Originally posted by Xzyborg It seems obvious now why they have essentially destroyed the ability to make gold via professions. They don't want you to be able to make gold via professions or flipping mats in the AH. They want you to make your gold by buying and selling game time tokens. It's awesome that core game features are now being gutted to maximize revenue through this new system.
This. It is not obvious at first, but when you follow the string of changes, you can see "the suits" took over the game a long time ago.
Its business 101. While it wont make WoW totally free to play it sure has hell will add a shit ton of players (back) to the game. Which they will then call 'subscribers' and if they go from 6 million or whatever they claim to 12 million again then they can claim they doubled their subscription base. And that is marketing 101.
WoW is a good game I soured because every time I got free access or went back all my shit was gone due to hackers (even with an authenticator) so I just stopped caring.
But WoW is a guilty pleasure I think for a lot of people but as a sub game and all the issues it has had since WotLK it has lost a lot of luster. Cata was a new hope but a flop and Pandas was a bad dream.
This change is all about numbers which will most definitely rise.
I always said if WoW went free to play all the haters would go back to it and it would basically kill every other free to play game out there because it would suck what few player most of them have left back to the first MMO ever made.
Well they broke the economy and ruined professions in Warlords of Draenor.
So they had to allow players to get gold and use it easy somehow.
Torn on this, In one way I do not have much time anymore, so I like the idea I can buy things I normally never could is great. Not to mention it makes gold sellers job that much harder. I don't have to spend hours making gold anymore, a few clicks and I can have a ton.
Most of the time I just want to play the damn game and leave making currency to real life. It's also good if you are broke, and want to buy some game time that you can with gold. Plenty of people have mountains of gold but are broke, this solves that problem. Eve is successful with this kind of system.
But the other side of me thinks this could also be bad. Everything about World of Warcraft now days is about easy of access, from boosts to how they handled professions. This seems like another step towards that, which is to allow players to get almost everything (outside of non LFR raids some of the time).
The gold barrier was great because it separated people who wanted to work hard for what they had, from those who did not want to put that much time in. You should have to work towards things in a MMO. Now you can buy gold and get all the gear and mounts you want. Just head to the black market AH and get that mount or transmog easy as pie now. Sends the wrong message.
Originally posted by daltanious Sub for gold should never happen and I can not accept this for Wow. Blizzard is simply not some average Korean gaming company that produces average and below games.
If they end up doing this there going be a big gold sink very soon in the game, to get people to buy more of them, but this should help attack the gold farmer. But I am sure there be people not happy about it.
The system in and of itself is a massive gold sink, and in order for players to buy the tokens someone has to buy them for real currency. Blizzard doesn't need to put a gold sink in the game, and indeed doing so would serve only to narrow down the number of players who could buy the tokens.
Instead, they'll launch the tokens with a higher price tag than we're anticipating, people will still buy them as demand will be high, gold will "move around the table", and Blizzard will make a HUGE pile of money.
I have not touch the game, for a few years other people telling me other things to get me back saying they have to much gold noting to use it on.
But anyhow if there is gold sink now like you said, this system comes in it does have a ahead start to people they can buy the tokens get the gold needed with out farming to get all the gear they needed crafted over people they can't farm that much gold that fast, to start raiding or other things.
If WoW actually does this, I think that will put the nail in the coffin for pretty much ALL gold farming everywhere. Most gold farming enterprises have a solid base with WoW gold, which enables them to open up a little bit and work with smaller margins on smaller games.
But once you take WoW out of the mix, I don't think the gold farming industry can exist at all anymore. Given that the prices of these tradeable currencies almost always end up settling at a market price that the gold farmers just can't compete with.
Originally posted by Phixion13 Soooooo.... what Eve has done and what Wildstar brought to the MMO realm already.
But now 95% of your forum trolls wil stop calling your game names because it's has some way to purchase ingame currency with real money trough third parties. And WoW somehow did much better and greater and more polished, which makes it an innovation the entire industry should be grateful for and Blizzard actually invented Pay 2 Win and everyone else is just a copy cat.
Business as usual.
Not long and selling oversized epic swords and armor will be "pretty cool" and just "convenient" for "people with real life responsibiliites and doctor titles and several degrees and familiy and saving kittens from trees" too.
When WOD very 'limited' beta keys were being handed out and forums was in frenzy i almost fell out of my chair laughing when i say your name in list of winners. It was apparent that anyone who won those keys put a lot of time and effort in spamming refresh key for hours just to be one of those lucky ones to win hadfull of beta invites.
That tells me everything i need to know about someone who has been bashing WOW since day one of the creation of forum account.
