Comments on: In which Blizzard figure out how to charge social players more

By: Pai

Pai — Sat, 21 May 2011 04:08:04 +0000

Yeah, but Blizzard pretty much destroyed that social reason for realms with the battlegroup-wide DungeonFinder.

By: It takes a world to raise a village « Welcome to Spinksville!

It takes a world to raise a village « Welcome to Spinksville! — Fri, 20 May 2011 05:45:30 +0000

[...] Comments « In which Blizzard figure out how to charge social players more [...]

By: Utakata

Utakata — Fri, 20 May 2011 05:00:55 +0000

…and one likely with shrinking subcribers I suspect.

By: Tesh

Tesh — Thu, 19 May 2011 17:17:17 +0000

Indeed… and it’s a bleak vision of the future.

By: Tesh

Tesh — Thu, 19 May 2011 17:16:28 +0000

Agreed, and that’s the point. What sort of “social” are they really trying to reward? Or punish, as the case may be.

By: spinks

spinks — Thu, 19 May 2011 16:33:43 +0000

Added the link for you (I’m not sure that would have put it in the spam filter btw, think people have posted links before.)

I think you make a good point though. When you’re building a new community in a game is when you really want to lure in the more social players. Once you have them hooked, then you can milk them.

By: Paul

Paul — Thu, 19 May 2011 12:12:52 +0000

I lean toward the explanation given on Blessing of Kings — that there was enough skepticism inside Blizzard that this would be worthwhile to add that the skeptics forced the advocates to make the feature pay for itself. The analogy given was the barbershop, which blue posters have indicated isn’t being used very much.

By: Blizzard’s new LFG premium makes perfect sense. « The Noisy Rogue

Blizzard’s new LFG premium makes perfect sense. « The Noisy Rogue — Thu, 19 May 2011 10:59:24 +0000

[...] Yes, I realise that most of you think that I have gone mental, (or more mental), but the fact remains that this is a perfectly understandable move by Blizzard with WoW in the current state that it is. In case you’ve missed the news, Blizzard has come out with a future feature where players will be able to bring in ReadID friends from different servers into the same heroic dungeon group that they are in. Oh yes, and it’s a premium service that will cost you an extra. Of course this has set off a chain of anguish throughout the blogging and forum world, with fists being shaken and thunder rumbling from the mountain tops. The common argument against this new plan is that it will punish, (ie make them pay more), the very players who care enough and are actually able to make friends in WoW. As Spinks says; [...]

By: sean

sean — Thu, 19 May 2011 08:45:34 +0000

i think Game by Night nails the motivation for this – i won’t post the link, as then the post will get eaten by your spam filter – that this is about WoW monetising players like it’s going out of style.

Valve’s model of paying connected customers only works when you expect to keep them – you’re making new games and you want to maintain or continue the community of users. Blizzard’s model works well when your game is in decline and you are looking to extract the maximum possible revenue from your user base.

Because this IS a form of asset-stripping: letting the players with established friend lists skip the random LFG tool, or minimise their contact with it, necessarily means that the remaining population in that LFG pool is more and more toxic. which would be a huge problem if you were trying to build your community; but if you are accepting that your community and player population is decreasing *anyway*, then it makes no difference – the population is decreasing and the LFG population becoming more toxic anyway – so offering an additional service to allow your well-connected players to keep playing while avoiding the pool of toxicity is win-win. except for the leftover LFG-ers of course, but they’re decreasing in number anyway, so it’s time to start monetising the hardcore/ long-termers.

By: Andrew Breese

Andrew Breese — Thu, 19 May 2011 05:52:01 +0000

I just can’t understand how they think it is viable to charge us additionally for a feature which is a logical part of the development path.

How much will patch 4.4 cost?