Well, people are already doing it in WoW, still don't understand why Blizz doesn't just allow it. It would prolly bring more customers as well.
Don't really see the harm personally, gold doesn't buy much in WoW anyway.
And I know a fair few people who already buy subs with ingame gold from friends...
Quite a clever system for Wildstar, seeing as every 30 day sub is still ultimately bought from their store. No loss of sub revenue.
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If I had to guess I'd say they're concerned it might encourage botters/hackers/etc.
It wouldn't lead to inflation at all. When people buy from sites it's as if they're creating gold because the gold they bought wasn't part of the economy. That on a large scale would create inflation.
With the selling game time option the gold people are buying comes directly from someone else who is an active part of the economy so the amount of gold in the economy isn't changing so there wont be inflation.
What will happen, I fear, is that so many people would take advantage of it that it would drive the price of gold per game time down to a point where it would be much cheaper to buy from sites and thus undermining the legal gold buying. If there were a way to maintain a ratio near $1/1k on the AH, like say each person gets to sell one unit of game time per month (as an example) maybe this could be mitigated.
Why would you buy gold from an external source and risking getting your account banned / hacked / credit card lost ?
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1 - hackers already exists
2 - encourage botters to do what ? farm gold ? again why would everyone buy gold from and external source and take any risk ?
“Do not lose time on daily trivialities. Do not dwell on petty detail. For all of these things melt away and drift apart within the obscure traffic of time. Live well and live broadly. You are alive and living now. Now is the envy of all of the dead.” ~ Emily3, World of Tomorrow
Words to live by.
Buying game time with gold isn't a gold sink.
A gold sink is something that takes gold out of the game -- like buying a Yak from a vendor, or spending it on the Black Market AH.
Buying a game time card off the Auction House only transfers my gold to the seller.
In real life, when the US Treasury prints 100 $1 bills, they also destroy $100 in the process to curb inflation. In WoW, gold also needs to be "destroyed" to curb inflation.
Last edited by ablib; 2014-06-11 at 05:38 AM.
Because there is no other method to do so?
Kinda like how breaking bad pirating went down after netflix became an established streaming service of it. If you give a legal option, people opt for that. This is why Game of Thrones is the most pirated show in the world, because if you do not have HBO you cannot watch it otherwise.
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Make it so it costs 15k gold in game + 15$ online, this also disallows a great number of hacked accounts buying up this currency with a stolen credit card or something. Or it will stop people from opening up vanilla accounts and buy up like 50 one month tokens, then issuing a chargeback.
People will sell it for 30k, and now you have removed 15k gold from the game, and the person basically spent 15$ for 15k gold. Theres numerous variations they can go with this.
Last edited by cityguy193; 2014-06-11 at 05:41 AM.
Chronomancer Club
Yes, this is awesome. EVE Online has this model and it works well. It lets poorer players play on someone else's real world money in exchange of some ingame money.
The problem is that ingame gold isn't exactly important right now in WoW. It's mostly used for vanity stuff and a few crafted pieces each tier - which only top raiders will buy. First they have to make gold more important before such a model would work.
Honestly gold being non-integral to the overall game is what makes the game great. I fail to see how such a system will fail if gold stays the way it is, there is still the BMAH + gold sinks for a lot of things in game already + alts. If someone made so much money that they overcame every gold sink in the game, then more power to them and then they can just play for free for the next 10 years.
Chronomancer Club
You mean an EVE like system where by playing the game you can pay for it? Well...that doesn't really work in MMOs like WoW. EVE's worked because anyone could make enough money to meet the prices for PLEX. In WoW, not everyone's main goal is money.
Sound like it could work. However, in my experiences buying game time with gold...the sellers are typically dirt poor (in game). 15k gold is a lot of money to these folks. If they had 15k, they probably wouldn't feel the need to purchase gold at all.
There needs to be a better way to curb inflation. The strategy should have a dual approach. The first one would be to stop creating (printing) so much gold in the first place. Every time an account is hacked, gold is duplicated. It's an immense problem on inflation. Instead of Blizzard being more active at eliminating hacking, they eliminating other sources of inflation such as reduced gold and item drops from lower level dungeons and raids.
Secondly, there can't be universal gold sinks, because the distribution of wealth amongst players is HUGE. The majority of players are broke, while a very tiny portion are wealthy (Google a chart of distribution of wealth in the USA, same thing). So you can't just universally increase the price of riding training, and repairs, and vendor goods, while lowering money drops off mobs, because it would hurt a great deal of the playerbase.
Selling cards on the AH for gold, would help distribute the wealth a little bit, to then be able to implement some serious gold sinks that affect a greater portion of players fairly.
I can't see enough people spending let's say $150 to buy 200K gold and spend it on a vanity item. Currently this is almost the only thing people need gold for. Average players don't exactly need a fortune to keep their characters gemmed and enchanted. Consumables are an even less concern now.
Another problem is that they really need to make AH global or at least integrate at least 10thousands of active players per AH. All this model doesn't work well if the economy is not active.
So, with how cheap gold is in WoW(under $1/100gold) the price of a CREDD-like currency would have to be incredibly high and that high price would translate to a very high real currency price. It wouldn't work, IMO. It works in WS because it's a new game and the economy is still shifting every single day.
I don't see why not.
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I would welcome if Blizzard allows the purchase of game time within the game. But not from from silly idea of killing a boss or any sort like others have it. Has to be something that demands a good amount of active playing to obtain (or a very lucky 1% drop).
FOMO: "Fear Of Missing Out", also commonly known as people with a mental issue of managing time and activities, many expecting others to fit into their schedule so they don't miss out on things to come. If FOMO becomes a problem for you, do seek help, it can be a very unhealthy lifestyle..
For some it's more like dont want to. Id rather not pay for games if I have an opportunity to pay for them with ingame currency. I usually have a lot of extra money anyway since I don't spend it on pets, mounts and cosmetic stuff.
So yes, I support this model and it shouldnt matter to Blizzard anyway, why should they care who pays for the sub as long as they get their 50 pieces of silver.
Just wanted to say that it doesn't stop gold sellers. I got spam mailed on Wildstar by fucking gold sellers.
And no. Don't want this in WoW. Anything that might take away from content I don't want.