However no one has ever bashed EVE, EQ2 or WS for this feature. Maybe for a lot of other reasons but never for the ability to convert gold into monthly sub.
Trading WoW-golds for subscription time sounds great to me, reduces farmers and gives new life to the guys that have real life money issues due to disability or whatever.
Now if they'd only come up with a way to trade WoW-golds for Hearthstone card packs, I'd resub immediately!
I dont really see the problem here, there was a lot of powerleveling service all around internet and they just stop it with instant level 90, secure, legitimate and cheap, there are million of web-sites selling gold, now with this initiative they can kill part of this ballast of their mmo. They will win more, ofc they will, but i prefer they win more for their own work than others that just destroyed the in-game economy for years and year.
As everything else this has pros and cons and people will need to adapt, adjust and benefit from the pros. I've been always for players freedom and rights to be able to do what they want with their currency, characters, items...use them or sell them for $.
But this is as far as I can go with the pros of this. The cons will be far more overwhelming and severe. Truth is though players already been able to buy gold with $ and been doing that for a long long time, illegally. I believe WOW can trace these transactions, but I doubt it's doing enough to combat them since they've existed for a long time.
Originally posted by Xzyborg It seems obvious now why they have essentially destroyed the ability to make gold via professions. They don't want you to be able to make gold via professions or flipping mats in the AH. They want you to make your gold by buying and selling game time tokens. It's awesome that core game features are now being gutted to maximize revenue through this new system.
I still don't know what people are saying when they mention professions being "destroyed". Well, at least not from a gold making perspective. Two accounts and 22 100s -- mainly from perfecting the leveling experience during beta and condensing it to just a couple of hours from 90 -- and over a million gold has been made from professions alone. All it does is take a lot longer, and as such most people claim it to be "broken" and don't bother with them. Every nine to ten days or so you are able to make an epic item that sells for 10,000 gold easy per craft (so 20,000 per character); in the first couple weeks things were selling for 100k for most professions. In fact, I've made more gold from professions now than ever before from actually doing the professions and not playing the auction house game or buying and selling.
If you think about it, it's now all about the professions and not just manipulating the auction house. Thus, they made professions relevant (in addition to still being able to make old stuff).
It's much like the old FFXIV 1.0 system whereby it was a pain to level and keep up on, but once you leveled it you made millions a day since nobody else wanted to.
400-500k every 10 days isn't that bad as a whole. Though that's just from professions and not the myriad of other ways to go about making money. It doesn't even count enchanting materials, world drops, dungeon farming, 200g (or whatever) per dungeon for tanks / healers, mount drops that spawn every 20 minutes and still sell for 20k each, etc.
On topic of buying WoW time for gold, most anyone could be set for years just from professions alone.
THAT SAID:
Ten years ago I would've been against this practice. Though as I grew I began to realize that people who have more time to play the game are naturally the richest people in said game or have the most powerful gear due to time commitment. The working stiff that plays only an hour or two a day is always behind (and typically has more disposable income), and developers have been trying to find a way to rectify this. Those who spend 18 hours a day playing will now be able to make some money, and those who do not can spend that money. Time no longer equals power, yet time still/also negates money (due to time = more gold naturally and being needed for mythic gear vs. the -30 ilvl 665 gear sold on auction house); the economy does not suffer as no gold is being put in the system. It's just gold that has already been earned (granted, more money that is being sat upon will start being spent and it will take weeks to settle down).
This is only with the working class, however. Those who are able to drop 100,000 on ships or whatever will likely have the time to play however much they want. They will benefit from this. But honestly, those who have that much money likely already have 25 multi-box accounts or means to get gold in game. They will always be ahead regardless.
With that I should state that no system is perfect. This just makes time played less relevant as a whole, which equals more money from casuals (who can now have as much gold as people who have more free time... as well as people who have said time being able to get extra money for the next CoD game or League skin or whatever people are into nowadays). Everything still had to be earned in one way or the other, by someone. It's just business.
Edit:
Precedence:
Some posters have already mentioned games that have this. I'll remind or inform others that this already exists in WoW in the form of the TGC trading card game in addition to a select few pets that they allowed to be bought and put on the auction house in the past.
One could easily spend $100 on a card and then turn around to sell it for 150-200k on the auction house for the in-game loot that comes with it now. In fact, that's what I did a long time ago when I was getting low and wanted to drop a few hundred thousand gold.
