Posts with tag price

Though character service pricing has always seemed high, if you're paying for WoW in pounds sterling then soon you're going to have to pay a bit more. Presumably, this is to bridge the difference in value between the pound and the euro, but Blizzard's description of the price change as an adjustment to ensure they're offering the "best entertainment value" doesn't really sell it -- as pages of unhappy commenters can attest to. If you're in the market for character services, here's the new pricing, in effect April 30th:

Takralus

Name Change .................................................... Current Price: £6 | New Price: £7
Pets ....................................................... Current Price: £9 | New Price: No change
Helms ................................................... Current Price: £10 | New Price: No change
Appearance Change ...................................... Current Price: £12 | New Price: £13
Guild Name Change ....................................... Current Price: £15 | New Price: £17
Character Transfer ........................................ Current Price: £15 | New Price: £17
Race Change ................................................. Current Price: £15 | New Price: £17
Mounts ................................................ Current Price: £17 | New Price: No change
Faction Change ............................................. Current Price: £20 | New Price: £22
Guild Transfer ..................................... Current Price: £25 | New Price: No change
Guild Faction Change ......................... Current Price: £30 | New Price: No change
Level 90 Character Boost .................... Current Price: £40 | New Price: No change
Guild Transfer and Faction Change .... Current Price: £50 | New Price: No change

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We realised as soon as we came out with Warlords of Draenor boost to 90, we knew that there was going to be demand for more than 1. It's tremendously awkward to tell someone that you should buy two copies of the expansion just to get a second 90. That's odd. So we knew at that point we were going to have to offer it as a separate service.

When pressed on the price, he responded as follows:

In terms of the pricing, honestly a big part of that is not wanting to devalue the accomplishment of levelling. If our goal here was to sell as many boosts as possible, we could halve the price or more than that - make it $10 or something. And then hardly anyone would ever level a character again.

But levelling is something that takes dozens if not over 100 hours in many cases and people have put serious time and effort into that, and we don't want to diminish that.I am not an economist, I'm not the one setting the dollar value myself, but it's not the profit maximising price. That was not our aim here.

Ion's explanations make sense, but it does not alter the fact that $60 is a huge amount of money, more than almost anyone ever thought the service would cost. Ion's interview with Eurogamer certainly implies although doesn't confirm that the $60 price point is correct, or at least was intentional at the time.

[Thanks for the tip, silvertongue0!]

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While we were expecting that the level 90 boosts may appear sometime after the patch's launch, we weren't thinking that they would crop up today before the pre-orders even went out. And we certainly didn't think they would be priced at $60.

It seems likely that this is not intended to be up yet, given that pre-orders are not live, so there is a possibility that this is a test number. A member of WoW Insider staff, Matthew Rossi, was able to log on and see this on his server, between restarts. Whether it will still be there when servers come back up later today remains to be seen.

This is a far higher price point than many were expecting, but that can be viewed as a good thing or a bad one. A good thing because it puts the price on leveling at a point where the work that goes into a 90 still has value, a bad thing because it's expensive.

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Blizzard has just announced permanent price cuts to the Wrath of the Lich King and Cataclysm expansions in the EU for 2012. What seems to be a push for easier accessibility to WoW, Wrath now costs only €19.99, down from €34.99 and Cataclysm is now €29.99, down from €34.99. Whether or not these deals are coming to the United States is not known at this time, but I can't really understand why they wouldn't. Getting your WoW account up to date has never been cheaper, and Blizzard is making sure the barrier to entry is as low as possible for new players.

Permanent price cuts for WoW expansions in 2012

Great news for all Blizzard fans! From today, our latest games are available at retail and on the Blizzard Store at new, permanently low prices. You can now get Wrath of the Lich King for a mere €19.99 and Cataclysm for just €29.99. There's never been a better time to grab the games you might have missed out on before. Just click here and celebrate the New Year by taking advantage of our new reduced prices. Still don´t have World of Warcraft? Now you can get the full game and all expansions for cheaper than ever before.

Want to check out StarCraft II? If you haven't yet taken advantage of our great new price for StarCraft II, you can click here to get yours right away!

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Brace yourselves for what could be some of most exciting updates to the game recently with patch 4.3. Review the official patch notes, and then dig into what's ahead: new item storage options, cross-realm raiding, cosmetic armor skinning and your chance to battle the mighty Deathwing -- from astride his back!

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Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen and Fox Van Allen aim to show you how to make money on the Auction House. Email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail!

Epic gems are here, and they're designed differently than we're used to. To be specific, they're designed without fairness baked in, which is somewhat of a new feeling for people who weren't around buying epic gems in The Burning Crusade.

