My God It's Full Of Stars And Also Money

You do need to have previously unlocked a super-fast mount in-game to unlock the fastest speed possible

Emphasis mine. This is a different skin for whatever mount you’ve already earned. It’s 100% cosmetic.

I’m not a big fan of the extra-cost stuff in a pay-to-play game but you’re not buying anything here but a shiny skin for an existing mount.

The Celestial Sucker

Freshly born every minute (we don’t care where, as long as they pay their $15/month), the Celestial Sucker lets us travel in style astride bags of money. So pony up, because this little scheme will fly as fast as our shamelessness will take us, and it will travel at a speed no less than the dividend expectations of our stockholders. Once activated, this World of Warcrap in-game key applies to every present and future player on a North American server.

During the purchase process, you can designate this item as a gift, which will e-mail your gullibility to the recipient.

Actually, since the “310% travel speed if you’ve earned any 310% mount in the past” is standard on all flying mounts and abilities already in game I think this rant is a bit off base. Blizzard did not violate thier “Cosmetic only” rule with this one.

It would be a huge stretch to assume that this mount travels at 310 for all of your characters if any of them has 310 flying, instead of the standard ” travels at 310 if that specific character has unlocked 310.”

That 5 hour wait turned quickly into a 45 minute wait. Still, it was a wait.

I do find it funny that people are quick to let Blizzard off the hook for RMT by saying the item has no stats and does not provide a speed bonus (it simply acquires the 310% from your existing mount, if you have one).

The item is valuable to players, that’s what matters. Other mounts take grinds as painful as real stat’d items. How many people did the Wyrmcrest rep for the dragon mount vs the good pre-raid, at the time, epics? Both are worth spending time for, but somehow one is ok to sell and the other is not. It’s RMT, plain and simple. Ditto on rare mount/item drops from seasonal bosses, raid bosses, etc.

In fact, to make it even more fun, you *can’t* earn this one on your own. There is no place in the game for the dedicated enthusiast to grind/skill/luck/?? his way to this mount. The only way to get it is to pay.

It may be subtle, but I think people need to get past the “no RMT” and try to hammer out an “RMT only what the game publisher decides” attitude, because the former just doesn’t fit any more.

While I’m not pro-RMT, I have absolutely no problem with this. If Blizzard wants to get more money from people who like shiny things that don’t change their “real” game experience in any way, then IMO they should go for it. I didn’t buy the pets from the store and I won’t buy this; not because I can’t afford them – while cool and all, they just don’t appeal enough to me.

The irony will be when there are so many people with this mount that it becomes commonplace and people stop using it, going instead with whatever is the “rare and/or cool” mount at that point in time. Which will probably be a faction or achievement mount. And then the cycle will repeat itself.

This is basically the same as Blizzard selling t-shirts. Except you get to wear it in-game rather than on the street.

Judging from this comment thread, the reaction inspired by a celestial steed and the reaction inspired by a “FOR THE HORDE!” t-shirt out about the town are probably quite similar, too!

I like the “percentage of stock left” meter.

Since, you know, they can only fit so many digital horses in the barn.

@geldonyetich
Well, if there’s too many celestial horses, nobody will pay $25 for them any more. And who will clean up all that celestial poop?

Reminds me of City of Heroes’s booster packs that added additional costume options and some minor powers.

Eh, dunno if I’d buy that for $25. But I was always willing to buy the CoH packs for $10 — it just meant I wouldn’t eat lunch out for a week or two.

Queue is 8 hours now.

Why do I want one? Because I hate the look of my 310% mount with a burning passion; it looks like a pile of wilted petunias. Because from what I understand, like the Headless Horseman’s mount, it self-selects ground/air as appropriate, doing away with the need for mount macros. Because it looks really cool, and I don’t care if 124,553 (the number of people in line in front of me) other people have something just as cool; I’ve never confused “cool” with “exclusive”. Because right now I can afford it, and for the price of a chain restaurant meal that’s fun for an hour, I can have something fun to play with as long as I play WoW. I don’t have WoW t-shirts or hoodies or any of that (though I will plead guilty to a murloc action figure) … but this is just kind of fun.

Someone who doesn’t want one, that’s their business. I’ve never wanted a pandaren monk, but judging from the number of “eeee-yaaaa” sounds I hear when I’m in any big city, a whole lot of people have. That’s fine. So long as it’s optional, I support any cosmetic stuff Blizz wants to sell, or put into the CCG, or give away at BlizzCon, or whatever else. It doesn’t change the gameplay; it’s just fun to have. I’m a capitalist; I have no problem with Blizzard making a profit off selling mount skins, if people want to buy them. Profit is actually not a dirty word. As long as they’re selling a product people want to buy, at a price they’re willing to pay, and on honorable terms (though I think you’re right, some overly-optimistic people with poor reading comprehension may be badly disappointed at their new 150% flying mount), they’ve got every right to as much money as customers want to give them. Besides, I know several good recipes for macaroni & cheese.

