.  Gear just increases potential, if someone does not play well they can have all the gear in the world and still be preforming at LFR levels anyway.  But me not caring about people buying their gear is more a matter of opinion only of course and another topic all together.

The second thing I worry about is that same BoE gear.  The game already removed valor gear.  Right now the only thing I have to offset my dreadfully horrible luck in game with concern to drops are BoE drops, which I am currently wearing 3 of.  Four if you count the fact I did get the BoE neck to drop off a boss, but still I liked the idea that if I needed it I could have visited the auction house to get it. 

As it stands I did not pay for any of them, they were all trash drops I farmed with guild but knowing that if they did not drop there was always the option of visiting the auction house was a nice thing and now that will be gone.  So how is someone with bad luck to get at least some pieces of gear if they want to remove BoE raid drops, or severely limit them, because some misguided fan boys might cry the game is turning "pay to win".

So as you see, these tokens, even if I will not be buying or selling them already will have an impact on my game play.  Blizzard already took away my chance at ever raiding mythic again by changing it to 20 man strict content and unless I am willing to switch servers, guilds and friends I will never raid mythic again and they took away my net for bad luck called valor gear but now they want to strip the possibility of getting gear from the auction house as well because they are afraid someone might call the game "pay to win".  I am not exactly liking this at all.

And that is only one way that the game tokens could, or might, change the game.  It would be a change which, in my opinion at least, is hurting the game.

But that is not the only way it could hurt.  While some are yelling it will destroy the economy without fully understanding that it isn't actually adding any gold to the game they still might have a point even if they are crying for the wrong reasons.

If a player on server A which has a very robust market which allows him to make gold left and right starts to buy his time for gold and a player on server B which is a dead server in terms of gold this basically allows the shifting of gold from server A to server B.

While it is true that no one will know where their gold is going it is completely possible that moving gold from one server to another this way can have a profoundly negative impact on the economy of some servers.  So even if no gold is being added to the game, gold is being shifted from the gold rich servers to the gold poor servers by process.

This becomes yet another thing that could impact my game play even if I do not intend to take part of it on either the buying or selling end.  It is something that I will never have any interaction with and it is already lining up to being something that could have a large impact on my enjoyment of the game possibly.  Not exactly an exciting prospect from where I stand right now, not at all.

I have only begun to think about this and all the aspects of the game that could be impacted by it for better or worse.  But in the end I think this will actually hurt the game even if I do believe it will help blizzard.  Call me selfish if you will, but I don't care if it helps blizzard if it hurts the game in the process.  Or could hurt the game, maybe. 

We still do not know what to expect as all the information is not out on it yet.  So all we can do now is speculate, guess, and just wonder while we think about it.  Who knows, maybe they can find a way to settle my worries on the situations I already mentioned.  We can surely hope.

Care to speculate?  Do you think the WoW token will hurt the game?

23 comments:

  1. The economy of the game has been destroyed for a few years now. Lvl 10 leather pants (+1 agi) starting at 300g was what I saw this morning. Should only be around a few gold, not at what it is.

    ok, I would love to make 20K of gold like you from doing follower missions.

    I am not sure how many follower missions you are doing on how many toons, but I am doing them on 5 (from lvl 94 to 100) and I don't see 20K G every week. I don't even see 10K or even 5K. I do the supposedly gold missions and the ones that offer anything I can sell, but maybe, maybe, I see 1K a week.

    I bet, since you are really devious of mind and smart, have a way of doing it, but an average player like me, I for one can't figure it out.

    But this chip or token, who knows. those who make the gold will still be making more than me and this token will probably not help.

    It's the start of "pay to win" and the downside of WOW is here with this.

    -roo

    PS- I am not crying, I am good with how I play and my lack of kind.

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    1. I don't do all my characters daily any more. Burnt out on it, but even doing a few I can pull 2-3K per day on missions. I have 7 100s and 4 others on draenor at the moment. Lost my desire to level any more.

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    2. > The economy of the game has been destroyed for a few years now. Lvl 10 leather pants (+1 agi) starting at 300g was what I saw this morning. Should only be around a few gold, not at what it is.

      The in-game auction house has major shortcomings.

      If I could list pants for 3G and have them just stay listed until they sell, I would.

      But if I list them and they don't sell, then they come back to my in my mailbox and I lose the deposit.

