Elder Scroll Online is not strange at all

When a brick and mortar store has a sale sometimes they limit the number of items per customer to keep it available to all – and in some circumstances depending on the type of product they limit the supply on hand to prevent a loss of future revenue. Imagine running a sale on washing machines half price, and having half the town come in for that. You supplied half the town at a margin terribly thin, and those people won’t come in over the next few years, by which time you will have gone bankrupt. If you had limited your stock, then you will be selling washing machines in 3 / 6 / 12 / 24 / 36 months at higher margins and remain solvent long term.

With virtual items, that sort of limitation needs to be applied in a different manner, such as through making the sale short, or largely unadvertised, or both of those, so that only those who act nearly immediately upon hearing about it will catch the discount.

From your viewpoint as a customer who thinks sales are good things, it seemed strange for a business to curtail the ‘good thing’. From the business perspective, sales are dangerous tools that easily cause self-inflicted wounds if mishandled, almost like trying to swing a sword that has no handle.

How obnoxiously patronizing and unhelpful. Thank you for explaining the basics of commerce…in a completely inapplicable scenario.

Washing machines are physical objects, limited in quantity by manufacturing requirements, and minor factors like time and space.

If there is ever a need to limit virtual goods, it’s because their producers need to be paid and the seller doesn’t want to over-commit.

Crowns are imaginary. No one produces them. They can sell as many as they want, any time they want.

And when they don’t advertise sales to the hundreds of thousands of customers like me, they don’t get me to instead pay full price: they get me to shrug and walk away without giving them a dime. They could have had my $25 if they’d informed me, but instead I’ll just keep subbing and buy my Glass motif for “free” in three months…or I’ll grow tired of shrugging at such baffling idiocy, and be playing something else by then.