Premium Cross-Realm Party System Coming to World of Warcraft

[Nimcha]

And to me, this community feeling is one of the things I like most about MMO's. That comradery between faction members, the way you made friends and found guilds through doing dungeons. But in WoW this is coming to an end more and more, which is a damn shame in my book.

Exactly. This started back in WotLK when Blizzard decided that their main target audience were to be the 'puggers'. This has lead to a community in which the vast majority of players go out of their way to interact with other players as little as possible, except when they have to. Most of them would actually prefer to raid with 24 npcs if it meant they'd get all the loot.

 

[Cowabungaa]

And to me, this community feeling is one of the things I like most about MMO's. That comradery between faction members, the way you made friends and found guilds through doing dungeons. But in WoW this is coming to an end more and more, which is a damn shame in my book.

Exactly. This started back in WotLK when Blizzard decided that their main target audience were to be the 'puggers'. This has lead to a community in which the vast majority of players go out of their way to interact with other players as little as possible, except when they have to. Most of them would actually prefer to raid with 24 npcs if it meant they'd get all the loot.

That's quite contradictory. How does PuGing make people go out of their way to interact with people? 25 Random people from one server still have to get together to complete difficult tasks together. If anything, making raids available for PuGing should've increased the community feel of servers. A way to meet new people, make friends and join guilds. It's exactly how 5-man instances were done back in the day, just with more people.

But then the Random Dungeon Finder tool came along. Given, it's fantastic gameplay wise, and I can now do instances that were abandoned before it. But it's downside is the sharp decrease in community feel. But at least it doesn't work with raids. Yet.

 

[Strixvaliano]

Crap like this makes me glad that I quit WoW. It's pure lunacy to think that their merger with Activision hasn't affected how they treat their bloated cash cows... err I mean "valued customers."

All of my friends who were absolutely unhealthily obsessed with the game have quit as well with how horrible and rushed Cataclysm was and with how little content it actually introduced.

This news is just the final nail in blizzard's coffin for myself. They can go rot for all I care now.

 

[tehroc]

The idea is great. I have tons of friends on other servers who I'd like to play with.

It being premium, not so much. Look, I *get* why some things cost money - the mobile AH/guild chat, faction/race/server transfers. This I'm not all too sure about.

It should be a basic function of the LFD system as is. It already places a priority to people on your own server, why not also place priority to your friends list.

 

[Nimcha]

And to me, this community feeling is one of the things I like most about MMO's. That comradery between faction members, the way you made friends and found guilds through doing dungeons. But in WoW this is coming to an end more and more, which is a damn shame in my book.

Exactly. This started back in WotLK when Blizzard decided that their main target audience were to be the 'puggers'. This has lead to a community in which the vast majority of players go out of their way to interact with other players as little as possible, except when they have to. Most of them would actually prefer to raid with 24 npcs if it meant they'd get all the loot.

That's quite contradictory. How does PuGing make people go out of their way to interact with people? 25 Random people from one server still have to get together to complete difficult tasks together. If anything, making raids available for PuGing should've increased the community feel of servers. A way to meet new people, make friends and join guilds. It's exactly how 5-man instances were done back in the day, just with more people.

Yeah, you'd think that. But it's a paradox.

The problem is that these people are Pugging because they don't want to be in a guild/community. They just want high level items. If they could raid instances alone, they would. But they still need other people to get the high level stuff, so they PuG.

For example: look at the whole gearscore thing in WotLK (I don't know if it's still like this, but I've heard it is) where some guy made a raidgroup and selected people to join only if their gearlevel was above some arbitrary level. Those people don't want nice folks in their group they can have a good time with. No, they want mindless drones who produce the highest numbers and don't say a word when the raid leader grabs all loot for himself. They want to be carried.

Now a little disclaimer, of course this is a grand generalization. Not everyone who doesn't raid with a guild is like this. I know because the ones that genuinely do want to have a good time but can't commit to a guild for whatever reason are easy to pick out. But they were in the minority, at least on the 4 servers I've played on in the last year of my playtime.

And indeed, the dungeon finder made it even worse. 5 random people, random dungeon, and you're done in 10 minutes without ever having to chat about anything at all.

 

[Stevepinto3]

I'm surprised by the disdain, and even outrage, for this. You're being offered a premium service that wasn't available previously, so therefor blizzard are jerks? Heck, it hasn't even been confirmed, it was only considered as a possibility.

I know the fact that there's already a monthly subscription fee. I know that WoW is already ridiculously profitable. Yes, I know that Activision would try to make a profit off of their own mother if she had cancer. But they aren't even taking anything away here. They're giving you the option to decide if you want this service or not. Switching up who you play with isn't the kind of game-changer that makes it necessary to have.

I saw the WoW forums, and of course they're up in arms over this. I loved WoW, but it's community is easily one of the worst out there. The people are just jerks complaining about how everyone else is a jerk. Seriously, you can find nicer people on 4chan.

