WoW Token to Battle.Net Balance Now Live

OMG, good new, but at same time the price is going to be high soon!!

Not enough offer, too much demand.

Blizzard need to create more gold sink or things to buy with golds.

Looks like US tapped out at 115k. I wonder if the EU price bouncing spooked people into caching in on the US side.

So the [first] peak is 115,543g. It has started to decrease.

So uhm.... Europe?!?!?! Anyone knows when it'll be available?!?!?!?!?!

Whoever Blizz has setting these prices is retarded. The tokens went from a great way to purchase game time to a complete ripoff in less than 48 hours. 40K-55K was reasonable for tokens; more than doubling the cost overnight is akin to saying that the warcraft economy is as stable as Greece or Cypress were a couple of years ago. In short way to totally devalue every item in the game Blizz.

Originally Posted by Baskell

So uhm.... Europe?!?!?! Anyone knows?!?!?!?!?!

182K and slowly dropping.

Though i doubt it will ever get close to 110K again.

Originally Posted by Fudal

Whoever Blizz has setting these prices is retarded. The tokens went from a great way to purchase game time to a complete ripoff in less than 48 hours. 40K-55K was reasonable for tokens; more than doubling the cost overnight is akin to saying that the warcraft economy is as stable as Greece or Cypress were a couple of years ago. In short way to totally devalue every item in the game Blizz.

The prices are set by supply and demand. If a lot of people are buying them but the supply is low the price goes up. When the Battle.net balance thing went live everyone and their grandma rushed buy as many as they could and the price skyrocketed because there weren't enough available. Once they hit 115k people started buying tokens with cash to sell for gold and the price is starting to drop again. It will stabilize eventually but it will probably never go as low as 60k again.

Originally Posted by Dhru

...and this is how Blizzard has removed East-European players from its game.

A person with the location stated as "New York" has a lot to say about Eastern Europeans I see...

Btw, I started playing wow in TBC, because my friends who played since vanilla invited me to join them. Guess what, there was no token back then and both me and my friends are Polish and that didn't prevent us from playing, even though the basic wage in Poland equaled to 200-300 euro. They quit at the end of WOTLK though but that had nothing to do with not being able to afford the sub, rather the combination of moving on with RL + other more interesting games out there + WC3 TFT arc being closed with WOTLK.

Most people who claim they quit wow because they can't afford token are people who treat wow as a f2p game they just have on their desktop but don't care much about. I played League of Legends for quite some time before I quit, I was on EUNE server and I saw firsthand how toxic can be a community in a game just because that game is f2p and people don't give a damn about their accounts, if banned just make another "smurf" and continue.

Hearthstone is another example, one reason why there is no chat and only emotes during a match. 90% of friend invites after a match are just because some salty dude wants to tell you how he will f*** your mom and a list of expletives before removing you.

On the other hand while I didn't play FF MMO (no time to play more than 1 MMO seriously really), I heard positive opinions about its community while the game is sub based.

All of these make me think WOW is better off as a sub-based game rather than a game that "theoretically has a sub but you can pay it off with gold with barely any effort or knowledge about game economy so it's negligible". If the sub cost could be paid off by 1 afternoon of effort (like herbing) for the whole month of forgetting about it, or passively by just sending order hall gold missions, then it was definitely not something expected to last forever.

Also let's not forget most casuals have 0 gold expenses in this game except repair bills. They don't need gems, enchants, flasks, pots, augment runes, food buffs and all these things that hardcores chug every raid night / high m+ session, therefore perpetuating the game economy. Casuals can just sell everything they find.

Originally Posted by TheDeeGee

182K and slowly dropping.

Though i doubt it will ever get close to 110K again.

meant "When will it be available?" hehe my bad

WoW was worth playing while I could pay with gold. Essentially one in a pile of F2P games that I dabble with from time to time.

It definitely isn't worth a subscription anymore, though.

Originally Posted by Marrilaife

Most people who claim they quit wow because they can't afford token are people who treat wow as a f2p game they just have on their desktop but don't care much about.

