A new shop in World of Warcraft wants your money. In return, there are housing items that you can’t get otherwise.
Even before housing went live, data miners had discovered that World of Warcraft was working on a new area in the in-game shop. Here, housing items that cannot otherwise be obtained in the game are to be sold. There was a lot of criticism at the time, but Blizzard assured that: The shop will be transparent and only a small part of the housing items will be accommodated there.
Now the shop is here – and so are the reactions of the players.
What can be purchased in the shop? So far, there are only two items available for purchase in the shop.
“Beloved Plush Wolf” and “Beloved Plush Lion” are, as the names suggest, plush toys that you can place in or around your house to further decorate it. They each cost 100 home tokens, but can also be purchased in a bundle of a total of 8 stuffed animals for 500 home tokens (4 of each).
Because remember: If you want to place several stuffed animals, you have to buy them multiple times.
This is the new currency: In order to purchase the two plush toys, however, you need a new currency: home tokens (Hearthsteel).
Home tokens can be purchased separately and cost 1 cent per token. The cheapest package brings 100 home tokens (1 Euro), and the largest package gives 100,000 home tokens (100 Euros).
There is no discount promotion or incentive, such as “Buy more and get a bonus” here.
As is usual in World of Warcraft, you can also buy these coins indirectly with in-game gold. If you first buy a WoW token in the auction house and then convert it to Battle.net balance, you can acquire the home tokens essentially for gold. Currently, the price for 13,000 tokens is around 400,000 gold.
Community finds housing shop disgusting, hopes for failure
Here’s how the shop is being discussed: Especially in the WoW Subreddit, there are several posts about the new shop. Under the title “And so it begins …”, WoW fans discuss the shop and hardly say anything good about it. For many, this is just the beginning, and they believe that Blizzard will be much more aggressive here than in the rest of the shop area:
- “Damn you, wretched horse armor from Oblivion!” -Wajiji_T – referring to what the first micro-transaction DLC was.
- “WTF, even for real money items you really have to buy several if you want to place multiple? That’s a bit ridiculous.” – Alteran195
- “Honestly, just this could probably finance the game if they go overboard with what you can buy.” – TheZombieGod
- “Give me a body pillow of Xal’atath, Blizzard, that’s my challenge!” – SweRakii
Cortyn says: To be honest, I don’t find the housing shop that wild. This might be because I have already come to terms with the thought or at least believe that the prices are somewhat “readable”. One cent corresponds exactly to one token across all price tiers. Therefore, I find the shop in its basic form much more transparent and fair than many other MMORPGs or mobile games.
Sure, the basic idea that there are real money shops in premium MMORPGs still bothers me. But I believe that the time to complain about it has long passed, and this is a reality we have to accept. Once you have accepted that, I find the variant of the new housing shop fair and transparent.
We can only hope that a large portion of the new housing items will not be found there and that the vast majority of the objects will still be part of the game world, just as we experienced in the early access of housing.
Aside from the cute housing, things are getting quite dark in World of Warcraft right now – because we’ve learned about the eerie, dark backstory of Xal’atath.
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