I don’t think you realize how big a billion is.
If every single one of those 1,000 players wanted to buy gold, they would need to buy a literal million gold each to deplete the supply.
Even assuming around 50k costs/character, you would need 20 characters per account to need a million gold.
Again, this is the amount they have RIGHT NOW. With NO FURTHER FARMING.
Makes sense to me.
It’s the same as it has been since 2014. You had to pay a charge (the price of the new expansion) to get a boost. No player ever got one for free. Additional boosts cost money.
It’s the other way around: TBC is a free expansion (the first one that WoW has ever had). But Blizzard is choosing not to give “TBC plus a boost to TBC” to anyone for free.
Since I don’t have an MBA and years of sales and marketing experience in the MMO industry, it would be ridiculous for me to advise Blizzard about sales and marketing. I see the simple stuff. This isn’t a simple issue.
Every one of those 1,000 players? I don’t think you know how many people play Classic. There’s tens of thousands on each realm.
And even assuming this claim of a billion gold is true (how would they know, honestly?), if they didn’t farm at all, it’d be gone very quickly. TBC’s costs are very frontloaded.
That doesn’t actually refute my argument, though. If it’s for new players, wouldn’t a free boost bring more in?
It’s just for money, and anyone with a brain knows that.
… why would they ever stop farming? Did I say they were going to stop farming? Of course they aren’t going to stop farming. The point is the benefit of the boost (i.e. faster route to content that is worth gold) is negligible, because they have far more supply than demand.
Even with 10,000 players, that’s enough gold for 100k each, out of the gate. Do you think every player on the server is going to buy gold? And that much?
I remember TBC very well. You got the scale all wrong. The “Big costs” are rounding errors to that much gold.
No boost for accounts with existing lvl 60, change my mind
Friends could be on another server. Many people stopped playing during phase 2 or 3 and friends continued playing and xferred to a different server. The entire concept of boosting a new character on a new server saves a lot of annoyance over paying for an account transfer. Especially if there’s a massive flood of requests from people wanting transfers.
Okay, then saying how much they have in stock now as an argument against the idea of botters/gold sellers using the boost is just a non-sequitur and we can safely disregard their current stock as inconsequential.
They’re going to continue farming and selling gold. Saying “they have 1 billion” is not a valid reason why they WON’T use the boost.
… Think about it for juuuust a little bit. I know you want to act like you’re smarter than everyone else, but just try for a second.
I need to continue farming for my business model. My current rate of gold acquisition greatly outpaces demand. There is an option available now to increase the gold acquisition of new bots via a boost. It saves roughly 2-3 days of play time vs current levelling.
I can choose to use the boost, and have even more gold that I can’t sell, for a cost, slightly faster (because the boost is only worth 2-3 days/played, this is important- each boost does not generate THAT much gold).
Or I can continue to use my current methods, continue to have more gold than I can sell, and not spend the money on a boost.
That’s why the stockpile is important. Because with the stockpile, there is no benefit to boosting- you make gold more quickly, but you already make it more quickly than you can sell, and you have a large stockpile to deal with upticks in demand, which as you said, TBC is frontloaded. Once people buy the upfront costs, gold is going to have even lower demand.
The stockpile is inconsequential in that scenario. If your production outpaces the consumption, how much you currently have isn’t important.
Or, I suppose more accurately, you only need so much before any more becomes superfluous. If you want to sell 50k gold, you obviously need 50k gold, but the functional difference between a million and a billion is zero.
If you completely wiped their stock, if they still only need to make 50k a week in order to meet demand, but easily make 60k a week, by your logic, they still would not use the boost.
No, it is not inconsequential- demand is not a constant. It fluctuates with several factors.
The stockpile is for periods of increased demand (expansion launches, for example) and to mitigate loss from bans.
Again- if the boost did more, you would have a point. But level 58 with crap gear just isn’t going to save enough time to justify the costs.
Here, consider it like naxx raiding in classic. If I farmed at a rate for phase 1-5, and had a stockpile of consumables ready to go, I could raid naxx until my group gets through all the learning, and clearing, without having to increase the rate I am farming at, despite using significantly more consumables.
Well, the stockpile is likely going to suffer from those same bans, but yeah, I understand the sudden spikes in demand.
Which is why I think you’re overestimating how much a billion gold is. 6000 gold for flying (slightly less, but it’s an easy number to work with). 1 billion / 6 thousand = 166,667.
Only 166,667 characters have to buy the gold for their flying for that stockpile to be gone. Now add training, profession costs, enchants, reputation items, repairs, respecs. Take a look at how prominent GDKPs are, an inflated economy with tons of new BiS BoEs to sell, profession materials and cooldowns. Then consider human nature. People will just buy gold to have it even though they don’t need it.
They’re going to keep farming gold. We both agree on that. If they didn’t keep farming gold, that billion is gone really fast. It is, as you say, only a buffer for the sudden increased demand.
The argument as to whether they will use the boost or not is not tied to how much gold they have. I believe I’ve seen you make the argument they’d just spin up more accounts instead. In this case, the stockpile is not a valid argument that they will not use the boost, but that they will not take ANY steps to ramp up production, including making more accounts.
