I love reading comments and World of Warcraft’s latest update to the game is producing some interesting dialog in the community. There are two sides to the story: those that care and really care and those that care but don’t care. Basically, they’ve introduced a cash shop into the game. A feature that essentially few in the WoW community want.

Why? Because it does nothing but feel like the game is on a slippery slope to F2P cash shop land. Something that WoW players hand Blizzard $14.99 a month to avoid. We pay a premium to not have non-premium features of a game and the ability to quickly give a game company more money within the game is similar to telling players you can now order pizza by complete a quest in the game.

/pizza

Speaking of - not a bad idea. Blizzard if you’re reading, be sure to put the ability to order pizza into the game. Maybe make a Dominos guy show up halfway through a raid and ask if anyone would like to place an order to arrive after the next wipe. Would be hilariously awesome.

Back on track, the outrage is justified yet at the same it isn’t. Why? Well, it’s the same stuff that’s in the actual website, just in the game. You still buy the stuff with real life money, no virtual coins or anything. It’s essentially just the website in video game form. Much like how the cable companies moved PPV from those little pamphlets on that weird tissue paper like paper to the menus in your cable box.

At the same time, there is experimentation. They put lucky charms in the store and boy the Internet almost exploded with the nerd rage of a 1,000 angry WoW players. They collectively were so mad that they slowly moved from their arm chairs and started calling their congressmen and stuff to have WoW taken down for harassing their sensibilities.

WoW Shop

The fun thing about being me is that I wouldn’t care at this point if WoW added a “pay to win” button and you started pouring cash into it. The person who bids the most each week become Super Saiyan and fly around shooting lasers out of their eyes or whatever. Who cares anymore. WoW jumped the shark ages ago and honestly adding a pay to win mechanic would be interesting and lively, far amount different then the idea that we want one meta, two vegetables, and a bread each and every expansion.

However, I’m sure if they did add a pay to win addition to the game, the entire playerbase would revolt. Fair enough, hey, we the gamers define what we play by our activity. However, all I’m saying is it is interesting.

For now, in the moment, the WoW shop just takes away the need to press alt-tab in order to buy the latest pet. No longer will you have to suffer the 10 second delay as you hastily type in the battle.net URL and find the giant link for the latest pet. It’s now available, just like /pizza in Everquest removed the need to open your web browser and type in “Dominios.”

Can people be upset? Sure, it’s WoW. They’re upset about everything. Does it matter? Probably, it probably is a slippery slope into the world of buying lucky charms and frosted flakes for your character. Will it affect anything? Probably not.

That’s my opinion anyway, feel free to share yours in the comment section below.


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Last Updated: Mar 29, 2016

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Get in the bush with David "Xerin" Piner as he leverages his spectacular insanity to ask the serious questions such as is Master Yi and Illidan the same person? What's for dinner? What are ways to elevate your gaming experience? David's column, Respawn, is updated near daily with some of the coolest things you'll read online, while David tackles ways to improve the game experience across the board with various hype guides to cool games.

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