World of Warcraft: The War Within was announced alongside two other expansions as part of the Worldsoul Saga at BlizzCon 2023, and first impressions from players seem to be pretty positive, with one notable exception: nobody’s happy about the idea of paying $90 for three days of early access to the new content.
There are three ways to purchase The War Within. You can get the $50 base edition, or you can upgrade to the $70 heroic edition if you want access to a bonus mount and transmog set. Or, if you want even more digital goodies, you can grab the $90 epic edition, which includes some other tchotchkes, plus 30 days of game time, guaranteed access to the beta, and three days worth of early access to the expansion itself.
It’s three days early, and the $90 includes a bunch of other stuff.
If you don’t want to pay it, don’t.
The only downside in the article is other people might get it. The less people who buy it the less it matters
Yup. Headline is a bit misleading. But I guess saying $40 extra which includes a $10 game time voucher and guaranteed beta access doesn’t grab attention the same way.
Three days headstart if you’re playing competitively is huge. Is this preaccess going to allow people to start leveling? If so literally all hardcore guilds will require it from their raiders.
If they do things like they have for the last few expansions, neither raids, neither ranked pvp, neither mythic+ will be available in the first 2 weeks or more.
Realistically you will have more than enough time to level a character to max, maybe even two.
It still doesn’t make it right, or acceptable, but it’s more than enough to bash Blizzard for being greedy.
Gotcha, I haven’t played for many years by now so didn’t know, back in my days the race started the moment the xpac released, from what I remembered. That still leaves things like realm first top level achievements and stuff like that, no?
I think the last time realm first achievements were a thing (for anything other than raids) was in Lich king, but I might be mistaken.
Since I wrote my previous comment, I thought about it, and there are advantages for starting earlier. Reaching max level gives you access to world quests, which can be a source of gear and reputation. It also leaves you more time to complete the weekly objectives before the next reset. If I recall correctly, last time (the launch of Dragonflight) you got an item you can use to increase the power of a piece of crafted gear.
For the average player it doesn’t really matter, but for the world first racers, it might.
It’s already too late. The time for us to shut this shit down was Diablo 4. Now that Blizzard knows their fanbase of rubes will pay extra for a headstart, expect to see this as the norm for all future releases.
I’m at Disneyland with my family RN and we mainly came because this week was insanely cheap for hotels. My hotel basically touches the convention center and there is almost no one here for blizzcon. It’s dying.
The conversations I’ve overheard are so sad. They all justify simping for blizzard like addicts. So much random misogyny too.
I used to love blizzard games but just the people I’ve listened to concern me.
It started long before. I remember boycotting d3 when the auction house came out and i stopped wow a decade ago because you are paying monthly for a savegame plus microtransactions.
I can buy way better indie games for that price or keep playing guild wars 2 which has no sub.
I mean this sort of thing in general started way before Diablo 4. Gamers have been licking the boots of publishers for a dozen years now. They tolerate DRM that kneecaps performance, they tolerate subscription fees, they tolerate microtransactions, they tolerate always-online games, they tolerate games that require 3rd-party accounts and EULAs, and they tolerate unnecessary bullshit launchers that are jam-packed full of spyware and ads. They would have tolerated the Unity bullshit too but Ricky boy boiled the frog too quickly.
But look, guys, you asked for this by saying you want us to pay staff better. We will, but first we need to increase some prices heavily because I only took this CEO job because of the juicy bonus and I’m definitely not giving that up. Would you? And don’t forget the board we’re so lucky to have who need their stipends and stock grants etc, lest they find other companies willing to bow to their demands. We wouldn’t be who we are if we didn’t keep paying the top dogs top dollar.
Business model. Legislating the fucking business model.
Jesus fuck, what is it about this industry that makes people flip out about any sort of consumer protection? You know this is fucked up. You know “just don’t buy it!” will never help. What other possible solution do you imagine, besides telling companies to just sell a product, without any exorbitant double-dipping?