      On some items the deposit is a hefty 10-20g which means if it doesn't sell after 1 or 2 times then I am starting to lose money.

      So what I do instead is:

      1) vendor cheap stuff
      2) disenchant anything I can using the enchanter's study (I am a blacksmith/miner)
      3) use an addon (the undermine journal) to see if the median price for the item is > 200g. Anything that's like 500g I list on the AH for sure.

      Another idea that I heard EVE Online has is buy orders. So if I want some pants and am willing to pay 10g, I can list my "wanted" ad and someone can fulfill it.

      What the major gold makers do is use addons to re-list things and keep track of how much it costs to list and relist them and set conditional thresholds to automatically do things like relist/vendor/disenchant things.

      If the wow-token allows us to buy gametime and expansions, it might be worth learning all that for me.

      Like you roo (and unlike grumpy), I don't have an army of alts. I don't solo stuff or quest too much. I do 5-mans (which I love) and raid, and maybe a bit of garrison and questing, but not too much. So the gold accrues over time, but not too quickly.
      --
      regards,

      regardsanon

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    3. Buy orders would be nice.

      I also like the idea of listings staying there forever. You only lose the deposit if it sells or you remove it to relist it. That way if you really wanted to you could just leave it there forever. One problem would be that people like me what hoard everything would list stuff are really high prices I know they will not sell at and use the AH as a second bank. I know I would do it.

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  2. I have 3 100s with level 3 inns and salvage huts and I'm pulling down 22k per week before counting any sales on salvage purples which will spike profits. Missions alone don't cut it, but missions plus salvage

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    1. I consider the salvage as part of the mission. It is a by product from it. And really, who does not have a salvage yard? I and many many others have been telling everyone that a salvage yard is mandatory since beta. But I get what you mean.

      However, missions alone can make that much, with luck. Yesterday alone my druids daily missions netted 1100 gold and my rogue had 1350. That was only 2 characters I remember because they were over 1K but all others had over 200 as well. If I went through all of mine, then yes, 20K just from missions is entirely possible with a fair deal of alts in a week. Heck, with my full stable, if I ever level them, 22K per day is not out of the question.

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  3. I am a tiny bit worried that it might actually end up adding gold to the game, thus have the potential for uncontrolled inflation -- maybe not as bad as Brazil in the 60's, but still. I say this because I read that Blizz will pay you the price they originally quoted for your game time being sold, no matter what they end up selling it for. Clearly this could work both for you and against you, but if they quoted you, say 40k gold and ended up selling it for 30k, they could just "print" the extra 10k gold to send to you.

    There are ways around this of course, but I also read, maybe a year ago, a Blizz rep saying no they don't have any real economists on staff, they just wing it and step in with gold sinks and the like once in awhile.

    So it seems possible that there could be some wild swings in the gold supply if they end up "winging it" with this endeavor. The extent to which this might happen depends on the degree of player participation, Blizz's perceptions of how they can best balance the process (based on some of the class changes, not convinced they have a great grasp of the term "balance"), and possibly also on the- degree to which the system might be manipulable by the illicit gold seller bunch.

    Like you, I think this is a smart business decision, but Blizz has a history of doing horrible long term planning, and of failing to anticipate consequences of their design changes. They have also demonstrated they are not very good at recovering from what end of being unintended consequences due to their poor planning process.

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    1. I understand your concern with regard to that but I can't help but believe they will start the price low and bring it up. Effectively this will remove gold from the game. Then when it settles out it will return some and hopefully hit a balance where it is a little gain and a little loss and never really "adding" to the game.

      However, with that said, it could be the motivation for a lot of people that never tried to make gold to start doing so. Meaning the easiest way, solo old content. If many do this and never did before, it is actually adding gold to the game even if it is not blizzard doing so directly. So end result might be what you were suggesting, it will add gold, but not add gold directly, add gold by giving some people more reason to be more active in making gold.

      I fear, like you, that they will mess it up somehow. Like starting the price at a 200K quote and no one buying it so they have to drastically lower it. That will add a boat load of gold to the game because even if I do not need gold I will surely buy 2 or 3 to sell at that price.

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  4. My concern is that I suspect that far more players will want to buy gold for $15 than will want to sell their own gold back to Blizzard. What's going to happen when twice as many cash contributors start sending money to Blizzard as the gold contributors who send gold? Is the company going to tell them "No, we don't want your money."

