Headline image courtesy of Blizzard Entertainment
As the World of Warcraft 20th Anniversary Event kicks off, Blizzard has once again shown that it is out of touch with its player base.
Recently, we've seen quite a big jump in the number of players in World of Warcraft as The War Within has definitely been a breath of fresh air throughout the community. While there are problems here and there, Blizzard Entertainment seems to have done its homework, constantly balancing classes and content, giving players things to do in the game, and ensuring the game’s longevity.
One such event came just this week with the 20th Anniversary of WoW, which brought an entire patch of content – but has also ruined a lot of the hard work done over the past few months.
Surprise, surprise, it has to do with a cash-shop item which never needed to be part of the game.
Many can recall a time in recent years when Blizzard came under fire for a mount and cosmetic added to Diablo IV which more than the base game itself. We also know that the first-ever mount added to the WoW in-game shop, Celestial Steed, made more money than StarCraft 2 itself – which is an entirely insane metric to think about.
Screenshot courtesy of Blizzard Entertainment
Now, they have done it again and have come under fire for it – as the Trader’s Gilded Brutosaur was added to the in-game shop – costing a massive NINETY DOLLARS! Who could have guessed that this caused instant uproar across the game’s vast community?
From all the good of the 20th Anniversary, there has been a lot of talk online of the problems, as the game has ruined scaling in many of the older raids and dungeons, broken many classes through bugs, and now brought in a spate of microtransactions which seem completely unnecessary.
The “Longboi”, the name given to the previous Brutosaur mount which was available in-game for 5,000,000 gold, was something special which players had to work hard to acquire. This mount, available during Battle for Azeroth, gave players access to the Auction House wherever mounting was available – so what stopped Blizzard from re-adding it to the game at that price or simply adding the new one for similar prices as a gold sync? The new mount comes with the same Auction House feature, but adds in a mailbox too, albeit with so many mailbox toys in the game, it is not too difficult to have that.
A few minutes after the mount was released, the new main city hub, Dornogal, was filled with people on their prized new possession – and fair play to them, taking advantage of what is provided with their own hard-earned money.
Screenshot courtesy of Blizzard Entertainment
However, this now opens the door for Blizzard to add in all sorts of mounts constantly, with many even stating that we are less likely to see things like the Swift Spectral Tiger or Magic Rooster put into the Trading Post but rather added to the in-game shop at a high price.
Image: GosuGamers
This is not even the only bundle added, as another $30 bundle was released at the same time, featuring a host of mounts which are deemed to be “Warcraft’s 30th Anniversary” mounts. All in all, this is a very strange move, but one that seems to be making them money – while also hyper-inflating the price of the WoW Token within the game. We can only hope that this is a once-off thing, but we have seen this before and it is a never-ending cycle.
