Guess why boosters aren’t muted for spamming
There is a lull in content, so I don’t think as many people are paying real money ($20) for in game gold. The token price has to go up to get people to buy tokens for $20. In the meantime, there are probably plenty of players sitting on a lot of gold and not much to buy with it, so they are buying tokens for gold, which also sends the token price up.
This is only one side of the coin. Rising gold cost per token can be explained by larger and larger amounts of gold chasing the relatively the same amount of tokens.
Unless you actually know the amount of tokens beings sold over time, you cannot make your assertion.
It’s funny, when token prices fall to lower levels at the release of new expansions, when everyone needs gold and wants to buy it and the supply/demand teeter-totter tips towards “demand”, people cry “Conspiracy!” all over the forums and claim the prices are being manipulated so that they have to spend more cash for gold.
Then later in the expansion, when raiders are done raiding so they don’t need to dump a bunch of gold into expensive mats and everyone already has the big-ticket gold sink items and prices inflate because there’s nothing left to spend gold on except for tokens to keep your account afloat, and that teeter-totter tips to “supply”…people cry “Conspiracy!” all over the forums.
These patterns have held over the past several expansions, and they have reasons - people need gold early in an expansion, so they pay cash for it, and that keeps the supply of tokens that you can buy with gold plentiful.
Late in the expansion no one really needs gold as much anymore. People pump the gold that they have into tokens to keep their subs going or get store items, but no one is really creating tokens with their cash because they don’t need the cash, so supply goes down. Prices go up.
This literally happens all the time and is very predictable. Until there are new gold sinks in the game, unlikely until the next expansion, we will probably see tokens creep ever-higher.
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I got mine late/end legion at 220K a piece. BFA was like about 2 months away.
whether to lure new players like me?
Or end of expac everyone is dumping 20+ alts of mats about to be useless so they have more gold?
GUess we can debate that. As end of expac always sees token price surge. so if its 9.2.5 or 9.3…expect that price surge.
Short answer: yes.
it did go off a cliff during legion last i remember or some time thereabouts.
You’re making the incorrect assumption that supply and demand increase and decrease at the same rate. They aren’t linked in that way. Think this through and you’ll see why it makes sense:
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It’s highly UNlikely the people buying tokens for game time (using gold) are going to be also buying tokens (using RL money) to sell for gold. So the tokens are almost definitely being bought and put up for sale (supply) by people who are paying for the game with RL money.
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No matter what reason people leave, it is very possible the people paying gold for their subs (buying tokens) would be more likely to hang around a little longer than people who are paying RL money for their sub.
If we agree on those two points, you have a situation where the people supplying the tokens are also likely to be the first ones unsubscribing during lulls in subscriptions. Thus even though there are now fewer players, the ones who left were creating the supply and the supply will decrease. This leaves the people who were buying the tokens (the demand) with fewer tokens to buy and the price increases.
I wasn’t excellent in economics, but this seems really simple to me. As far as increasing the price goes, Blizzard has some control, yes. To understand this point, you have to understand the point behind the creepy old joke of the guy who offers a woman five dollars to sleep with him and she rebuffs him asking him what kind of woman he thinks she is, but when he asks her if she’d sleep with him for five million dollars and she says yes, so he tells her “then now we’re only haggling”. This is exactly why the token prices get adjusted. Blizzard doesn’t ever want their to be ZERO tokens available for sale, so the idea is to tempt people to buy tokens to sell. Someone might not pay $20 for 100k, but that same person might pay $20 for 400k. Just like in the joke, everything between is only haggling out the location of that price point.
However, they also can’t just raise the price willy nilly because you still have to think of the demand side of the equation. If Blizzard set the price at one million gold per token, there are a lot of people who would buy tokens with RL money to sell for that (creating supply) but there are a lot of people buying tokens for gold who wouldn’t buy tokens for that price (reducing demand) and then you would have a surplus of tokens on the market. At that point, the price has to come down to make the tokens sell.
So the answer to “does Blizzard control the token prices?” comes down to: “Only insomuch as to balance the supply and demand of available tokens” because they both don’t want to run out of tokens to sell AND they don’t want to have piles of surplus available tokens which aren’t being bought.
The amount of available gold in the economy is another EXCELLENT example of part of what decides the price of tokens. If all of a sudden everyone in the game were getting one million gold per week, those hypothetical one million gold tokens I mentioned above might sell handily. So our location in the life-cycle of the expansion (a time when people are selling more readily) might also have more to do with the prices than people would first think.
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