Yes, people pay $20 to buy a WoW token from the cash shop which then gets sold on the in game auction house. That person gets in game gold (the amount fluctuates), and the person who bought the token from the auction house gets their choice of either $15 of shop balance or 30 days of game time.

Yep! People will buy WoW tokens from the auction house with gold, and they can either redeem the tokens for $15 of shop balance or 30 days of game time. I like making gold in game, so anything I’ve bought from Blizzard over the last few years (including WoW expansions and other games) has been with gold.

The price of tokens went up by about 100,000 gold after this mount got announced and they were selling out fairly regularly for the rest of the day. It seems to have stabilized now, though.

It’s definitely still chugging along, although I will point out that the sub numbers now include not only modern WoW players but also Classic players. If the 7 million number is accurate, that’s 7 million across all WoW versions, not just modern WoW.

Same. A friend and I were excited to play together like we did in D3, but we barely managed to finish the campaign. It’s on the shelf for now unless/until we hear the team turned things around.

I know the article says it was published one day ago, but the author must’ve missed an update or something. The Hildir’s Request update in August 2023 also gave us world modifiers; we no longer need a mod to portal metal and other restricted items!

Other than they ongoing payments for games I continue to play (hello, World of Warcraft), most of my money now goes toward games from smaller studios that aren’t so expensive. Valheim, Timberborn, and many others are well below $70, and now I get to try games from other creators while still affording the couple of big spenders I enjoy.

Nice! I know there was a Spirit of Competition pet as well that recently became available again via the August 2023 trading post; I wonder if they would leave the tabard as an exclusive now that the pet was brought back around. It’s nice that some of the retired items are coming back, but I can also see value in some of the event-based ones remaining unavailable.

True, if it turned into a situation where you had to sub with money for a month every time you wanted to redeem a token or something, that would definitely lessen the value for me. I’d still say it was worth it because I could use the tokens for expansions and other games, but not everyone may have the same opinion.

The WoW token wasn’t introduced until WoD, so if you played that long ago it wouldn’t have been an option. If you’re ever looking to jump in again though, it’s definitely a useful system if you like to make gold in game.

Free trials can’t farm gold anyway because they’re capped to 1k gold, so this really does only impact bot accounts for the most part. There’s likely a small number of people who use tokens because they otherwise couldn’t afford to play, but I expect that’s not terribly common.

As someone who uses gold to buy WoW tokens for both game time and shop credit to make other Blizzard purchases, I have a hard time getting upset over this. I’ve been playing the game without spending money for years, and tokens are also how I buy both WoW expansions and other Blizzard games. Asking me to pay money for a month of sub time every few years seems reasonable, especially if this change makes it even the slightest bit annoying/harder for bot accounts.

That might be better, but I’d still worry about people rep farming (for lack of a better term). Any time you give people a score, title, or other personal metric, you run the risk of people posting to influence that metric rather than to post for the sake of contributing content.

It’s possible the good such a system could do would outweigh the bad, but it will definitely always have elements of both.

While karma might help spam/bots in some ways, I feel like it would also lead to karma farming, which I’m personally happy to not have here. Maybe they could instead allow communities to set requirements for minimum time subscribed or minimum interaction (voting, commenting, etc.) before people could post? I’d prefer that be set per-community, though, and not a site-wide mandate.

Similar to that, yeah, although I think the master/slave thing started earlier. (It’s a bit more blatant, tbf.)

I agree that allowlist doesn’t roll off the tongue quite as nicely, but as long as it makes it obvious what the word means, I’ll go with it.

Sync! It’s what I used on Reddit, and having it here made switching platforms so much smoother.

In recent years there’s been a shift from “white/black list” to “allow/block list” in an effort to avoid the stereotypes associated with those terms. I wouldn’t say it’s the new norm yet, but it’s slowly becoming more popular.

The donation links go straight to the fundraiser on the Cleveland Clinic’s site to support the Tuohy vaccine for breast cancer. None of the race organizers collect the money themselves.

Like others have commented, unlimited texting has been available in most phone plans for the better part of a decade now; I’d struggle to name a place that offers plans without it.

As for the accented characters, that’s something I personally don’t encounter much as a native English speaker. I obviously can’t speak for those who do need those keyboards, but for me it’s not a problem.

With regards to encryption/privacy, I can’t say that’s a concern I’ve personally had regarding my texts. Could the government read my messages? Probably, but all they’re getting is cute cat pics and random chatter about games and food and whatnot. Again, that’s another aspect that’s probably more of a concern for people in more sensitive situations, but I can’t speak for them.

SMS text messaging unless it’s a group chat/voice call for gaming, in which case it’s Discord.

The difference is that racists are usually racist due to a moral stance, not because it makes them money; ignoring them means we’ll hear about it less but it won’t actually go away. Clickbait/ragebait, on the other hand, isn’t a moral viewpoint - it’s meant to bring a person money via exposure/engagement, so less engagement leads to less money which leads to less bait because it’s no longer working.