This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
My guess on the queue was that they anticipated the massive influx of sales, and used it as a means to throttle (so we didn't crash the store.) By queuing people up, they could limit it to a maximum number of sales per second, making sure the store could handle it even if a million people popped in.Pre-Blizzcon tests are a good theory as well.Personally, this was a fantastic investment on my part. Free mounts for all alts (everywhere), plus an additional 310 option to let me have some variety. (I sure hope they make all mounts scale some day. Poor abandoned Windriders.)And with some luck, they can treat this like a PBS fundraiser week, to stack up extra capital to sink into their hardware, software, employee costs, etc. The more money they have, the more they'll reinvest, and the better/faster the game/content releases are.We might even get to see Diablo 3.
Agreed. It certainly wouldn't have cost the company very much at all to have it done, but anyone who honestly thinks it was nothing has more than a single screw loose in their head.
i calculated that if it costs them $140k per day to keep the servers running, it would require 334k subscribers each on the lowest subscription rate to break even.Of course, that would mean they can profit on the other 5.1 million subscribers.
"Limited supply" is totally a marketing fad, not that hard to figure out. Some people feel better when they're told they're buying something that is "in limited supply"... "not THAT many people will be having it" et cetera. And that "you're not guaranteed you're going to get it" you're seeing when on the queue, is exactly along the same lines.It was at 48% stock when there were 25000 people remaining on my queue for the steed, and same percentage when i bought it. And personally, it's the same concept with buying a beautiful vase for your living room, you like it you buy it, not thinking whether the cost outweighs its beauty and crap like that. Especially if its cost is less than 1% of a monthly wage :-)
It looks good on my chars. It flies. It covers all levels of riding. This little baby stops me from buying a 60%, 100%, 150% and 280% mount. I don't mind.Also, I bought the mount and pet as soon as it was available. I didn't know it was "limited", which it isn't. Blizz just has to put a number in the stock when the put stuff for sale.
Everyone saying that Blizzard makes 15$ a month for every person playing is very stu... misinformed.P2p in some areas is actually sold by the minute and not in blocks of days. Subscription fees also scale according to the area. I can tell you from experience, p2p in Europe is more expensive than p2p in America. Guess what? Cost of living in Europe is much higher than it is in America. P2p in some areas is also purchased with "monopoly money," which has next to no western currency value. As you can guess, cost of living in these areas (if you are western) is very, very low. WoW has a very large Chinese player base. Guess what? WoW is contracted out in China. Blizzard makes no money from p2p in China. You're also forgetting that p2p can be purchased in much bigger blocks than one month. You also cannot rely on the information you see in Activision-Blizzard quarterly reports to determine how much Blizzard makes from p2p every month.TL;DR- Blizzard does not make $165,000,000 a month in p2p. I really wish Blizzard would post just how much money they make every month in p2p.
I am amazed Blzzard has been handing out rewards like dead horses, dead or rusted drakes. While we seem to have to pay for the shiny stuff. Let's try get them banned for misusing game mechanics.
Guys I get that due to their database code they can't just make the website itself generate the codes. I get that they have to load in a limited amount of codes into some form of "physical stock"So why can't they just put an extra field into the database that says "this item is a digital item" and just change the "% stock left" to "% codes left before new codes are generated"I mean there is already a field in there telling it is a digital item - when you do a search it says it is. there's also something on the checkout section saying its a digital download. Also stuff on the page that I guess only appears when that flag is loaded - after all I don't think they write that manually for the product page.All they would need to do is to use that flag to change one piece of text on the code from "% stock left" to "% codes left before new codes are generated"Hmmm. I'm going to copy and paste this into a post on the Suggestions forum .. Thanks for listening to me rant :)