I don’t see the issue to be honest. It’s three days… How is it substantially different from somebody waiting 3 months for the price to go down even more? What are you protecting against?
Runescape’s real-money transactions should absolutely be illegal.
The fact they had to limit people to spending thousands of dollars per week - for fucking Runescape - is a giant flashing red light. In no universe is any public MMO worth ten thousand dollars per year. But that’s the kind of spending all games with real-money charges actively pursue.
If we allow this to continue there will be nothing else.
I don’t think we need laws to stop a few oil barons from risking it all in the wildy, you’re proposing such stupid overregulation lol. these are literally non issues
This is becoming EVERY GAME. Silent Hill has a battle pass! Silent Hill does not have battles! All of that shit is just lootboxes plus excuses. People finally recognize lootboxes are abusive nonsense. But all that’s changed is how they’re presented, so people can go, well, that was bad, but this is completely different slightly!
And all it takes to stop that from infecting the entire industry, is - stop charging real money, inside video games. A thing that was barely conceivable, fifteen years ago, when the industry was neither small nor broke. This grift takes in billions of dollars per year. Largely from children. And if you care as little about kids as I do - it’s also fucking up the entire medium of video games. Again: this is becoming every game. Nothing modern is safe. You can’t even reliably stay away, because it gets shoved into games, after people bought them.
If we allow this to continue, there will be nothing else. Only legislation will fix this.
Yes, but presumably the order of magnitude (waiting substantially longer) would be worse but you’re arguing the opposite… Why is waiting longer for a price cut better?
Ohhh, that’s a completely different angle than I thought you were going for.
It’s still ridiculous, though.
Price drops exist to encourage new people to pay. People who would not otherwise buy the thing, buy the thing. But - anyone who pays an exorbitant amount up-front, for a game with a monthly subscription, three days early, was fucking obviously going to buy the thing, full-price, day-of. This is just gouging. This is seeing how little they can offer, in exchange for completely arbitrary quantities of money.
If they offered a sliding scale where the price doubles for every extra day of early access - some addict with more money than sense may well drop tens thousand dollars, for an extra week. Which is obviously fucking nonsense. Please tell me you understand price and value are different concepts, and they can align, or they can not. Ten thousand dollars for one week of a game that costs ten dollars a month is complete absurdity, rivaled only by games charging more than the price of the entire full-price game for some stupid item inside that game.
That exploitation of irrational decision-making doesn’t begin at ten thousand dollars. Smaller-scale abuses of it are not better… just lesser.
I think it’s fine too, for the general case of video games. If someone wants to pay some premium, several times a game’s price to get access a couple days or a week early, I mean, I sure as hell am not going to pay it, but if some people do and are willing to bear a larger portion of the development costs, fine. It’s not like I would have noticed or cared if a game’s release date was a week later. Besides, I’m going to wait for reviews to come out anyway.
I’ll also add that I’m not gonna get “premium” editions with some plastic doodads or artbooks or whatever, but there are clearly people who are willing to do that. If a game publisher wants to make the offer and someone else is willing to accept, I mean, okay, whatever makes them happy.
That being said, WoW is an MMO, and that does introduce different dynamics. I don’t play it, so I don’t know the specifics there. Like, a guild cannot play together if all of its members aren’t together at the same time, and maybe that puts pressure on all the members to buy early. It also sounds like there are some self-imposed challenges to try to be the first person to do various things, and I guess that there could be a pay-to-win element in that sense. Frankly, I don’t find doing that sort of thing to be much fun, but I suppose for people who do, maybe it’d be an issue. Maybe there’s something specific to WoW that makes it matter more than a typical video game there.
I think that in general, a lot of video game players would be a lot happier if they obsessed less about getting things exactly on release dates. I mean, the patientgamers crowd waits for at least a year before they look at a game. I wouldn’t go quite that far myself, but they still have fun playing games.
I dont get your point about “Just don’t buy it” not working.