I wouldn’t pay $25 for a sparklepony. Maybe $10, but no more.

I would, however, pay $25 for a pterodactyl to ride.

And since I can’t edit, whoever said that you get to go 310% speed on any mount as long as you have a 310% speed mount, that is only true of druid flight form and a couple other things, the vast majority of flying mounts do not currently scale up to 310%.

I hate to admit it, but if I were playing WoW right now I’d happily pay $25 for that. It’s shiny.

I bought it. It’s worth it to me. People buy collector’s editions to get vanity pets, and to me this is no different. I paid 25 bucks for a mount just because it looks cool. I haven’t purchased any of the other Blizzard store vanity pets and don’t own any collector’s editions, but this one just struck me the right way.

And I have $25 less in mine.

But it’s fun. And really, isn’t that what the whole “game” concept is about?

I just find this whole thing a really sad comment on the games industry. Guys like Kotick and his gang of meatplows are just half of it. Consumers who pay for this crap are the other half.

Time was when you paid for a game and you got the whole game. Now, you buy it in bits and pieces. (Same price though for the initial game, just extra for the other stuff you SHOULD have gotten with the original game.)

To me this DOES represent a conflict of interest. Before, this item would have been obtainable in game by simply playing the game. You paid your 14 bucks a month for the right to access the stuff the developers make for the game. Now you pay your 14 bucks a month for SOME of the stuff the devs make.

The conflict of interest comes in where it’s more viable to have Blizzard have their guys working on content that we have to pay extra for, than content that will just appear in the game. Why put a really cool pet or mount into the game as a reward for something when you can withhold it and sell it from the cash store?

Is anyone else seeing this? Is anyone else seeing where this is likely going to end up in a few years?

Seriously, it is for my girlfriend. Which actually makes me feel worse about it… I could at least say screw you and stand tall if I was buying something *I* wanted.

Shut up and give me my twenty five bucks, little man. My Porsche needs some performance upgrades.

For $25, I could buy an entire game.

Junk like this should never cost more than $5.

I am a avid digital product consumer and every game with RMT is happy to have me as a customer.

BUT Stormwaltz is absolutely right, at 25$ this is digital robbery, nothing more.

The best part is that the website tracks “inventory”

Current stock of virtual non-existent commodity: 97%!

Do alarms go off in executive suites when the “stock” drops to, say, 89%? If so, what do they do, order the devs to fire-up the sequence generator for license keys… for what, 2 minutes? As far as “commerce” goes… this is almost perfect: selling something that does not exist and which cost almost nothing to produce. Brilliant.

Not exactly a ‘micro’ transaction is it, the price of an expansion pack for a glittery mount? Wouldn’t pay anything over £2-3 for shat like that let alone £18+

@Jeff: Not sure, people sure are worried about how other people spend their recreational money aren’t they?

I have a lot of alts, and $25 gets a sparklepony for all of them. I thought it was worth the cost, so I bought one.

“Everyone that buys $25 for 4 days of work by an artist is adding to inflation. The people up top are going to look at this and go, “you know, with these kind of numbers, we could up the subscription price, or charge more money for games overall without increasing content.” This will inevitably make video games more out of reach for the lower classes and put strain on the middle.”

No. What will happen is that they’ll hire some more artists and try to replicate their success by making more “cool” mounts and pets. And if that model succeeds and they can make a lot of money that way, then long term that means LOWER prices for the game. Why? Not because they’re such nice people that want to give back some of that money. No, it’s because if you can make a crapton selling addons, then you have more power to segment your market. You lower the basic subscription so you can get more people playing (and paying) and then you milk that larger market by selling them pets and mounts and titles and tabards and whatever else you can sell them.

Your argument is sort of like saying “don’t buy fries and a coke with your whopper, because that’s just going to drive the cost of the whopper even higher!” when the reality is completely the opposite. If businesses know they can get you to buy all the extras, they can charge less for the basic product, and (here’s the important part) it’s in their best interest to charge less. More people buying the cheaper basic product means more opportunities to up sell. That way you get the people who couldn’t afford the basic service now able to afford it AND you get to make more money off of those who are willing and able to pay more.

The only downside to the up-selling model is that the business becomes incentivized not to provide those perks as part of the basic package. If you are in some uber guild that gets all the awesome mounts, then you might be genuinely concerned that the best/coolest mounts are no longer going to be a reward for being uber. Instead you’ll get the second tier rewards, and the really cool stuff will be for sale.