Blizzard introduces WoW-token, which looks like PLEX. Now PLEX has it problems, like promoting multibox-farming, but generally it doesn't introduce new ISK to the system. One player gives his in-game earned ISK to another player. For this, the community accepts PLEX as a necessary evil to battle RMT and doesn't consider it P2W cash-grab.
The WoW token offers the same, but even reading their post makes it clear that Blizzard is abusing this consensus to introduce a power cash shop. Unlike PLEX, this WoW-token cannot be traded according to player decisions. The price will be defined by Blizzard. While this can be considered simply not understanding the term "market price", there is no excuse for "You will always receive the gold amount quoted to you at the time you place a Token up for sale, regardless of what the current price is when the item actually sells." So no actual trade happens. You sell your token to Blizzard and a buyer buys one from Blizzard for a different rate.
What will happen is Blizzard set a rate much higher than market price, resulting much more gold buyers than gold sellers. The difference will be gold printed by Blizzard and tokens destroyed by them. To make it perfect, you won't be able to resell your token. So the only thing you can do with your token is selling to Blizzard for a rate set by Blizzard. This means the token is equal to a set amount of gold, so you are simply buying gold for money.
Of course this would cause hyper-inflation that must be handled and Blizzard also needs to provide reason to buy gold: both can be achieved by the Black Market AH which already sells top (or even above-top) level gear for ridiculous amount of gold. After the tokens, these prices won't be ridiculous, they'll be around $20-50 equivalent. So the bottom line is that you'll be able to buy the best available gear for real money, without any playing involved (you can already create gold by buying high level alts and run garrison, but you must play with the alts).
With this change WoW will sink to the level of Clash of Clans: a P2W cash-grab. Uninstall!
PS: the idea behind AFK ratting is that your ship is expendable. Using a faction fit faction ship for that is irresponsible.
I hate to feature Mordus Angels among morons, but this one can't be skipped. Dude! If you have no clue about spaceships, just donate your ISK to the SRP fund instead of feeding the Goons hilarious kills.
Finally, I can't verify this mail, it can be a troll. But it's pretty hilarious:
The WoW token offers the same, but even reading their post makes it clear that Blizzard is abusing this consensus to introduce a power cash shop. Unlike PLEX, this WoW-token cannot be traded according to player decisions. The price will be defined by Blizzard. While this can be considered simply not understanding the term "market price", there is no excuse for "You will always receive the gold amount quoted to you at the time you place a Token up for sale, regardless of what the current price is when the item actually sells." So no actual trade happens. You sell your token to Blizzard and a buyer buys one from Blizzard for a different rate.
What will happen is Blizzard set a rate much higher than market price, resulting much more gold buyers than gold sellers. The difference will be gold printed by Blizzard and tokens destroyed by them. To make it perfect, you won't be able to resell your token. So the only thing you can do with your token is selling to Blizzard for a rate set by Blizzard. This means the token is equal to a set amount of gold, so you are simply buying gold for money.
Of course this would cause hyper-inflation that must be handled and Blizzard also needs to provide reason to buy gold: both can be achieved by the Black Market AH which already sells top (or even above-top) level gear for ridiculous amount of gold. After the tokens, these prices won't be ridiculous, they'll be around $20-50 equivalent. So the bottom line is that you'll be able to buy the best available gear for real money, without any playing involved (you can already create gold by buying high level alts and run garrison, but you must play with the alts).
With this change WoW will sink to the level of Clash of Clans: a P2W cash-grab. Uninstall!
PS: the idea behind AFK ratting is that your ship is expendable. Using a faction fit faction ship for that is irresponsible.
I hate to feature Mordus Angels among morons, but this one can't be skipped. Dude! If you have no clue about spaceships, just donate your ISK to the SRP fund instead of feeding the Goons hilarious kills.
Finally, I can't verify this mail, it can be a troll. But it's pretty hilarious:
27 comments:
Sorry, but no. Not only was getting gold for money always a possibility (Mount Trading), but gear for gold in WoW is severely limited. Best case scenario, you will get enough to skip some steps along the way, maybe enough to get you into a BRF Heroic Pug.
Your example, the Black Market AH, sells one random piece per day, for the whole server. Not only you need to camp the final minutes of the auction for a shot, there is no guarantee you will even be able to buy an item you can buy. Even being gold capped is no guarantee of getting fully equipped.