Fairness is actually the wrong word for this. Life isn't fair, and neither is WoW. Instead, I'll talk about balance. Blizzard has gone to great lengths to ensure that the game remains fun for as many people as possible by trying to avoid changes that suddenly disadvantage an arbitrary subset of players or shift the desirability of choices made a long time ago.

Balanced changes don't force competitive PvP and raiding group to play the gold-making game to be on a level footing with the competition. They also don't provide a tangible itemization difference between the profession perks of different crafting professions.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen and Fox Van Allen aim to show you how to make money on the Auction House. Email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail!

Volatile Fire is quite cheap now but will not remain so after patch 4.3. Volatiles are a cornerstone of the crafting and economic design of WoW, as each one has several types of items that require it for production. When the prices of Volatiles increase, crafted goods go up in price and raw materials go down in price.

Very few people farm exclusively for Volatiles, as they're usually given a small chance to drop off things that are worth considerably more than the Volatiles themselves (like ore veins and elementals). That's part of why the Volatiles market is exceptionally susceptible to changes that change the way a lot of people play and loot. In this case for Volatile Fire, right now a ton of Fires are coming from people continuing to do Fireland dailies. Patch 4.3 is around the corner and will likely have something cooler for people do with their time than grind for entry level raiding and PVP gear. What can you do to protect yourself and profit from these changes?

Pop law abounds in The Lawbringer, your weekly dose of WoW, the law, video games and the MMO genre. Running parallel to the games we love and enjoy is a world full of rules, regulations, pitfalls and traps. How about you hang out with us as we discuss some of the more esoteric aspects of the games we love to play?

The no-win situation is, at its core, a sad state of affairs. Seriously, no one is winning in a no-win situation. In fact, everyone could be said to be losing.

Piracy has been long held to be the dire no-win situation in the video game industry because it represents a perfect culmination of utter loss -- an infinitely copyable product that took millions of dollars to produce being distributed for free. No profit means the studio gets its windows shuttered and no one goes home employed.

Last week, I read an article on PC Gamer that talks about Runic Games's Torchlight. The game is a fantastic spiritual successor to the Diablo series that the company's CEO, Max Schaefer, served as lead designer for. Runic Games was essentially bought by Perfect World, a Chinese MMO company that seeks to release an MMO version of the popular game.

Schaefer has some different views and conclusions about how piracy effects his game. In a nutshell, Schaefer sees no problem with the millions of illegally downloaded copies of Torchlight in Asian markets. When the MMO is released, the brand recognition and audience building that piracy affords will bring in new customers for the eventual MMO, where it is harder to pirate a service. With so many games going online these days with multiplayer components requiring authentication or even a license purchase (as with used versions of PS3 and XBox 360 games), is this the right attitude to have in world where a game's success is made or destroyed based on sales? Is this line of thought able to coexist with the fickle dev studio and publisher system in place now in the industry?

Ultimately, we can learn something from Schaefer's comments, especially about audience building. And, potentially, we can see the future of World of Warcraft's distribution as the game gets a bit heavy in terms of barrier to entry.

Our friends over at FigurePrints have a few pieces of news to share this weekend: first of all, they've dropped the price in the EU from €129.95 (which was about $166) to €99.95, which lines up with the US price of $129.95. The reason given for the original higher price was exchange rates, but they now say things have settled down enough where they can line up the prices. No word on if EU people who ordered them at the higher price will be getting a refund, so I'd assume they won't.

Also, they have now implemented the Tier armor sets we were told about in our interview at BlizzCon -- instead of ordering a FigurePrint with your usual gear on it, you can instead choose to dress your character in Tier 1, 2, or 3, dungeon set 1 or 2, or the original PvP Rare or Epic armor sets. That's designed so that characters don't have to go back and collect all of those pieces -- if you'd rather remember your character in that original armor from the vanilla game, there you go.

Creative Labs posted a World of Warcraft-related teaser yesterday, and today WoW.com is proud to deliver an exclusive reveal: they're promoting a brand new product called the Sound Blaster World of Warcraft headset. This will be a state of the art gaming headset available in both wired and wireless versions, complete with all of Creative's high end gaming audio technology, including THX TruStudio PC Surround, which they say is the "most advanced 'virtual' 3D surround" on the market today. Creative's CMSS is already recognized by many as the best virtual surround sound in gaming, and THX TruStudio PC is supposed to sound even better. The headset also features Creative's VoiceFX technology (so you can disguise your voice with a few different effects), and they say the wireless version of the headset will feature an uncompressed signal that sounds terrific as well.

The headset itself is designed in coordination with Blizzard, and the ear cups (which are complete over-ear) actually feature lighted glyphs, available in Horde or Alliance flavors at launch (with other designs released eventually), and illuminated by programmable RGB LEDs. They have their own software interface, so you'll be able to choose from 16 million colors. Price isn't set just yet, but we'd expect it'll be in line with other high-end headsets, from $100 to $150 depending on what options you go with.

