Blizzard stance on gold inflation and AH mount being to common

[Sámsa]

Removing it just forces people who really want it to buy tokens via real money. Hence profit for Blizzard

[Corroc]

So the whole OP of this thread is completely based on misconceptions. Most likely because his english is not that good.

-They never said Brutosaur was too common, they said they want it have more prestige on it. Two completely different things
-OP says blizzard is hypocrite for talking about gold inflation while introducing wod garrison and legion. Blizzard never actually talked about gold inflation until wod and legion.
-Blizzard solution to inflation wasn't expensive mounts, it was cutting down the gold sources. Source: https://wowtoken.info/

Wow token is a good overall indicator of how much money is in the market available for players. People buy wow tokens from ah and the price will go up. If people dont buy them its because its too expensive.

[LordVargK]

So the whole OP of this thread is completely based on misconceptions. Most likely because his english is not that good.

-They never said Brutosaur was too common, they said they want it have more prestige on it. Two completely different things
-OP says blizzard is hypocrite for talking about gold inflation while introducing wod garrison and legion. Blizzard never actually talked about gold inflation until wod and legion.
-Blizzard solution to inflation wasn't expensive mounts, it was cutting down the gold sources. Source: https://wowtoken.info/

They said they don't want it to be too common like the Mammoth. And that implies that they fear that the current price will be very easy to achieve in the future. And the current tokenprice (very low) implies, that more gold is flushed into the economy than there is taken out, as there seems to be an oversupply so the price stays close to the bottom threshold (which i think exists).

[Corroc]

They said they don't want it to be too common like the Mammoth. And that implies that they fear that the current price will be very easy to achieve in the future. And the current tokenprice (very low) implies, that more gold is flushed into the economy than there is taken out, as there seems to be an oversupply so the price stays close to the bottom threshold.

Not wanting something to be too common =/= something being too common

You are reading the wow token price incorrectly. Token price is down if there is lack gold in the economy, because people buy tokens from the shop and the token price goes down if there are more people buying tokens from shop compared to ingame. When people buy tokens ingame the price goes up. You can see this in August and November. August was classic release, those people with surplus of gold bought game time to play it instead of paying for it. November was Blizzcon and release of new expansion. Every time something new gets introduced in the shop people use excess ingame gold to buy blizzard balance with tokens to buy the new game.

[Marrilaife]

Elite pvp sets.
Like these badass sets

Funnily Blizzard was toying with the idea of bringing them back purchasable for people who have elite pvp rating now and not only in the past and they were met with a big wall of NO from the pvp community.

You can blame pvpers for that, not Blizzard.

Personally I have no idea why every mythic transmog and mount is still grindable to this day, many for trivial effort, but pvpers get their special snowflake status "get it now or never".

- - - Updated - - -

And the current tokenprice (very low) implies, that more gold is flushed into the economy than there is taken out, as there seems to be an oversupply so the price stays close to the bottom threshold (which i think exists).

Completely wrong. There's no bottom threshold, tokens were worth as little as 25k in WOD, but the economy changed since then.

Second "very low" price implies that there are more people buying gold (poor in game) than people selling gold (rich in game). Oversupply comes from people who don't have gold, but have 20$ and want to have gold.

[kaminaris]

It's also bad for returning players. For instance, avid WoW fans who might be on deployment without access to the game for long periods of time.

The entire concept of protecting special snowflake elitism and exclusivity is bad for the game in general. But Blizzard appears to be banking on the idea of entrenching their super hard-core fans even more than they already are, I guess.

Yeah it is, while I have 36 mage towers I feel bad for my friend who took a break during entire legion, and is now sad because he missed it.
Mythic raider with a top notch skills yet a collector with over 1000 unique pets, tons of transmogs, tons of mounts.
He will never be able to get it even if he has the skills to complete these towers without any nerfs.

[SirCowdog]

Yeah it is, while I have 36 mage towers I feel bad for my friend who took a break during entire legion, and is now sad because he missed it.
Mythic raider with a top notch skills yet a collector with over 1000 unique pets, tons of transmogs, tons of mounts.
He will never be able to get it even if he has the skills to complete these towers without any nerfs.

I've said this before, but I strongly believe the barrier should not be WHEN you play, but how well you play. Whether that play is represented in the amount of time you have available to throw at a problem, or raw skill at videogames, the barrier remains available to overcome.

I understand why Blizzard does it the way they do. Fear of Missing Out is a powerful motivator. It drives sales and subscriptions by preying on the herd/tribe mentality of human beings. A person badly wants to be part of something, and when there's an exclusive group of us vs them, haves and have-nots, those that are IN the group get a powerful feeling of superiority.

But that's divisive. Every time Blizzard does this it splits the community into smaller and smaller groups. And by removing ANY possibility of future access to those groups, it becomes non-sustainable.

