I was reading about the massive revenue numbers for Diablo Immortal and started thinking about the serious cheese ActiBlizz is missing out on in WoW. There is a huge amount of economic activity happening outside of their systems. This activity will not go away no matter what. It is 2022, not 2004, and players have a proven desire to throw money at the game rather than working for things.
- Do nothing <this_is_fine.jpg>
Plenty of players responding in the 25 “ban GDKP” threads per week think there is nothing wrong at all with the state of the WoW economies. Maybe the correct path forward is to do nothing at all. Paradigm: ostrich. - Fix the game
Ensure that the game economy is a healthy closed loop using game mechanics & TOS enforcement. Ensure botting, gold buying, gold selling all face actual systemic issues that make the cost unfeasible. This costs the business in dev hours and will require long-term incremental work. Introduce new sources of gold, new gold sinks, and new ways for players to interact with each other economically. Paradigm: old school game dev. - Monetize the economic activity
Introduce WoW tokens and in-game store to WoW Classic. Correlate WoW gold with USD and take a slice. Invest the money in game services and don’t just pad quarterly profit. Paradigm: you’ve already done this on retail.