https://i.postimg.cc/KvCT2XYB/image.png
I imagine the system works thusly: There’s a big bucket, players fill the bucket with gold, other players spend money on tokens and post them on the AH, someone buys the token and some gold from the bucket is given to the player and the player who bought the token with gold adds his gold to the bucket.
If no player buys the token, gold is taken from the bucket and given to the person who posted the token, it’s not “new gold”.
If a botter buys a game time token for their bot and you sell yours, you will have paid real money for botted gold safely
The economy does not work like normal in a video game. Lets say you bought Long Boi for 5 mil gold. Where does that gold go? Into the hands of someone who raised that Long Boi from a pup? No, it just disappears into nowhere and that Long Boi came from nowhere, just typed in on some screen.
Its not even an “economy” at all, if you buy a token and sell it for gold, you might use it to buy a mount on AH, the seller might spend his profit on the BMAH and the gold goes nowhere instead of into someone’s hands… Its like buying tokens at Chuck E Cheese to play games, you are just paying for entertainment, at the end of the day, you get nothing except for a few hours of fun. At least in WoW you get to keep the Long Boi…
I have heard of it taking a long time to sell.
That’s what a token does.
The other thing you need to keep in mind is that the “token” is simply the legal means of acquiring gold in WoW. Google “buy wow gold” and examine the results.
So, in effect, the token allows non-cheaters to participate in the already-inflated-by-illegal-gold economy.
The logical alternative is for Blizzard to allow legal RMT. Which, given their lax enforcement, is arguably their stance already.
Can someone explain to me how the token system works? I don’t really believe it’s adjusted by supply and demand of the players. You telling me there’s a possibility of running out of tokens? They could easily just make tokens out of thin air and just say it’s supply and demand.
Moving a single item (the WoW token) across a regional market is likely much easier than having a single regional market for the thousands of items you can (and many do) list on the AH. I would think they’d need a specific bank of servers just to handle a region-wide general AH and since there’s no real-money profit for Blizz (like there is on the token), it’s likely not a priority for Blizz (if it’s even on their radar).
You’re correct… if there are more tokens listed and less buying with gold, then the gold price for a token drops (and vice-versa).
I see the price fluctuate throughout the day so price adjustments based on supply/demand could be something like “if 100 tokens were listed in a 1 hour period and 100 tokens sell in a 1 hour period, then no price change. Otherwise, price is adjusted by the ratio (nSold / nListed).”
The queue could be bigger than 100 tokens and the update interval could be longer than 1 hour, and there are likely “collars” to keep the ratio in the range of 0.9 to 1.1 so there aren’t wild price swings in a one hour period (or they use a moving average to smooth price adjustments), but that’s how it probably works in principle. Blizzard has never disclosed the details, but a basic economics course will explain supply/demand pricing.