Token Prices

Community General Discussion
21

Yeah it’s like how bond prices go up as interest rates go down. :wink:

22

Well, anyone who wants to buy gold of course wants as much gold as possible for their $20 dollars, which might also deter some people from buying them for gold.

However… MANY people want to buy game time no matter how much gold it costs them because that’s game time that doesn’t come out of their wallet. Unless WoW truly “dies” there will always be people who buy game time with tokens, and probably a lot more of them than the people purchasing gold.

23

Token prices were high at the end of Legion because people were using gold for Battle.net Balance and buying BFA with them. Now they have bought everything from the shop so there is no demand and the price is low.

I used tokens for Battle.net Balance to buy just about every game Blizzard has and most of the WOW Cash Shop. As well as the Blizzcon stream. Was going to buy Destiny2 but they gave it to me for free with Blizzcon.

2 Likes
24

Things like long boi and frog mounts are Gold sinks ‘‘usually’’ for those that already have an excess of Gold. They don’t need to buy tokens.

1 Like
25

Wait, so, people who get the game time tokens, do those tokens also fluctuate with the worth whatever the current amount of gold is? Or are the worth an exact amount always? Like were those 250k for game time when I bought all this gold?

26

Whatever you get upon purchase is what the person paid in gold for it as far as I know.

27

It does but it depends on the quantity of the purchases.
When you sell tokens, it’s with the set price you accepted to sell it at. It doesn’t go with the fluctuations.

28

Not quite sure how no one has pointed out the obvious.
Significantly less players are playing the game.

More people are trying to “buy” gold since gold is hard to come by in BfA.

Token market gets flooded with product.
Token price goes down because there’s more sellers than buyers.

29

I think that’s the opposite of how they say it works.

30

They have been trending downwards slowly but surely. Less people around to buy them which means the price goes down. The rate of the drop seems to have slowed down but they were around 120k a few months ago and now they’re around 110k.

Not only that but Blizzard has put a lot of gold sinks into the game. Less gold in circulation means prices deflate, including the tokens. People have less gold to spend and therefore don’t buy the tokens in-game until the price drops to where they can afford it.

31

I thought that was a given at this point :sweat_smile:

32

The gold prices on here are based on a supply and demand kind of thing. If there are not many people out there buying or selling them , then the price goes down, but with BFA, I kind of haven’t had any trouble with gold, so I don’t have much of a reason for buying a WoW Token for gold anymore. I am sure if they made craftable items a bit more optimized better than standard raiding gear, then maybe people with those professions may ask for more gold and those people wanting those items my go out and get a WoW Token to obtain more gold to get that item. I mean now these days, alts are easy to level so people can just make alts and then craft those items.

33

I wish that they wanted my money, because their system seems to encourage me not to actually buy the gold. It’s so strange to me.

34

Because the Token is the product. Not gold. It’s a weird way to explain it, but in my head a simple supply demand logic applied works.

35

I haven’t seen anyone say it or I might’ve skimmed the thread too fast :worried:

36

This really.

My first gold buys were at 220k when I started. New to game, hated being poor. I fixed that.

Months later yeah, I am settled in. Could I use more gold…not really but if tokens at 220+K…i’d buy some. Not at 100K levels though. Not even cost effective for stuff I’d buy.

BoP run rampant these days. What I want people could not sell me even if they wanted to.

And what some are charging for BoE drops, even I with a mog hunt desire say I can find this myself. 40K gold? nope. Make it 10 maybe we will talk. Till then I will just spam runs to find this. The latter pays me okayish.

And with BFA not liked by all (in that crew) I personally have no issues finding these mogs. Its not like I have driving content in BFA. A week of say WoD dungeon farming does not have me going oh no…I am missing so much in bfa.

37

And no worries. :smile:

1 Like
38

There are two types of players when it comes to tokens, and how many there are of each relative to each other determines the AH gold price of a token:

  1. Those with lots of time to farm, grind, and make gold in game. These are the “goblins” and because they have so much gold, they can readily spend it to buy a token for gold off the AH and use that token for either game time or battle.net balance, and with that balance, buy store mounts, pets, or other Blizzard games and stuff for those games.

  2. Those without lots of time to get gold in game, but they have some extra real world money to spend, so they go to the Blizz store, plunk down a $20 bill, and buy a token that they list on the AH to get gold. When it sells, they get their 100k or a bit more to spend in game, whether it’s to fund their raiding, get pets and mounts off the AH, or whatever.

The token price in gold on the AH fluctuates with the supply (provided by player type 2 above) and demand (player type 1 above).

Bizzard uses an algorithm to determine whether, at a given moment in time, supply exceeds demand (resulting in a price drop) or demand exceeds supply (resulting in a price increase). Blizzard updates the token gold price every few minutes, but caps the rate of change at +/- 3%/hour. You can see the prices and % change at wowtoken.info for each region since the tokens were introduced.

Short term fluctuations happen, such as when a new use for battle.net balance is announced or later when it becomes available, as the goblins spend their excess gold to boost their battle.net balance to spend it on the new thing that was announced or made availale. These announcements/releases lead to a short term but sharp rise in the gold price of a token, until it settles back down over a few days, usually at a little higher place than it was before since there is yet one more thing battle.net balance can be spent on.

Long term fluctuations can happen, as in BfA where gold is harder to come by and requires significantly more work to obtain. As a result, some people who used to make enough to buy tokens off the AH for sub time no longer can do so, so they either buy sub time with real money or stop playing, but the result is a lower demand for tokens on the AH, hence a price drop. And for those that still make gold in BfA, but now make less, they are less inclined to spend it to buy a token for battle.net balance stuff, so that drives down demand long term.

Whether declining player population drives the gold price up or down is a harder question, because it depends on the balance between the two player types described above: are there fewer goblins at lower player population relative to those that buy tokens to get gold or vice versa? Generally, when a new patch drops or a raid opens, token prices for gold on the AH tend to drop a little bit, presumably because more people are buying tokens for real $$ to sell them to get gold to play the game to play the new content, try out the new raid, etc.

/moo :cow:

2 Likes
39

Yeah, this is what I am saying. It seems like if you want people to buy gold for $20, then make the gold worth my money like it was when I bought it last time. I am finding this system as backwards as you do because it seems to encourage people to not spend the real world money. Which is weird to me as wow costs about $15 and a toekn costs $20, so every token they sell me for $20 nets them an extra $5. Just really weird.

40

It’s not a purely company driven system to directly encourage sales. It’s meant to act as a ‘‘player-driven’’ economy that is for the most part affected by said player.

New product releases, and things along those lines that interest players CAN sway peoples’ minds and influences the price by a massive buy of tokens but ultimately you are left to keeping an eye on the price and see if it goes up back to a worthwhile price point.

Nothing else you can do :stuck_out_tongue:

1 Like