It's short term, short-sighted gains at the expense of long-term health. It's probably a major contributing factor to the steady decline of WoW's player count(as far as we know, and can predict from before Blizz released sub numbers, but also estimated from twitch views and server pop addons).

But that's the state of the industry. You can see the same methods and formulas throughout the AAA scene. And they wouldn't be doing it if it didn't work.

[THEORACLE64]

First of all, here is the link: https://blue.mmo-champion.com/topic/...inable-in-901/

I just haft to laugh. Cause in the next expansion I would bet money, that a new game-changing gold sink will appear. They are a bunch of hypocrites. First he says they want a slow amount of gold inflation, but then they make game systems (First being soloing raids for a lot of gold, later WOD and legion table missions and world quests etc) that creates inflation problems, and their solution is making things on a vendor cost a lot.

Im sorry, but damn. I can understand they dont like having Brutosaur everywhere (Removes the snowflake concept, which I personally dont care too much about), but to remove it cause of there own created problems`? I personally make a lot of gold in wow, so I bought it a long time ago, but people who want it 1-10?? years from now will always feel like they missed out. I have this feeling with say the MOP molten core anniversary event - I unsubbed for a short while it was going on, kinda didnt follow the wow news cycle in time, and poof...Nope, no core mount for you, cause Blizzard think its good design to remove content.

You still have ~9 months left to get it though, it's really not that hard.

[Marrilaife]

I understand why Blizzard does it the way they do. Fear of Missing Out is a powerful motivator. It drives sales and subscriptions by preying on the herd/tribe mentality of human beings. A person badly wants to be part of something, and when there's an exclusive group of us vs them, haves and have-nots, those that are IN the group get a powerful feeling of superiority.

That's because they have 2 marketing goals that are in conflict with each other: 1) attract new & returning player 2) retain current subscriber. The more they did to make it easier to jump in for new & returning players, the more current subscribers started asking themselves whether it's worth it being subbed 12 months a year, especially if they were on the more casual side and the game didn't provide them incentives to stay subbed outside of big patch launch months. So they started employing tactics to prevent people from unsubbing, especially during content droughts that were always prime candidate to take time off.

Path of Exile is employing EXACTLY the same strat. Wanna return? You can jump back in every season. But if you don't play in a season? Bam, exclusive season rewards are gone, FOREVER. It's not like Diablo where old rewards are recycled. Tbh Hearthstone employed the same strats (I'm not playing anymore so no idea if it changed). It had EXCLUSIVE card backs and hero skins you could only get during specific month / year / seasonal event.

But yeah, BFA was really heavy on "pls don't unsub" tricks, 2 promos for 6 month sub with mount, new RAF that instead of 2-3 month requires 12 for full rewards (nevermind people found ways to cheese it with 12 accounts, not sure if Blizzard predicted that, especially since they already put a cap of 4 accounts RAFed to 1), and now "limited offer" longboi.

That's outside of standard "time limited" items like the pre-BFA mounts from the pre-patch event, seasonal pvp rewards, now season 4 will have mount both for keystone master season 4 and for curve in the new raid, bet both going away with Shadowlands.

Tbh, stuff like Legion gold missions being especially buffed in 7.3 was imo one of these "tricks" to make people not unsub or miss out (a mountain of gold this time).

[SirCowdog]

That's because they have 2 marketing goals that are in conflict with each other: 1) attract new & returning player 2) retain current subscriber. The more they did to make it easier to jump in for new & returning players, the more current subscribers started asking themselves whether it's worth it being subbed 12 months a year, especially if they were on the more casual side and the game didn't provide them incentives to stay subbed outside of big patch launch months. So they started employing tactics to prevent people from unsubbing, especially during content droughts that were always prime candidate to take time off.

Path of Exile is employing EXACTLY the same strat. Wanna return? You can jump back in every season. But if you don't play in a season? Bam, exclusive season rewards are gone, FOREVER. It's not like Diablo where old rewards are recycled. Tbh Hearthstone employed the same strats (I'm not playing anymore so no idea if it changed). It had EXCLUSIVE card backs and hero skins you could only get during specific month / year / seasonal event.

But yeah, BFA was really heavy on "pls don't unsub" tricks, 2 promos for 6 month sub with mount, new RAF that instead of 2-3 month requires 12 for full rewards (nevermind people found ways to cheese it with 12 accounts, not sure if Blizzard predicted that, especially since they already put a cap of 4 accounts RAFed to 1), and now "limited offer" longboi.

That's outside of standard "time limited" items like the pre-BFA mounts from the pre-patch event, seasonal pvp rewards, now season 4 will have mount both for keystone master season 4 and for curve in the new raid, bet both going away with Shadowlands.

Tbh, stuff like Legion gold missions being especially buffed in 7.3 was imo one of these "tricks" to make people not unsub or miss out (a mountain of gold this time).