If consumers didnt think it was a fair price, then they wouldn’t buy it. People can live without a videogame, it’s not like this is a big pharma company raising prices on a life-saving drug.
the business model of...charging too much money? No, I dont have any issue with this. I have a lot of issues with Blizzard, but this ain't on the list. It sounds like a smart way to alleviate expansion launch server burden, giving both a much better experience for some, and an improved launch for the rest.
… it’s a subscription service! They already get a shitload of money, every single month. Don’t bemoan their server costs. That’s what you’re already paying for!
I didnt say server costs, I said server burden. Long queue times on launch day, server crashes, very unevenly distributed server load when everyone is in the same area at the start. I remember FF14's latest expansion was so bad, they completely halted sales of it. Forget too expensive, there was no price, you could not buy it if you were late.
You dont have to pay $90, because you dont have to buy this early access. you dont have to buy the regular access. You are not entitled to this game as a human right, the developers didnt have to make this game, and they dont have to let you play it for whatever price you want. They get to decide the price.
Hair-splitting. They have your money already. Services breaking down is not a problem solved by charging more - as you point out, for FF14. Charging more than the price of an entire new game, for three fucking days of opt-in beta testing, is completely absurd.
Any form of taking your money for bullshit is reducing how much you can spend on things that matter. This ultracapitalist zeal for equating price and value only makes a lick of sense if it’s rational people making informed decisions - and there’s a thousand other ways we identify and forbid irrational uses of money.
Outright confidence scams have seen victims come back with more money, thinking it’ll work out this time. Revenue alone absolves nothing.
Yeah, charging more is a very common way to alleviate service congestion, like amusement parks. They have the same sort of early access for more money deals. or very popular dine in restaurants, concerts, anything where capacity is a concern really.
Any form of taking your money
They are not taking anything, they do not have access to your wallet or your bank account. You can choose to give them your money. No one is making you, you have all of your money to spend on things that matter. If this doesnt matter to you? Dont have to spend a cent on it. Make your own MMO and charge less for it.
First paragraph: ‘it happens a bunch’ never makes direct monetary exploitation better.
Second paragraph: strawman based on stupid word game. Less than hair-splitting. A lie about what I fucking obviously mean, by comparing this abuse to a scam, not theft.
this is no strawman, I quoted you, you're claiming they're taking your money. Because otherwise what point do you even have? Nothing is happening because they dont have your money if you're not giving it to them of your own free will for a service you very much do not need or have any innate entitlement to. It's only a problem for you because you want that service, you think you are entitled to it for a cheaper price.
Please, take up game programming. 3D modeling, rigging, animating, shading, level designing, server coding, writing, music composing, voice acting, localizing, play testing, bug fixing. On the scale of World of Warcraft. You can sell it for whatever price you want after you've paid the hundreds of people you had to get help because you didnt know how to. You have no appreciation for what you think you're entitled to.
A vending machine takes money. Taking doesn’t just mean stealing. That’s why I didn’t say stealing your money. You are fixated on one word to ignore the actual god-damn argument.
Or do you get the impression I choose words for softer impact?
I don’t play WoW. I have never played WoW. I am never going to play WoW. I happen to care about people who aren’t me. And all the devs you namedrop as if I’m wildly ignorant of underlying complexity would be massively better-off, if the industry that already abused the shit out of them wasn’t careening toward bottomless greed. If they could just make a thing, and sell it, without being laden with expectations by coked-out executives who expect everything to be an eternal subscription and an overpriced retail sale and a microtransaction Skinner box.
How things make money… matters. Some ways are a scam. And when scams are allowed to proliferate, they starve everything more sensible, by making a shitload more money. But being, y’know, inherently dishonest, morally intolerable, widely detested, et very cetera, the revenue is completely detached from value, and largely detached from quality. Video games as a medium are becoming a mere base for these parasitic business schemes. That happens to be really fucking bad for everyone involved - but most immediately, for anyone who wants to purchase and enjoy a major entertainment product, without being subjected to psychological manipulation to give give give unbounded quantities of their actual real-world money, before they’ve even played the game.
