token is gonna skyrocket

05/17/2018 12:39 PMPosted by Gnomere

They should allow a free token market similar to EVEs, and let the players set the price.

While there are similarities the EVE Plex and the WoW Token function differently in a very important aspect. With EVE Plex you can invest in it, and the market supports investing from the ground up. With Plex you can buy with ISK and resell a few months later in ISK again. Their economy is built entirely different to support that kind of playstyle. It's very interesting but it just wouldn't work in WoW.

As someone that plays both EVE and WoW, they have similar player feedback towards PLEX that you see about the WoW Token. Almost the exact same, so just adopting their market wouldn't magically fix what problems you think it has. Us regulating its growth and decay allows us to keep it from fluctuating too wildly and impacting server economies. You'd be pretty upset if you bought a WoW token and in the time it took you to list it on the market its value dropped 40% because someone decided to unload and crash the value. That can happen in EVE. That's not really a negative about the game, its just designed to allow that kind of market behavior.

05/17/2018 02:01 PMPosted by Tim

While it's validating to have a blue post in response to this, your response doesn't really address the main issue -- a game outside of World of Warcraft (and Blizzard) is going to be influencing its economy.

Adding games to the launcher doesn't influence WoW's economy. It influences the cost of the token, sure. However it doesn't affect the overall economy.

Tokens do not inject gold into the economy. The same gold always exists. If the price jumps up 50k someone is still paying that 50k that already existed and someone will receive that same 50k.

It reduces the value of gold in regard specifically to the Token because the Token itself is worth more but it doesn't change the value of say flasks or food or change the amount of gold circulating between players. There is gold inflation naturally through expansions but its not because of the Token or adding things to the launcher or Battle.net store.

05/17/2018 02:37 PMPosted by Narlow

So if tokens are sold out that means all the available gold is now locked away in tokens.

No. That means that not enough players have bought tokens. It's happening right now. People aren't buying enough tokens with real money to satisfy the demand so the tokens are selling out.

05/17/2018 02:37 PMPosted by Narlow

Untill these tokens are converted back into gold, the total ammount of gold available will have to come from in game rewards, thus increasing the total ammount of in game gold.

You can't convert a token "back into gold". Doing those activities would still increase gold in the economy regardless of tokens being present or not.

05/17/2018 02:37 PMPosted by Narlow

Then, if a mass sell off happens, the token price should drop significantly untill the gold is again locked up in an even larger number of tokens.

The price can only increase or decrease so much an hour. If a mass sell off were to happen the same amount of gold would still exist in the economy. Tokens at their time of purchase have a fixed value of what they were worth at that time. You cannot gain or lose value of it once it is bought.

Repeat until things even out or crash.

It can't unless you have another way to counteract the inflation. The price could crash very slowly but again the same gold still exists unless there is something else removing it (vendors, repairs, AH cuts, etc).

05/17/2018 04:09 PMPosted by Krysteen

But does it? Every time I go to my mission tables there are gold missions there to be done. Every time I, and anyone else, completes one of those, new gold is being, in effect, created for me. If Blizzard removes those gold missions - which it has done in the past - that gold is no longer being collected by players to be injected into the economy.

Farming, say, leather and selling it on the AH is a natural form of gold production, its transferring existing gold from one player to another. But gold missions are sparkly new gold fresh from the mint, untouched by human hands. It comes, not from the server pool of gold from players, but from Blizzard itself.

You're talking about something that does create gold which is through those missions which does cause inflation naturally. Game economies are a balancing act between that and things that are gold sinks that remove the gold completely(AH cuts, repairs, vendors, etc). We're talking about the Tokens which just cause the existing gold players have to exchange hands into someone that wants to spend it. In economics terms this changes a currencies "velocity".

05/17/2018 04:55 PMPosted by Piddy

The problem with the token is the price is based on the gold DISTRIBUTION within the economy rather than the values of the economy.

For an arbitrary, contrived, example when the Token price goes up doesn't mean that, say, the price of Starlight Rose goes up. It's instead based on the amount of accumulated gold players have that they are willing to spend on a token.

Obviously, individual resources in the AH have their own abs and flows, but the token economy is tied solely to EXTERNAL demand (those willing to spend cash monies on gold tokens), rather than INTERNAL demand.

The rise in token prices is because more players want tokens (for external reasons) rather than spending that money "inside" of WoW. Now it's fair to say that that's not quite fair, as someone ELSE is purchasing gold for internal purposes. Since it's a wealth transfer. But that representation of the market value of a WoW token is only tangentially related to the actual values in the economy. If players did not have a large cache of gold, they wouldn't be willing to spend it on a token, "not at these prices".

Arguably WoW is "out of tokens" right now because buyers are, rightfully, "waiting" for the token gold price of a token to go UP. Why should i buy now when the price is just going to go up? It's a deflationary event right now since the "price of gold" is going DOWN (more gold/$ right now). So, wait, cause more scarcity (fewer tokens), demand remains the same or goes up, driving the gold price of the token up and, consequentially, drive the dollar price of gold down even farther. It's late game legion, who the heck needs another 200K of gold?

None of these elements are related to the internal WoW economy.

We could, for example, certainly expect to the Token price crash, and crash hard, if, for example, BfA does NOT offer gold missions, drying up a major source of revenue for many players.

Basically the WoW token is for WoW players to participate in other BNet things and offer a safe avenue for gold selling. I pretty much doubt we're going to see an influx of CoD players buying WoW, paying for a subscription, and then playing the WoW "Gold Game" in order to "save money" on CoD.

This is a great post.