I brought this up in a response to...I think it was Felplague... But the only real problem is the PERMANENT removal of access to "exclusive" items. Other formats can be used to create a sense of urgency to attain the items, while not completely removing the ability to ever make further attempts. Seasonal lockouts which are a year long, for instance.

I prefer skill-based locks, but that would require Blizzard to keep the barrier of challenge up to par against a constantly shifting level of power that players have each patch. And the challenge need not always be exactly the same. Something like the Challenge Mode Dungeons in MoP were a decent barrier, but perhaps access to those same rewards could be made available through defeating a certain high-level M+ dungeon today. That sort of thing. So long as the level of difficulty is similar, it's not terribly important that it perfectly recreate it. Only that the player is required to overcome a high bar.

But given the apparent targeting of whales, and Allen Adham's stated intent to move into the mobile market(which is known to use every exploitative trick in the book), I don't see Blizzard deviating from their current formula. As long as people keep throwing money at them, they'll keep doing it.

[LordVargK]

Funnily Blizzard was toying with the idea of bringing them back purchasable for people who have elite pvp rating now and not only in the past and they were met with a big wall of NO from the pvp community.

You can blame pvpers for that, not Blizzard.

Personally I have no idea why every mythic transmog and mount is still grindable to this day, many for trivial effort, but pvpers get their special snowflake status "get it now or never".

- - - Updated - - -

Completely wrong. There's no bottom threshold, tokens were worth as little as 25k in WOD, but the economy changed since then.

Second "very low" price implies that there are more people buying gold (poor in game) than people selling gold (rich in game). Oversupply comes from people who don't have gold, but have 20$ and want to have gold.

Who buys tokens at 25k value....

[Seramore]

Not sure I get your point.

You had it for an entire expac. It's available to anyone who wants to buy it today. I'm glad they aren't common cause it would be a mess. And now they are becoming less common going forward, which in turn appropriately rewards the people who actually played in BFA.

Did I miss something there? Seems aok to me.

gatekeeping vendor mounts weirdchamp

[FelPlague]

You dont see a problem >.<? The only reason why it exsist is because of Blizzards own created problems, by having poor game design that increased inflation since MOP. And then there soloution is to remove the souloution to said problem. Never remove collectibles from wow should be obvious game design by now.

it should and blizzard has tried, but the try hard elitist community refuses that, and wants blizz to add MORE AND MORE AND MORE thing that are time limited.

[Schizoide]

gold inflation occurred prior to MOP,

Of course it did, but that was moderate and reasonable. WoD/Legion table missions were completely insane.

[Marrilaife]

Who buys tokens at 25k value....

Look it up, it's the lowest historical value it ever had on US, early after implementation, back in WOD. Ofc lots have changed since then.

[LordVargK]

Look it up, it's the lowest historical value it ever had on US, early after implementation, back in WOD. Ofc lots have changed since then.

yeah, i've looked it up, you are absolutely right. I just could not believe someone would be soo... let's say rich that he would pay 20$ for 25k gold! that's 16$ for the Mammoth
And in WoD of all things, where gold was flowing to you left an right.

[Relapses]

yeah, i've looked it up, you are absolutely right. I just could not believe someone would be soo... let's say rich that he would pay 20$ for 25k gold! that's 16$ for the Mammoth
And in WoD of all things, where gold was flowing to you left an right.

I bought more than a dozen tokens back in WoD at this value because I could be arsed to play the dumb fucking Facebook game that was Garrisons. /shrug

[LordVargK]

I bought more than a dozen tokens back in WoD at this value because I could be arsed to play the dumb fucking Facebook game that was Garrisons. /shrug

Well, yeah. I feel you, garrisons felt fun at first, but were a real dumb chore soon enough. But I just unsubbed after two months of WoD instead of donating Blizz even more money for a lackluster gaming experience...

[Marrilaife]

yeah, i've looked it up, you are absolutely right. I just could not believe someone would be soo... let's say rich that he would pay 20$ for 25k gold! that's 16$ for the Mammoth
And in WoD of all things, where gold was flowing to you left an right.

Well back then gold had different worth, it happened before WOD ended and Legion happened, and it's mostly Legion that pushed hyper inflation (token on EU during Legion peak price was around ~400k, can't remember exact value).

Just saying 200k or so is definitely not the "price floor" for tokens, it just looks "cheap" compared to Legion because deflation happened in BFA.

[sam86]

Can't make token "worth more" without injecting gold into economy or reworking how token works.

Legion gave players gold = token gold value went up
BFA cut the gold income = token dropped a whopping 50% in value and only regained a bit of it more than a year later... nowhere close to legion value.

If they make a lot of people buy token for gold to afford the longboi, guess what, the gold value of token will drop even further due to increased supply.

u r right, no idea why i thought exact opposite -.-