 

[Charli]

Yeah this isn't going to fly. Pets, Mounts, Phone apps. Fine.

This is ingame territory. You do not go premium based with ingame stuff in a subscription based game. I don't like where this is headed and neither do alot of players, the outcry on the EU forums is far more overall negative than the US forums surprisingly. (Haven't commented but reading it has been informative)

some MMO's have special features to allow you to change servers for an extra fee.

This just seems something along those lines.


Though, I don't know anyone that already doesn't have another character on their friends servers who would want to pay more just to raid a dungeon together.

Here's the catch. WoW already does that. And that's fine, the reasons for changing server are usually more along the lines of 'Well this server doesn't suit me anymore' rather than "HEY random X friend started on a different server, I'ma go there now.

Usually friends have different end game interests. I know mine all do and move to different servers to get the most out of the end game, but it's nice if we could kick back and run dungeons together now and then. But for what has become the norm, we're not going to pay for that, that's silly and WoW is already subscription based with tones of extra things to be paid for should you feel you need it. This is dangerously close to a game altering micro transaction that makes me very uneasy.

 

[Jumwa]

What the heck else are you paying $15 a month for if it?s not this? This is a basic function to connecting friends with each other to play their game. Isn?t that the whole point of their game?

Most MMOs don?t even charge for what they already do and either earn their money from micro-transaction vanity items or initial/expansion purchase fees. WoW has initial fees, expansions, monthly fees (multiple ones now for various features like the mobile auction house which other MMOs provide as part of the basic service) and sells you vanity items that used to be part of the monthly fee but have dried up since they realized they could make people pay even more for them for them.

 

[Anaklusmos]

My stance on this is that due to the loss of the 600K Subscribers instead of analyzing how to improve World of Warcraft and bring back those lost Subscribers they instead prefer to bring in a feature and charge customers for that instead. This will most likely make up for the loss of subscribers. I reckon that if those 600K Subscribers were still paying this would be totally free.

To me, World of Warcraft is a social game, and it's focused around that, all bosses require communication, Rated Battlegrounds require communication. They implemented Battle.Net so people could talk to friends across realms and on different games. So it doesn't make sense, why this ultimate feature, something that would undoubtably help a lot of friends, is going to be 'Premium'. I'm probably sounding entitled, but I still believe that something that a lot of people have been begging for should be free.

 

[Auxiliary]

Compared to other MMO's WoW is by far the most greedy. They have the initial cost of buying the game, every single expansion, the subscription, the cash shop for vanity items such as pets and mounts, essential services such as realm transfers, the mobile auction house and now they add this one on top of that.

If a MMO such as Guildwars 1 can be considdered highly succesful on only the initial purchase of the game and it's expansions and a small cashshop I wonder how Blizzard dares to say they think the cost of developing these basic services should allow them to charge even more.

WoW is a huge cashcow and they intend to milk it for every penny that it's worth, I am quite appalled by their code of conduct.

 

[BabyRaptor]

So either they're finally allowing a nickname option for RealID or they're dropping the original "It's only for use with people you really trust" bullshit they gave us.

Yeah, I'm thinking the second one.

And I hadn't read that they're charging for it. That's a load of bollocks...Anything for a few more pennies, I guess. It won't last, though. People will whine too much.

 

[Marohen]

This is actually causing quite an uproar in the wow forums, by the looks of it, the likes of which hasn't been seen since the prior realID fiasco wherein individuals would have their name shown on the forums.

Since this is the money department and not the "your real name on the internet" department, the debate is a lot less black and white, so I can't really say if they'll ditch the "premium" fee or not.

As far as I'm concerned, this is an abysmal idea, but I'll save this thread another rambling post.

 

[MajorDolphin]

Next stop for Blizzard, paid "premium" cross server/world auction houses! Think neutral auction houses with actual items. Kiss your hard earned rare items value goodbye!

.snip.

If Blizzard was still one with gamers and not with their bloated profit margins, you'd get to server change for free on a timed cool down same with faction and name changes. I know people who have spent literally hundreds of dollars just in this administrative bullshit.

.snip.

That wouldn't work. Part of the benefit of paid transfers is the lack of gold digging asshats jumping from server to server with their packs full of rare or high demand items and selling for massive profits while devaluing the items you've gathered. I'm the first guy to rail against a game developer that tries to nickel and dime a player but I'm also against making life easy for low life gold farmers and the people who buy their gold.

Personally, I hate the way they have the "worlds" set up. Its 2011, can we get a single world non-shard MMO that doesn't blow?

 

[John Funk]

Compared to other MMO's WoW is by far the most greedy. They have the initial cost of buying the game, every single expansion, the subscription, the cash shop for vanity items such as pets and mounts, essential services such as realm transfers, the mobile auction house and now they add this one on top of that.

