Wow game time tokens.. thoughts?Follow

Very very awesome.

I've generally enjoyed this concept in other games. Doing something like farming materials, selling, and then purchasing game time or freemium unlocks, etc. It's been pretty enjoyable as a whole, and it gives me something to do on the economic side of things other than buying random mounts or pets with my earnings. Depending on what that conversion rate ends up being, no doubt this could sucker me and the Mrs. back into the game for a while.

"Like, omigawd, Blizz is selling gold now! Blizz is now RMT! They support the goldsellers!"

Sounds pretty stupid, right? Sad part of it is, I've actually heard people say these sorts of things and it just makes me facepalm.

That was always a big part of why I loved reading those EVE stories so much.

This is going to drive the AH prices through the roof. WoW does not have the economy to support this kind of feature. Those 10k gold blues in the AH? Their prices just doubled. Good luck getting one, Average Joe. Oh, wait, I can just transfer some real money and buy it that way.

How is this not P2W again? What happened to "only cosmetic stuff" from two years ago?

Edited, Mar 3rd 2015 9:44pm by Mazra

Those blues aren't all that important to your progression, TBH.

It isn't "P2W" because there's very little IN the game you actually MUST spend gold to get. I've spent, maybe a grand total of 5k gold on the AH since WoD release back in November. I've made 5x that easy on just Follower Missions, Quest Rewards, Salvage Crates, etc.

Gold isn't what it used to be; you use more gold on NPC transactions than you do anything else these days, WoD throws gold at you left-and-right. If anything, this will cause deflation or at least slow the inflation down as money is removed from the market via these gametime tokens. I think it'll balance out; as gold is removed from the economy, the prices have to come down or at least go up slower. People are getting more and more money. If I can get 25k in three months by doing basically nothing but follower missions, what do you think a player who is actually TRYING to make Gold can do? I hear talk of people doing 25k in a week with this kinda stuff, using alts and follower missions, salvage crates, anything they can to make money. The amount of gold being generated these days is absolutely ridiculous.

The gametime tokens are an awesome idea; it is a 100% gold sink and it encourages more players to play WoW (esp those people who have lots of gold on hand but don't feel like spending real money to maintain their subscription; they'll pay someone who has extra money to burn RL but not time to go farming a lot).

EDIT: Would also like to point out, that Crafted pieces have a Limit of 3, and there's only what, 1-2 slots per each geartype of Purple BoEs that are randomly dropped out of Salvage Crates? Even if you had all the gold in the world, you still can't "P2W" because 3-5 items on your character isn't going to get you into Mythic Raiding off the bat. It won't even get you into most NORMAL PUG raids (the I-level they ask for is way higher than what you can get with BoEs).

Edited, Mar 3rd 2015 7:32pm by Lyrailis

I'd hope they'd at least do away with BoE Epics from the current raid tier going forward.

Last I checked, gear progression guides listed 3 x BOE items on your way to raiding.

I'm currently stuck in a vacuum between normal 5-mans and heroic 5-mans because I can't afford to buy BOE gear. I managed to burn to level 100 by doing dungeons, because "kill x <NPC> and gather y amount of <item>" quests got boring nine years ago, but you can't reach ilevel 600 through dungeon running alone -- the final dungeon only rewards armor, not accessories or weapons. You need to either do Nagrand quests until you get some ilevel 600 gear, or grind follower quests ad nauseam, neither of which I have any interest in doing.

As for applying RMT to a starving market... that won't make prices go down. Sure, some people will dump gold on the tokens, but others will create gold by buying the tokens with real money and selling them. This isn't a balanced economy. There is an unlimited amount of tokens available, because pixels, while only a limited amount of gold at any given time, due to gold requiring time to acquire. What's a token going to cost? 15 bucks? I could buy ten of those tokens without blinking. They'll sell for, what, 20k gold each? So that's 200,000 gold in an instant. Do you think I'll sit on those 200,000 gold for weeks until prices go down? Of course not, I'll buy overpriced **** with it, because gold suddenly has no value at all to me. 150 bucks is nothing. 200,000 gold is more than I'd ever be able to scrounge together in this expansion. Do the math.

Edited, Mar 5th 2015 12:27am by Mazra

While true, lazy people will have access to a larger portion of the gold, so they'll likely pay a premium for certain items. I doubt you'll see an across the grid increase in prices, but some items will more than likely trend upwards. I doubt the trend will be too huge, since many of the people that go this route will be former goldbuyers(who were likely doing the same thing anyway), but I'd be surprised if it wasn't noticeable.