    "Sorry, we can't take your cash and give you gold because not enough players have given us gold to buy time."

    I suspect that Blizzard will find it hard to stop selling tokens, once they start. That means that new gold will be injected into the game.

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    1. People will stop buying when they see the "estimated sell date is Nov. 14th 2023". They did say they would add an estimated date.

      But I agree with you. There will be more looking to make gold than sell gold which means the market will get flooded and none will sell.

      That is why pricing is extremely important. And also why I believe it will be low. If it is low than trading cash for gold will only be for the new players starting up or people dreadfully horrible at making gold. Most people, like myself, would see a low sell price as not worth it. So they will need to keep it really low if they do not want what you suspect will happen to happen.

      As you said, once they start I do not see them being able to stop it. So I really hope they are thinking this out long term.

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    2. @Arcadius
      Right, I agree. The obvious fix for such a situation would be to limit the number of times an account can sell game time for gold -- once a week, once a month, whatever. I also foresee a problem if there is a huge long queue (sorry but there is precedent, right) to receive your gold because of the imbalance you postulate. Will you have to wait weeks or months to receive your gold? Will Blizz pay up right away then limit how many others can do the transaction until they recoup a certain amount of their gold advance? Will you be unable to even try such a transaction because the size of the queue will be controlled? Will you be forced to use your purchased time instead of selling it?

      As I indicated in my comment above, I am very skeptical that Blizz has considered any of these scenarios, even more skeptical that they have contingency plans for them should they occur.

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    3. @Fiannor

      I see that happening. I see them having a back log and having to pay people in advance which would cause inflation for sure.

      I like your idea of limiting it to once a week. That might help some.

      Blizzard never considers the consequences of their actions. Like adding all those gated dailies at the beginning of MoP or having none what so ever at the beginning of WoD. They do not think things out beforehand and they sure as hell can not do anything in moderation. It has to be full swing one direction or the other and that attitude can really hurt them here.

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  5. Short term I don’t really see this hurting anything. Inflation, at least my understanding of it, won’t be an issue because you are not adding gold to the system. You are merely taking it out of the hands of one person and handing it to another.

    From a business perspective this does nothing but help Blizzard. Subscriptions that they may have lost will now be retained. As well as the money they would have lost to gold sellers will now be going into their pockets instead.

    My concern is long term. As you mention Blizzard is already “adjusting” items for sale on the black market auction house. So in order to encourage token sales, in the future we may end up seeing more mounts and cosmetic items that cost exorbitant amounts of gold to get. One example that comes to mind is the alliance treadblade. http://www.wowhead.com/item=116789/champions-treadblade

    The mind set of encouraging token sales can affect other facets of the game as well. As an example, let’s say that in order to try out the new raid you have to do a series of daily quests that give crystals of de-gating so that an NPC can open the magical gate of gated content. Or you can give the NPC “X” amount of gold and they’ll get the required materials for you.

    Is this a really far fetched example? I’m not so certain. When I look at the number of re-skinned mounts going into the game and compare that to the number of flashy specialized mounts in the Blizzard store. It gives me reason to pause.

    For the new mounts coming out, items that are cosmetic only or are not required, all of a sudden they aren’t as flashy or special in game while in the store they are pretty nice. Likewise items that don’t necessarily cost that much gold now in the future may end up costing a heck of a lot more.

    This is not being done with the players best intentions in mind. This is about the Blizzards bottom line. A few years ago this would not have even been an issue with me. But now...yea, I pause for a second.

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    1. I did not think of them "baiting" us to spend more gold as you mentioned. Like having someone you can pay gold to skip the gating. Excellent point and one I would not put past a business trying to suck money from its players. Hey, they re a business after all, we can not blame them for being who they are.

      However there is one problem with that. As someone else mentioned, what happens when none of those are selling because there are more people looking to buy gold selling packs instead of sell gold buying packs?

      I agree that this is being done with the best intentions to their stockholders, not their players, as you said. That is what has me worried.

      Could you imagine micro transactions "snuck" in under the radar for gold. Blizzard would say it is for game play and no cash is needed because you can buy everything in game but someone in the corporate office will be saying "you need to make it better so they will buy more gold" I can see that happening. Absolutely.

