Premium WoW Cross-Realm Play

Battle.net has the announcement that Blizzard is working on a service to allow World of Warcraft players to invite Real ID friends of the same faction to party, even if they play on a different realm. They explain why part of this service will be offered at a premium: "As this is a fairly complex service to develop, we don’t have a release date to share quite yet. It’s important to note that as with some of the other convenience- and connectivity-oriented features we offer, certain elements of the cross-realm Real ID party system will be premium-based, though only the player sending the invitations will need to have access to the premium service. We'll have more details to share with you as development progresses -- in the meantime, you may begin to see elements of the feature appear on the World of Warcraft PTR." There is some backlash from users unhappy that this will involve a fee, and the controversy is summarized on IncGamers.
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Re: Premium WoW Cross-Realm Play
May 18, 2011, 11:10
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Re: Premium WoW Cross-Realm Play May 18, 2011, 11:10
May 18, 2011, 11:10
 
This is burning up the general forums topics where admins are deleting threads left, right, and center from angry players. It seems like this, aside from when they wanted to reveal your real name on the forums, is one of the few things which 90% of the community is against and for good reason.

Blizzard has to be so blind by greed to start nickle and diming their players through a method they introduced to encourage social gaming which should have been a (free) feature right from the start. They either lack foresight or saw dollars instead of a happier community who were screaming for a feature such as this to come out.

Whether they charge $1 or $10 for this is simply unacceptable and sets up a dangerous precedence when it comes to what they will charge for next such as (non-expansion) content updates. While I would find that hard to believe a couple years ago, it's now a real possibility.

Pretty soon, they will simply change their subscription method to:

WoW Light - $15 - Standard account with no premium perks
WoW Plus - $18 - A combination of standard account with one premium perk
WoW Platinum - $22 - Features all premium access

Bottom line is is that premium based subscriptions should be left to the F2P games which rely on microtransactions to support the developers which, in turn, benefits the community. In no way does Blizzard need financial support on top of what we are already paying in subscriptions.

What makes this such a glaring scheme to capitalize on is the fact that they only decided to implement this right after it was announced that 600k players left. No doubt they need to fill that hole. I suspect the same will happen when the next wave of players leave and they decide to allow BoA items transfer to separate servers for a fee.
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