Anyway, I’m all for this. It’s cutting into Blizzard’s profits to do this, as I’ve explained elsewhere. So I really don’t see a down side if they want to do it.

I’m not going to have the panderan out much but I bought him anyway because, 1. It goes to a good cause and 2. It’s a pet. But people see this as a warning sign. All those neat little things like cool pets, fancy tabards, toys, etc. Well they are going to be taking more and more developer created content, and instead of just including it with methods to obtain in game, they will sell it too you.

So now you have the situation where instead of new pets (and other fun stuff) appearing in game via methods to obtain via in game, the majority of the best ones will instead be sold to you.

I absolutely loathe the idea of microtransactions for items in game that people “need” or “want” in order to perform better. Free to Play games that will, yes, let you play for free, but if you want to actually accomplish something other than very basic leveling, you’ll need to shell out some cash to become strong enough to participate in the more engaging encounters. Armor, weapons, inventory space, travel abilities, potions, enchants, whole maps of the game, raised level caps – paying individually for these things would drive me up the wall.

WoW isn’t Free to Play. We pay our subscription. So IMO, items that actually affect how or what your character is able to do is the place where I would personally “draw the line,” as it were. Vanity pets don’t cross that line, but I will admit that I can very clearly SEE that line approaching, and that’s something that I do not like.

That said – people are claiming that the Charity donation is just a front, that it’s there to fool people into thinking that this pet store is a good thing. To those people I, as a vanity pet collector, must giggle and snicker. I collect vanity pets, the kind you need to farm up or hunt down in WoW. I have always had a keen interest in the TCG pets, however, paying ~ $100 to a middle man has always been such a turn off that I’ve totally written those pets off as an option. It’s not that paying real world money offends me, it’s that I’m paying a ridiculous amount to a middle man who got LUCKY… (and was apparently willing to spend ridiculous amounts of money on the off chance that they’d get some good TCG cards – that’s their choice, and not buying from those people is my choice).

In this particular instance, regarding vanity pets alone, I would have purchased these pets regardless of the Charity aspect of the matter. Only one of them even counts toward the Charity. That they’re doing it at all just seems like a sound business decision on a product they knew would sell like hot cakes at the beginning of it’s release, and obviously slow down over time. The Charity didn’t melt my heart. It does make me respect Blizz a little more that they’d even consider losing some of the pure profit they’d have other wise gotten from the Panderan purchases.

In the over all scheme of things, I’m very suspicious of where this particular practice will lead. People are already expecting us to be able to purchase in game mounts from the Blizzard Store, and while I do also collect mounts, I’m very definitely uncomfortable/unhappy with that idea. In game items that actually affect your character (make’em go faster, level faster, hit harder, take fewer hits, etc) are taboo for me.

So I can see that, “Vanity pets are no big deal, all the profit is at least going to the people who created and are supplying these pets,” but I can also see that, “This is merely the beginning. We’ve gotten sex changes, Faction changes, and Race changes. Soon we’ll have Class changes, purchased legendary armor, mounts, guild halls and bonuses, new zones we have to pay for between expansions. The snowball is growing and it’s rolling at an astonishing rate. This WILL get out of hand.”

Well, I do think that any multi-millon dollar business has an army of clever marketing strategists that do NOTHING “just because”.

I think they have forseen the negative responses and want to counteract it with the charity.

And the concern that the two pets are just the beginning is also very valid in my opinion. I mean, if you would like to sell tabards, titles, mounts or epics, how would you do it? Use something innocent and test the waters, ease it with some bonuses (charity) and then continue to the next step.

Now, if the players accept the pets, they will say later “hey, the new mounts you can buy are purely cosmetic, what’s the big difference to the pets”? Later “well, whats the big difference between a dragon and a mount?” and even later “hey, dragon mounts are worth more than epics anyways so you can buy this ring now”.

The best counter to this kind of tactic is in my opinion to be against it firmly and since the beginning.

And for something different:
As I understand it the money of the make-a-wish foundation goes to critically ill children, right?
So, I dont want to be mean here, but with the amount of money you use to grant an expensive wish to one child, couldn’t you just buy food to really save the lives of multiple children at once in countries where they are starving?