If they could just make a thing, and sell it, without being laden with expectations by coked-out executives who expect everything to be an eternal subscription and an overpriced retail sale and a microtransaction Skinner box.
they can, there is nothing stopping anyone from doing that. But here's what happens. They've got freedom too. This 3D modeler has spent a tremendous amount of time and focus to be as good as he is. And he gets the final say on what he is worth, and what he will accept to work for. A game studio is looking to hire a new 3D modeler. And they have a long history of successful games, games that they have sold for an up front cost and continuing subscription cost. They have more money to offer him than other studios, and he accepts their offer. They are paying industry leading amounts to secure industry leading talent. And they get the final say what they're willing to sell their game for. And you get final say on what you spend your money on. Everyone involved has their freedom, no one is being forced to do anything against their will. The modeler didnt have to accept the job, the studio didnt have to offer that pay, you dont have to buy their game. A chain of events of freedom of choice has lead to the price that they are charging
I have no idea how you think this is a scam. What's the deception? Is it not actually $90? Do you not get 3 days early access? There's...not a whole lot of elements to get through here, one of those two would have to not be true.
Taking money for value invented out of thin air is a scam. All of this arbitrary exclusivity for absurd sums of money is that same process. This is the shallow end - but it is the same sty.
No theyre taking money for 3 days of early access. You dont think its worth that, but that is what people are paying for, Blizzard is being honest about what they are getting, and how much it costs. Scams are by definition deceptive, and there is nothing of the sort happening here.
It costs them nothing extra and makes them a shitload of money. It further normalizes some people paying entirely too much for a video game, and getting special treatment commensurate with the money they throw at it.
And it’s still a subscription fucking MMO, with real-money “microtransactions” for arbitrary in-game bullshit, charging ninety god-damn dollars on top of all that.
Do you know what determines if something costs too much? People not buying it. Thats it. If people buy it? Then its worth that much.
I think youve got a misconception about me telling you you dont have to buy it. Im not prescribing it as a method to stop video game prices from going up if we all work together to not buy it. Im telling you, personally, dont have to buy it, you get to keep your money, and no harm has been done to you. And everyone that does buy it has the same option not to. But Blizzard has been up front, what they get for the money they are spending, and they have the freedom to choose to pay that money, the price is not too much for them.
This is harming the entire video game industry… by making maximum profit come from addiction and frustration. We are all worse-off, because this makes more money. “Caveat emptor” doesn’t fucking work. That’s part of what makes this a scam. Outright boycotts don’t even work, because these greedy bastards can hook a bunch of severe addicts and siphon thousands from each of them. For hats. Or for a game that is, giant air quotes, “free.”
There’s a fucking battle pass… in a Silent Hill game. How blatant does this problem have to get, before you stop pretending it’s just me, as an individual, having a snit? If we allow this to continue, there will be nothing else.
Try this on for size. Split them up, make them worker owned, or strip their IP and open source it. Send a message that anti consumer behavior is dangerous - that your investments could go to zero.
Blizzard and Activision stood up there at the ftc and promised their merger would lead to better products at better prices for customers. Their customers overwhelmingly disagree. Microsoft and Activision/Blizzard said the same. It’s all worse and more expensive.
Companies exist for people, not the other way around. They don’t have rights, they don’t have feelings, and if we do nothing everything we love will turn to shit.
We’re in the endgame. Companies are cannibalizing themselves and each other to desperately extend their profit growth for one more quarter. Not to mention, they do that by squeezing their customers just a little harder from all sides
We need rules and boundaries to the game, or this becomes the only workable playstyle for the board of every publicly traded corporation. We’re going to crash - we’ve colonized the whole world (or at least every place with resources highly profitable to extract). The rate of growth can’t increase - new markets and technologies will open up areas for growth now and then, but certainly not quarterly. Cannibalizing existing industries is going pretty damn fast, and either we stop it now or we stop it once everything is terrible and our technology sucks.