The headset releases in November, but Creative also sent us the pre-prototype render at right, and they've updated their teaser with a picture of the Alliance glyph. Creative tells us they'll have the headset on display at BlizzCon, so if you're there this weekend, stop by their booth and check it out. And be sure to stay tuned to WoW.com -- we're working on a way to give you the chance to win one of these for yourself.

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BlizzCon 2009 is coming up on August 21st and 22nd! We've got all the latest news and information. At BlizzCon you can play the latest games, meet your guildmates, and ask the developers your questions. Plus, there's some great looking costumes.

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We've rounded up a few more Wrath of the Lich King deals if you haven't pulled the trigger on a preorder yet.

• Newegg has the game available for the low price of $36.99 with free shipping, which is a couple bucks cheaper than Amazon. (thanks, Lîlîth of Crushridge!)
• Reader Tyler G tell us that Gametraders, a chain in Australia, will be selling the game with a 60 day timecard and poster for AU$79.95. Usually the game is AU$60 and the timecard is AU$40, so it's a deal.
• Commenter Rey tells us that Canada's Futureshop is offering 40% off if you trade-in two games. We don't see that on their site (there is a $100 costume contest though and a free hat!), but we'll take his word for it. A free hat!
  

A few more after the break.

When I got my recruit a friend account it came with two lovely, full-color Bradygames guide books. Each is a 24.99 16.49 value with the Battle Chest purchase. The books have descriptions of all the races and classes. They go into some detail about the zones and many of the monsters in WoW. The guides contain tips on game play and various mechanics. I found them to be completely useless. They're outdated. They guides don't really give any tips on the nuances of the game. At times they are wildly inaccurate.

Granted, they may be helpful to brand new players, though not entirely more useful than small, black and white Game Manual that also comes in the box. As a rookie I never turned toward printed guides. I asked a lot of questions from resources like Thottbot, Petopia, and of course WoW Insider. Most of what I've learned, I've learned on the fly. The beautiful, colorful images must cost a small fortune to print. It all seems very excessive to me.

Alright, so the splash screen mystery is dramatic. Whatever the important announcement is, I don't think they could come up with one that makes me happier than the new authenticator. I will be first in line to buy mine once it comes out. It seems that most of us are with me. We've been clamoring for better authentication, and we're going to get it.

A one-time charge of six and a half bucks for an extra layer of security seems like a smoking deal to me. It hasn't occurred to me to be bothered by the price. Tuhrell of Malrone believes that the authenticators should be distributed by Blizzard for free. Vallana of Thaurissan is on a short list of responders in the thread that agreed with the original poster. She believes that her $15/month is enough to spend on WoW and is "not retarded enough to get hacked so I really don't need it."

Figureprints (that company that will make a 3D mini-figurine of your character) has posted a notice on their site that they are in fact doing so well... that they're raising their price. Now, if you want a real-life copy of the character you've worked so hard on, it'll cost you $130, a $30 increase over the original price. What will the extra money buy you? They say they're stepping up production, and that they've opened up a brand new production facility on the other side of the country. But even though they say they can make more faster, they're still doing that random drawing thing -- instead of actually buying a figure, you have to enter a drawing to buy one.

The other reason they cite for raising the price is that their "material costs" are much higher than they expected. Could that have to do with the fact that we've seen a lot of figure replacements in their run so far? These things can get pretty expensive when you have to make two for every other order.

Is $130 too much for you or are you still interested? From the beginning, Figureprints has been working around the clock making these, so even if they lose a little business over the higher price, maybe it'll help them keep up with demand better. And if the new price doesn't work out, maybe we'll see them cutting back again (or offering deals via Blizzard or someone else).

Drysc has written a book about epic flying mount costs on the forums -- there aren't many goldsinks left in the game, but that 5000g you've got to pay for an epic flying mount is still there for sure (just ask anyone who doesn't have one).

He says that yes, the flying mount is definitely worth it (it makes playing the game much faster, since most of the time spent in the game is actually travel anyway), but also that actually obtaining an epic flyer was always meant to be optional -- only for players who want to "go the extra mile." Not sure how he can say both of those things at the same time, but there you go. He also says the main consideration in the cost wasn't any effect on the economy, but rather simply making sure that it took a certain amount of time for players to obtain all that gold -- they averaged how quickly players could pick up gold versus how long they wanted players to work for the mount, and arrived at 5000g.

There is some (kind of) good news on the horizon for players who don't want to spend all that money, however. If and/or when Blizzard releases a higher riding skill, Drysc says they'll probably drop the price on this one. Of course, that doesn't really tell us anything concrete -- with the onset of siege vehicles, there may be all kinds of changes to how riding and driving works in the game. Until then, keep grinding, because apparently the only thing that will get you flying fast is a whole lot of gold.