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    2. From a Blizzard stand point the way to fix any issues with the buying/selling process of the tokens is to start “balancing” items in the game. For example, if there is too much gold in the game and people are not interested in any of the high priced “sold for gold” items that will inevitably be put forth, all of a sudden quests won’t give out as big a gold reward, and soloing old raids won’t be as lucrative. This will be done all for the sake of balance mind you and I would not be surprised if a convenient boogey man in the form of “those darn gold sellers” weren’t also put forth as a scapegoat to take the blame for this “balancing”. This will choke off the gold being supplied in game and encourage the purchase and sale of these tokens.

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    3. I soloed some old 5 mans looking for one thing or another and bosses were dropping 5 silver, 11 silver, it was a joke. They even nerfed the gems that dropped in BC raids which used to sell for 3 gold each if I remember correctly, they are now 50 silver. They nerf everything that way and quite honestly it is annoying. But they think it is helping things. Actually no, it is not.

      If they really wanted to remove money from the game then instead of having a 680 BoE boots drop from trash in BRF just sell them directly from the in game shop for 20K. If they drop in the raid all it does is take gold from one persons hands and puts it in anothers. If they sell it from a vendor, it removes the gold from the game.

      Blizzard really is not all that bright when it comes to stuff like this. Instead of finding a way to funnel gold out of the game through reasonable means they would rather just nerf it in old raids, dungeons and quests.

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  6. I'm curious what creative ways nefarious gold sellers and bot makers will come up with to stay in business. I assume they aren't going down without a fight (although I hope they lose).

    If Blizzard does make the gold conversion a high amount of cash for a low amount of gold, then gold sellers who can undercut that price with their account hacking will still have a market.

    What happens when a hacked account buys a wow token using a stolen credit card and then sells the gold on their shady web site?

    The system curbs some illegal gold selling/buying by giving people who were waiting for a legitimate outlet a way to get gold aboveboard.

    But I suspect that the majority of people who were willing to risk account suspension were not pining for Blizzard to offer gold for cash. I suspect that they wanted cheap gold method-be-damned and if Blizzard's gold is not cheaper than the alternative then they will continue to turn to illegal gold sellers who will continue to hack accounts and use bots.
    --
    regards,

    regardsanon

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    1. Gold sellers will continue to do what they do. If anything this "might" make it better for them in the long run.

      Using my example of 20K as the sale price. If the gold sellers undercut that to lets say 10 dollars for 20K than people will buy the 20K from the gold sellers. So even people willing to pay the 15 dollars might be baited into paying 10 instead of 15. It will bring gold selling more to the forefront. It will open doors and make new customers for them.

      Add to the fact that the gold sellers themselves can now buy the game time with gold. They already know how to make gold and buying the game time with gold instead of a stolen credit card could help them work with the account longer whereas if they used a stolen credit card it could be noticed and shut down sooner.

      This is all speculation of course, but I could see this as helping the illegal sales a lot.

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  7. Basically, it's P2W, no matter how people try it out to make. And that's not because you can buy gear, even though that helps too, but it's because you can buy everything. People like to say that gear doesn't mean you can get rating or a cutting edge. But guess what does - money. Everything is being bought nowadays and in a public way too, it's not on shady sites anymore, it's trade chat 24/7, from big guilds or smaller. Method lists CMs every day for example. And these guilds or groups work for both gold and money, whichever you prefer. Want rating? Buy it. Want glory? But it. Want gear? Buy it. Want cutting edge? Buy it. Anything. There is absolutely nothing you can't buy with gold.
    But. This is already a thing. Only not really legal at this time. So while I find it disgusting on a level you can't imagine, I actually don't see it will make much of a change. Maybe add in frustration that we (well, *I*) was looking at games as a clean thing, a fun thing, where we don't have to cheat and skip things to get ahead just like in real life. Oh well.

    So change? I don't know. I like the idea from the point of view of my honey who doesn't work and will be able to buy time with gold. Then again, I'm looking like a lazy ass, paying with real money while I could play for free. Anyway.

    What actually really bothers me is how they did it. The hurry they were in to add this to the game. It's not even waiting for patch 6.2. It was probably meant to go at 6.1 but some details needed ironing out. Or they didn't want more outrage from people seeing this as what they were spending time on doing instead of giving us real content for 6.1.