Either way, we’re going to have to tackle climate change and inequality…
That’s not even you voting with your wallet. That’s just you not buying a thing because it’s too expensive. That’s an example of price elasticity
Voting with your wallet is this flawed concept that consumers can control companies through individuals boycotting their products.
For example, I uninstalled hearthstone and quit Blizzard along with many others back when they let China censor a US esports player who commented on Hong Kong protests. But now I wouldn’t buy anyways, because their games suck and their payment schemes are obscene
All they know is they lost n customers in that time period, and failed to recover m
That’s just you not buying a thing because it’s too expensive.
yeah, that's what Im doing. I am not hurt in anyway by not buying this thing, no one is making me buy it. That is an option for literally everyone, no one has to buy it. Im not a protesting activist trying to change Blizzard, Im simply not affected by this. The only people that are, are people that want to pay $90 for early access. If they dont want to, nobody is making them.
Yeah, that’s fine. I’m also not interested, because i don’t play wow anymore
But the phrase “voting with your wallet” is a term loaded with a narrative to justify everything under capitalism, from anti-consumer behaviors to blaming working people for climate change. Neoconservatives and Libertarians use the idea for how deregulation and privitization is the solution to everything
You don’t seem to believe in that nonsense, so I’d encourage you to not use the phrase
Huh, yeah fair enough, your post just had that energy.
I mean, obviously you don’t have to buy a game, but saying just “you don’t have to buy the product from the company being anti-consumer” sounds a lot like a defense of them, you know?
Stop lying to me about my own comments, god dammit.
I am talking about how this product is sold. At no point did I propose not selling it. That’s just the absurd extreme you lot always make up, whenever someone suggests a specific and recent business model is exploitative greedy horseshit.
I want games sold.
What’s happening instead - the status quo you’re sloppily defending - is having games treated as bottomless pits where you can throw all your money, for asymptotically smaller fractions of content that’s already in the game. Or being a subscription service that also demands too much fucking money up-front, as if it was a concrete product being sold anew - and offering a bottomless pit where you can throw all your money.
That shit is what’s happening to every game. Every genre has this. Every platform has this. Single-player games have this. It is the dominant strategy. Everyone scoffing ‘just don’t buy it!’ has seen their glib advice accomplish precisely dick. If we allow this to continue, there will be nothing else. Only legislation will fix this.
Early access is a product. Your comment is asking for laws to prevent this product from existing. You are asking for early access products to be illegal. Your comment is literally that stupid. Not a single part of any of my comment has to do with the ethics of this practice, so stop lying to me about my own comments.
WoW is a service. You could almost call this expansion a product. Charging extra for three lousy days of early access is not a fucking product and not really a service either. It’s gouging. It’s charging extra just because you can get away with it. And market forces let companies get away with that, in a game that already takes fifteen dollars per month, so saying ‘just don’t encourage it’ would obviously accomplish zilch.
I’m accusing you of lying because you want to make it sound like I said “ban WoW” and not “just charge the normal amount the day of like any other product for fuck’s sake.”
You’re accusing me of lying because apparently you don’t know what discussing ethics means. I mean this as literally as possible: what the fuck do you think you’re doing? What activity are you engaged in, here and now? Do you just hit the keys because you like to hear them go clickity-clack?
Governments shouldn’t tell companies what value their products have. Consumers should simply not buy the product if they dont consider it a fair value.
Consumers should simply not buy the product if they dont consider it a fair value.
Does that work?
Think long and hard about your answer. Does that, in fact, have the effect you insist it must? Or are there abundant counterexamples, where greedy horseshit makes bank for negligible value?
You literally said "no recurring costs" (subscription) and "no up-front costs" (price). I'm not sure what other takeaway I was supposed to have from that comment.
Either way, it still sounds like you're expecting developers to work for free, so that you can play video games without paying for them. That's a really weird sense of entitlement, imo.