Due to frequent travel in my youth, English isn't something I consider my primary language (and thus I obtained quirky ways of writing). German and French were always easier for me despite my family being U.S. citizens for over a century. Spanish I learned as a requirement in school, Japanese and Korean I acquired for my youthful desire of anime and gaming (and also work now). I only debate in English to help me work with it (and limit things). In addition, I'm not smart enough to remain fluent in everything and typically need exposure to get in the groove of things again if I haven't heard it in a while. If you understand Mandarin, I know a little, but it has actually been a challenge and could use some help.
Also, I thoroughly enjoy debates and have accounts on over a dozen sites for this. If you wish to engage in such, please put effort in a post and provide sources -- I will then do the same with what I already wrote (if I didn't) as well as with my responses to your own. Expanding my information on a subject makes my stance either change or strengthen the next time I speak of it or write a thesis. Allow me to thank you sincerely for your time.
To those saying that they will hate the cash to gold system give me a break! What can you even buy besides barely entry level raid gear with Gold? You can get all of that stuff for free easily just by playing the games. The Heroics are easily doable in PVP gear, and LFR is a joke but nice preview to actual raiding. Anything that requires end game solutions cannot be purchased.
This will also lessen bot players entering our games/servers/etc.
To those saying that they will hate the cash to gold system give me a break! What can you even buy besides barely entry level raid gear with Gold? You can get all of that stuff for free easily just by playing the games. The Heroics are easily doable in PVP gear, and LFR is a joke but nice preview to actual raiding. Anything that requires end game solutions cannot be purchased.
This will also lessen bot players entering our games/servers/etc.
If Blizzard does not expand it's cash shop anymore than Yes you will be correct. We will have nothing to worry about...
...But I haven't seen a single MMO Publisher YET that could say No to the temptation to cash in on the Cash Shop craze, and I am betting Blizzard will greatly expand what Players can buy sometime in the next year or two. That would give Players much more to buy with the influx of cash into the game.
That's what's got some of us concerned. Time will tell and I hope You are correct and that we won't have anything to worry about.
Stupid idea. Such system promotes gold farming, botting and multiboxing.
They will also need to create more gold sinks in order to sell more sub tokens which is really toxic game development. Sad to see WoW change from legit P2P.
How does it promote gold farming?
Exactly - people claiming it promotes gold farming don't understand economics. They will be adding a way to trade gold for a month of subscription that someone has paid cash for. It's still essentially a zero sum game from Blizzards' perspective - people are still going to need the same number of subscriptions. And if subscription tokens flood the market the gold price for them will crash reducing the number of subscription tokens that get put on the market. And if subscription tokens are scarce the gold price will skyrocket and give people incentive to put more tokens into the market. The system will self-correcting in the long run. But it will also provide a way for people to legitimately buy gold for the game which will essentially make it tougher for gold sellers to compete.
So finally blizzard have reach low last year it was add 3 in game button to there cash shop this year the are add trade game time token for in game gold serious talk about be desperate to found way to earn $$$$ serious blizzard should be ashame to even call WoW a mmorpg the should make a new Genre call "milk there custom out of money".
It is shame to see how a company that once upon a time did a one of best mmorpg trun more to care for money then care more for game.
You spend $30 to buy a token for 1 month of free game time, you put it on the AH at an indecent profit in gold... everything else on the AH goes up to match said exorbitant pricing. Gold farmers rejoice because now you literally can't afford anything in game anymore. The only true benefactors are Blizzard and the Gold farmers. This won't increase subs by any stretch of the imagination.
Lest we forget, the Alliance Chopper was put in game, by Blizzard itself, at a cost of 100K gold... a 30 day game token is easily going to eclipse that. If you can come up with 100K gold, you can come up with 1000K gold, etc etc.
I don't get where all the gold comes from in this game? People ask insane prices like 12k, 18k, even 50k. I find that completely absurd, I don't think I could get 20k on all 6 alts. Lots of dungeon runs to gear up your character(s) as the crafting requires large amounts of materials that you develop very slowly. Think I have managed to make 3 pieces of armor and one weapon since the expansion released.
Comments
This. It is not obvious at first, but when you follow the string of changes, you can see "the suits" took over the game a long time ago.
New players can get a welcome package and old/returning players can also get a welcome back package and 7 days free subscription time! Just click here to use my referral invitation
Its business 101. While it wont make WoW totally free to play it sure has hell will add a shit ton of players (back) to the game. Which they will then call 'subscribers' and if they go from 6 million or whatever they claim to 12 million again then they can claim they doubled their subscription base. And that is marketing 101.
WoW is a good game I soured because every time I got free access or went back all my shit was gone due to hackers (even with an authenticator) so I just stopped caring.
