It’s possible that this was due to tokens. However, it’s also possible that the introduction of BattleNet accounts, and various other security measures, including those now obsolete battlenet authenticators, and general awareness of phishing, email, and Internet usage among the population increased around the same time.
Also, as much as I trust you and your opinions, that doesn’t give me solid information that I could point to as being verifiable, if I were to be questioned by someone else, i.e. verifiable information.
Of course, while I do not doubt that adding tokens may have reduced the overall numbers of people buying gold from third parties, I would suspect it also increased the number of people who buy gold (via tokens), as it then became acceptable (i.e. not a bannable offense), in game.
This suggest that “token buyers” get “instant results” where as “gold sellers” are left to hang, and that there’s likely little need to “generate gold to meet demand”.
And the flip side, which does happen, is that a token sits in the AH for a relatively long period of time not selling, leaving the gold buyer waiting. (I’ve seen the threads occasionally when people got worried the system wasn’t working because they weren’t getting a fast turn-around.)
It takes the ability to set the conversion out of the gold-sellers hands, and since they would need to heavily undercut Blizz’s prices in order to entice people to buy from illicit sources, in the end the effort -> reward just isnt worth it anymore.
The basic point that if this happens, then you don’t have Blizzard arbitraging requests for the sake of the players.
You should be able to buy a token for $20. Those are “unlimited”. They are made up out of thin air, as they can be directly redeemed for game time et al, having no “in game” effect.
But the trading of gold and tokens, that’s where the rubber meets the road. No tokens for sale, nothing to spend the gold on. No gold available, nothing to sell tokens for. No reason Blizzard should presumptively “buy” tokens from from sellers for Gold (thus “generating” gold).
Mind, some of this MAY happening internally, “there’s a bunch of tokens, a bunch of gold, sell them for $PRICE and we’ll clean up the edges later”. And gold may creep in (or vanish) at the edges. But as a matter of Policy, this apparently does not happen.
If that were true, then I would suspect they wouldn’t do it. However, it’s pretty easy to prove this false with a quick search on the search engine of your choice.
But their market is definitely constrained when there’s a Blizzard approved push button mechanic for it. I would think that the gold seller have to offer a substantial bonus to buyers.
You’re right and I just did the same. But did you check the prices? They’re selling gold for MORE than the legal token conversion. Which leads me to believe those are abandoned sites or just there as filler to entice people into buying other services, because there is absolutely no reason someone would pay more to buy from the “black market”
Yea but it goes both ways. If the price falls, gold is generated. If the price increases gold is removed.
And given that gold is almost always added at a faster rate than it is removed resulting in a general inflation of prices overtime, if there is a trend towards one direction or the other you would expect it would be towards an inflationary effect, which is then offset to a degree by the gold that is subsequently removed from the economy
Correct people have issues with part 2 saying its giving unfair advantage. I do not see it this way. I see that players where buying gold before ( this is seen by the amount of gold farmer spam historically) and there is no way to confirm numbers since it was hush hush. Now with tokens we have actual numbers. Are they the same as people before? We cannot confirm anything since there was 0 data. But players just see the after affect of people buying tokens and gold. They believe this directly affects them when in reality it has little affect on them. If I where to buy tokens and make 2 million gold Player Y on this form would have no idea nor care that I now purchased every BOE to raid with my guild.
The key difference is Blizzard now makes the money and can use the data to help develop games and updates so that the gold buying isnt affecting the game or economy…
Based on what? Have you compared numbers? Have you done any research into how much they were selling prior to the introduction of tokens and whether that had any impact whatsoever on how much they were selling after the introduction of tokens?
It’s all fine and well to spew forth commentary that sounds reasonable, but that’s simply conversation. Of course we are all entitled to our own opinions, and we can freely share them with each other. I’m not trying to shut anyone down from doing that. Just pointing out that there are many site that sell retail gold. Many.
Personally, I don’t like the message that tokens send. That it is OK to buy gold. Regardless of whether people are buying it or not. It would roughly be equivalent (though, we could argue this, I’m sure) to Blizzard selling, for money, a Trinket-of-Botting.
That may prevent some third-party bots, but it certainly would not solve the problem of players cheating.
Common sense or even a cursory knowledge of history gives the answer pretty clearly. Throughout the entire history of the world, eliminating the black market for a good always reduces its cost, independent of other variables like taxes
But why would a source exist at all that is charging more than the legal price of a good? That NEVER happens. Would you buy water from a guy standing outside a 711 for $5 when the same bottle is $2 inside? Of course not…