Finally, all raiding from the Mythic level upwards can't be beaten by gear alone, needing at least a highly competent core of players. The only way you could ever hope to "Pay to Win" in WoW, in fact, is the way you used to "win" Ulduar back during WotLK.
No more P2W than EVE, at least not where it matters.
In the same announcement, Blizzard stated that they're going to revisit the BMAH and BoE raid drops in light of the WoW-token change, probably to address the perception in any case.
Is part of the problem that Blizzard is facing is that the auction house does not have buy orders? So they need to have a mechanism so that people don't get perpetually undercut by 1 cp.
And yes, hyper-inflation was one of my fears when I saw that Blizzard was going to create gold out of thin air. Hopefully, they learned something from Diablo 3.
@Noizy: they can battle inflation by offering more gear for sale.
@Another byte: mount trading was severly limited, as most people with gold didn't buy one. On the other hand the magical AH will always buy your token.
The most important is that you can buy the "highly competent core of players". Paid runs were already a thing, but only for AH wizzards. Now every kiddie with dad's credit card can get goldcapped and buy a paid run.
in breaking news from the wow forums it seems Blizzard has begun nerfing gold faucets. questing in wrath and cata zones are reportedly dropping no gold and loot from old raids vendor prices are a fraction of what they were yesterday. with the huge gold sinks of garrisons and heirlooms for gold recently added Blizz is going all in on this.
I'm expecting threadnaughts. I've got a couple of million banked so I'm looking forward to 20k per month subs.
You, once again, fail to appreciate the difference between actual win and stuff that somewhat facilitates winning, but is nowhere near an actual win on its own.
Gold does not equal win in WoW. It facilitates wins somewhat, but only somewhat. Selling gold is not the same as selling #1 World Top spot.
No matter how much gold you have, you'll never be in any way relevant in PvE or PvP ranking from just that gold. Buying carries is irrelevant because carries happen long after the actual race is over.
I understand that Blizzard's token system is still going to respond to supply-demand pressures. The quoted price is not going to appear just out of thin air.
Granted, it will be easy for Blizzard to adjust by buying out tokens and introducing new ones, but i really don't see much of a problem with that.
P.S: Clash of Clans is one of the few games that managed to do f2p right and show off the actual potential of business model for both creator and customer. Saying "sunk to the level of Clash of Clans" implies that CoC is a bad game with a bad business model. Both are patently false.
Phoenix is actually a nice solo fit that killed 4 typhoons before having 2 dreads dropped on it and has been used very successfully in the past. I know that's not impressive to Gevlon, but not everyone uses ISK as their only metric.
I don't really understand why you believe that the A-side and B-side prices of the token won't be linked.
I think there will just be a smoothing function applied, like the A-side price is the average of the B-side prices over the last week. Thus the A-side price is still be market-based, just lagging the B-side price slightly. If this is the case, the negative effects you predict will be slight at best.
I suppose it's possible that Blizzard will manually set the A-side and B-side prices to some values they consider appropriate, and are not linked. But price controls produce shortages, so I find it hard to believe Blizzard would do something so stupid.
For one, unlimited gold does not allow a player to win in WoW. It allows certain shortcuts to be taken but lots of skill and dedication (grinding) are still required. When you were playing WoW full time you were making lots of gold. You had effectively unlimited gold but it wasn't getting you any world firsts or even server firsts.
For two, even if paying for lots of gold made the game ridiculously easy, so what? Someone else buying lots of gear and paying to be carried through Mythic raids has absolutely no effect on me as a player. Even if everyone started paying to be boosted it does not affect my challenges in the game.
@Maxim: I told multiple times that "pay to win" is a term for "pay for power". It's like telling someone "you're a pig" means he is dirty and not that he is actually a farm animal.
@Comrade Blade: yes, I know that there are players not using ISK as their metric. They are called "morons".
@Rohan: "shortages" is exactly what Blizzard wants. They set the price so high that there will be 10 people who want to sell a token for gold and 1 who want to sell gold for a token. 1 out of 10 will trade with the one buyer. The other 9 will not be able to sell their tokens to other players. But Blizzard will gladly buy their token for gold created from air. This way they get their token back and practically sold gold for $.
@Jim L: if everyone else buys gear easily, they will be recruited into the "serious" guilds and not you.
Good luck getting into a TH9 clan in CoC without paying!
This really shows your inexperience with top guilds. They will routinely recruit good, undergeared players. If you raided at a high level in Cataclysm, and now decide to come back, then you can probably get into a top guild if you have reasonable gear. Maybe not during progression, but for farm raids they will often gear up new potential raiders.
