Originally Posted by
Raelbo
Why would you? By the sounds of things you wouldn't. Why would someone else? I thought it was obvious, but here goes:
It takes time and effort to make gold in the game. It takes time and effort to make money in the world. If the time it takes you to make the $$ in the real world is significantly less than the time it takes you to make the gold you could get from selling a token, then it's basic common sense to spend real money buying a token.
So if I earn $100 per hour, but I can only make 1000g per hour in the game, spending 12 minutes of work time makes a lot more sense than spending 100 hours grinding gold.
Anyone who wastes time in game grinding gold is a sucker...
The game doesn't require you to buy resources with real money. That being said, why would you want to devote hours of time in a game to making gold when you can earn the money to buy that gold in a fraction of time?
Not really true though. The price of the tokens by it's dynamic nature will always land up at the point where the quantity of gold is not that easy to get. Because if it really were easy to get that much gold, then everyone would want to buy them for gold and no one would want to spend real money buying them.
Unlike random people trying to impress random strangers with their gold making prowess on a gaming forum, the token is an actual barometer of how "easy" gold is to get.
I think it's actually pretty interesting looking at this poll because it indicates that about 15% of players are buying tokens with real money (assuming the sample on MMO-C is reasonably representative of the WoW community at large). This means that probably around 15% of people buy tokens with gold. Which means that for 85% of players, 120K is a lot of gold.
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You know, when someone calls someone else a fucking moron on the internet, it's generally a good idea to make sure that your own expressed opinion doesn't make the irony quite so obvious.
FYI, for a person who earns $100 per hour, that is 12 minutes to earn the cash to buy a token, which is 40 seconds per day, which I guarantee you is less time than you spend doing whatever it is you do to make the gold. Hell, even earning minimum wage (what's that about $10 per hour?) you'd still only spend 4 minutes a day.
Personally I devote 15-20 mins a day to using the AH. Granted, I make a lot more than I need for just the token (but sadly not enough to throw gold cap a swift Zulian Tiger like someone else on my server did the other day) but that's still 10 hours a month.
The only reason it makes any economic sense for me to spend gold on tokens/game time is that I would be spending that time playing WoW regardless, because I enjoy it. There have certainly been times though where I have had to consciously throttle back on making gold when it was no longer fun, and if it ever gets to the point where I find am not getting some kind of satisfaction out of the time I spend making gold, I'll gladly go back to buying my game time for cash, or even consider spending some cash on buying tokens to sell for gold.