www.massively.com/2008/12/10/world-of-warcraft-launches-paid-character-re-customization/

There was a time when content was added for good gameplay mechanics and content. Here comes the times of the micro transactions for things that should come as part of the game or under the subscription fee. This is a basic service that you'd expect to come as part of the game and not something you should buy... theres sooo much Role Play involved putting your credit card details in on a site to change your look.

If you're going to charge for stupid things like this then get rid o subscription fee's. This is like charging me $15 a month and saying it's for server bandwidth and yet come patch day I see it's using bittorrent and I'm actually downloading everything off of other users.......  Oh wait!

I don't even get good customer service as part of my subscription fee and after 2 months all I've got back from customer support is "It's you not us" even though other people with similar cards have complained about the same issue. I can max Crysis out with my 4870X2 but your right my 8FPS Framerate in Feralas is my fault because I didn't program the game.

OH MY GAWD 15 DOLLARS I CANT AFFORD THAT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!111

Originally posted by Punk999

OH MY GAWD 15 DOLLARS I CANT AFFORD THAT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!111

Well good for you more money than sense.

Originally posted by John.A.Zoid

Originally posted by Punk999

OH MY GAWD 15 DOLLARS I CANT AFFORD THAT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!111

 

Well good for you more money than sense.

Thank you kind sir.

Before posting this you should have raised your head and looked at what the other MMO companies are doing. This service gives you no game advantage, no game items, no game altering effect, no special service only character features. In fact the bigger portion of the population would ignore it. The only change that could potentially give you an advantage via racials is not there.

All in all, you can ignore this service as it was never offered and you will see no distinctive changes for you or others in game.

Then again, maybe the female avatar population will grow. Who knows ...

Your subscription fee pays for Blizzard to host and maintain the servers, it pays the wages of GMs, it pays for developers to continually work on improving the game (ironing out bugs, adding content etc).

You CAN download updates from Blizzard, obviously, you choose not to...

If you dont want to pay to edit your character, then dont... noone's going to force you to...

You were happy when you made and finalised your character in the beginning, whats changed? Blizzard are cashing in on giving players an option, so its your option to pay them...

Edit: You've claimed that its a basic service, that should be included for free... yet off the top of my head, I cant think of a single other game that allows this. Any that I can, have offered paid character-editing or server-changes, for years now... and I'm not aware of any complaints against that...

other mmos like EQ2 let you do the same thing without paying any cash   (except for gender)

this should really be part of the WOW barber like other mmos

World of Warcraft  is the first p2p mmo to charge for this

- that other games give you the same functionality (to change face, skin color, etc) for essentially free

Lotro have barber in game that you can go to and change your hair style or eye brows and thing like that. if i remember it doesnt even cost much to do it some silver in game to do it.

Name and gender are the only things that you can't change ingame (not sure about skin colour).

Does EQ2 offer name change for free? It would be a first if the money hungry SOE don't charge you for that.

Originally posted by John.A.Zoid

www.massively.com/2008/12/10/world-of-warcraft-launches-paid-character-re-customization/

 

There was a time when content was added for good gameplay mechanics and content. Here comes the times of the micro transactions for things that should come as part of the game or under the subscription fee. This is a basic service that you'd expect to come as part of the game and not something you should buy... theres sooo much Role Play involved putting your credit card details in on a site to change your look.

If you're going to charge for stupid things like this then get rid o subscription fee's. This is like charging me $15 a month and saying it's for server bandwidth and yet come patch day I see it's using bittorrent and I'm actually downloading everything off of other users.......  Oh wait!

I don't even get good customer service as part of my subscription fee and after 2 months all I've got back from customer support is "It's you not us" even though other people with similar cards have complained about the same issue. I can max Crysis out with my 4870X2 but your right my 8FPS Framerate in Feralas is my fault because I didn't program the game.

You can do the same for free in lotro and a lot of p2p mmorpgs.

PAY to recustomize your character?

BUWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Better yet, some of you guys are willing to pay extra for it!

Oh... you guys are killing me

I rather like the fact that they charge for it.... prevents the entire population from constantly changeing in appearance. 

Paid name change is the best, I deleted a toon that I had invested a lot of time in just because I came to absolutely loathe his name =( (that was back in eq1).  Paid server transfer also = win... though it would be even better if you could just log your toon onto whatever server you want so you can play with friends more.... I guess that would have problems attached to it.

 I dont know too many games that allow you to change your name , gender and other things at all. 15 bucks seems fair if it really means that much to you to recustomize.

Like I said, some of you are actually willing to pay for it

There was a time when character recustomizations were readily available in game.  Hell, even SWG allowed it when you got with certain players that had the ability to do so.

And you guys are willing to pay money for it believing it's a great service when it used to be the normal thing to allow.

Oh man.  This should be recorded for comedy purposes.

I dont know but I assume EQ2 charges for name changes

when you visit the EQ2 Barber you are given access to the character generator screen

- to change whatever you like (including Face and skin color),    except race and gender

  Name changes, customization shouldn't be free, they just shouldn't exist.  You choose all this when you create your character,  be responsible to your choices and live with them.

I wonder where justifying the cost of 15 dollars comes in to change your character's appearance?  Does someone have to go in and manually update a database somewhere on a server because someone want's to change thier appearance?  What exactly is that 15 for?  As mentioned other MMORPGs do this with no additional cost from the regular subcription fee.  It really baffles me why its such a high charge for something that probably happens automatically and nobody has to acutally do or maintain anything for that 15 dollars.  Its worse than hundreds of percents of accessory mark ups at the stores.  Its probably all straight profit.  The acutal cost to do something like that is probably measured in cents not dollars. 

It sounds to me as much BS as paying 15 dollars to check in a bag at the airlines these days because of 'high gas prices'  Gas prices are low now so how can that be the blame?  I'm already paying an amount on the ticket.  I understand they don't want to raise the fare but then they have hidden charges like this.  They used to provide you with meals too but thats gone now and you have to pay for those too. 

Oh well, if they choose to implement crap like this, we also have a choice not to support it.

http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/46394

The link points to a guide/feature description of the WoW barber shop. Aka changing avatar features ingame.

I believe the cost is a measure to prevent people from overusing this feature, thus taxing the databases. I suppose that they could charge ingame money to do so as a preventive measure, in the same manner they did with the barber shop. But since this is a business and since the competition is not offering a free alternative, I suppose they thought they could get away with the barring cost translated into RL money.

Personally, for the money I'd rather see a race change instead of a mere sex change (ok, that sounded weird). In any case, this feature would be only interesting for people that would change their ingame sex.

Paying for server transfers is infinitely more important than paying for sex swapping.

it should be noted that blizzard already lets you do name changes for $10.00 prior to this new feature

charging for skin color and face changes

-- when other mmos (like EQ2) dont ask for cash when you change these seems greedy to me

Besides changing the character name - who cares about the rest? WoW has the worst character customization on the market to date (WAR is sadly not that far ahead). Would you really want to pick from the same five faces again?

It is nice that they wrap everything into this service; you can pay almost the same amount to change a character's name in other MMOs. However, I'm dissapointed they haven't enriched the character creation options still - after X years - when this would have been a perfect opportunity to roll those additional options out.

Oh well, everyone in WoW will continue to look the same... but at least they can choose to be male OR female each month (for a few $$$)!