paying
Latest
Apple Music now has 60 million paid subscribers
Apple Music now has 60 million paying subscribers. The company's Eddy Cue, a senior vice president of services, confirmed the milestone with French business publication Numerama today. According to Music Business Worldwide, Apple also noted that Beats 1 has "tens of millions of listeners."
Breakfast Topic: Instance for sale
Ixus sent us a question about hiring mercenaries in World of Warcraft: he's a level 20 Warlock who paid a level 57 a whopping 1g to run him through Deadmines since he couldn't find a group for it. We have mentioned this topic before, but it's usually in posts about beggars, and I don't know if we've actually considered what could be a cottage industry: actually setting rates and hiring out higher levels to complete various tasks for lowbies.Is this an OK thing to do. I'll admit that I've run lowbies through instances before, but never for gold -- usually it's a friend of mine who just wants some extra gear from a certain instance. And I've been offered gold for an instance run, but I've never accepted it, and I'm not even sure what I would charge to actually run someone through an instance (I'd probably have pretty high terms: 5-10g and a portion of the drops, depending on what class was going through).Have you? Do you think this is the kind of thing that's legit (and if so, should Blizzard maybe even implement a "looking for mercenaries" channel for lowbies to find their benefactors?), or should lowbies all go find their own groups like you had to and stop pestering you to run them through Wailing Caverns for their pittance?
The Daily Grind: The end of the affair
Stephen Totilo over at MTV's Mutliplayer blog actually canceled his WoW subscription recently, and to his surprise, actually found the experience easy and fun. He hadn't updated the game since last September, and speaking as someone who's played the game many, many times since then, I can safely say he was wasting his money. A great MMO is worthless to you if you're not playing it.Thinking back on it, I believe I've only canceled one MMO ever, and that was Dark Age of Camelot (and I only canceled it because I started playing WoW). It was so long ago that I don't remember if I had any problems or not, but it must have gone smoothly enough. Other than that, I've pretty much considered all my subscriptions money well spent, so I haven't had to end anything.But surely there are many more cancellations going on. When have you stepped up and ended the subscription, and for what reasons? Ever had a bad cancellation, or a really good one? And maybe we can help, too-- if there are any subscriptions you're paying right now that you shouldn't be, feel free to commiserate about them here-- we'll help you quit, if you need it. There are always more MMOs in the sea, if we're allowed to mess up a metaphor.
Poll: Do you use a game card or a credit card?
I'm very interested in seeing the answer to this one-- I have always used a credit card to pay for my account, just because it's all automatically done between Blizzard and my bank, and I don't ever have to worry if my account is all paid up. But I'm sure there are tons of people out there, like popsixx, who play from game card to game card, buying them one after another, or hoarding them up (from gifts or elsewhere), and putting them in when necessary.For the life of me, though, I can't guess which one would be more popular. There are definitely a lot of kids playing the game, and they'd use game cards for sure. But then again, most of the folks I play with are a little older and financially more stable, and more likely to use credit cards (or PayPal for that matter)So which is it? Game cards or credit cards? And feel free to tell us in the comments why you do what you do-- maybe there's some huge benefit to using only game cards that I haven't noticed yet.%Poll-4045%
