[cube13]

It doesn't matter what Blizzard does to make it easier to get, really. If there is even a perception of rarity, someone will try to sell it for real money.

An entire economy has developed around buying virtual items, and Blizzard is only the latest ones to try to cash in on it. EVE Online does this with the PLEX licenses, which are 1 month subscriptions that players can buy with real money, then sell them in-game to other players. Everquest 2 had(or has?) servers that allowed the player to do the exact same thing, by auctioning off in-game items and characters for real money.

Blizzard's is doing the exact same thing that SOE and CCP did. They're making sure that they are going to get a cut of the money that will be flowing through the game.

[alnayyir]

Eve is hemorrhaging accounts and the player outrage from the aftermath of their attempts to directly monetize the playerbase beyond PLEX accounts make them a VERY bad example to follow.

http://beefjack.com/news/eve-online-revolts-could-cost-ccp-1...

$1mm is a big deal for a small, niche company like CCP.

[cube13]

>Eve is hemorrhaging accounts and the player outrage from the aftermath of their attempts to directly monetize the playerbase beyond PLEX accounts make them a VERY bad example to follow.

I would argue CCP's issues are more with their marketing and customer-facing people than anything else. Valve did that with TF2 hats(some cost $20 or more to buy), and didn't have nearly the same level of fallout with it. Blizzard's done the same thing with purchasable vanity pets and in-game mounts, and hasn't had really any backlash from it.

CCP was charging US$70 for a virtual pair of jeans, then made forum posts trying to convince people since people spend that much on actual clothing, they could charge the same thing for the virtual item. The userbase, predictably, wasn't happy with this idiotic argument, and the fact that a LOT of development time went to these features versus things that actually impacted the player's experience.

[alnayyir]

It was a misunderstanding of their market entirely. The Eve player-base is incredibly pissy.