But WoW is a guilty pleasure I think for a lot of people but as a sub game and all the issues it has had since WotLK it has lost a lot of luster. Cata was a new hope but a flop and Pandas was a bad dream.
This change is all about numbers which will most definitely rise.
I always said if WoW went free to play all the haters would go back to it and it would basically kill every other free to play game out there because it would suck what few player most of them have left back to the first MMO ever made.
Well they broke the economy and ruined professions in Warlords of Draenor.
So they had to allow players to get gold and use it easy somehow.
Torn on this, In one way I do not have much time anymore, so I like the idea I can buy things I normally never could is great. Not to mention it makes gold sellers job that much harder. I don't have to spend hours making gold anymore, a few clicks and I can have a ton.
Most of the time I just want to play the damn game and leave making currency to real life. It's also good if you are broke, and want to buy some game time that you can with gold. Plenty of people have mountains of gold but are broke, this solves that problem. Eve is successful with this kind of system.
But the other side of me thinks this could also be bad. Everything about World of Warcraft now days is about easy of access, from boosts to how they handled professions. This seems like another step towards that, which is to allow players to get almost everything (outside of non LFR raids some of the time).
The gold barrier was great because it separated people who wanted to work hard for what they had, from those who did not want to put that much time in. You should have to work towards things in a MMO. Now you can buy gold and get all the gear and mounts you want. Just head to the black market AH and get that mount or transmog easy as pie now. Sends the wrong message.
EVE isn't either. Has the same system.
I have not touch the game, for a few years other people telling me other things to get me back saying they have to much gold noting to use it on.
But anyhow if there is gold sink now like you said, this system comes in it does have a ahead start to people they can buy the tokens get the gold needed with out farming to get all the gear they needed crafted over people they can't farm that much gold that fast, to start raiding or other things.
agree, EQ2 adopted a similar thing 2 years ago with Krono
http://massively.joystiq.com/2012/11/03/the-tattered-notebook-an-appraisal-of-eqiis-krono/
EQ2 fan sites
If WoW actually does this, I think that will put the nail in the coffin for pretty much ALL gold farming everywhere. Most gold farming enterprises have a solid base with WoW gold, which enables them to open up a little bit and work with smaller margins on smaller games.
But once you take WoW out of the mix, I don't think the gold farming industry can exist at all anymore. Given that the prices of these tradeable currencies almost always end up settling at a market price that the gold farmers just can't compete with.
When WOD very 'limited' beta keys were being handed out and forums was in frenzy i almost fell out of my chair laughing when i say your name in list of winners. It was apparent that anyone who won those keys put a lot of time and effort in spamming refresh key for hours just to be one of those lucky ones to win hadfull of beta invites.
That tells me everything i need to know about someone who has been bashing WOW since day one of the creation of forum account.
However no one has ever bashed EVE, EQ2 or WS for this feature. Maybe for a lot of other reasons but never for the ability to convert gold into monthly sub.
Trading WoW-golds for subscription time sounds great to me, reduces farmers and gives new life to the guys that have real life money issues due to disability or whatever.
Now if they'd only come up with a way to trade WoW-golds for Hearthstone card packs, I'd resub immediately!
As everything else this has pros and cons and people will need to adapt, adjust and benefit from the pros. I've been always for players freedom and rights to be able to do what they want with their currency, characters, items...use them or sell them for $.
But this is as far as I can go with the pros of this. The cons will be far more overwhelming and severe. Truth is though players already been able to buy gold with $ and been doing that for a long long time, illegally. I believe WOW can trace these transactions, but I doubt it's doing enough to combat them since they've existed for a long time.
I still don't know what people are saying when they mention professions being "destroyed". Well, at least not from a gold making perspective. Two accounts and 22 100s -- mainly from perfecting the leveling experience during beta and condensing it to just a couple of hours from 90 -- and over a million gold has been made from professions alone. All it does is take a lot longer, and as such most people claim it to be "broken" and don't bother with them. Every nine to ten days or so you are able to make an epic item that sells for 10,000 gold easy per craft (so 20,000 per character); in the first couple weeks things were selling for 100k for most professions. In fact, I've made more gold from professions now than ever before from actually doing the professions and not playing the auction house game or buying and selling.
If you think about it, it's now all about the professions and not just manipulating the auction house. Thus, they made professions relevant (in addition to still being able to make old stuff).
It's much like the old FFXIV 1.0 system whereby it was a pain to level and keep up on, but once you leveled it you made millions a day since nobody else wanted to.
