It weakens botting by offering “safe” competition from actual players, as RMT botters want real money not tokens, and buyers will prefer an option that doesn’t risk a ban/virus.
It puts an upper limit on how profitable RMT is, because people will never buy gold from botters if a WoW token is cheaper per gold.
Buying gold now has a fringe benefit of giving game time to people who want to play the game but are tight on money (such as fixed income, disability, etc).
Because botted gold is competing with Activision for people’s money, Activision has a monetary incentive to police it… which we all know is about the only think that motivates Activision to anything that takes effort.
Cons:
It legitimizes buying gold, so more people will do so.
It doesn’t stop botting as long as they can sell the gold cheaper, so Activision would still need to put in some effort, and it may be hard to convince Bobby he’ll earn more Yachts in the long run by spending some of the profit from Tokens on enforcement.
It’s kind of annoying that Activision gets to profit off half-arsing RMT enforcement until this become an improvement.
Overall, this is the lesser of two evils and Activision might care more that it has an impact on their quarterly earnings statements.
The only way to remove RMT is to completely disable trading, grouping, and then banning anyone who logs in from a different IP than the one they registered their account from.
With how brazenly bots and gold buyers behave in this game with no repercussions whatsoever, I can hardly agree with you that this is going to feel “safer” for people. There’s already a ton of cheaters buying gold.
I’m pretty sure official cheater gold has never been cheaper than unofficial cheater gold, and it’s demand that drives the prices. Also, I don’t see how it matters whether it’s slightly less profitable for unofficial sellers since they’re going to continue regardless.
This I agree with. Though I think the benefit is extremely marginal at best. I’m going to guess that close to 100% of the current playerbase is able to pay for a sub fee. I’m also going to guess that the ability to play the game for free isn’t going to attract very many people.
Activision is competing with them, not the other way around. They already did almost nothing to police it before, and I see no reason for them to start now.
I agree with these, but one big one is that WoW Classic has come full circle and turned back into Retail, but on a faster timeline. Now you can officially just swipe your credit card and skip the vast majority of all the gameplay. It’s just like every tacky private server.
MMOs are cursed it seems. Almost none of them have anything like WoW’s charm, but WoW is just another EA-esque cash cow where money matters more than design philosophy.
Faerlina tokens are like 8k right now.
For $20 you can get a lot more than 8k. So people are still gonna buy dirty gold
The people who buy tokens to sell are selling them to people who use the dirty gold they bought to get cheaper game time. Blizz doesn’t care, if they stop RMT it removes incentive for people to buy WoW tokens to sell them to people who buy gold.
The end result is redistributed wealth and a larger incentive for bots. They need to give you better deals than blizzard. This means trade goods, potions, etc go up in price not only from bots selling them but by players knowing more gold is in the economy vs on a few people. This is so bad for the game and we all have watched it happen before in retail.
It creates a world where why should I, a player spend 5 hours a day farming gold when I can buy a token for the amount of money I earn in 1 hour of work that is equal to 8 hours of gold farming. Farming that a bot did and was sold to a player for money, so they could buy epic flying and 30 days of game time for cheaper than the $20 I spent to skip farming.
It butchers any feeling of gain, of effort outside of raiding and promotes raid logging