That's funny because WoW is pretty much the only MMO I've played mate and as far as content goes, a lot of it is nothing but filler on your way to 85. The end game content made me stop playing through boredom as I wasn't interested in PVP or rolling new toons after doing everything. Over £100 in software and £30 in subscriptions for 3 months of gaming is a lot of money. Sure there are people who can make it decent value for money by subscribing for several years, buying no other games and putting in a good few hours a day but I cannot see how anyone could do that in WoW, it gets very tedious to play it after a while.
For the average person to try and get into WoW (I was mega excited when I got them all and started playing) it costs an absolute bomb, especially with the new expansion coming out at full premium. They make something like 50 million a month yet updates are hardly frequent and all of the old areas are left behind graphically. If you could tell me what exactly the players subscription fee is paying for I'd appreciate it, because the development cost is covered and then some by the mass of money they make from people shelling out full retail for each new expansion, and the excess can easily cover any strain that might be put onto the servers for a good while. I'd say that if you divided server costs by the amount of people on them, about £1 of your £7 subscription would cover the strain you'd place on the servers if you played an average amount a week, say 15 hours.
I can't say I've ever looked in depth to what the costs may be but to say that even somebody who no lifes WoW 126 hours a week would put anywhere near £7 worth of strain on a server in a month is pretty absurd. They have 11.49
BILLION of equity, and from what? I'd be amazed if the server costs were over a million a month, yet they take in 50+ and give you nothing but expansions you have to pay out your backside for in return. Now that's seeing the big ££££££££££££££££ and raking it in. Shame that none of the 7 million or so subs can see past their love for the game and their brand fanboyism to realise they are getting ripped off.
http://ve3d.ign.com/articles/news/41586/World-of-WarCraft-Costs-200-Million-to-Maintain
^ $200,000,000 maintenance cost in 4 years, that's $4,160,000 a month and they rake in $56,000,000 a month! They are putting nothing back into the game and laughing at everyone who's playing. It's quite funny really. They've been raking that kind of cash in now for almost 10 years, more so actually as WoW subs are at an all time low recently. What do they put into the game monthly exactly? After overhead, payroll, benefits, rent, utilities, insurance, taxes etc. they'd be taking £30,000,000 of that as pure revenue a month easily. So $4M server costs, probably even less now compared to 7 million subscribers, so about 70 pence of your subscription goes into maintaining the servers, nice one!
Can't even begin to think about how much they make a month from server/race changes that they charge absurd amounts for, like it costs them or even inconveniences them on their end in any way to do it!
So I ask again, what are you paying for?
Azeroth is about the size of Manhatten at 90km2, compared to Fuels 1,000+km2 map and the content in WoW is very sparse and far between. End game content is what, about 25 raids now maybe? I'm not sure on that but I know it isn't very many. You've got PvP which is basically just tacked on, and dailies to do which are stupidly boring. As I said before they haven't even bothered to update the entire games graphical quality to the endgame standard that I know of. They really do offer very little in return for what they make from you.
"When its done"
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