If a MMO such as Guildwars 1 can be considdered highly succesful on only the initial purchase of the game and it's expansions and a small cashshop I wonder how Blizzard dares to say they think the cost of developing these basic services should allow them to charge even more.

WoW is a huge cashcow and they intend to milk it for every penny that it's worth, I am quite appalled by their code of conduct.

Okay, that's actually completely ignorant. There are plenty of MMOs - subscription MMOs - that have had just as many expenses as WoW has. That's the nature of the beast.

Also, regarding Guild Wars - the first one was barely an MMO; it was more like a fancy Diablo with some communal areas, which likely saved ArenaNet some hefty bandwidth costs. I admit I would have really loved to see ArenaNet's bank sheets for that out of pure professional curiosity, because everything I know suggests that their business model was unsustainable (but clearly, it wasn't). Maybe they were skirting the profitable line, maybe the microtransactions were enough to keep it afloat, etc.

 

[Typhron]

Compared to other MMO's WoW is by far the most greedy. They have the initial cost of buying the game, every single expansion, the subscription, the cash shop for vanity items such as pets and mounts, essential services such as realm transfers, the mobile auction house and now they add this one on top of that.

If a MMO such as Guildwars 1 can be considdered highly succesful on only the initial purchase of the game and it's expansions and a small cashshop I wonder how Blizzard dares to say they think the cost of developing these basic services should allow them to charge even more.

WoW is a huge cashcow and they intend to milk it for every penny that it's worth, I am quite appalled by their code of conduct.

Okay, that's actually completely ignorant. There are plenty of MMOs - subscription MMOs - that have had just as many expenses as WoW has. That's the nature of the beast.

Also, regarding Guild Wars - the first one was barely an MMO; it was more like a fancy Diablo with some communal areas, which likely saved ArenaNet some hefty bandwidth costs. I admit I would have really loved to see ArenaNet's bank sheets for that out of pure professional curiosity, because everything I know suggests that their business model was unsustainable (but clearly, it wasn't). Maybe they were skirting the profitable line, maybe the microtransactions were enough to keep it afloat, etc.

To be fair, Everquest did the same thing.

Look where they are now.

 

[Auxiliary]

Compared to other MMO's WoW is by far the most greedy. They have the initial cost of buying the game, every single expansion, the subscription, the cash shop for vanity items such as pets and mounts, essential services such as realm transfers, the mobile auction house and now they add this one on top of that.

If a MMO such as Guildwars 1 can be considdered highly succesful on only the initial purchase of the game and it's expansions and a small cashshop I wonder how Blizzard dares to say they think the cost of developing these basic services should allow them to charge even more.

WoW is a huge cashcow and they intend to milk it for every penny that it's worth, I am quite appalled by their code of conduct.

Okay, that's actually completely ignorant. There are plenty of MMOs - subscription MMOs - that have had just as many expenses as WoW has. That's the nature of the beast.

Also, regarding Guild Wars - the first one was barely an MMO; it was more like a fancy Diablo with some communal areas, which likely saved ArenaNet some hefty bandwidth costs. I admit I would have really loved to see ArenaNet's bank sheets for that out of pure professional curiosity, because everything I know suggests that their business model was unsustainable (but clearly, it wasn't). Maybe they were skirting the profitable line, maybe the microtransactions were enough to keep it afloat, etc.

You are definitely right that Guildwars saved a lot of money on bandwith costs, but the instancing of a great number of areas was not the main reason for that as said by the developers. The cashshop of Guildwars isn't exactly huge either, you can purchase a few set of outfits quite cheap and the most expensive feature is the option to turn your own characters (alts, mains, etc) into computer controlled heroes / henchman, which is obviously cool.

Sources:
http://gigaom.com/2006/10/26/guild-wars/
http://playnoevil.com/serendipity/index.php?/archives/302-NCSoft-Guild-Wars-Building-An-Efficient-MMO-Infrastructure.html
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17820122/ns/technology_and_science-games/t/guild-wars-experiment-worked/
https://secure.ncsoft.com/cgi-bin/Store.pl?dnv=1568251813&action=toggleCategory&category=4

 

[John Funk]

Compared to other MMO's WoW is by far the most greedy. They have the initial cost of buying the game, every single expansion, the subscription, the cash shop for vanity items such as pets and mounts, essential services such as realm transfers, the mobile auction house and now they add this one on top of that.

If a MMO such as Guildwars 1 can be considdered highly succesful on only the initial purchase of the game and it's expansions and a small cashshop I wonder how Blizzard dares to say they think the cost of developing these basic services should allow them to charge even more.

WoW is a huge cashcow and they intend to milk it for every penny that it's worth, I am quite appalled by their code of conduct.

