As per the fireside chat today, there is a goal within Hasbro to further monetize D&D, one avenue being discussed here on EnWorld being microtransactions and the impact this has or has not had on MMOs.
I dont know that its on topic to the original discussion but my view on this would be.
WoW functioned best, under a feedback loop of having to 'put in the work', the work being playing the game, to achieve the goal of having the best stuff, that added an element of prestige within the game, that you had either done the work, or had been lucky, or had a level of dedication/skill, higher than your peers.
Context for my comments: I have been playing WoW since vanilla alpha. I have been a guild leader since day one of retail. Except for breaks during Cataclysm and Shadowlands (caused by raiding alliance drama in both cases), I have been a raider since vanilla and have been a regular non-ranked PvPer (although with the solo queue for arenas, I hope to finally grind out a few vicious saddles in Dragonflight, especially as my raiding alliance seems to have permanently dissolved at last).
The addition of microtransactions shorts that feedback loop, by simply allowing one to swipe the card of their choice, and buy the 'prestige' or avoid the gameplay loop all together.
Examples include.
Paying to skip content - no need to level up your character.
Paying for cosmetics - no need to play through and earn it within the game, you just buy it.
Paying for character changes or services - decrease in attachment to the character, or degrades the community by having people just transfer.
Paying for mounts - Mounts in WoW used to be quite rare, in how you went about earning them. It was something unique that people had to either work for (Gladiators, Achievements) or get randomly via Boss Drops, or World Drops.
With the exception of the leveling issue, I categorically disagree.
None of the things WoW has for sale are things you can earn in-game. Riding around on a sparkle pony tells everyone you bought it from the store. No one looks at it and wonders what long questline you completed, what meta-achievement you painstakingly assembled or how many Alliance cloth-wearers you stunlocked to get it.
There isn't any inherent prestige for using the in-game store. In fact, there are wry chuckles about some of it, in the "holy (moley), you paid for
that" fashion.
There are hundreds of mounts in the game. There are thousands of pets. There are who knows how many transmoggable items.
There hasn't been prestige in scarcity for a long time. And I say that as someone who rocked the Herald of the Titans title in WotLK while riding on my Blizzcon polar bear mount.
And honestly, I have a hard time seeing "people fail to be impressed with my gladiator drake because they have a flying cat they bought from the store" to be meaningful damage to the game.
Outside of rated PvP mounts, I
have almost all of the prestigious crap in the game. No one sends me admiring whispers when I bring it out and I don't send admiring whispers to other people when they've got stuff I don't have.
There are two possible exceptions to this:
1) For several expansions now, Blizzard has sold the ability to level up one character to the new expansion's starting level as part of the expansion purchase, to avoid EverQuest's mistake of making players slog through all of the expansions (they're up to 17 now, I think) in order to be able to catch up to and be competitive with their friends.
This does take away people grinding their way through multiple expansions, some of them extremely dated, in order to reach where everyone else is. If grinding through levels is somehow virtuous, this chips away at that.
I would argue that there's nothing virtuous about grinding and that Blizzard's very mercenary decision -- lower the barriers to entry and let people jump (back) in and play easily -- is all good.
2) Retail formerly, and apparently Classic currently, had a big problem with gold farmers, who would monopolize any areas perceived to be lucrative places to make money and then would sell it to players in return for their credit card numbers.
Leaving aside the apparent not-rare incidents of credit card hanky panky that's happened with this, the gold farmers really hurt the game for all players, from something as innocuous as leaving their corpses all over Stormwind, spelling out the URLs of gold sites, to making it that no one could quest in portions of the Plaguelands during vanilla because there were 24/7 gold farming groups there killing every spawn instantly.
When my wife wants to farm transmogs in old dungeons or raids (it's a large part of what brings her back to the game each expansion), there's now a cap on how many instances she can go into in an hour, which Blizzard put in place specifically to slow the gold farmers down.
So when Blizzard started selling in-game items -- first a now-removed pet, and later the game time token -- for in-game gold/real world dollars, depending on which world you bought it, it meant that Blizzard was now enabling whales to drop their credit cards down and purchase effectively unlimited gold with real world dollars. (Since the value of the tokens fluctuates with how many are purchased, eventually, it would get prohibitively expensive to buy gold this way, but as I am not a whale, I don't know how fast the value changes.)
Now, a large amount of people were doing this anyway, illegally, so we can't know for sure how much of an impact this is having on the game. (I'm guessing someone at Blizzard has a spreadsheet that tracks this stuff and has a rough idea, but I doubt the public will ever get that data.)
Using that gold, they could buy whatever good gear other players have made available for trade or the Auction House. But there's a limit to how much is out there -- there's nothing at this point in Dragonflight that I could buy with real world dollars that would make me as well-geared as someone just running dungeons would be -- and while it can move the needle, it's not game-changing. The most expensive stuff on the Auction House is cosmetic, typically rare mounts and pets that other players have farmed. Being able to ride on a rocket for a mount is fun, but it's not PTW.
Now, there are people who argue that the artists and animators working on the store cosmetics are doing that instead of working on items that would be available inside the game, which may be true, but we don't know how much cosmetics are bringing in, and if they offset the cost of hiring additional animators and graphics folks, or if Blizzard has done so. That's a potential minor harm to players (I don't know how much damage one store mount per quarter does to overall productivity), but it's not one we're ever likely to know real numbers on.
