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[Column] General: With WoW Tokens The Community Wins
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
Blizzard is heading back into real money trading with the introduction of the WoW Token for World of Warcraft. The recent announcement that players would be able to trade gold or real money for a token worth 30 days of game time in the shop or auction house. Predictably, the sky began falling to some players, while others saw the new option as logical. World of Warcraft doesn’t deserve alarm bells just because its payment method is getting a little more flexible. This is a very good thing in several regards, even without all of the info just yet.
Read more of Christina Gonzalez's The Social Hub: With WoW Tokens, the Community Wins.
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Comments
Time to grind some quests for gold, perhaps by leveling my priest who's still 90.
Speaking of Wildstar, tried the free 10 days over the weekend. Man... It's just not worth it. Its like a combo of WoW with GW2 combat on crack. I play both WoW and Gw2 daily, so ... idk it's just not as good as either. It feels to much like a game and not enough like a world. Mostly off-topic, but it was on my mind.
Not a fan of trading game time for in-game currency, only EVE has found success with it, everyone else that has tried has had the system exploited massively.
I'm sure Blizzard will do better with it, but it feels wrong to me. Too many years of being told buying gold for real money is bad I guess
Smart move by blizzard to make these soulbound once you purchase them from AH.
Removes all the possibilities of abusing or exploiting.
Welcome to relative morality. 3rd party gold sellers = bad. Players that buy from them = bad lamers.
But when the game itself does it it's the most wonderful thing ever lol.
Fucking crazy ass shit.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
But.. it's bad because they're receiving revenue from an intellectual property which is not their own... what are you arguing?
eh wtf are you talking about? Tera Online, rift, wildstar all used it or still using it and the system works great.
I don't think the token will be all that. They haven't stated exactly what the amount of gold will be to purchase one yet... given past in-game gold item pricing set by Blizzard, it will likely be well above the 100,000 gold mark... so unless you have been squirreling away your gold all these years, odds are, you won't be able to fund your gaming through tokens. As I see it, you will probably need to play around 6 months to earn enough gold to get one free month. They get 6 months of you trying to scrape up enough gold to play for free... that's far better than you not playing for 6 months while you wait for some new content release.
This is just a ploy to get you to play more... it's more like a pyramid scheme... you really aren't going to beat the house.
Sure you can acquire gold in-game legally now... but honestly, do you really have that much stuff that you need to buy? This hoopla will be short lived once everyone realizes it's not really adding anything.
Of course, this could all backfire on them and players could purchase game time tokens and not use them until the next expansion is released... think about it, they typically get about 2 months of play out of players... two tokens and you've cost them 60 days of game time that they normally would have calculated into their earnings during a release.
This is in the Bill of Rights of life, my friend, not just WoW or games...
So that's all that's left? The only thing wrong with buying and selling gold is whether you own the IP or not? Like I said, relative morality.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
Replace the word community with company in the title and you might be on to something. I don't see how using cash to buy game time, to in turn get in-game gold, is anything more than pay 2 win.
You always hear, "I can play for free!" but never, because you are supplying a whale with in game gold who already paid for the game time with real cash.
To chalk this up as some kind of community win? How? What exactly is the community winning here? The option to buy in game gold via game time and to get game time for "FREE" by supplying whales with gold.
I'll tell you why the company wins. All of this game time is paid for.
Same for PLEX, APEX, CREDD and whatever other system does this.
"classification of games into MMOs is not by rational reasoning" - nariusseldon
Love Minecraft. And check out my Youtube channel OhCanadaGamer
Try a MUD today at http://www.mudconnect.com/I wonder if they will actually make gold useful for something besides max flight speed now
Waiting for:
The Repopulation
Albion Online
No, gold is still used for superfluous things... it's why they don't care that you have a lot of gold... you have a lot of gold, because get this, there's really nothing to spend it on. So now they are giving you another thing to spend it on... but typically speaking, those gold hoarders are hoarding gold for the next expansion, not for frivolous purchases in-between... that's why they have so much gold in the first place. So do you really think they will squander it away on game time that they're already paying for anyways?
If anything, this might piss off the gold hoarders... someone could just buy their way into gold hoarding when they had to earn theirs the unscrupulous way... indecent profits.
i expect gold farming nerfs incoming , or just up the price of things
epic flying used to be a gold sink (not anymore ) , heirlooms now i guess....but other than that....
the community wins? far from it, i cant wait until ppl star crying that everything on AH is overpriced .
Well, yes, that has always been what's fundamentally "wrong" with it. I mean, people can assign other opinions like "buying progress" and I understand those points, but the actual problem in the matter is that it's not "their" creation to be reaping revenue. Countries make laws against this and it exists in all kinds of intellectual property from software to music to trademarked names and quotations. Sure, it goes a little overboard, like an artist copyrighting a song lyric on a tshirt, and hey, those issues are up to courts.
