The only logical motivation for this change is that Blizzard have noticed an uptick of old (likely abandoned) accounts getting resubbed for gold and used for botting.
It doesn’t make sense as a financial change because no matter how you slice it, subbing for a Token earns Blizzard more money than subbing for RL cash does.
Um, people are acting like a one time payment of $15 in 7 years is gonna break the bank and put them on the street.
I buy expansions. With balance or money. Even if it was just balance, that does not make me not a customer. They still make money off me. Just its via a chain of people.
If me and people like me are not here to be a part of that chain, people who buy our gold… arent able to buy it as much, and thus blizzard loses money.
I may eventually pay. But I shouldn’t have to. Who knows how often they are going to require this real money for game time thing in the future. Dumb crap like this is never just a one off deal. It’s just a prelude to more to come later.
You only need to do it once per battlenet account, so if you’ve got a bunch of licenses on one bnet account, you’d still only need to pay $15 once.
Oh, I get why they’re doing it. I just don’t think it’s going to necessarily be effective.
I honestly think the only way to get rid of bots and cheaters, is to make it illegal across the world. To where you can actually face prison time and have local authorities arrest you. Where Blizzard can track where the player or who the player is through the cash transactions and get the cops involved. Only then we will actually see bots and cheaters go significantly down. But this will never happen, thus there’s no way to ever fully get rid of them.
If a person logs in and gives engagement, and also buys the token, which in turn is part of the ecosystem where the $5 profit comes in, they sure AF are a customer. I don’t know if all of those thorns are gold.
It’s essentially just an additional sanction against Russia.
If they choose to hurt innocent people, well then theres consequences.
From what I read on another thread, if you use the tokens to buy balance, and then use that balance to buy the 60 days of game time, as a service, not a sub, and then you apply it, it will look like you purchased it because it won’t track where the $30 was sourced once it is balance.
This is what I am thinking too. Those are stolen accounts and they get compromised and added to a bot farm. Easy to do from the login screen if the account has enough gold. Being stolen, they don’t care if it gets banned once they do nefarious things with it.
It also does indeed impact the bot farms that are run by farming and transferring gold, using the gold to fund the subs and expansions for those accounts.
It is going to COST Blizzard money to do this. They get $20 a month from those who sub with tokens vs $15 for those who pay max normal costs with real money. The only reason to give themselves a financial hit like this is to reduce the impact of account theft and botting farms.
I will be interested to see if they do implement a time requirement to how often they do this. Once every 5 years? Once every 2 years? Once a year? I don’t think they will make any decisions on that until the Hacks team analyzes the data results on bot farming/account theft after this change. If it achieves enough of an impact, they may not require it very often.
Someone figured out a way they could make more money with this change. They wouldn’t be doing it if it was going to cut into their profits.
From a straight cost of sub approach, it means Blizzard loses money. They lose $5 USD for every sub purchased with real money instead of using a gold token (paid by someone else for $20).
The cost savings, if there are any, is going to be in the Hacks and Support side. Fewer hacked account recovery and reconstruction tickets for returning players. Maybe some reduction in botting, bot ban waves, and the tickets they generate.
Not sure that really is a “savings” that makes them money. They don’t even know yet if it will work to achieve the results they want.
If they wanted max money? I can tell you how to do that. Allow all the gold token purchases forever, and never crack down on botting. Also no CS support for hacked accounts, appeal tickets, etc. If they just don’t care and don’t spend labor costs to help players, or try to keep the game clean, they will make max cash off it.
For as long as people put up with it… the game would be such trash people would quit and in the end the money grab would fail.
Hence, the current attempt to gate access behind real money payments once in 6 years to reduce unwanted game behaviors, even if it costs Blizz $5 per account that has to do that.
That’s too simplistic. When was the last time you knew Blizzard to make a change that was going to cost them money?
Just because we don’t understand the data and the reasoning that led to this decision doesn’t mean they’re going to lose money because of it.
The suits, and even Devs, do dumb things all the time that cost them players, hence money is lost. I am sure people could list hundreds of things that made different people unsub for a long time, or even leave the game.
In this case, I don’t think it is a money grab and don’t think any cost savings in CS or Hacks is going to really bring them bank. What it will hopefully do is create a better overall game environment that encourages people to stay subbed, return to the game, or even start playing.
Kind of like cleaning up the trash, fixing the buildings, installing good lighting, having user friendly services - increases the number of people who will go to an area IRL. That is where they hope to get money - by cleaning up the trash and hoping players return. It is a risk, so we shall see how that turns out.
I’d like to say that this was not intentional, but often it seems like it was entirely by design. I think they were looking toward a future where, with the game purged of undesirables, it could grow stronger and bigger than ever. Tens of millions of players who left because cata dungeon and healing changes were reverted, because flight was brought back in wod, because of band-aid fixes to doomed systems in BfA and shadowlands would come flocking back and bring all their friends to spam mythic+ dungeons and do raid logging.
I don’t see this change as being beneficial to the players. They make lots of rules that are never enforced. Level 1’s still spam carry ads. The group finder and trade chat still have links to outside websites.
We will see.
…there’s people out there that can actually afford these currently-inflated 300k+ WoW token prices using gold alone? That’s news to me 
Must be bots or “goblin”/whale types, as has already been mentioned earlier, cause I just don’t see regular/everyday players affording these 300k+ WoW tokens on a regular basis
It was great when it was in the 20k to 30k range. There is far too much gold in the game now.
Maybe getting these accounts to pay will see a big drop in price. Not as good for those who buy tokens. I bought one when it hit 370k gold.
True.
I do not think people realize how much gold was pumped into the game during WoD and Legion. During WoD alone I made close to 20m gold by just cycling a bunch of alts through garrison mission tables.
I made some gold during WOD but never so much that I made over 1 million. Not sure if I was doing it wrong or maybe I took a break - I often do play for 6 months then have a year off.
I dont craft so I usually make most of my gold early on from selling herbs, ores and skins. Once the bots arrive its game over for making any money. At the moment I just do the races and other WQ which have cash rewards.
They can’t make burner accounts anymore so easily without restrictions now.
They have to face the music.
I think a lot of non-botters care because quite a few people have been banned for chat violations with months long and/or permanent duration.