Blizzard Explains World of Warcraft's Paid Character Customization

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With Blizzard having confirmed that some sort of "paid character customization" will eventually be offered to it 11+ million World of Warcraft subscribers, the famed developer has offered a few new details on the controversial feature.

"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," Blizzard's Paul Sams told Eurogamer.

"We want to give you the ability to do this, but we don't want you to do it all the time," added Blizzard's Lee Sparks. "The same thing goes for [the existing] paid character transfer, we don't want people bouncing back and forth."

Paid character customization will be more about modifying previous character design decisions instead of adding more customization options to the MMO, Sparks noted.

No specifics were offered, but Eurogamer suggests the paid customization could apply more to fundamental changes--facial features, skin color--over superficial things like haircuts, which were recently introduced to the game.

Sams noted his belief that paid character customization will be "a good value for customers," explaining that "it's not like we're going to go about pricing it in such a way that it's unfair or inappropriate."

Chris Faylor was previously a games journalist creating content at Shacknews.

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From The Chatty
  • reply
    November 13, 2008 8:38 AM

    What kind of Cr@p is this? I might be misreading this but you'll need to pay (real currency) just to change your hair at some point? And not select from a brand new set of hair styles at that? Or any other new features of customization? PASS!!!

    • reply
      November 13, 2008 8:41 AM

      If you could make money off of stupid people willing to pay for stupid shit, but it's all legal and not immoral, wouldn't you do it? HELL YEA YOU WOULD, and so would everyone else..

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      November 13, 2008 8:42 AM

      It sounds like a class/race paid change since everything else is already in.
      I say just make permanent tournament servers with battlegrounds enabled

    • reply
      November 13, 2008 9:44 AM

      the haircuts and other "features" (ie troll tusks, undead faces) are already in the game under the recently added Barber shop system. You pay gold for those. This sounds more like adding a couple or different options such as skin color, and face (for some races). Perhaps they will bundle it with some additional items that you can change? I don't see this working for more than say $2-5

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      November 13, 2008 10:02 AM

      its actually a brilliant way of making sure only the people that genuinely want to change something do so -- even charging as little as $0.10 could probably be effective. economics at work!

    • reply
      November 13, 2008 10:24 AM

      Yes you are misreading.

      You can change tattoos and hair for free ingame.

      • reply
        November 13, 2008 10:41 AM

        I'm aware of the barber shop, yet the only "new" hair style was the mohawk for NE's. Everything else was just a cut and paste job of other races hair styles. So what I am wondering is are they holding out on the more unique customizations to charge you for it? If so, I'd hope they better be worth it.

        Like if I am going to pay for a visual customization, I'd like to be able to add some sort of spell effect or glowing rune tattoos or something worth paying for.

        • reply
          November 13, 2008 10:59 AM

          That would suck because of one simple reason: Everyone who can pay will be cooler than the other ones. That would just create mobbing situations.

          • reply
            November 13, 2008 11:13 AM

            It's a game, it doesn't matter if you have paid-for hair.

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