You can’t really get rid of gold sellers. Even if you got rid of gold there would be accounts, reps, arena status etc. There will always be people who choose to spend real life money in how they value their time to what is advantageous in the game.
For Classic/Vanilla, closest way I can see to lessen impact would be to lower the price of riding. Riding/Mounts were probably their most lucrative reason why demand was so high initially when the game was released.
Other wise it will pretty much be the same as it was in 2004/2005. I guess that is the Vanilla experience warts and all.
You have a source for that? I know hacking happens, but with the SMS and other automated security features (don’t you all have phones?) hacking is much less common nowadays than it was, say, in Vanilla.
I’m not saying hacking accounts doesn’t play a role, but I am skeptical that the majority of gold sold outside the legitimate paths of trading by gold sellers comes from hacking at this point. (I’m not sure it ever was true, tbh.)
But, I’m willing to be convinced by a reliable source of that claim.
The costs, today, of dealing with hacked accounts (much fewer, I would think, because of better account security measures) is a lot less than it used to be.
People will never fully stop buying/selling gold. Blizzard can only control it and keep it in check. I agree that targeting only sellers increases the profits of those sellers that get away with it, actually increasing the incentives to selling. Note sellers only risk whatever money and time they put into the game. It’s not like they’ll go to jail if they’re caught.
I think that treating this whole gold buying/selling as a moral outrage is perhaps counterproductive to a goal of eliminating (or at least minimizing) it. People get enough “tut, tut” from society that they don’t need it from a company who plays games for a living…
We’re all grownups here. No need to threaten coal in stockings for being bad little boys and girls.
There should be servers that have strict suspend/ban policies, and servers that have a WoW store built into the game.
We don’t have to demonize players who pay to win or pay for convenience or pay for custom mounts/pets. They number in the millions too. They are valuable customers and not horrible people. They just want to spend their past time differently than some others.
The WoW Classic servers that have WoW Store access should be called WoW Classic Plus, and be positive that they have something else to offer besides the game.
We’ve come along way people. Let’s be honest with each other and accept that we all love WoW. With that level of respect, the gaming products Blizzard can deliver can be better than ever.
No it won’t it will be like it is in modern wow.
Tokens really had little impact on gold sellers and we are getting the same security/anti spam features in classic
But what if for say I put up a random green item on the auction house for 500-1000g and some would be gold seller just bought the item from the auction house giving me the 500-1000g he gets the green item. There’s no chat in game just through outside sources.
IMO, with regards to classic, players that choose to try to cheat by buying gold SHOULD be “demonized”.
If Johnny can’t handle having to actually put forth effort to EARN what he wants, then classic is not really the game for him, IMO.
The same goes for an “in game store”.
If Johnny cannot handle having to put forth the effort to actually EARN the gold he needs to buy that epic mount, then he doesn’t really deserve that epic mount, IMO.
There are plenty of games that will cater to those who wish to pay to win or pay for cosmetics, but IMO, classic should not be one of them.
IMO, many of the people that oppose banning gold buyers plan to buy gold and do not want to risk their account being banned.
Some people push for tokens so they can buy that gold “legally”.
In the likely event that tokens are not sold in classic, they feel the need to ensure that they are not banned when they willingly and deliberately violate the rules by buying gold.
There is no way to say whether any token transaction was net-zero gold generation/sink on a given server. In fact, since the token price algorithms are common to all servers in a region, even if the net gold generated/sunk is zero, I don’t see that the possibility of server-to-server transfers of gold can’t exist.
To my knowledge, when a player sells a token for gold (I’ve never done this, though I’ve bought several tokens for gold), they don’t get an in-game mail telling them who bought it and at what gold price. They just get the gold, and I’m pretty sure they get at least the gold they were guaranteed when they paid the $20, even if the gold price went down between the time of the guarantee and the time of the sale.
It may be that, on average and across all servers over a period of time, the (super-secret proprietary we’ll never be able to peek under that hood) gold pricing algorithms produce a roughly net-zero gold source/sink within a region full of servers, but I don’t buy for a second that there is never gold generated (or sunk) on an individual server from these transactions.
My gut says they’re run at a net gold surplus/generation, but they are keeping gold inflation somewhat under control by offering huge sinks (e.g. 5M gold for a dino mount with an auction house on it).
Its like being a liquor store and neglecting to verify who you’re selling to. If it turns out to be someone hired by regulation or law enforcement hired specifically to test you, its a “sting” and you get a massive fine that is probably just as bad as actually selling alcohol to minors.
Subs dropped like a rock at the start of Cata. Dev arrogance cut wow down at the knees. Remember the “dungeons are hard” watercooler?
Easy gold didn’t come online for two more expansions, WoD. Tokens also came online then, but didn’t cause sub loss. WoD lost subs overwhelmingly for two reasons: lack of content and the flight debacle. Again, Dev arrogance.
Gold, tokens, and sub loss are unrelated. Sub loss can be directly attributed to Dev arrogance.
In Wow Vanilla, there were plenty of gold sellers. On WoW pirate servers, there was almost always an item store or character store, or even more gold selling.
Real money entering the game is part of Vanilla, it was always there. Before I even played WoW in Vanilla, people were ebaying their characters and selling gold. And yes today more people are willing to pay in. So why not give them some servers with stores that allow for it? Then a strict ban policy for pure servers could be considered.
We shouldn’t pretend WoW was ever some magical place that was cutoff from real money. We should act responsibly and help design systems that will accommodate more and more of us.
Because Blizzard isn’t going to do that. Just because it happened doesn’t mean it was legal. There are cases where Blizzard found out an account was sold and it was banned. Zeuzo was sold for 10k USD and Blizzard banned the account.
Just because something can happen doesn’t mean it should. Either way, Blizzard isn’t going to make special servers for special people. Vanilla wow only had real money enter when people broke the ToS.