Blizzard announced that they will be offering a new service to World of Warcraft. Namely the ability for people on different realms to play in the same dungeon despite the server borders. That’s well and dandy. Except for the fact they will be charging for this. A rather controversial move for something they claim is incredibly complicated which myself and countless others are doubting. This comes after they lost a massive amount of subscribers, fueling the fire that they’re only doing it for the money. The statement is reprinted below.
With the continued popularity of the Dungeon Finder, many players have been asking for a way to group up with real-life friends who play on other realms to take on instances together. Today, we wanted to give you a heads up about a new feature currently in development that will allow players to invite Real ID friends ( http://us.battle.net/en/realid/ ) of the same faction to a party regardless of the realm they play on, and then queue up for a 5-player regular or Heroic dungeon.
As this is a fairly complex service to develop, we don’t have a release date to share quite yet. It’s important to note that as with some of the other convenience- and connectivity-oriented features we offer, certain elements of the cross-realm Real ID party system will be premium-based, though only the player sending the invitations will need to have access to the premium service. We’ll have more details to share with you as development progresses – in the meantime, you may begin to see elements of the feature appear on the World of Warcraft PTR.
Only needing one person to be able to use the service in the willing party is a good idea however. Some don’t mind spending extra cash on these kinds of things and will gladly show some generosity to their friends. How much this will cost or when it will be fully implemented is, as far as I know, unknown.
Personally I see this as them trying to grab more cash that they’re already raking in to a near-extreme level. With each person paying around ten bucks a month or so, the amount of subscribers and the income is truly staggering. I don’t know how difficult it can be to pull a character file from one server and transmit it to another, but in this day and age where entire gigabytes are passed about like pamphlets, I feel they’re just fleecing.