It reminds me of a game I played before ever getting into WoW. There was a cash shop that sold things you could sell for in-game gold. People who sold that stuff would then spend that gold on silly, silly things. I used to go buy fireworks from a vendor and set up my own market stall selling them, jacking up the price 10,000%. Usually, I set up my stall right next to the fireworks vendor. I always sold out, because rather than take a few minutes to look around and learn the game, people would instead prefer to use RL money to skip that kind of effort.

From the comments I'm reading, the "lazy people" along with various griefers and other lovely folks are already hooked up with existing RMT. People already buy game cards and various achievements using RL money. It has been possible to make a killing in gold from the CCG for years (money>card>gold), although that supply surely must be starting to wind down by now.

All told, I don't see much changing, except a certain degree of convenience for those of us who have steered clear of the dodgier activities.

Maz, perhaps you should actually *read* how this is going to work before commenting further? Your speculations are already addressed. For example, go look it up, can you really buy ten of those tokens? Nope, you can't. Does it create gold? Nope, it creates tokens ... which are then purchased with gold that is already in the game, sitting in some toon's bank -- as several others have noted.

As for how you choose to play, you've played long enough to know the drill ... grind it, get carried if you're lucky, buy it for a premium, or PVP it. How long has that been the model, particularly near the start of an expansion? The only difference is that you don't have to grind to exalted with faction X's dailies, so that you can open faction Y, to get the gear that you have to have (until next raid releases and it will become something completely skipped over), and instead you have the minimally painful choice of clicking some missions as you level up to have 600-645 gear already banked before you even ding 100. Particularly with addons, it is pretty low hassle compared to things we've done in earlier versions.

It'd take you all of a couple hours to do some questing in Nagrand, if even that.

Choosing not to do a major facet of PvE and then talking about how you can't progress in PvE because you purposefully skipped content is not a game design problem.

What about Follower Missions? You do realize that you can get a 615-645 weapon/OH + Shoulders/Body/Trinket/Bracers/Boots out of Follower Missions, right? Of course you'd have to do some... *gasp* questing to unlock followers, but the rewards are ridiculously awesome if you did. Just an hour a day and you'd eventually make it through the main questline in each zone and probably get your 20 followers that way. Or, you know, just build an Inn and recruit 1 follower a week though that'd take months to build a full group of 20.

The 615s only require Lv100 followers which takes... what, a week of doing the missions twice daily? It takes maybe 5 minutes to log on, collect missions, then send followers out on new missions and you only need to do that morning&evening. Make sure you get the Master Plan Addon which makes it easier, though (hopefully sometime Blizz will update their official UI to make it less painful).

My Blacksmith hasn't touched Nagrand whatsoever beyond the first few intro quests (she doesn't even have the outpost building yet) and she's 633 just from Follower Mission items. She's not wearing a single BoE. She is wearing a total of 2 items that didn't come from follower missions: The Legendary Ring (first step, only requires clearing 1 dungeon) and a ring you find just laying around in Nagrand (no quests required to get it). Everything else she's wearing is all Follower Missions and Salvage Crates gotten from Follower Missions.

Also, don't forget that you can buy 630s with Apexis Shards, with the Missives you can buy for 200 garrison resources each. It takes about an hour to get enough Apexis Crystals to buy 1 piece of 630. Who needs crafting BoEs when you can spend one hour to buy comparable gear from the Apexis Trader? Heck, who needs RNG Heroics at that point, 'cept for weapon and jewelry?

EDIT: The Salvage Yard can also give you 610 items in the Weapon, Off-hand, Legs, Helmet, Belt, and Cape.

Edited, Mar 5th 2015 7:40am by Lyrailis

Didn't they recently "fix" Ashran for that very reason, to "encourage" more PvP to happen there? Or is it STILL broken? lol. I do know they removed the conquest points from killing the commander IIRC, and lots of people were complaining about that. Not sure about the rest, never went there myself.

Edited, Mar 5th 2015 12:29pm by Lyrailis

Haven't played WoW in a really long time, but I might come back now given this and other recent changes. I was able to log in as my sub-level 20 characters and snoop around to see what all has changed. I checked the price of WoW tokens on the auction house and they're at about 21k gold each at the moment.

So right now I'm thinking of a way I can buy such a token with my level 20 priest-- although I'm pretty sure there is a hard cap on how much money I can carry on a "free" status account that comes nowhere close to 21k gold. If I could just log in my main I could probably make that pretty easily in a relatively small amount of time.

Right now you're all thinking "Why not just buy game time and get the ball rolling?" Well I'll tell you. I'm poor and $15 buys a lot of ramen.