So the question becomes… will they ramp up production? At what point do they cap off and say “we’re making enough gold, now there’s no point in farming any harder.” You say they already reached that. Okay, so regardless of whether they’d spend their money on the boost or on more accounts, they’ll be doing neither.
Therefore… the stockpile is not consequential.
If anything, if the stockpile IS consequential, the sudden spike of demand serves as an argument FOR bots/gold sellers using the boost. Sudden demand, stockpile not large enough, need gold NOW. Can’t wait 3 days when people are buying epic flying RIGHT NOW. You think EVERY gold seller has a billion gold ready?
I mean, this is exactly what I’m talking about when I say you have no sense of scale.
Do you really think any single server has 166,000 characters? or even half that? I already proved 10,000 buyers could have 100,000g of expenses. There’s just not enough need for gold to eat a supply like that.
Anyways, the stockpile is probably spread over several accounts that don’t have any botting activity. You’ll lose some in a ban wave, but if it’s spread properly not most of it.
And no, the stockpile is still consequential. They have enough gold for TBC gold demand right now, most likely. They’re farming for WotLK. They’re farming for whatever comes after wotlk. By spacing it out over a long enough time period, they can use bots in ways that make them less likely to be detected; shorter farm sessions and such.
I never said there’s no point in farming any harder. I said the relative value of the boost (what you get for what you pay) is too low to be considered. You are saving at most 2-3 days of /played time. Whatever gold you can generate in that time, that’s the value of the boost. It’s not much.
If you’re a smaller gold seller on a server with other gold sellers who have millions, it doesn’t matter how many boosts you buy- people will buy from the sellers that have supply. Look at the price of oil- so much supply it went negative last year. Similar situation, and you’re arguing people would invest money in getting a piece of the pie .
LOL, that would be one heck of a massive server! What is the current server limits 10,000 or somewhere around that.
So basically you would need a server population that is ~10x the maximum limit to even remotely consume the current gold stockpile on most servers.
Every realm? No. I’d wager a lot of them have a lot more than that, though.
Do you really think every gold seller has 1 billion gold stockpiled on every realm?
Okay, and my point is that argument is separate from the stockpile. If the boost isn’t worth considering due to its supposedly low value, then they weren’t going to use the boost anyway. Having a billion gold or not doesn’t change that.
To be clear, your argument is that if they didn’t have a billion gold stockpiled, they would use the boost?
Also, I really want to see you get to level 60 in 2 days /played, even post XP nerf. Even world records are barely reaching that now with mob tagging, dungeon boosting, rested, and ZG coins from 58-60.
You think the average botter with garbage “of the Eagle” greens, even multiboxing dungeons, is going get leveling speeds like that?
Maybe you sell “locally.” You don’t have a site, but you sell to guildmates and their acquaintances.
Or maybe the point of buying the boost is so you can be one of the sellers with the supply. I think definitively stating that botters/gold sellers won’t use the boost just because some big supplier supposedly has a billion gold (of course the gnome mage would know that) is silly.
Ah, yes, because all players log in at the same time.
Right, and gold seller’s market is not the entire population of a server, it’s the small sub-section actually willing to buy gold.
There isn’t a single classic wow server with close to a big enough target demographic for their supply.
It’s mostly kept going because they have to make up for the losses from bans. They launder it the best they can, but blizz catches some of it pretty frequently.
I have no clue what point you were making here? Are you saying the current Classic server limit is not 10,000?
Try more like 6,000 on a realm.
Now multiply that by what is it 8 characters on average per account…
6,000 x 8 = 48,000 possible characters.
We could be generous and call it 50,000 max, that is ~3 times less than the number needed to consume the gold stockpile.
I’ll take that wager. Go prove any single server has at least 166,000 characters. I’ll wait.
Oh wait, while I was typing someone else posted the proof.
No. But I do think it’s a safe bet that after 2 years of classic, there is cumulatively enough gold to fit the demand of each server.
Nah, because the stockpile as we’ve established is important for meeting increased periods of demand. If people have to wait for the gold to be farmed, they will buy from someone else. Plain and simple.
With a stockpile and a rate of farming large enough that the gold supply grows over time to meet future demand, the boost is of very little value. At the point where it allows you to move more gold (i.e. you have less supply than demand) a boost is of higher value. It still has a cost, but if paying that cost allows you to move enough gold to cover it, then it is worth doing. As an example, if there had been no setup time (either boosts in classic or the TBC boost but no classic transfers to TBC servers) then the boost would be quite valuable.
If you can’t meet future cashflows but have enough time, then scaling up via accounts is a more-efficient and better option than the boost.
Two terms you should look up- Economies of scale and Barriers to entry. You’re trying to argue if they buy enough boosts, a mom and pop shop can compete with amazon directly.
Change your mind? Who cares? It’s happening.
This would, at least, make Blizzard’s message not a lie about how they want player’s friends to be able to boost and play with them.
But I have a better idea. How about just no boost? That’s what a muscular brain would do.