World of Warcraft‘s Wrath of the Lich King delivers a lot of new stuff to the game: a new continent, new dungeons, a new class, and even new character customization options for those who want a perky new haircut ever day.
The fashion conscious might have given a hair flip of approval when they found out that character customization also provides options to change even fundamental qualities like facial features and skin color. Maybe even go on a gender bender.
But, why oh why, does Blizzard have to charge its gamers for wanting to display a bit of flair to match their good looks? Well according to Blizzard’s Paul Sams and Lee Sparks, it’s to discourage players from changing their characters looks too often.
Says Sams:
When you create your character, often times you wish you’d done things differently. You wish you were on a different realm, you wish you’d had a different name or you wish you’d chosen a different look and feel to your character.
This is a way for [players] to be able to do that, but it’s something that’s taking a lot of time and energy for us to be able to put in place. We also think that it’s important to have some consistency in the game, we don’t want people changing their look and feel every day.
Says Sparks:
Yeah, and I think the reason for the monetary expense is more of a barrier so that people don’t do it every day. We want to give you the ability to do this, but we don’t want you to do it all the time time.
The same thing goes for paid character transfer, we don’t want people bouncing back and forth. [It] also allows us to have the staff to be able to continually manage the population
It probably doesn’t hurt that they’re getting more money either.
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