Jesus! This subject invites the most aggressively poor reading comprehension of any topic on the internet.
My entire fucking argument is JUST SELL GAMES, and people will bend over inside-out to find some way to scoff ‘you want it for free.’ Because apparently that’s the only position you’re prepared to deal with, y’might as well pretend that’s what’s happening.
I really don't understand what difference "products" or "services" is supposed to make in this argument, though. Many games these days are a service, a fact which is inherently true for an MMO like WoW. MMOs require active and ongoing development and support in order to function. That's just the nature of that type of game.
If you want single-player, offline games that only require a one-time purchase, those still exist. But WoW is not that game, and has no intention to ever be, nor do the players have any expectation that it would operate in such a manner.
Maybe instead of getting defensive, you could just clarify wtf you're talking about, or at least take into consideration the context of live-service games, which is what this discussion is specifically about.
Subscription services are fine. Just… don’t charge… up-front.
I do not know how to make this more clear or simple.
… and goddammit I do have to complicate this because you dragged “live service” games into it. Those generally aren’t a product or a service. They’re a scam. They’re a no-cover-charge casino that will gladly take unlimited sums of your actual money in exchange for approximately nothing.
My guy, are we even having the same discussion here?
Considering you thought ‘don’t charge up-front for subscription games’ meant ‘destroy all subscription games,’ evidently fucking not.
There’s at least almost an argument for applying “live service” to anything that’s not a standalone title - but no, the term mostly exists to distinguish them from games that are subscription-based. We have another term for those. It’s “subscription-based.” The alternative is microtransaction hell. Or “season pass” nonsense, which is macrotransaction hell. Games that ostensibly do not cost money… but somehow pull in billions upon billions of dollars.
Considering you thought ‘don’t charge up-front for subscription games’ meant ‘destroy all subscription games,’ evidently fucking not.
I never said or suggested this, so your "reading comprehension" complaints are a little ironic now. I was trying to figure out what you were trying to say, which I still don't fully understand.
It seems like your argument is more "I don't like these types of games, so nobody else should". And it's fine to not like live service games; they're not for everybody. But for millions of people out there, that's the type of game they want to play, and are willing to pay for. You can make the argument that microtransactions or subscription fees are predatory, which is fine, but nobody's obligated to pay for those; people choose to because they want to play a live service game, which is a product an a service which is not free to develop or maintain.
Many games these days are a service, a fact which is inherently true for an MMO like WoW. MMOs require active and ongoing development and support in order to function. That’s just the nature of that type of game.
My ass you didn’t.
And god damn am I tired of people reducing all arguments to ‘you just don’t like it.’
It’s a SCAM. It’s an abuse of innate human foibles, to make a shitload of money. It is making video games, as a medium, objectively worse - maximum profit comes from addiction and frustration, not any form of innate enjoyment. What the fuck does like have to do with that?
You even immediately acknowledge this is condemnation of predatory practices - but you refuse to see the problem, because hey, nobody put a gun to scam victim’s heads!
Don't play WoW, then. I'm not sure what the issue is. You don't like their pricing model, I get that. You don't have to, and you're allowed to not like it. I also don't like it, because I haven't the time or level of interest for the costs to be worthwhile for me.
The thing is, other people are allowed to like it. It's not a scam, though; you're getting what you're paying for. Just because it's not something you would pay for doesn't mean nobody else would or should. If you don't feel that the cost is worth your perceived value of the service, then don't buy it. But to suggest that the government should restrict them from being able to sustain their product (or even - GASP - make a profit from doing so) is absurd.
But the fact of the matter is that games like that cost money to create and maintain. If people are willing to pay for a base game, expansion, and a subscription fee in order to access it, then the creator should be allowed to charge for those things. It's not exploiting a vulnerable demographic like, for instance, payday loan sharks. We're talking about a purely recreational hobby. Hobbies generally cost money.
