This was actually one of the best/most realistic model for an economy. Labor can be had cheaply to produce resources. Where you make your money is taking those resources and crafting them into something useful. I made more money in WoD than any other expansion.
So did literally everyone else without much more effort than operating two to three garrisons.
No it doesn’t. You buy a token and you sell it to other players. Thats how it works.
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It’s part or assisted it.
It’s like The game was stone to death or death by a thousand cuts.
The first one or second didn’t do it. It helped do it though.
Current WoW your accomplishments are almost meaningless.
Ppl play the game different. You should not get what they have.
As some play the market, some PvP for rank, some level alts, some raid, some dungeon crawl, some beg for gold, professions, and much more.
If add tokens gold becomes less valuable in the game.
If you add catchup mechanics every month or ilvl scaling raiders/dungeon/LFR/LFG crawlers efforts become meaningless
If you make leveling easy everyone will have alts.
Easy to max professions effects ppl that do try.
Almost everything you decide to do in Vanilla takes time, effort, and creates value to do it. Because if want it you have to earn it.
In current WoW you can be a jack of all and master of none.
Meaning it’s almost pointless to even do anything. Twinks possibly but for how long?
Ahhhh, yes, that is the way it works “in theory”. You are guaranteed that gold once you buy the token. Do you really believe there are that many people who consistently, and like clockwork, shell out $120k+ gold for a month of play time? Blizzard is handing over a majority of that gold.
They haven’t confirmed no Guild Banks yet, they’re still discussing it internally.
Since Guild Banks DID exist…it’s just most guilds ended up breaking the ToS to use them, unless you kept the exact same banker forever or moved everything to a new account when you got a new one.
Putting in guild banks would be on a similar level to their allowing loot-trade in raids. Washing their hands of a particular annoying aspect of Vanilla/Early TBC that was technically illegal on most guilds and should’ve had their bank-accounts banned for account sharing, as in most guilds at least a few officers had Guild Bank account access.
And your evidence is???
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What is your evidence that it isn’t? All you know is that when you buy a token, you magically get $120k gold in your inbox within 12 hours. If you did that 20 times a day for a month, you would get the exact same result. Now auction off ANYTHING else and see if you get those same results.
Russel’s teapot. You made the claim blizzard fabricates the gold, you have the burden of proof.
Besides, if i did sell 20 tokens a day for a month thats only 600 subs. Well within the realm of possibility for the 2million-ish players.
This is just a conspiracy theory of yours with zero evidence besides “I don’t feel like this makes sense based on my gut feeling about how other people behave”.
Which, to be clear, carries little value in logical discourse.
Yes, absolutely. Half of my guild pays their subs in tokens. Making gold isn’t remotely difficult. 120k gold in a month is piddly change if you’re actually looking to make gold.
There is zero evidence to support this conclusion, and significant evidence against it.
For example, the fact that your tokens don’t sell on the AH the moment you put them up. It can take hours (one guild mate had his almost expire), particularly when demand is low.
To be clear:
When you sell linen cloth or enchanting vellums on the AH, only people on your server and a connected server can see those auctions. You’re limited to the 5-20k players that you can guild with.
When you sell a WoW token it’s auctioned region wide, and is purchasable by anyone in your region. This means that WoW token sales are going to be significantly smoother than any other item because your item reaches literally every potential buyer all at once.
Tokens are sold region-wide. Other items are not. It’s no surprise that Tokens would sell faster and more consistently.
As an aside, there’s something called “The Burden of Proof”. This stipulates that when two (or more) people are having a discussion and one person disputes a claim made by another, the burden of proof is on the one who made the claim.
Example:
- You claim that Tokens are quietly paid out by Blizzard and not other players, or at least that some of them are.
- I dispute that claim.
- It is now up to you to provide evidence to support your claim.
Essentially, you do not get to just claim any random thing and then expect me to prove it wrong. You must prove it correct, in fact.
You are committing a logical fallacy, because you are assuming your statement to be true unless proven false. Unfortunately, your statement is neither proven true or false until someone provides evidence for either position. It is up to you to provide evidence to prove it true because it is your claim, otherwise it’s simply a hearsay claim with no argumentative value.
Right now, your claim is in the realm of “but what if!?” style arguments. Such as when a child says that the moon is made of cheese, and you suggest that the moon is made of rock and not cheese, to which they reply “ok but what if it’s made of cheese?” It might be an amusing thought, but the assertion that it could be made of cheese does not prove that it is made of cheese.
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LOL. Except there is. Inflation.
Just so we’re clear; the article you linked doesn’t support your own argument. Having said that, let’s dive in.
What do they have to say about the WoW token?
The WoW token is very simple: You pay Blizzard $20 for a token, and then you can sell the token on the in-game auction house. A player with gold can buy a token and redeem it for a month of WoW subscription time or for $15 of Battle.net balance, which is like a gift card credit that can be redeemed in WoW or other Blizzard games such as Hearthstone and Overwatch . You get their gold; they get your cash, or at least most of it.
Interestingly, they never once suggest that WoW tokens are creating gold. What they do suggest, however, is that there are not one but two benefits to buying the tokens from other players.
- A month of game time (which you suggest isn’t enough to support the overall supply because of how many sub numbers that would generate)
- $15 in Battle.net balance.
Worth noting because $15 in account balance can be used not just for game time but for character services, transfers, level boosts, etc. One person who wants to boost a single character needs four tokens to convert into balance. That changes the metric quite a bit, and it puts significantly more pressure on your argument. If I need not only 1 token per month, but potentially half a dozen tokens a month to support things like pets, mounts, and character services (not to mention loot boxes and such in other games I might play), the demand goes through the roof compared to just game time.
