You are not conversing in good faith whatsoever. You are not even reading what I am writing, which addresses what you said. The people you are describing, the “AH players” and the “TCG gold” havers, are the same people. They are the same. I am not implying someone is going to take the gold from their Feldrake, a paltry sum, and use that specific lump sum to manipulate markets.
I am saying that players who have far more gold than what a Feldrake costs, who already focus their efforts on the activities that provide the most gold, now have one of their exit valves completely closed. As they accrue too much gold and need to lock it away, no more can they escape into TCG mounts. That is a very significant economic shift at the top end, these are players with many gold caps and all of the requirements needed to lock down any market they want to (that is not region-wide).
I will say that is more of a player market issue. Since they stopped making money off those sales a long time ago. Blizz maintains those assets.
Getting people to watch twitch for it can lead to more customers, thus more players and more people in need of services for the market for example. The mounts also are only available for a select few days, meaning the value will go down and then back up.
Them making money off stuff like advertisors/new players/good will towards streamers may be more impactful in the eyes of blizzard and there money making potnetial.
It is a weird predicament but it’s more of a player made issue with the scarcity of the item, I don’t think blizzard ever said they wouldn’t add more ways to get old tcg mounts. Them letting players have nice resale value for so long (like a decade or more) was a market blizzard didn’t tap into for a long time though.
Fomo sales have some scum in general. But dealing with virtual goods it all gets muddy.
They certainly do, considering I purchased many TCG mounts in the 100k-300k range and all of them could now sell promptly for anywhere between 6m and gold cap. That means years ago, I locked up excess gold, and when I want to redeem it I can capture the value I locked away.
It didn’t just put a dent in that issue, it solved it completely and gave me some nice profits on top. Without that escape valve, I will have to derive my profits from open markets, which will be good for me, but not for players who wanted to buy non-TCG vanity items.
Yeah I understand all of that. I still do not care for people who want to charge 3000 for a TCG code. Too bad for them, if they wanted to cash in they should have not trusted a digital good.
Same stuff happened with World of Tanks and people cried at Wargaming, people did not care. Happened in many other games.
Company is there to make money, they don’t care about the individual nerd who hold onto a piece of paper back for 15 years.
Anyone who wants a Crawling Claw on my server can now pay triple the price they could have paid any day of the week for the last 6 months. I could find more data points for you, but I can tell you have made up your mind already and think you know more than people who spend all day dealing with WoW’s economy.
I like your angle, but please consider that markets for the majority of players will now have active manipulators participating in them, when previously it would not have been worth the manipulator’s time. The Feldrake is not as cool of a mount as that huge Murloc they are bundling in the 12-month sub, and I don’t think anyone would complain if they switched the mount to that.
Hit you up when Blizzard starts giving away in-game rewards that were gated behind progress for free? And you’re smugly posting like that would be a good thing? Why? Because you don’t like me and it would put an egg on my face?
You are incredibly childish and have not seriously acknowledged my primary argument. I just got back to you with data from right now, I didn’t need to wait 2 months. I won’t be posting in 2 months because I will be too busy running auctions across multiple servers because that is what Blizzard has mandated with their move to handout Feldrakes.
Tcg mounts do absolutely nothing to fight gold inflation. The gold goes to another player.
I hope the person who bought a card for $3000 last week is feeling like “holy crap I’m a frigging idiot, I spent $3000 on a wow mount, I really am stupid aren’t I, gee whiz”. Nothing about this changes that.
I totally agree with your post. It’s not just the feldrake, this is a step that could impact all rare mounts in the future. I don’t feel motivated to work on items that could just be given away whenever they have a promotion. It’s bad business to hurt some of your most long term and dedicated players.
No, nobody did. This is fake context using a real scenario that is not happening right now and hasn’t happened recently and you know it. Clearly you would have access to evidence to support this claim. I’ll be waiting.
Mount does look cool, but I’d rather find a card, then sit there for 4 hours watching some dude play the game… Actually I usually watch Jokerd for that long XD
I am the Contradiction (Oooh, that could be a song)
I’m going to join the discussion by saying first that I really want the mount, like pretty much anyone else, and I was really hyped by the announcement. I’m getting it for sure, no question.
But I feel like people in this thread are not understanding the point Richnasty is trying to make. I don’t think he’s wrong.
There are enormous amounts of gold being transacted daily on every servers and I don’t think the average player is aware how huge it is. I used to be part of a boosting wow gold community that generated approx 5 billions gold (yes, with a b) per month in sales. Everything was documented so I’m not throwing random numbers in the air. Factor in the 3-4 other huge communities (we weren’t even the biggest) that did the same thing and we end up with many many billions of gold moving from average players to gold hoarders every month (mostly community owners). Granted, that number is probably at least halfed or more now that gold making communities are against TOS now.
Still, this huge amount of gold needs to be stored somewhere somehow so many rich players bought TCG items to do it.
Now that Blizzard started to give away those items, their value dropped instantly.
This means that any very wealthy player isn’t going to “invest” or “store” their enormous amount of gold in these anymore and will instead start looking for other in game items like non-tcg mounts/toys/transmogs and will definitely price and manipulate these items to account for inflation.
The end result is that the average player (all of us…) will need to pay more for any item that is selected as being the next safe choice to store their gold for these insanely rich players.
This affects 100% of the auction house users and we all should be concerned by it.