Whenever people with dubious (non-existent) economic expertise chime in with their “tokens-dont-cause-inflation” spiel, they always seem to neglect the fact that player 1 might not have the motivation to farm 100 gold if he couldn’t pay his sub with that gold. Player one has the choice of any number of activities to do when he logs in to WoW; battlegrounds, world pvp, crafting, running dungeons, rolling an alt, dueling in front of Org, etc. Because player 1 can pay his sub with gold, player 1 (and thousands of players like him) may decide to spend his daily playtime farming the most efficient gold spots. This likely involves killing stuff, collecting the gold dops, and vendoring some of the drops, which creates even more gold that didn’t exist before. If that player (and the thousands of players like him) didn’t have this particular motivation to farm gold, they might have partaken in another activity that generates far less gold per hour, or even costs gold per hour.
So yes, player 1’s gold does get transferred to player 2, but player 1’s gold may have never been created in the first place if the token didn’t exist. Without the token, player 1 might only choose to engage in enough gold-producing activities to pay his repair bills and purchase some raiding consumables. With the token in the game, he takes the hour a day that he usually spends dueling and instead spends it creating gold, as do thousands of players like him.
There’s an argument to be made that the addition of the token increases the demand for gold. Sans token, you’re stuck buying gold from a shady 3rd party site, which involves going to a website that likely has malicious programs, such as keyloggers. Then you need to give this shady site your credit card info, or some other form of payment. In addition, if the site fails to deliver the gold, your recourse options are limited. You could try and do a charge back, but those can be risky. The shadyness and risk involved in buying gold from grey-market 3rd party sites likely dissuades a number of people from using those services.
With the token, Blizzard has provided a safe and officially sanctioned method of buying gold, so players who had been scared of sketchy gold sellers can now purchase gold in a legitimate manner. This likely increases the number of people who are willing to purchase gold, which increases the demand for gold. What happens when demand for something goes up? Supply increases to meet demand. What happens when there’s an unhealthy increase in the money supply? Inflation.
Furthermore, retail servers have the black market auction house, which (in theory) could be used to pull excess money off of servers where the money supply is too high. As far as I know, the devs can choose to list very desirable items at high starting bids on the BMAH. This might pull gold out of the economy, or it might just increase the demand for gold and make the situation worse. Point is, it’s another knob the devs can turn to impact the economy, which may or may not serve as a check on inflation. Without being privy to Blizzard’s data, I can’t really say what impact the BMAH has, and neither can you.
So yeah, economies are just a little bit more complicated than “player 1 gives gold to player 2.” The token may very well increase the demand for gold, because it’s safe and convenient, and a number of players who avoided sketchy gold sellers are likely to have no problem buying gold via the token system. If this system does in fact increase the demand for gold, then it’s almost inarguable that it also increases the production of gold, and thereby increases the money supply, which is one of the contributing factors to inflation. Supply always, always, always rises to meet demand.
Keep the token out of Classic, please.
![:slight_smile:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/slight_smile.png?v=6" ":slight_smile:")