[Citation needed]

I don't mean to be trite, but your sweeping generalizations callously disregard players I know who are deeply invested in the game despite only being able to sub through tokens. Maybe they're not "most people", but the way you used that term strongly indicated you didn't believe such people either existed or mattered in the slightest.

Originally Posted by Montegomery

I don't mean to be trite, but your sweeping generalizations callously disregard players I know who are deeply invested in the game despite only being able to sub through tokens. Maybe they're not "most people", but the way you used that term strongly indicated you didn't believe such people either existed or mattered in the slightest.

I was subbed through tokens as well, but people who are "deeply invested in the game" as you describe can go back to paying sub because they care about the game and because we paid sub for years before token was released. "Only being able to sub through tokens" must be some people who never played before tokens were released or what? People who say "if token goes this high, I quit" just don't think the game is worth a sub, they only tolerate it in f2p edition. They could pay it, but they don't want to. Especially the posts about how they won't give Blizzard their money because they don't agree with some dev decision etc.

I'm seriously baffled how people just paid a sub for 10 years and then tokens launched and there isn't a single day someone wouldn't be complaining it costs too much gold or begging for gold for token because his gametime is "ending soon". People are not entitled to tokens and have the game in f2p edition.

Deeply invested players who played wow for years know it's a sub based game and are used to treat it as such. If you have some sad story of sudden impoverishment then it's the same as every other hobby. Can't afford cinema / restaurant / gym / clubbing etc. any more? Unfortunate, but you aren't entitled for free entry just because.

Those people exist, but are rare, and since Blizzard is a business, not charity, token was never planned as a "welfare sub" but as an extra avenue of profit.

WOW even when sub based is still a cheap form of entertainment because 1 month of WOW costs as much as 1 evening somewhere else (cinema / restaurant / club etc.) and for example single player games often cost 40-60$ and you consume them in few days, very few last for weeks or have much replayability value. Obviously we're talking here about developed countries because WOW requires stable internet connection which already excludes parts of the world that don't have access to it.

People who pay gametime through tokens are a minority, among that minority those who can't go back to sub if they wanted are even smaller minority. If people could get gold for token with barely any effort they did so, so they have extra savings to buy another beer or pizza.

A very dedicated player that is indeed "forced to" use tokens can use their skills to do some homework on WOW economy and find ways to make that extra gold. Many people were just relying on lazy gold like garrisons / order hall missions, farming old raids etc. and then throwing tantrums they "have to" do an extra hour of "chores" to afford rising token prices.

So generally people have options:
- find ways to make extra gold in wow
- find ways to save 15$ / 13eu a month for a sub
- quit wow because they cba neither of the above (= not a dedicated player)

Tbh there's nothing wrong with quitting wow because someone doesn't have time any more or just doesn't like the game anymore. What's wrong is people throwing tantrums, empty threats and generally behaving as if token was welfare and they were entitled to receive it. Also making grand claims how high token prices will de-populate wow and so on. I'm sure majority of players does not use tokens, neither sell or buy. Don't have statistics to prove it, just general idea among my friends or guildies most of them don't use either option, only a handful people do. That's why I say, minority.

Even in countries where you can't use sub, like Greece, because their credit cards aren't internationally usable because of EU financial restrictions, most people buy gamecards from shops instead of using token.

Originally Posted by Thrackerzod

The prices are set by supply and demand. If a lot of people are buying them but the supply is low the price goes up. When the Battle.net balance thing went live everyone and their grandma rushed buy as many as they could and the price skyrocketed because there weren't enough available. Once they hit 115k people started buying tokens with cash to sell for gold and the price is starting to drop again. It will stabilize eventually but it will probably never go as low as 60k again.

True supply based economics are the way it should work. But, we all know that isn't what happened here. Blizzard sets the price, not the market. Blizzard made an announcement, then artificially raised gold prices on the AH to create interest from cash buyers hoping to make huge profits in game. If people were to refuse to pay the price on the AH then Blizz would be forced to either lower the price or make changes to the token system.