Okay, that's actually completely ignorant. There are plenty of MMOs - subscription MMOs - that have had just as many expenses as WoW has. That's the nature of the beast.

Also, regarding Guild Wars - the first one was barely an MMO; it was more like a fancy Diablo with some communal areas, which likely saved ArenaNet some hefty bandwidth costs. I admit I would have really loved to see ArenaNet's bank sheets for that out of pure professional curiosity, because everything I know suggests that their business model was unsustainable (but clearly, it wasn't). Maybe they were skirting the profitable line, maybe the microtransactions were enough to keep it afloat, etc.

You are definitely right that Guildwars saved a lot of money on bandwith costs, but the instancing of a great number of areas was not the main reason for that as said by the developers. The cashshop of Guildwars isn't exactly huge either, you can purchase a few set of outfits quite cheap and the most expensive feature is the option to turn your own characters (alts, mains, etc) into computer controlled heroes / henchman, which is obviously cool.

Sources:
http://gigaom.com/2006/10/26/guild-wars/
http://playnoevil.com/serendipity/index.php?/archives/302-NCSoft-Guild-Wars-Building-An-Efficient-MMO-Infrastructure.html
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17820122/ns/technology_and_science-games/t/guild-wars-experiment-worked/
https://secure.ncsoft.com/cgi-bin/Store.pl?dnv=1568251813&action=toggleCategory&category=4

Yeah, no doubt. It's why I said that I really want to look at ArenaNet's books to see HOW it worked. I mean, I know that the North American WoW servers cost Blizzard about $150,000 to run every day, and that's just on tech costs, not counting paying salary for customer service, etc. Obviously ArenaNet didn't have nearly so many to deal with, nor did it have so many GMs, but that's still a lot of money that you simply can't make up with boxed sales alone I'd imagine.

So I'm just curious to see HOW it worked, because all logic says it shouldn't have. Maybe the microtransaction store WAS a lot more popular, maybe they really saved a ton of money on bandwidth, maybe they were actually just barely in the red the whole time.

 

[Auxiliary]

It's possible to find out!

http://global.ncsoft.com/global/ir/quarterly.aspx

Don't expect me to dig into them for you though ;p

 

[Proteus214]

I can remember a quote from one of the head honcho's at Blizzard from 2008, saying that they will never consider a thing like micro-transactions because they already charge a subscription fee. How times have changed. I will see if I can dig up this quote somewhere.

Good thing I left the sinking ship that is WoW some time ago. Blizzard was already a greedy corporation, but after since their merger with Activision, it has just gotten worse.

Edit: Found the quote!

We chose to go with the subscription-based model instead of that approach. We've taken the approach that we want players to feel like it's a level playing field once they're in WoW. Outside resources don't play into it -- no gold buying, etc. We take a hard line stance against it. What you get out of microtransactions is kind of the same thing and I think our player base would feel betrayed by it. I think that's something else you have to decide on up-front instead of implementing later.
--Rob Pardo, Blizzard's Senior Vice President of Game Design (2/20/2008)

You do realize that he was not talking about something like this at all. When people talk about microtransactions, they're talking about what you see in a game like Farmville. Want a nice weapon? 5 bucks. Want to play a new battleground that they just put in? 5 bucks. Want to unlock the next raid instance? 10 bucks.

So far the only microtransactions that they actually have pertain to vanity mounts, vanity pets, changing character name/race/sex/faction/server, and possibly a cross-realm invite. None of this has any effect whatsoever on combat, questing, or available game content. Pardo has kept his word.

 

[The Human Torch]

I can remember a quote from one of the head honcho's at Blizzard from 2008, saying that they will never consider a thing like micro-transactions because they already charge a subscription fee. How times have changed. I will see if I can dig up this quote somewhere.

Good thing I left the sinking ship that is WoW some time ago. Blizzard was already a greedy corporation, but after since their merger with Activision, it has just gotten worse.

Edit: Found the quote!

We chose to go with the subscription-based model instead of that approach. We've taken the approach that we want players to feel like it's a level playing field once they're in WoW. Outside resources don't play into it -- no gold buying, etc. We take a hard line stance against it. What you get out of microtransactions is kind of the same thing and I think our player base would feel betrayed by it. I think that's something else you have to decide on up-front instead of implementing later.
--Rob Pardo, Blizzard's Senior Vice President of Game Design (2/20/2008)

You do realize that he was not talking about something like this at all. When people talk about microtransactions, they're talking about what you see in a game like Farmville. Want a nice weapon? 5 bucks. Want to play a new battleground that they just put in? 5 bucks. Want to unlock the next raid instance? 10 bucks.

So far the only microtransactions that they actually have pertain to vanity mounts, vanity pets, changing character name/race/sex/faction/server, and possibly a cross-realm invite. None of this has any effect whatsoever on combat, questing, or available game content. Pardo has kept his word.

And how long do you think that that will last?