People buy the skins. They actually spend money on this stuff. Crazy right?!
So what are corporations going to do? They are going to slowly increase the price, see what they can get away with. Paid cosmetics started as microtransactions, $0.01 to $5, but have since ballooned into a $20-50 normality with them being way way up into the hundreds in some cases. It's ridiculous, but it's all because people actually buy this stuff...
because they can get away with it corporations are always pushing the boundaries of how shitty they can be, and we have arrived at maximum shit for now, until they figure out some new horrible thing to do. There is no going back people have accepted the shit and corporations wont give it up, the only hope is regulation. But there is, not exactly a silver lining since its not a side effect of the shit but there is is lack of shit in some places, AA games and indie games are just fine and they are putting out some of the best games ever made with no shit at all, its just "AAA" mainly that is shitty.
Risk less profit makes the quants and the suits happy. At worst you waste the wages of the artist to create model, and the whole bureaucratic corporate process to get it QA’d and on the shop.
I tried going back to Warcraft for the first time in a few years Just a few weeks ago. It felt like going to a dead mall. There were like 3 people in stormwind and trade was dead.
I mean since Burning Crusade people usually aren’t in capital cities, but mostly in the new zones capital like Shatt or Dornagal for TWW. You might also have been chromie phased?
Game isn’t at 10 million anymore but it is far from dead.
I started in LK days and org/storm was always packed. it started dwindling as time went on but bigger part for me is TRADE being a ghost town too. Who am I gonna play the anal game with?!
You will probably want to go where the current content is, which isn't the old capitals really. I also found that some servers are really dead, though many are linked to others and can for all intents and purposes be considered the same server.
That being said this mount is absurdly priced and I kinda hope the buyers will somehow be ridiculed as in the past (blizzard literally disabled the ability to /spit at others because the playerbase bullied their real money shop customers with it a while ago).
Those people in the new capitals would still be spamming the shit out of trade in the old days. also I should point out i used one of those server status webpages to make sure i was going to a high population alliance server. social shit is half the reason i play MMO's (I say from my second monitor as I play FFXIV lol)
Stormwind and Orgrimmar haven't been main capitals since the first expansions 20 years ago lol, people usually only stayed there for the auction houses.
It's been a moderately populated place on and off since then. But since Dragonflight there has been an auction house in the expansion zone, and now also in The War Within city. So there's next to no reason to even stay in Stormwind/Orgrimmar anymore.
And that's really sad. The expansions added new content and areas which was great but also made the world so big that it feels empty. I think server phasing also had something to do with that, but with the dwindling player base compared to peek times, even the major cities in the expansions feel more empty than ever.
The RMAH on D3 is exactly the cause of what made me quit playing D3 and have not played Diablo since after spending hundreds of hours in D2. Path or Exiles has always been what I pictured D3 should have been but never was.
Yeah I'm gonna pay jack shit for mounts, especially these kind of useful mounts that have exclusive features that can only be obtained through store purchase.
It's even more annoying that they're also locking the 30th anniversary faction mounts behind a paid bundle as well. As if my many years of service and subscriptions isn't sufficient to grant me (and others in the same boat) an opportunity to unlock that kind of stuff through the actual game with fun and creative challenges (no fucking token/rep grinds). Store purchases have no fucking place in a pay-to-play game with a monthly subscription on top, it would've been different had it been a subscriptionless F2P game, but it isn't.
They really love to screw over long-time players.
They had already sunk to a new low when they introduced early-access and paid tender-tokens, but now they're sinking even further down.