I can see why you would say that, I personally just always assume that when someone says “players control the price” what they are talking about is supply and demand and when people say “Blizzard chooses the price” they mean Blizz is explicitly setting prices or raising some variable.
I personally just think it’s supply and demand, there’s always spikes whenever there’s an announcement (there was one for 9.1 I believe) and when shop mounts get added but there’s of course no way to know for sure, Blizz could be behind the scenes twirling their mustache and inflating the price 
The players 100% “control” it by buying a token to convert to gold, or buying a token with gold to convert to game time or Blizzard Balance.
Right now, the best thing to do is buy tokens with money and convert them to gold. The more people that do that, the lower the “gold to token” price will go (this also means you will get less gold each time you buy a token with real money).
The players ABSOLUTELY control this price.
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You are only looking at half the equation. Sure, if I were buying tokens with cash to get more gold, the higher it goes, the more value I get from my purchase.
But if I was buying the tokens with gold for gametime, the higher it gets, the more money I have to farm up every month to keep playing.
If it gets too high, it might not be worth it for some people to keep buying them for more time and they stop playing.
This only makes sense if you consider playing the game to be the equivalent of work.
Personally, the day I felt that way, I would be vendoring all my in-game assets, giving away the gold, deleting all my character and closing my account for good.
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It’s a mutualistic relationship! People that want gold push the token prices down making it cheaper for people that want game time to play for free and when they buy tokens with gold they push the token price up 
But which player do you think Blizz would want more of? The player paying 2 sub fees, his own actual sub fee and $20 for a token or players just paying for game time with gold? Though Blizzard does say that the game needs both because supposedly it is possible to run out of tokens, I’ve never seen that happen but I don’t monitor token availability to say if it is true or false.
This actually made me kind of sad to think about, very good point. So many things in this game feel like a chore to me now, the only thing I enjoy doing is PvP’ing.
Guess i’m burnt out atm, my sub ends in a few days, hopefully I come back for 9.2 nice and refreshed.
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I also have observed that there is a correlation between fewer players being in the game and tokens being worth more gold.
It goes without saying that there are fewer players in the game in the lulls between patches and expansions, and more players in the game right after new content is launched.
When patches are fresh, more competitive and wannabe competitive players are busy gearing up and doing power-related content, and being starved on time to farm gold they are more desperate for gold for BoE gear, consumables, and anything else that can give them a power advantage, perhaps even being boosted themselves. (More tokens being bought with real money to sell for gold leads to the gold value of tokens going down.)
During the content lulls, the gold value of power-related items goes down, and the competitive players enjoy an influx of gold from boosting or having time to do content without needing to spend gold, while casual players less affected by raid cadences are as busy as ever earning gold from current expansion world content, professions, and old expansion content. (More gold being converted into game time tokens leads to the gold value of tokens going up.)
Think the problem is less people are buying tokens at the store and more people have decided to pay for their subscription using them.
This means less are available on the AH so the price on the AH goes up.
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My frustration and disappointment with Legion has had the same effect. Having to wait to December to play the Mage Tower was straw that put me over the edge and I also unsubbed (done around Nov 12). In the meantime, I am going to stick to finishing up some questing on newer characters in the oldest expansions and doing some crafting for mog. I might come back for the Mage Tower in December but I will see how I feel.
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Sad to hear you’re going too but honestly it’s probabaly healthier to do so.
A break is always a good idea, especially if you don’t find yourself enjoying the content as much as you used to.
As much as I go on rants about the PvP gearing system, besides that, PvP content has provided me with so much joy since the expansion launch. At this point in time though i’ve been left frustrated because I want to try something other than Rogue but i’m not going to go through that massive renown/torghast/rank grind again lol
100% will come back for 9.2 to gear up my Rogue, do LFR to see the new raid, and complete the new campaign questline.
For as much criticism as it gets, this game is still pretty neat, just gotta know when to play and when not to play.
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You basically hit it on the head. There’s a system that tracks the number of tokens that are listed/bought on the AH every 20 minutes or so, and it bumps the price up/down by like 1% based on that.
I see people still dont understand Supply and Demand.
We have none of the sort of internal data we would need to be able to do more than take the system on faith.
darn i hope so…better buy some tokens
IIRC it’s capped at 3% change per “tick”.
Blizzard doesn’t touch the prices of tokens. It’s driven by supply and demand.
High prices mean the demand is outpacing the supply.
Low prices means the supply is outpacing the demand.
So there’s triple the supply and triple the demand and therefore it should be a different price?
I never understood why people rely so much on tokens for paying their subs. One day of work can actually get you a 6-month sub.
Yeah, i never really believed that Blizzard allows our habits to 100% control the price of tokens, i’m sure that they put their finger on the scales when it suits them. Kinda like how gas prices at the pump immediately jump up in price at the slightest hint of trouble in the Middle East but when something good happens like a peace deal or some other major thing that secures the flow of oil happens, the benefits to the consumers take a long time to trickle down.
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