The meat of the matter is that if you make something for the purpose of financial gain, if you are the first to make it, you have the right to protect that idea and not have others take your stuff. We could go round and round arguing how right or wrong it is to protect "an idea" in such a way, but generally it's understood it falls into the realm of "theft". Sure, there are plenty of people who don't respect the premise, they illicitly upload/download music, movies, games because they're ill with some notion they're master pirates or some other dumb shit, however they legitimize it, but at the end of the day it comes down to the pure and simple fact it's thievery.
edit: If a game wants to retail its own currency, aside from being short-sighted because it destroys the game economy, they've always been allowed to do so, and players make decisions based on these design choices whether they want to participate. This is an aspect of the p2w conversation. Is "selling time tokens which you can sell for gold" a method of p2w? Maybe, or certainly it's "closer", but before that argument the issue is "who is selling it?", and if it ain't the IP owner, that is wrong.
To be fair most companies do not care all that much about the selling of gold in it self... It is all the dumb shit that goes on around it that they have a problem with... Such as (but not limited to)
- Farming
- Botting
- Scamming
- Exploiting
- Account theft
Especially as most of these negatively affect the community and the server economics. It also bump the amount of CS tickets up by a fair margin.
If gold seller just kept at buying "fair trade gold" nobody would have any issue with it... But that is a fairly naive utopia.
All Blizzard do now is giving people a alternative.
This have been a good conversation
How does farming fit in there? If I'm looking for tradeskill mats and kill every "wicksniggle" which possibly drops "wickets" in a 500 yard radius, that is bad?
edit: I made a new topic so as not to derail this thread. Discuss this here:
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/post/6603911/thread/428676#6603911
You cannot - directly - farm gold and convert it into game time.
Blizzard are not accepting in-game gold.
Tokens will be limited by the number of people who want to "buy gold" (via this method). If no one on your server cluster buys any tokens from Blizzard - for $$$ - you won't even have the opportunity to use your gold to buy time.
(Edit)
/
From Blizzard's perspective - this is a zero sum scheme. If subscriber numbers stay the same Blizzard will make the same amount of money; gold sellers will lose money, some in-game players will save money. No extra money for Blizzard, no loss of money either (subs staying the same etc.)
/
How much gold will a token be worth? Assuming they cost $15 a purchaser is going to expect "about as much gold" as they could get from a gold seller. Now Blizzard might decide to set the amount somewhat higher - to make it less attractive to buy from gold sellers. The GSs could offer more gold but Blizzard will be fine with the price going up as that means GSs will make less money - as long as there are players in the game who can afford to buy a token.
/
This is a bullet designed by Blizzard targeted at gold sellers. If they pull it off then they ultimately win by seeing a reduction in spam, bots, farming etc. - reducing their support costs on the one hand and reducing the irritation caused to players from said farmers etc.
The proposed token system is exactly like PLEX, CREDD, and Chronoscrolls. All of those systems requires another player to purchase the in game item from a cash shop to sell to people in game, who in turn use it for game time. This is no different.
I can fly higher than an aeroplane.
And I have the voice of a thousand hurricanes.
Hurt - Wars
Edited the above - I thought the idea behind e.g. CREDD in WS was that you could - essentially - play forever. Same system then. (Blizzard adopting it for WoW.) Someone has to buy the token first.
I'm curious what the prices will be like. And no speculation will ever be right.
Neverwinter had a stupid-low price on currency when they came out, but then the price sky-rocketed as players left. Wildstar had something similar, with many people buying 12 months of sub very easily.
If WoW players are rich + many are gold-hungry, then a good % of the player base (read mostly "raiders who are rich") will be able to buy a lot of months of gametime.
Boosted level 90 characters
WoW token (gold selling)
Cash Shop
Game services. Race change, Faction change etc
Expansions which are 40 euro +
WoWs model at the moment is a F2P/B2P game. It's a disgrace this game charges per month
Optional - does not affect gameplay
Optional - does not affect gameplay
Optional - does not affect gameplay
Optional - does not affect gameplay
Ok, box price + sub, not exactly criminal
It's a disgrace that people demand expensive to maintain games for free.
I can fly higher than an aeroplane.
And I have the voice of a thousand hurricanes.
Hurt - Wars
Im curious as to how the players who actually dropped the game due to its dumbing down will take this... I for one dont care how they set up the play options... if the game sucks it doesnt matter if they make it free. I wont play it.
I played from the beta of Vanilla and I hate what the game has become since the release of Wrath. Blizzard can take that PoS game and shove it where the sun don't shine.
Played: UO, LotR, WoW, SWG, DDO, AoC, EVE, Warhammer, TF2, EQ2, SWTOR, TSW, CSS, KF, L4D, AoW, WoT
Playing: The Secret World until Citadel of Sorcery goes into Alpha testing.
Tired of: Linear quest games, dailies, and dumbed down games
Anticipating:Citadel of Sorcery