Sure, if you have absolutely no history and are trying to get to the top, you'll likely have to work a bit more, but no top guild will take in someone with the best gear unless they can also show they are good players.
Playing at the top level (server/world first) is so different from most guilds that it's hard to imagine unless you've been there. No gear in the world can prepare you for that, and your guild mates will instantly see through you if you've only bought your gear. These players are so far ahead of the average player, you simply won't be able to trick your way in, not with millions of gold.
Sure, you can buy yourself into a farm raid and get the achievements and gear, but is that really winning?
There is no bounty on bombers bar people from condi - it's just someone wishing there were so they could feel relevant.
You can absolutely play CoC without paying. And since wars are fought against people with more or less ame th lvls as your own clan, you wont be stomped on by people who have paid to get ahead of where you are.
Im not saying Coc is perfect, and i still dislike cashshop gaming, but reaching th9 or even fully fleshing out a th9 base is by no means impossible for free, it just takes a while longer...
What? You don't sell your token to blizzard, you sell it to other players. Totally the same as plex except that the token is not tradeable after purchase. Price will be set by the market, with I guess some low and high caps imposed by Blizzard. They obviously want it to be higher gold/USD than farmers can produce to kill them off and save a lot on support costs.
PLEX style exchange systems are proven to be profitable. Why would Blizzard attempt to screw with that?
Price manipulation and injecting gold into the economy would have two major giveaways that Blizzard are up to no good. The first being the sudden boost of inflation that comes about, shortly after the release of the token system. The second being the fact that legitimate players should not be able to offer gold prices that compete with, let alone exceed what illegal gold sellers can offer (region-wide, the minority of gold-capped players buying tokens will not push the market value so high). Those artificial prices you say Blizzard will post will mean their little shennanigens will be exposed very quickly. I don't think that a billion dollar business like Blizzard would stake the highly valuable reputation of their company on such a scheme.
Maxim, I think it's generally agreed that "Pay2Win" is shorthand for "pay to get a competitive advantage". Nobody seriously imagines a big "I.W.I.N" button appearing on their screen when we talk about P2W.
As for the main thrust of Gevlon's argument, I have to agree that this is the last straw, if it is implemented as described. This cuts to the heart of the living, breathing world that is Azeroth. What is the incentive now to go into that world? Farming? Give it up and go and work at McDonalds, who pay better. Once Blizzard put a dollar amount on the time I spend collecting herbs, it becomes obvious that I should just buy them off the AH, with gold bought with real money. Actually skip buying herbs, I might as well just buy the flasks directly, because making flasks also pays less than McDonalds. Pretty soon, I'm only turning up for raid nights.
My plan is to cancel my subscription when this finally happens, spend my gold on tokens, and when it's all spent, I'm off.
"When you put a WoW Token up for sale, you’ll be quoted the amount of gold you’ll receive once someone buys it—you’re guaranteed to get that amount no matter how the market moves."
Heh! So... they have unintentionally created a reverse Ponzi Scheme.
Let's say... 100 tokens a month are bought. But oh crap... they just aren't selling for gold. The first few sell... but the last 50 are just sitting there. They promised the sell price at the time the "auction" was started... but won't pay until it actually sells.
Blizzard then has no choice but to BUY THE AUCTIONS THEMSELVES and print gold to fulfill their promised purchase price when people complain that their "auctions" aren't selling.
This is a bad plan.
@Anon 05:37
"Blizzard then has no choice but to BUY THE AUCTIONS THEMSELVES and print gold to fulfill their promised purchase price when people complain that their "auctions" aren't selling."
No, they do what any regular seller does with a glut of stuck: lower the gold price. That will simultaneously make the tokens more attractive for those with gold and less attractive for this with real money wanting to buy gold. Economics 101.
They can't drop the price as they promised to give you the money you listed it on, regardless of market changes.
Aye, they fulfill their promises to token sellers, but the advertised price will fall. This will cause an inflationary effect.
However, Blizzard's token system will have a stabilizing effect on the overall economy in each region. Over time, particularly as new expansions come with new, bigger gold seeds, the token system will act to stabilize the rate of inflation.
Interestingly enough, it'll effectively cause inflation on low population servers while stemming it or even causing deflation on high population servers.
@Gevlon
Your opinion on this topic is exceedingly binary.