Look at it this way; 48 hours ago 60K gold was equivalent to a steak dinner at Applebees ($20), today 60K gold is equivalent of a value meal at McDonalds ($8).

Monopoly money. That being said...

I think this will actually have the inverse effect of increasing the value of gold. Everyone freaks out dumps gold on game time increasing the price 100%.
Personally IDGAF. I have millions rotting on servers and I also have a job. $13 a month is a joke. Most of the 12 years I've played I've been paying for 2x accounts anyway. If tokens remain at ~90k I would probably just pay $13 or quit. Game is depressingly bad anyway. Legendaries and loot in general has just removed any fun I used to have playing. I used to think the artifact system was cool/interesting but now I've come to realize it's just a way to shackle us to a specialization and add a few new talent/abilities without making them baseline.

It basically boils down to whether or not people are willing to pay this new artificially inflated price. 90-100k a month is still probably easy to make, but so is $13-15. With the way things currently are, I'm inclined to play less; not more to try and make up the difference. If they are going to demand double for game time I expect a proportionate increase in the quality and content of the game and I'm not seeing that; just more ways to fish for money so they can add skins to Overwatch (where WoW subscription fees go anyway).

So when do EU get Battle.net Balance?

"It will stabilize eventually but it will probably never go as low as 60k again."

Well it didn't take long for me to be proven wrong on that, it's already down to 65k again and still dropping.

Originally Posted by TheDeeGee

182K and slowly dropping.

Though i doubt it will ever get close to 110K again.

Well, it did. But once it gets close to that line people started buying the token for gold cause they have been like you....so it went up again at 115k. Watch the same happening when it gets close to 200k today(likely around 190-195k). The question is where it will stand when the extreme ups and downs(due to high demand) are over. The demand should be gone for quite some time...and during the last months the price was only rising due to smart people expecting the demand to go up now(I'm still sitting on 5 months game time here). So it's possible that it will drop quite a bit below the 100k line in march/april.

Originally Posted by Thrackerzod

"It will stabilize eventually but it will probably never go as low as 60k again."

Well it didn't take long for me to be proven wrong on that, it's already down to 65k again and still dropping.

It's never dropped like this before; only ever dropped a bit to skyrocket back up past its previous high point.
This smells like Blizzard have fixed it themselves. Now if only they could equalise the cost across all regions so that my race changes aren't twice as expensive as America.

Originally Posted by Blayze

It's never dropped like this before; only ever dropped a bit to skyrocket back up past its previous high point.
This smells like Blizzard have fixed it themselves. Now if only they could equalise the cost across all regions so that my race changes aren't twice as expensive as America.

Nah
it's just a logical reaction.

1) People see this news and suddenly the demand on the tokens skyrockets.
2) Now everyone gets word of the ability to convert money to a lot of gold so a lot of people invest in tokens and put them on sale, or wait for prices to peak.
3) Prices peaked and start dropping due to demand on them slowing down. Either people who wanted them already have the tokens to convert to BNet currency; or they simply find prices to be too high.
4) As a result everyone who still has tokens starts flooding the market seeing as prices are going down again.
5) There is now a huge supply of tokens on the market and the demand slowed down.

So now it's just waiting for people to start buying tokens again and the prices will go up again.
It's pretty natural to have this eb and flow shockwave effect after a change like this.

Plus blizzard doesn't really benefit from changing something on their end. It's a supply and demand system, so it will always balance itself. In the end they are always the winners anyway, they just made a ton of profit. No gold is created with this whole process so there is no influx of gold, if anything you're more likely to see a bit of gold flow from rich players to poorer players with IRL cash. It's win-win.

EDIT: In fact EU prices are rising again. And US prices have already bottomed out; probably going to rise again as well.
It's very likely there will be another "sine wave" in the prices (albeit a smaller one), before it settles a bit.

I want change race to Orc Blizz pls