    But the truth is - this is actually it. If you look at it and ask yourself - what did they do with the money from the more expensive expansion and from our subs, then the answer is this. Laying the groundworks for opening up the game. Veteran account - added so people could buy stuff with gold when their account expires. Tokens for all the new people that will join or rejoin, attracted by the idea. Daily crappy professions and random crap in everything so you're hooked to the idea of logging in daily. Removing abilities and encumbersome stuff (reforging, gemming everything, enchanting everything) for easier access to newer people. New models for people who weren't joining because old models were old and ugly. Twitter integration for opening up through social media and showing off different new graphics and silly things you can do.

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    1. (continuation +need edit button)
      And even garrisons are a sort of personal twist on the popular MMO idea of personal housing. Even if it didn't quite hit the mark.

      This whole expansions seems like a pretext. I have never felt cheated in all these years, but I do now.

      Why... because while they were working on reworking their *business* we were getting the short end of the stick with unfinished stuff and amateur work. Look at the breezestrider's tail. Seriously. Doesn't that look like a 'Hello World' project for someone who is learning to animate? It does to me. It looks so crap, it can't have been done by anyone with an experience. This is to me the concentrated essence of this expansion. And you can take this and apply it to a whole bunch of things. Amateur. Unfinished. Bugged.
      Look at 6.1. Does anything look like it required work from more than 1-2 people? Pepe thing - we all know it was pet project of one guy. SELFIE thing is probably the same. Adding 1300 platinum rating to something already in place (invasions). Maybe the race at darkmoon took more people, but I wouldn't bet on it. And heirlooms seems like work, but still, we know that's been in the works for a while and probably close to finish it. I'm even getting so paranoid as to say they had stuff finished but didn't release it so they could drag it on and pretend they have content later on. I'm sure they could've gotten away with pretending BRF was 6.1 content.
      And don't get me started of the blood elf models - of when they should've been released and on the shoddy work they did on them. We were foolishly thinking that, being last, they would be the best, but we got crappy stretchy bugged textures, horrible clipping, stupid caricature faces that would have been acceptable only if we hadn't had some originals first.

      I'm just angry. Angry at a game. This isn't right. I know it's a business but this just doesn't feel right.

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    2. *try to make it out
      Seriously, reading my own post makes me want to edit it 100 times. I sound like a retard who can't spell. Well, at least I hope I get my point across.

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    3. Also, did you noticed all these 'new' things added lately? They say twitter integration, boom, already in a few weeks. They say token, boom, already in in a few week. These weren't ideas thrown at people to see what their reaction was, to see if they like it or not, if they should go ahead with them or not. These were planned things and done, changing WoW's business model without actually announcing it as such. We're just being taken slower, but we're not given an option to state how we feel about it or change things
      It's all presented as a small 6.1.2 patch, not with the bells it would have been presented by the media if it were there at launch.
      Yes. I do believe it's a PR thing. Tinfoil hat on.

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    4. I agree that anything can be bought, but I do not believe any of that is pay to win. Is getting cutting edge "winning"? Nope. Is having a 2500 arena rating winning? Nope.

      No one is buying themselves to work first ranks. No one is buying themselves to the top rating in the game. It is not pay to win because warcraft is not a game you can "win". Seriously, there is no winning in warcraft. With no winning there can be no paying to win.

      I would not call it lazy paying for the game with money instead of gold. I will continue to pay with money instead of gold and I have lots of gold. I just support the game I like so I pay for it. For example, I download a lot of music for free online but I still buy the CDs from the bands I love. Why do I do that even if I already downloaded the whole thing? Because I support the bands I like. Simple as that. Using real cash is not being lazy, it is supporting what you like because you are in the position to do so.

      The expansion is a bit like "cheating" people. I don't think there is anyone out there that thinks otherwise. Even the ones that say they are loving it would admit it is very light on what we have become accustom to getting. It could be called cheating, I call it blizzard cashing in their chips. We all had some good faith in them because we like the game. They are cashing in those good faith chips hoping we stick it out through this whole transition before they move back into making a game instead of filler.

      I agree that these are things already done. As you said, they are moving too fast adding them after mentioning them. They had to be in the works a long time. We have a lot of experience with this company and one thing we both know for sure, they do not move this fast at anything.

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