"pay-to-win" is not a binary concept. Great many games have truly benefited from offering a small amount of game power up for microstransactions.
@Dacheng
Someone still needs to farm the herbs, though.
Those tokens are not actually creating anything in the economy. They are not even creating extra gold in the economy.
Hiasa Kite says:
"No, they do what any regular seller does with a glut of stuck: lower the gold price. That will simultaneously make the tokens more attractive for those with gold and less attractive for this with real money wanting to buy gold. Economics 101."
First. Let's clarify some terms. There are actually 2 different tokens, the conversion is supposedly done during the fake "auction". There is the gold token, which you buy from Blizzard for dollars and sell back for gold. Then there is the "game time token" that you buy from the "auction" and is soulbound and can be used only for extending game time.
Except it's not an "auction", it's a brokered sale with a guaranteed sale price.
The price can't "correct" by going down until it sells because it's a "buyout only" auction (Let's just call that a brokered sale.)
If the brokered sale sells immediately, there is greater demand than supply and the illusion that it's an "auction" holds. If supply outstrips demand, the gold token seller quickly realizes that since blizzard GUARANTEED THE SALE PRICE, they should just buy the gold token themselves instead of making them wait to get what was promised them as a guaranteed sale.
At the same time, it becomes clear that they could have just offered the game time tokens for sale without linking them to gold token purchases.
I think PLEX is dodgy as well, what with the 3rd party resellers and "volume pricing", but at least with PLEX there is only one kind.
Confirming that's a troll, Gevlon. We're not offering bounties on bb pilots/fcs.
@Anon 15:14
"Blizzard then has no choice but to BUY THE AUCTIONS THEMSELVES and print gold to fulfill their promised purchase price when people complain that their "auctions" aren't selling."
"If supply outstrips demand, the gold token seller quickly realizes that since blizzard GUARANTEED THE SALE PRICE, they should just buy the gold token themselves instead of making them wait to get what was promised them as a guaranteed sale."
I'm confused. Is it Blizzard or the token seller buying out those slow moving auctions?
If the former, I've already laid out in an earlier response how that would be a detrimental action for WoW and Blizzard. If the latter, they're just being stupid, as they're effectively purchasing game time at a higher price, with a small gain in gold that doesn't justify the increased cost.
I'm confused. Is it Blizzard or the token seller buying out those slow moving auctions?
Obviously Blizzard. Huh, I thought should be clearer there... but I thought, "Naw, why would any one think I mean the gold token seller, who obviously wants gold? It has to be Blizzard buying the token."
Of course it would be bad, which is why they would have to buy the token themselves (Essentially remove the auction and pay the guy directly. I.E. print gold.)
That's why this is stupid. They're opening themselves for a demand side failure forcing them to inject gold into the economy.
It's also possible that they never intended for the "auctions" to ever work. All in all, it's a bad plan.
"Obviously Blizzard. Huh, I thought should be clearer there... but I thought, "Naw, why would any one think I mean the gold token seller, who obviously wants gold? It has to be Blizzard buying the token.""
Liberal use of pronouns lead to a statement with ambiguous meaning which couldn't be resolved through context owing to either scenario being equally ludicrous. ie Be it Blizzard or a token seller to buy their own auctions is ultimately self destructive.
"Of course it would be bad, which is why they would have to buy the token themselves (Essentially remove the auction and pay the guy directly. I.E. print gold.)"
No, they wouldn't. The customer in that scenario would simply have to wait. Do note, that the unacceptable wait would be an uncharacteristicly long delay in the resolotion of the gold buyer's auction. How long would such a wait be in your scenario? 24 hours? 48? Bearing in mind that this person's auction is just one in a massive pool that spans the entire region and will likely consist of thousands of auctions in your given scenario. This would be indicative of a major deflationary event for the WoW gold economy, the kind of which has never been seen.
So while there's potential for long waits for gold buying customers, the scenario where Blizzard would be even remotely tempted to sell gold directly is rare to the point of no precedent.
"It's also possible that they never intended for the "auctions" to ever work. All in all, it's a bad plan."
I've already debunked this at 06 March, 2015 12:02. Not only is this massively self destructive for Blizzard, they have no hope of getting away with such deceit.
After listening to the LFG "documentary" I'm personally not optimistic as to their chances of getting the details right:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyPzTywUBsQ&feature=youtu.be&t=52m35s
As far as I've heard, they still don't have in-house economists.
Post a Comment