gwax's rumblings

So, I’ve been play­ing World of Warcraft (WoW) using a free 10-day trial that I got from Fileplanet and it’s pretty darned good if ask me; in fact, it pretty well is the elec­tronic crack that peo­ple make it out to be. Blizzard, how­ever, is not the best crack dealer out there and made the mis­take of mak­ing the trial a bit of a WoW-lite, which falls a lit­tle shy of the addic­tive power it could stand to har­ness. The trial ver­sion is crip­pled in a num­ber of ways, some worse than oth­ers: (there may be more, this is just what I’ve noticed)

• You can’t use the pub­lic chat chan­nels — not a big issue, you can always respond to peo­ple with per­sonal messages
• You’re capped at 5 gold — not a big issue for me, I was usu­ally spend­ing fast enough to stay below 1 gold most of the time
• You can’t trade with other play­ers — this annoyed me a lit­tle at first but then when I got my brother play­ing on a trial account and wanted to get him up to speed with me, I got really annoyed; since coop­er­a­tion is one of the key sell­ing points of the game, this is a real buzz-kill
• There’s a level cap of 20 — this is the real killer; I’m only just barely into the game; I can’t get a mount and I can’t rea­son­ably do any PvP stuff. If they had made the level cap 40, I’d get a taste of all of those things and then prob­a­bly be acheing to be able to play for 20 more lev­els and max my char­ac­ter but instead they’ve just pissed me off a whole bunch.

So Blizzard, take note, if you overly crip­ple a trial ver­sion, it’ll turn peo­ple off, not attrack them. At this point, I’m pretty much on the edge as far as WoW is con­cerned, the level cap was a real buzz-kill. Hmm, we could prob­a­bly reverse the metaphor and draw con­clu­sions about how to best sell crack: give out free sam­ples that are just below your best crack in qual­ity, then when they come to buy crack the first time, sell them your best stuff at a lower price than nor­mal and every time there­after sell them lower grade stuff at an inflated price.

And while we’re on the topic of highly addic­tive drugs and video games, hey tech­nol­ogy peo­ple, where the heck are BTL–chips already? (Shadowrun reference)

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 1st, 2005 at 11:26 pm and is filed under video games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.