It might seem convenient to buy the game time tokens with your extra gold but you will most likely pay a price that is equivalent to the actual subscription but in gold. The problem is that you probably value gold much less (0.15-0.50) compared to the non botter, so you will drive the gold price up for them and people will choose selling tokens to get gold instead of buying from you or your buyers. It would be better to let the actual wow community dictate the value and not the gold farmers or else there will be no business for the people you probably sell gold to.
for example if I am willing to pay 45k for a $15 subscription the token seller would much rather get that deal instead of buying gold for $0.5-$1 per k. If that becomes a trend then rip botting.
id be sad if the best deal i could find as a buyer is $1 per k. gold sellers today were spamming my server selling gold for .39 per K
Just looking at other games. In eve you get the amount of gold to buy a game time token in about 6-8 hours of game play. In wildstar it takes 2-3 hours. Regular Joe farming in world of warcraft can maybe achieve 3K an hour. i.e Game tokens will stabilize @ around 25k-40k. Large scale botters wont buy them as their accounts get banned before the free month runs out. In the end. It will be bad if you can buy a token for 40k and it costs 20€. That's 0.5 euro per K gold, which is lower than the gold companies are selling for atm. Which means that wow-gold will drop an additional 20-30% in value. Bot breaking? I think not. Annoying? Yeah pretty much. I think the main problem for blizzard are the potential credit card fraudsters. If you could instantly buy gold with a stolen credit card then sell the gold to some bloak...well you get the picture.
a lot of people do not bot for money. So its more ore less Power costs for the pc. And dont forget that if 40k cost 20€ to buy you wont make 20€ for selling 40k. I see good times for profile writers for old raids. I would definitly pay for GOOD! profiles for old raids and doing old raids with 11 toons while at work. BC, Wrath and Cata should be possible with dd´s.
Seriously 40k is the number we've come to for those tokens? You completely left out that if they are so popular that they ever get to 40k... so many more people would be buying them crashing the prices as they climbed. Won't ever happen on vast majority of servers. I'd like to see these for sale on the AH not just via trade chat. You want to influence the market on your server? Just get some of your accounts spamming trade and /1 chats around draenor selling them for a lesser value even when you dont have any for sale. Play a constant cat a mouse for the first week or two and buy them up if you feel prices are going to climb.
Only used information gathered from other games. I don't think you can factor in botters that have a ton of gold. The thing is that any botter wont buy more than N tokens per month, where N is the number of accounts he wants to have gametime on. So the usability of tokens declines fast. And then you have the whole thing about legitimizing gold selling. And also the CC-fraudsters which is a huge problem. I just dont know. The only thing you know is that you really dont know anything, you can make educated guesses based on other games. Wildstar and EVE being two game sthat currently employ this system. And I asked around and it seems that the amount of gold you need to get a token you can farm in 3 hours in Wildstar and in 7-9 hours in EVE. So there's a huge discrepency there. 250-300%. How many hours you'd need in WoW...I don't know. But for the sake of arguing, as I said in ym previous post. Assume that you'd need 10 hours of farming to get a token. A normal player who dsnt bot can farm about 3000G an hour. Some can farm more, some can farm less. Doing old raids once a week nets you about 5000g an hour, but few people do that. I'm going to say that the tokens will go for around 30k. And the market will probably get saturated fairly fast.
ive soloed a few old raids and cant remember ever getting 5k in loot. and if you can only do them once a week, your 5k per hour might be off a little. im interested in how buying tokens reduces the chance for an 'exploiting the economy' ban. please elaborate.
Blizz wont ban me for using their ingame system to get ingame playtime, while they will for gold selling and buying ingame playtime with that money.
I think the better way to calculate is from the opposite direction. The real currency. Assume they'll cost $15 a month, this won't be like a subscription where credit card fraud is a huge problem. They'll have fail-safes built in when they legitimize. I can think of a few mediocre off the top of my head. Only allow accounts in good standing to buy them. ie accounts with subscriptions already in place. If the transaction turns out to be a fraud its tied to a specific account now that possibly had to meet some restrictions before being able to purchase. Just taking back the gold is obviously not a realistic fail-safe, but a very traceable line of accounting could be made from that specific transaction. Much more so than hacked gold from accounts was traceable without a specific event to follow. Obviously those are only half-ass thoughts, but there are ways they'll have to protect the transactions if they are going to legitimize it. I loved the days of $2-$3 a month RAF game-time for a few years while it lasted, but those days are long gone unfortunately.
What could those restrictions possibly be? CC-Fraudster could just setup a account, bot on it so it looks legit for a month. Then after 28 days or w/e he buys game time with a stolen CC. Cash out and burn the account. Tracing the gold isnt that viable either because it could be split into a thousand pieces scattered over 10 or even 50 accounts... Just look at what's happening now. Chinese are using the instant 90 to farm for 3 days then take the ban and the 100k gold they were able to farm. They have it all automized, account creation > instant botting etc etc. Its all one click CC-fraud gold cash out. What is blizzard doing? Nothing.