I’m all for legislation to fix scummy practices in areas where something is essential, i.e. transport, connectivity, food, etc. Or to counter predatory practices like gambling or lootboxes that prey on addicts or children. But in this case I feel like it’d be a bit too much. Nobody needs WoW, nor is it really (in my opinion) preying on addicts in the same way as gambling or lootboxes. If enough people are willing to pay such a ridiculous amount of money, then apparently this is really the value.
Gonna play a bit of devil's advocate, think of a popular MMO like an amusement park, selling a service that several people are using at once, a service that has a certain capacity, and that the quality of that service tends to degrade the more full that capacity is. Long wait times in lines, crowded, noisy, messy. MMO's have the same problems, and emphatically more at expansion launch.
Both services are also focused on immersion, and experiences are much improved when it's not crowded. An early access pass for an amusement park has to be prohibitively expensive or limited to achieve a good experience.
Blizzard's shit, but if FF14 did something like this I'd probably go for it.
Amusement parks can’t just spin up extra servers to handle load at peak times. Video games can. Also there is not a complex economy and ranking system that pits guests against each other at an amusement park.
They also need bandwidth infrastructure. Like theres reasons ff14 stopped sales of its new expansion instead of just "spinning up extra servers". Theyre not installing a direct line from your house to their server, data from around the world is converging on data centers through utility data lines.
Tell me about it. This was a long time ago but I remember one of my friends couldn’t even go a day without doing his dailies. He wasn’t even interested in WoW anymore, he was playing a bunch of other games. But he absolutely had to login every day just to do his dailies then log out and play the game he actually wanted to play.
This went on for months. When we asked him why, he would just say he didn’t want to miss out and fall behind. Bro, you aren’t even interested in the game anymore…
I want to though. Nothing holds my interest like it used to. When a fromsoft game or a deep crpg comes out that isn’t made by Larian I love every minute of getting sucked in but it’s all over too quick and I’d rather play checkers with the wall than pull the lever on another digital skinner box. It doesn’t appeal. It never did. Fuck off.
This is what I’ve been doing with Eve Online for about 10 years. I login every couple months just to make sure my training queue isn’t empty. I don’t even know how to pilot any of the ships I’m trained in now.
Just keep it to one character. FFXIV gates your reward endgame. You can’t just farm as much as you want. So you don’t have to spend too much time keeping up.
But if you start running multiple high level characters you have a problem.
Sure, it would’ve been better if they didn’t add a three days head start but I still don’t really think it’s quite the catastrophy everyone makes it out to be.
It just won’t affect me in any way. I don’t rush to max level, don’t care for world’s first and so on.
So, meh, it just doesn’t feel like it’s THAT big a deal.
I had a friend who paid $100 apiece for 2 “Collectors” versions of the Warhammer MMO 15 years ago. We were both in the beta. I knew it sucked. He had delusions of being a guild leader.
Okay, I gotta ask, since it’s been bugging me for years. I don’t really understand the Warhammer franchise.
I never ran into products in the franchise in the 1980s and 1990s in the US. Dungeons & Dragons yes, Warhammer no.
But I kept crashing into people who talk about it online, and tons of products in the franchise. However, it seems to be a large number of not-that-wildly-successful products.
I can think of products that have had lots of derived products in the franchise, like Star Wars. But there there was one very successful initial trilogy of movies, and those spawned follow-on products.
Or Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Like Warhammer, that’s a UK-originating franchise, but like Star Wars, there was an enormously successful initial product.
Those drew people into the franchise, made the fanbase what it is.
But I’m not really aware of an equivalent for Warhammer. There are some that are pretty good within their niche, like the Total War games. But those didn’t start the franchise.
Is the scene driven by Brits who fell in love with the physical board game? Or what was it that gets people enthusiastic about the series? Like, what is it that is getting people into it?
I don’t hate it, but most of the games I’ve seen don’t really blow me away (even in genres that I’d normally tend to like, like the Battlefleet Gothic: Armada games).
