World of Warcraft will soon introduce a whole new economy, allowing players both to spend in-game gold on real-life game time and to exchange real-life money for tokens that can be sold for in-game gold.
The system is simple, and best summed up in this graphic (via battle.net):
The new system will launch “in an upcoming patch,” Blizzard says, and though they haven’t announced specific pricing details yet, they do have a big Q&A (that you can read here) addressing many potential questions. Each token can only be sold once; gold values will fluctuate based on supply and demand; and they’re hoping this system will “lead to fewer account compromises and a better game experience overall.”
This isn’t a particularly unusual move for World of Warcraft, as other MMORPGS (like EVE Online) have already taken steps like this to regulate their gold economies and help crack down on grey-market gold sellers. And although this new system will inevitably lead to speculation about the future of Blizzard’s big cash cow, it’s worth keeping in mind that WoW still dwarfs every other subscription-based multiplayer game on the market.
Comments
13 responses to “World Of Warcraft Will Start Selling Subscription Time For Gold”
Don’t mind this, gold can be had pretty easily these days anyway and it’s a better solution than going free to play proper.
Agreed.
Haven’t played this in years but it would be interesting to see how this effects auction house prices.
Anything that removes gold from circulation is positive. The AH cut is 15% from memory, so there’s potential for a lot of gold to be removed through sales of these items.
I’m a fan, wild star had goals for a similar system. It means that people who play a lot can play for free to some extent and people who don’t have the time to play a lot and build up gold are less likely to resort to gold farmers.
It was only a matter of time. WoW has been slowly peeling back all those rules we thought were set in stone since vanilla, like the ban on transferring toons from PvE to PvP realms. Maybe Kotick realised that the mass exodus of care bears at $30 a pop was a good way to afford that new yacht. Now you can effectively buy gold, one of the oldest no nos in the book.
The reason buying gold was a no-no, was because it was bought off gold-farmers. This did two things; it had people making profit off of Blizzards game, and it also artificially inflates the in-game economy with the influx of artificial funds.
The latter may sound odd, but it is a huge problem for maintaining game balance. [CCP employ a full-time economist/financial analyst to keep the game economy in check].
What CCP did by introducing PLEX – and now Blizzard with WoW tokens – is solve both of those problems, plus more.
– It prevents the external trade of currency.
– It gives a method of buying gold to people who want to, but with gold already in the economy, therefore preventing inflation
– It’s a zero sum game for play-time paid; ie, the big players get their game-time for free, but it is instead paid for by those below who are purchasing WoW tokens instead.
It works, and it really helps to stabilise big games.
Welcome to the “lower class supporting the upper class” model for WoW. Unless you are reinvesting the gold you make into the tokens, your money is going to support other players instead of being of any real benefit to you. And if you do reinvest in WoW tokens, then why not just buy a month of game time in the first place?
I think you have it the wrong way around. This is people with disposable income spending money, and people who can’t or don’t want to spend money investing gold (aka time) instead. If anything, that’s the upper class supporting the lower class.
blizzard exploiting the cashed up and stupid for extra profit. Gotcha.
Now you’re just fishing for a reason to hate Blizzard. When the upper class helps the lower class, it’s welfare, and when the lower class helps the upper class it’s exploitation. You’ve created a scenario in which your disdain is justified no matter what they do.
Where’s the extra profit coming from? Each month of subscription time is only paid for once.
Ok, take the class stuff out of the situation (Hell, I’ll concede that point to you. Bravo).
Person A buys WoW Token, sells it to Person B on the AH, uses gold on mounts, mats, etc, without reinvesting into a WoW Token themselves. Person A still need to buy a month of game time anyway to keep playing. Total cost to player A: 2 months game time.
Sure, Person B is now getting “free” game time by buying in Gold as opposed to paying cash. However the time investment to keep up this new currency system requires a lot longer playing time to constantly have the gold required to buy next month’s game time.
This system looks great on paper as it is eliminating the gold farmers from the game (Finally!) but the way the system works looks more beneficial to the hardcore players and looks to part cashed up fools from their money.
There is no such thing as a “free” game time. At some point, someone is paying more than they need to in order to sustain someone else.
I don’t need to fish for anything. Lately Blizzard has been serving up reasons to hate WoW on a silver platter.
too bad they don’t treat it like Plex in Eve where it is a physical item that can be stolen if you kill some one in PvP. But that would be too much risk for your average WoW pvper. Although at the end of the day what they do doesn’t matter to me because I doubt I will ever go back to the game unless the give me the chance to play my dual wielding mortal strike warrior.
Now this is a great idea!!!
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THIS is what would make a real PVP server. Similar to old school Lineage days where if you were ganked you dropped some items. Get ganked in the open world and you drop your token. Would give meaning to pvp guilds etc and open a wholr new game style. Of course BGs and arenas would be exempt. Open world only.