A new pattern seems to be emerging. Blizzard has hit on a new idea to keep people subscribed. And it only requires the art department to churn out a couple new mounts a year.
Back at the end of September last year Blizz announced that if you opted in for a six month term on your subscription, you would get the Dreadwake mount.
Last week, just about nine months down the line from the last offer, Blizzard announced that if you again opted in for a six month subscription you would get the Sylverian Dreamer mount.
Another mount if you’ll just subscribe
Fortunately, if you are already on a recurring six month subscription plan you get the mount for basically carrying on with it. I went to check the details to see if they were requiring you to commit to an additional six months on top of what you already had lined up. The 9 month gap made me suspicious that they wanted to get people committed deep into 2020.
But no, if you already have a six month recurring plan setup, you’re covered… though, I did notice that the account management UI will let you buy in another six months of subscription time in advance. So maybe Blizz is playing the confusion card a bit.
For the rest of us who subscribe in shorter increments, we have to press the button for a six month buy to get the mount.
If you’re somebody who has to have all the mounts, you’ll probably go for it. Blizz sells mounts like this for $25 in its shop. In fact, you can buy this exact mount in the shop for $25, if you don’t care to commit. But there is lots to do in Azeroth for the rest of the year. The Rise of Azshara update is just out and in under two months WoW Classic will go live. If you want the mount you might as well subscribe rather than pay for it straight up. Blizzard wins either way, so you should opt for the best deal for you.
I’ve fallen off the mount collecting idea myself. Unlike battle pets, where having a deep bench is a requirement to do things like the Celestial Tournament or the pet battle dungeons, you can only ride one mount at a time. And when I can fly, my main still uses the Silver Covenant Hippogryph which he earned in the Argent Tournament back during Wrath of the Lich King.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 
Where my thought leads is that “if” they pull the plug on WoW retail, they would not owe you a refund because it is a payment for battle net sub. I may be wrong. Been awhile since I read the recurring sub terms.
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@Marathal – In a world where EverQuest and EverQuest II are still alive and kicking and getting annual expansions, the idea that we should be worrying about Blizzard pulling the plug on WoW seems a bit silly. To my mind that isn’t even an idea worth entertaining until Blizz finally decides that WoW should go full on free to play or some similar radical change.
Besides which, having watched other games go under, one of the early signs is that they stop offering first annual, then six month, then three month subscriptions. The good developers, or those who have the luxury of being good, tend to even let the last month or two go without charging a subscription fee.
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I did find this. And they said it in CAPS so they really mean it.
You agree to pay all fees and applicable taxes incurred by you or anyone using your Account. If you choose a recurring subscription for a Game, you acknowledge that payments will be processed automatically (e.g., debited from your Blizzard Balance or charged to your credit card) until you cancel the subscription or the Account. Blizzard may revise the pricing for the goods and services offered through the Platform at any time. YOU ACKNOWLEDGE THAT BLIZZARD IS NOT REQUIRED TO REFUND AMOUNTS YOU PAY TO BLIZZARD FOR USE OF THE PLATFORM, OR FOR DIGITAL PURCHASES MADE THROUGH THE PLATFORM, FOR ANY REASON.
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@Marathal – I am going to guess you’ll find similar wording in an MMO. I would be more interested to hear about and online game that didn’t have such a clause in their TOS or EULA.
CCP, for example, has, in addition to something similar to what you quoted above, an additional section in their EULA that specifically says they owe you nothing and you won’t get any sort of refund if they shut the game down for whatever reason. Companies have to protect themselves. You pay to use their game, but you accrue no rights for having done so.
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Oh I’m sure it’s a common clause. I know however that the board of directors can always just drop the hammer. They could reach a point and say that losses have not turned around and the game is no longer profitable to the level they want. Divert resources to other titles and lay off any unneeded employees.
The sub fee is for Battlenet games, so legally a player wouldn’t have any recourse.
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Speculation about them reaching a point where the board of directors would shut WoW down is venturing into what my grandmother would have called, “borrowing trouble.” I mean, it is possible that Bobby Kotick could find Christ and demand that WoW be shut down due to satanic imagery, but I doubt it is going to happen.
People get so worked up about WoW losing subscriptions that they seem to forget that it still has likely an order of magnitude more subscribers than other still profitable MMOs. There are about a dozen steps that would happen, like layoffs, free to play, new monetization schemes, smaller and more frequent expansions, that would come about before the company would even consider shutting things down.
Meanwhile, your assertion about the sub fee being for “battlenet games” looks to be incorrect. At the top of the current EULA it clearly says:
“As used herein, the term “Platform” refers collectively, and at times individually, to (1) the Blizzard Battle.net App software, (2) the Blizzard Battle.net gaming services, (3) each of the Games, (4) authorized Mobile Apps relating to the Games and the Blizzard Battle.net service and (5) all features and components of each of them, whether installed or used on a computer or mobile device.”
Basically, they appear to have one umbrella EULA that covers all of their games rather than having one per game, so it applies to any particular game you mean. And you wouldn’t get a refund anyway, because they specifically say you won’t.
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I am cynical about the 6 month sub (this is Activision we’re talking about) and would say this is definitely a marketing ploy to try and keep people paying even when they are not playing. They wouldn’t be doing this unless they were struggling to maintain income from subs.
They have also lost a lot of paying customers to FFXIV which has been growing at a massive rate. Granted many new FFXIV players do not continue with an active sub after the initial trial but still it must be hurting Blizzard’s bottom line. FFXIV is trending up to 1 million actively subbed players and WoW is trending down to the 1 million mark. BFA has really hurt WoW’s active playerbase.
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If I drilled played this definitely would have gotten me. I was a diehard mount collector. >_<
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@zaphod6502 – I have no doubt that this is to keep people on the hook. It is transparently obvious.
Where do you get your information about FFXIV and WoW subscriber numbers? I haven’t seen anything about in the news and people simply make up things on the forums and Reddit.
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Ironically, I used to subscribe for 6 months at a time back when cool mounts were something you had to farm for in-game :P
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@Wilhelm: There was a leak of WoW sub numbers via a back end API which exposed customer end sub dates about nine months ago. It was reported by quite a few YouTubers (eg. HeelvsBabyface). At the time they had 1.7 million subbed accounts plus active population of the servers has decreased when looking at the Warcraft realms site so that 1.7 million would have definitely decreased. I have no doubt though if another expansion is released that number would increase but certainly the halcyon days of 12 million subs is long gone especially with the direction the game has headed towards.
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@Wilhelm: As for FFXIV Square Enix reports their active player accounts which has now exceeded 16 million. A site that tracks physical population numbers on each server has recorded a subscriber number of greater than 660,000 has of last month and that has been trending upwards. The site tracks account greater than lvl 35 and more than 30 days gametime – the point at which you must pay a sub.
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