Absolutely absurd profit ratios on the figures, and that’s before they start selling you rule books and paints. The novels are cheap to produce as well.
Warhammer is a tabletop wargame franchise. Everything else is an ad for the toys war game miniatures.
Let me put it like this:
A popular console game might cost $70 now, take hundreds of thousands of man-hours to make, and still might flop and be terrible.
They sell boxes of Imperial Guard squads, little plastic army men, for $40. You need like, ten of them for the screening units of a low-point army.
I remember discovering Warhammer when I was a teenager and thinking how cool it all looked. And then I saw how much it would cost and I until this day have the same dilemma some 20+ years later.
Okay, so thanks to you and @DragonTypeWyvern for the explanation, but follow up question:
Okay, so is the Warhammer boardgame (well, okay, tabletop game, not sure if boardgame is the right term) mostly the province of the groknard crowd, people who are really into specifically wargaming? Or is it more that people like the painting aspect of it, kind of like assembling models, and just that Warhammer lets you can play a game with your models when you’re done decorating them?
My general impression is that hex wargaming has generally been on a decline over about the past thirty years or so. I think that some of that might be just that computers permit for simulations that don’t require simplified models and that may have eaten some of the market. But point is, if there was a big crowd that really liked tabletop wargaming and was gung-ho on having stylized, turn-based gaming, I’d think that places like, oh, Matrix Games that sell a bunch of computer turn-based strategy wargames would be selling competing wargame products like hotcakes; competitors wouldn’t have to worry about cannibalizing a market. But there’s no comparable franchise that I’m really aware of.
I think the computer games are what really helped get the franchise going internationally. I remember my first contact with the franchise was the first Dawn of War, which I really enjoyed, but I think it was only around the time of Dark Crusade that I got to know more about the actual tabletop/miniature game. Being a filthy south american, the official miniatures were and still are completely out of my monetary reach.
I put a lot of emphasis on that aspect of the computer games driving interest because Warhammer Fantasy never had anything as successful as Dawn of War or Space Marine, at least not before the Total War games (which arrived after Fantasy was ditched). Also, for a number of years, 40k grognards will tell you all about the shitty rules of Xth edition (6, 7, 8, 9, whichever), times during which some competitors started showing up. Two notorious competitors to 40k proper, in being sci-fi, are Infinity and Warpath. Within the niche of board/wargames and miniature skirmishes, they’re known, but you’ll be hard pressed to find anyone outside that niche to have ever heard of either. Neither has a videogame which “normies” can play and get to know about the respective universes.
1D4chan has a lot of info on GW, including early history
I think one of the great things about the WAR collectors edition was that you got some excellent merch with it. You got a metal figure (worth around £40 these days), a really good art book, a mousepad (I used mine for many years) and a graphic novel. Sure the MMO was a failure largely in part because EA acquired Mythic and forced the game out the door, but the collectors edition was well worth its price for people that love Warhammer.
The cost Blizzard are charging for a game with digital assets that cost nothing to duplicate is genuinely awful.
If they didn’t stop from abusive micro transactions, half-ass launches, mocking players about mobile phones, overworked devs, a sexist frat boy culture, women leaving over sexual abuse, or a employee who committed suicide (!)… then nothing will.
WoW has micro transactions, including: level boost, several exclusive cosmetics (mounts, armors, weapons), exclusive pets.
You can also buy game time with cash and resell it for gold, so an indirect and limited cash for power, too. I know these have been around at least since BfA, dunno if Legion already had them
Not only that, this is by design. They want their early testers to be a small group of people who are heavily invested in the game, both mentally and financially.
Sure, a lot of people are going to be mad about being “excluded”, but how many of them are going to actually boycott the expansion when it releases because of it? The ones are maddest are the ones who most want to play it and are unlikely to walk away.
There was always going to be a small group of players that got to play it before the majority of the playerbase. The only difference is the $90, and that price is well worth it to a lot of the big fans.
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