With the AH being down overnight until now, the token price has risen nearly 50K.
How? Nobody is buying OR selling tokens on the AH. Why is the price moving at all?
I thought the pricing was based on supply/demand? Therefore the price should be flat, but it’s not.
Supply and Demand. Everyone is demanding it, but can’t purchase it.
People look at the high price - get excited and buy one to sell for gold - then realize they can’t sell it. Because they CAN’T sell it - the price goes up.
I expect the AH will open back up when people quit spending $20 to buy a token they can’t sell. Slick way for Bliz to make extra bucks.
Yeah - I am suspicious, too. I have no faith at all in this company.
There is NEITHER supply nor demand because there is no venue for either right now. Your response makes no sense.
Patch is coming out on Tuesday with content, this always spikes the price up
Maybe whatever issue effecting the AH is also effecting Tokens.
Only saying I need more info to say either way.
It affects tokens in that tokens purchased on the cash shop cannot be sold on the AH for gold, nor can they be bought on the AH for gold. But, if the token price were purely based on the markets like we’re led to believe, then the price would be flat since there’s no supply and no demand, since there’s no AH to facilitate either.
Ok.
But why, specifically, is the AH shut down atm? What is the issue causing the AH to not open?
I am saying that issue/bug could effect token prices.
something similar happened with a previous un expected down of the Servers and therefore the AH.
if the state the AH goes down in is More demand than supply, the Price will grow until it equalizes. and since no one COULD add more supply the price went out of control. its prob the very first Major spike seen back when every few minutes were being logged and tracked.
any how, even if the core issue was patched/ fixed, i wouldn’t doubt errors and exceptions to still exist where a similar problem happens by being outside the specific patched parameters.
the Token supply/ demand system prob functions as a separate program/ addon/ code than the AH specifically and thus keeps operating regardless of other various states of the game unless addressed.
/hypothesis
3 pairs of Garrosh shoulders says the AH is down due to some complication with warbands.
Basically, the token price is coded to inflate automatically if demand is really low to generate demand.
In situations where no one can buy anything, it’s simply exacerbated.
From my understanding, for a while, people were able to buy stuff but not list stuff. And then it went down completely.
If people bought tokens but others couldn’t post tokens and then the system was shut down… well… I think that makes sense?
Which is a problem, because it would mean that it’s not actually looking at AH supply or transactions to determine actual supply/demand.
Unless the code is actually trying to divide by 0s (since there’d be 0 on token inventory and 0 on purchases) and throwing up, which would be hilariously bad but I guess expected in modern Blizzard code.
It does.
I am just saying I could come up with a variety of issues that could cause the AH to have to be closed, and effect prices.
And before anyone else jumps in, I am not defending anything. Only saying I dont believe we have enough information.
Or maybe the AH issue which caused it to close down is interfering with that?
When the Token AH was down in the past, the price was flat and you could see it on the token price tracking sites.
This is different as it shows the price steadily running up to over 300k right now. The price was never flat, like it has been in the past when the AH or just tokens on the AH were offline.
This spike looks like what happens right when they announce a new expansion coming with a target date or date range and people run out to stock up for battle.net balance. But I’m not seeing any news that looks like that.
/moo 
It actually does make sense. Think about it. People can’t purchase it. But there would be people who do want to purchase it. So the system thinks that there is none listed, despite the Auction House is actually down. So the price goes up.
No it doesn’t, because by your logic that makes assumptions, the reverse would also be true (which isn’t):
The only info we have is that OCE went to crap and then the AH acted up everywhere and now it’s shut down everywhere and some are reporting the instance servers are lagging now.
I thought the token price for gold was only supposed to go up when many people were buying it off the AH. With the AH being super down… this makes no sense.
false.
the AH goes down when say there are 12203 tokens.
the average sale demand mark was 30000 tokens.
the AH is below average demand. price must rise to equal demand.
Demand slowly falls as price slowly raises.
assume it drops enough to be 20000 the new average mark over time.
its still less than supply. so the price must continue to rise. and the demand average over time continues to fall.
it wont stop until the average mark = 12203
then if it remained down the average demand would be less than supply and it would start to go down.
from observed other patches where it would go down correctly, the AH would pause. demand and supply unchanged until its open again.
the AH going down doesnt magically make supply 0 and demand 0