On my server (Deathwing) on the Horde side (only girls and 12 year olds play Alliance, and don't get me started on paladins), 300g can buy you:
A non-trivial amount of an epic mount. The game world is large, and epic mounts move fast. I beileve you can get the price down to 800g if you meet certain requirements. This is the single most expensive purchase most people will make in WoW. Pretty much any epic item on the auction house. (Items in game can be "good", "rare", "epic" or "legendary".) Most epics can't be purchased; those that can go for anything between 80g and 500g. Most people, though, will use purchased gold to "twink" their "alt". An alt is any character that is not your primary character. Twinking means using the resources available to your primary character to equip your lower-level alt with gear that a character of that level normally wouldn't have available to them, except serendipitously. There are areas of the game (called battlegrounds) that segregate players based on level. Twinking out your alts for the 10-19 battlegrounds is a favorite passtime of many players, and it can be an expensive process. If you consider that earning 300g in-game could take several days of boring play, and most people who can afford to play an MMO earn $40 in a couple of hours at work, it starts to make more sense economically. They can either be bored in a game that they'd rather have fun with for a few days, or put in an extra couple hours at the office for the same end result. I don't recall how much WoW costs to purchase initially, but it's about $15 a month to play. While most non-MMO games can be played online for free, the cost to the game company of providing this service is minimal because it's possible, once the players start the game, to allow one of them to act as the server for the duration of the game. This is not possible with an MMO. The entire in-game world must reside on a server maintained by the game company, and the demands on server resources are significantly higher than most other server applications. I don't think anyone outside Blizzard's bean counting department knows exactly what it costs to maintain the servers, but it can't be that cheap. Granted, with a couple billion subscribers they could probably afford to drop the monthly price a bit, but the stockholders wouldn't hear of such a thing. Dan On 9/8/06, Hill, Greg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
So, can 300g buy some uber-elite items or something? You do realize you're paying the cost of a full game, right? Most RPGs I've played 300g won't buy you much of anything, so $40 US seems insanely steep to me. I never understood the whole MMORPG phenomenon, anyway. The whole pay full-price for the game, then pay almost as much every month just to play it seems like a total scam. Too many games have free, unlimited online play. I mean, if the original game was free, or if it were free to play online after buying the original game, that makes sense to me. Anyway, just curious what kind of a value 300g for $40 is, since it doesn't seem like much of one from an uninvolved bystander. Greg
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