In fact the article touches on this exact transition:
Once Blizzard allowed players to redeem tokens for Battle.net balance, however, there was basically no limit to how many tokens players needed. Rich players began dumping their stashes, and with so many more people trying to sell than buy, the value of gold relative to dollars plunged, and the gold price of the tokens started skyrocketing.
In August 2016, when Legion was released, a WoW token was worth 35,000 gold. Prices began to rise after Blizzard announced that tokens would be redeemable for Battle.net balance, and when the new functionality was released, the price of a token surged to about 90,000 gold. In July 2018, shortly before the release of Battle for Azeroth , prices peaked above 200,000 gold per token.
Funny that, isn’t it? Even though gold was at an all time high at the end of WoD, the tokens themselves were fairly low value because all you could buy with them was time. Low demand, high supply, low value.
Then suddenly the tokens can be redeemed for blizzard balance, and you can pay gold for all those pets, mounts, games, services, etc, and the demand for those tokens skyrockets. They skyrocketed even more just before the launch of an expansion, probably because people wanted to buy the expansion without having to, you know, buy the expansion.
So… if that’s all true, though, where does the inflation come from? You suggest that it’s because Blizzard is putting hundreds of thousands of gold into the economy many times a day over and over, because nothing else makes sense to you, right? Well, how about:
Another problem is that gold isn’t a finite resource; the game is constantly creating more of it. Gold is created every time someone completes a quest, kills an enemy or sells trash to a vendor. Some gold is siphoned back out of the game economy by repair bills, flight paths and a “tax” on auction house sales. Occasionally, a lot of gold is destroyed when someone buys a pricey vanity mount from a vendor. But gold is created quicker than it is destroyed, and it becomes less valuable as it becomes less scarce.
In particular, between 2014 and 2016, it was possible for dedicated players to generate quantities of gold that were previously impossible to obtain, and have not been possible to obtain since. The Warlords of Draenor expansion was the first time the game included nonplayer character followers that players could send on missions to collect resources, items and other useful stuff, including gold.
In that expansion, NPC followers could get an ability called “treasure hunter” that doubled any gold rewards they earned from a quest. And “treasure hunter” perks stacked, so it was possible to get a few thousand gold per day, per garrison. Many casual players who had never had significant amounts of money before earned hundreds of thousands of gold during Warlords of Draenor . Players could sock away millions, since each character could earn roughly the same amount of gold from their garrisons, and you can have as many as 10 characters on a server.
So not only are the ways we earn gold ever increasing in “value” (50g per quest today vs 1-3g per quest 14 years ago), but we can earn much more gold passively, with almost no time investment, just by logging into alts and queuing up missions. The fact that WoD funneled millions of gold into anyone who so much as breathed at their garrison with the intent to make gold only further creates an issue.
It’s also useful to note, as the article also mentions, part of the issue with token prices, gold value, and so on, is that since MoP the scarcity of sought after trade goods has plummeted. In Vanilla > Wrath/Cata we had scarcity of ingredients to both control inflation and mitigate increasing income (though inflation continued through both of those expansions, where by cataclysm having 20-40k gold wasn’t strictly unreasonable, but not super easy).
So what changed?
- MoP and WoD gave us our own personal resource pumps for things. We could mass produce (on as many alts as we felt like) a wide variety of resources.
- WoD/Legion (can’t quite recall which enabled it) gave us shared resource nodes. See that herb? You have 5 seconds after I loot it to loot it as well. My guild partook in farming via the seeds. Plant a bunch of seeds, all 40 of us loot the flowers, rinse repeat.
- Flying in the zones only made this situation significantly worse.
So what happens here? The relative value of trade goods plummeted. We were able to spend much less of our overall capital to fund ourselves, but we were making even more money than ever just by existing. The result is that a glut of resources, a massive rise of gold in the world, meant that stock piles continued to grow instead of shrink.
As I pointed out above, we then saw partway into Legion the sudden shift to tokens being able to be redeemed for battle net currency, and things got all sorts of screwy.
TLDR
Your article provides nothing that suggests that tokens are being meddled with, and in fact provides enough arguments and evidences to suggest that there needn’t be any further interaction on Blizzards part to create such rampant inflation.
There’s more than enough demand for tokens to drive the market and speed that we see, particularly considering that unlike your trade goods the tokens are region wide (your token can be purchased anywhere in the NA region, but your trade goods can only be purchased on your 1-3 connected realms).
You have provided no compelling evidence that tokens add any currency to the game world at all, and in fact provided a “source” that doesn’t support your own argument.
Still too long, still didn’t read.
Read your sources, you still haven’t provided compelling evidence that Blizzard is lying. Inflation is caused by so many other things that it doesn’t need help.
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Last first… I doubt enchanting vellum had anything to do with spammers and racists, they have always been there.
2nd Blacksmiths, leather workers, tailors, engineers, alchemists, miners, herbalists, skinners and cloth gatherers NEVER had to spam trade to sell items… WHY is enchanting the only profession you can’t sell on the auction house? That said…how does one profession affect social interaction as you claim? Not a very well thought out post for sure. AND…
First of all…boy… you have never been a top level enchanter have you? I have… and I sell enchants for an ungodly amount of gold. Far more than the total cost of materials to make the enchant. Which is why I NEVER do enchanting for “tips”… you pay a fee or take your business elsewhere and HOPE they have the enchant you want.
Crusader, +15 agil on weapon, +25 agil on weapon, 30 spell power, sunfire… none of which are vendor or trainer learned enchants. You gotta grind for them. That said, what idiot would sell them for less than the clown disenchanting items to sell mats, gets?
Face it… “Your mats plus tip” and you get “Get the enchant from the guy that sold you the mats or pay MY FEE” or go without… your choice.
I am curious why vellum was not included in original wow, since scrolls a available via drop and from vendors. Who make those?