400-500k every 10 days isn't that bad as a whole. Though that's just from professions and not the myriad of other ways to go about making money. It doesn't even count enchanting materials, world drops, dungeon farming, 200g (or whatever) per dungeon for tanks / healers, mount drops that spawn every 20 minutes and still sell for 20k each, etc.
On topic of buying WoW time for gold, most anyone could be set for years just from professions alone.
THAT SAID:
Ten years ago I would've been against this practice. Though as I grew I began to realize that people who have more time to play the game are naturally the richest people in said game or have the most powerful gear due to time commitment. The working stiff that plays only an hour or two a day is always behind (and typically has more disposable income), and developers have been trying to find a way to rectify this. Those who spend 18 hours a day playing will now be able to make some money, and those who do not can spend that money. Time no longer equals power, yet time still/also negates money (due to time = more gold naturally and being needed for mythic gear vs. the -30 ilvl 665 gear sold on auction house); the economy does not suffer as no gold is being put in the system. It's just gold that has already been earned (granted, more money that is being sat upon will start being spent and it will take weeks to settle down).
This is only with the working class, however. Those who are able to drop 100,000 on ships or whatever will likely have the time to play however much they want. They will benefit from this. But honestly, those who have that much money likely already have 25 multi-box accounts or means to get gold in game. They will always be ahead regardless.
With that I should state that no system is perfect. This just makes time played less relevant as a whole, which equals more money from casuals (who can now have as much gold as people who have more free time... as well as people who have said time being able to get extra money for the next CoD game or League skin or whatever people are into nowadays). Everything still had to be earned in one way or the other, by someone. It's just business.
Edit:
Precedence:
Some posters have already mentioned games that have this. I'll remind or inform others that this already exists in WoW in the form of the TGC trading card game in addition to a select few pets that they allowed to be bought and put on the auction house in the past.
One could easily spend $100 on a card and then turn around to sell it for 150-200k on the auction house for the in-game loot that comes with it now. In fact, that's what I did a long time ago when I was getting low and wanted to drop a few hundred thousand gold.
To those saying that they will hate the cash to gold system give me a break! What can you even buy besides barely entry level raid gear with Gold? You can get all of that stuff for free easily just by playing the games. The Heroics are easily doable in PVP gear, and LFR is a joke but nice preview to actual raiding. Anything that requires end game solutions cannot be purchased.
This will also lessen bot players entering our games/servers/etc.
If Blizzard does not expand it's cash shop anymore than Yes you will be correct. We will have nothing to worry about...
...But I haven't seen a single MMO Publisher YET that could say No to the temptation to cash in on the Cash Shop craze, and I am betting Blizzard will greatly expand what Players can buy sometime in the next year or two. That would give Players much more to buy with the influx of cash into the game.
That's what's got some of us concerned. Time will tell and I hope You are correct and that we won't have anything to worry about.
Exactly - people claiming it promotes gold farming don't understand economics. They will be adding a way to trade gold for a month of subscription that someone has paid cash for. It's still essentially a zero sum game from Blizzards' perspective - people are still going to need the same number of subscriptions. And if subscription tokens flood the market the gold price for them will crash reducing the number of subscription tokens that get put on the market. And if subscription tokens are scarce the gold price will skyrocket and give people incentive to put more tokens into the market. The system will self-correcting in the long run. But it will also provide a way for people to legitimately buy gold for the game which will essentially make it tougher for gold sellers to compete.
So finally blizzard have reach low last year it was add 3 in game button to there cash shop this year the are add trade game time token for in game gold serious talk about be desperate to found way to earn $$$$ serious blizzard should be ashame to even call WoW a mmorpg the should make a new Genre call "milk there custom out of money".
It is shame to see how a company that once upon a time did a one of best mmorpg trun more to care for money then care more for game.
It is really sad to see to be honest
You spend $30 to buy a token for 1 month of free game time, you put it on the AH at an indecent profit in gold... everything else on the AH goes up to match said exorbitant pricing. Gold farmers rejoice because now you literally can't afford anything in game anymore. The only true benefactors are Blizzard and the Gold farmers. This won't increase subs by any stretch of the imagination.
Lest we forget, the Alliance Chopper was put in game, by Blizzard itself, at a cost of 100K gold... a 30 day game token is easily going to eclipse that. If you can come up with 100K gold, you can come up with 1000K gold, etc etc.
I don't get where all the gold comes from in this game? People ask insane prices like 12k, 18k, even 50k. I find that completely absurd, I don't think I could get 20k on all 6 alts. Lots of dungeon runs to gear up your character(s) as the crafting requires large amounts of materials that you develop very slowly. Think I have managed to make 3 pieces of armor and one weapon since the expansion released.
Right now, I probably won't resub.