Rumor: World of Warcraft To Add Microtransactions

[Nurb]

If you pay for a game first and then pay monthly fees to have everyone on an equal playing field you don't charge fucking microtransactions for anything

Damn I don't even play anymore but this pisses me off. Those greedy assholes. You either charge a fee to play and let everyone have an equal shot at content or you have "free" to play and charge to get through content faster and beat up other players with the power of a credit card. Not both!

Paying to bypass grind only encourages developers to keep making games with grind, and more of it to "encourage" people to pay them. No one seems to get this.

 

[shintakie10]

So you have a game built around a tedious grind that encourages people to keep playing longer and rake in money from the subscription fees, and they're planning to give people the option of paying extra to reduce said grind.

As the saying goes, there's a sucker born every minute.

Except at this point, leveling is nothing but one big tutorial so you aren't left staring at a few dozen spells with no idea what they do, the gameplay most people are paying for is at the level cap.

I'd love it if they implemented this, levels 58-80 just drag on forever and the rest get pretty bad after doing them a few times too.

Thing is, there's a strong temptation to eventually start designing *for* those boosts, not the other way around. Is leveling a breeze and people are not buying enough boosts? Let me handle that (...) done, now it's slightly grindier, rejoice. Were people complaining about that other area being too grindy? Psh, not going to bother balancing it better now, when we can sell workarounds instead. Are those items desirable but only few people are buying using cash and avoiding a grind? Let's say they are periodically destroyed unless you have cash-only prevention. Ofc it will be introduced as loot, saying "look! we do listen to players!", but later, preferably after a pile of money is collected. At the same time another cash-only gimmick will be introduced and the cycle will continue, with more and more resources being focused on... gimmicks. While WoW is not there, this kind of stuff is not a theory - look at LOTRO, for example.

In more general sense: introduce quest markers/guides -> clear and detailed descriptions from questgivers become optional -> they are moved down on priority ladder -> they are more likely to be skipped when deadline is closer ->suddenly you have no option than to use quest markers/guides. Various in-game boosts don't have to be a "forced purchase", but something that can happen after they are established will have much to do with "forced" and limiting player's choices.

Blizzard has had up xp boosters in the game for a long while now. Even without them you still generally can outlevel zones you're questin in long before you reach the climax of the story. In fact, they've gone so far as to nerf the needed experience to level on 3 separate occasions as I recall, 2 of which happened within this expansion and the last.

The newest class added into the game, the Monk, actually gets (once a day for an horu) a quest that gives them a straight 50% experience buff. It has no level limit, stacks with every other XP buff (includin an elixir that drops off a rare mob that increases experience gain by another somethin percent), and works for every thing that gives you xp.

A Monk can literally level from 15 (when you get out of the starter zone I believe) to 90 in a single day, not even a very long day, due to the massive amounts of xp boosts they get.

 

[eberhart]

Blizzard has had up xp boosters in the game for a long while now. Even without them you still generally can outlevel zones you're questin in long before you reach the climax of the story. In fact, they've gone so far as to nerf the needed experience to level on 3 separate occasions as I recall, 2 of which happened within this expansion and the last.

The newest class added into the game, the Monk, actually gets (once a day for an horu) a quest that gives them a straight 50% experience buff. It has no level limit, stacks with every other XP buff (includin an elixir that drops off a rare mob that increases experience gain by another somethin percent), and works for every thing that gives you xp.

A Monk can literally level from 15 (when you get out of the starter zone I believe) to 90 in a single day, not even a very long day, due to the massive amounts of xp boosts they get.

Imho, leveling itself is understandable for WoW - a game with level cap getting higher and higher (and as long as this is how vertical progression is handled by xpacs). If you want to get a decent number of new people and main part of that game is still... endgame, you better make sure they get to the cap before they quit. And you can bet quitting fast is an issue in many games, not necessarily F2P ones even.

 

[Evonisia]

Luckily for me it's optional and not too important, so I can level at my own pace as always.

 

[rapidoud]

Eh, because they're not making enough money as it is?

Then again, games are about doing whatever makes the customer happy. If they're happier paying money to get to a higher level faster, good for them I guess.

I called shenanigans when RMAH was announced for D3, and look how that turned out. Made the game terrible.

Granted, what they're doing here is about making an already established game being made ever so easier, but comeon; if people want to powerlevel then they'll just pay a service to do it. This is just being greedy blizz.

Also, what happens when new content is introduced and people race to the new level cap?