Posts with tag fee

I think this is a wild idea (even if it is something I wouldn't actually put my money in). We got tipped about a new site called "You Play or We Pay" and from the looks of it, these guys are offering none other than downtime insurance. That is: you pay a fee to them regularly, and then they "compensate" you for any downtime that your server has. They call it "third-party compensation," but that sounds like insurance to me.

At any rate, we wouldn't quite recommend jumping in headfirst yet -- they haven't, as far as we can see, revealed any prices, and while you can register your characters, you can't actually get any sort of payout quite yet, as they say they're still working on the system. For all we know the site could be an elaborate scam at this point. But it is an intriguing idea, and if they're really ready to put their money where their FAQ is, these guys may have an actual business plan that depends on Blizzard keeping the servers up. Just like all insurance companies, they must have figured out that the servers stay up more often than not, and that there was money to be made there.

It's quite an interesting plan, and we'll keep an eye on it to see if they ever announce a fee or explain themselves better. The math doesn't quite seem right here, but if somehow their fees are low enough and the payouts are high enough, it's possible that you really could be compensated for downtime by a completely separate company other than Blizzard. Very interesting.

Update: The company has contacted WoW Insider, and we've requested an interview. Stay tuned.

It seems Blizzard has been listening to the complaints and concerns of players. I've been taken aback by the implementation of paid name changes, PvE to PvP transfers and gender changes. For years, I've read clamoring for race, faction and class changes.

Zarhym weighed in Wolfbite of Chromaggus' thread in the general forums requesting class changes. Name and appearance changes are purely cosmetic, while allowing class changes would affect the overall dynamics of the game. Later in the thread Zarhym stated that this is partially to avoid creating a "flavor of the month" class, and would prefer to address player concerns. Rerolling was the most common prescription amongst posters to solve the original poster's issue.

If you've played the level 70 game and done the Shattered Sun Offensive dailies, you probably know where this is going. On a good day, doing the complete Outland daily circle, I can come out with somewhere around 10 disenchant-worthy items between regular drops and Shattered Sun Supplies. Leafshine says she can sometimes spend up to 10 minutes working on Disenchanting, and I can believe it. Every time I process a batch of greens on my disenchanter, not only does it take some time to get through with them, then I have to process multiple piles of reagents, and figure if I'm going to store them, sell them, or use them to make a tailoring blue which I will then disenchant into a shard.

If added disenchanting for friends in there, I could spend all the day disenchanting. I have to commend Leafshine for putting up with it, and I don't think it would be a bad idea to start charging a disenchant fee - even if it's as simple as taking a cut of the materials. It's one thing to expect a disenchanter to be ready to disenchant dungeon blues that no-one needs, but it seems like another to mail your stuff to them and expect them to take their time to disenchant it free of charge. I know that friends should help each other out with tradeskill stuff, but there's a limit. Yeah, we're friends, we've raided together, but if I expect you to take 10 minutes out of your play time to help me out, throwing you some gold for your time seems like nothing more than common courtesy.

See if you can follow this reasoning: WoW has ten million players, which is nice and all, but there are actually 800 million teens in the world. Therefore, since Blizzard hasn't reached even 10% of them (80 million), WoW is not actually a success. That's what Craig Sherman of Gaia Online (a casual, browser-based MMO) said to folks at the M16 Marketing conference in San Francisco this week. He claims that WoW's subscription fee has hampered its growth, and that it would be even bigger if there was a free-to-play model.

But his reasoning is unstable there to say the least. Part of the reason WoW is so successful is that Blizzard has had the cash to put up for new servers, new content, and a brand new HQ, and with a free-to-play model, they wouldn't be making nearly as much money as they are. Not to mention the quality of the players -- in my experience, part of the reason WoW is such a good game is that when people pay to play it, you often get a much more interested and involved player base. And of course, while yes, WoW hasn't reached a larger fraction of its "potential" player base (however you define that -- what makes Sherman think that Blizzard is targeting teens at all?), anyone who thinks a 10 million player MMO is "not a success" needs to examine the rest of the MMO market more closely.

Will there be a game bigger than World of Warcraft? It sure seems like it -- at some point in the future, there should be a game that does go free to play and does hit on all the marks -- casual, hardcore, serious, fun -- that World of Warcraft does (in fact, maybe WoW itself will someday open up a free-to-play model). But to claim that WoW has somehow suffered from its subscription model is pretty far from the truth.

[Via Worldofwar.net]

Tobold has a good post up about lifetime subscriptions to MMORPGs that got me wondering: why hasn't Blizzard ever offered a lifetime subscription to WoW?

The obvious answer, of course, is that they think they can make more money by not doing so. In order for a lifetime subscription to be profitable, the player that buys it has to either stop playing before the subscription would have ended, or not be a major drain on the system after their subscription becomes "free." It's a gamble on both sides.

Now, Tobold's reasons for liking his LoTRO lifetime subscription and not jumping on a Hellgate London subscription aren't really applicable to WoW-- HgL is going to be completely different, with no subscription fee required for some players. But would you invest in a lifetime subscription for Blizzard's game? There's little chance they'll offer one now (usually a lifetime subscription is offered at the start of a game's life), but you never know-- if reception to WotLK isn't great, maybe they'll offer it right before the expansion to try and nab players that would quit right afterwards otherwise. By Hellgate's prices, a lifetime subscription to WoW would be $225. Let's go a step further and say that because WoW is so popular, Blizzard would charge $250 for a lifetime subscription to the game, approximately the same price as a year and change paid monthly. Would you take that deal?