WoW’s Free Trial is now Endless. Woohoo.
When Warhammer Online introduced the endless free trial, I was all over that. You could continue playing the most interesting aspect of the game forever without paying, basically introducing a casual PvP minigame you could play for free. Awesome. Now World of Warcraft has an endless free trial as well, except it is awful. Now you can play your free trial as much as you want and get up to level 20, except there is not much to do when you get there, really.
In WAR you’d have access to a variety of Battlegrounds at close to maximum level for that particular PvP bracket. In WoW, all you get is Warsong Gulch and Arathi Basin and you’ll be at the bottom of your bracket. Sure, you could freeze XP gain at 19 (if you manage to make that kind of money on a free account, which used to be hard), but then you’d have to compete with all the incredible twinks running around in that bracket.
Everything aside from PvP is just worse. You will very quickly run out of PvE content to do, you can’t advance, dungeons will get boring, and you can’t even really interact with other players while on a free account. Frankly, I doubt that there are many people who start playing the 10 or 14 day trial, do not stop early because they stopped caring but still don’t manage to hit 20 in that time.
Realistically, this move changes nothing. It doesn’t even allow me to try out the Goblin and Worgen starting areas which I might have been interested in. Why do I even post about this?