Would removing the wow token be better for the health of the game?

[Niwes]

I noticed in my little side hobby I do at the end of an expansion ( leveling a fresh alt on a new realm without contacts) that th entry level for a lack of a better term has changed quite drastically.

There has never been this level of players selling services to one another in any point of the game and from being on the seller's side of it I honestly believe it is fueled by the wow token.

I'm just undecided if it is a bad thing or not... while buying your way to a geared character is now a option that many utilize you can still create your own pugs and clear content up to and including mythic although it is a bit harder the it used to be.

I don't really know if this is better or not... it's kind of why I made the thread. While this new normal seems a bit off to me it is allowing people to see content they never would before. While carry runs always existed it really wasn't till the token that the use of then exploded.

If you or for or against the token though can we all agree it would be nice if blizzard accepted the real life money community they created and made it it's own lfg channel to stop people spamming it else where though.?

it is one of the most bad things and i explain you why:

1)
Token is there for solely one reason. Money. Because Token is a so called smart cash grab system. Blizzard earns 7 bugs for free, for every Token ever passed the AH. Why ? Person A must buy a Token for 20 bugs. Blizzrad is +20 bugs. Person B buys this Token in AH and transfers his Gold to Person A. Person B pays his account with his new token. Blizzrad is -13. What happened in the end of the day? Gold and game economy wasnt hurt and same amount of gold in game is just on another person. Blizzard had to do nothing, no investment, and their automatic system earned 7 bugs for free.

2)
Blizzard will ever be focused on having a high Token usage. The more ppl buying tokens the more 7 bugs for free Blizz earns. Most ppl buy Token to get easy gold for in game activities. So, if you design a game that has a good use of gold, you sell Tokens. So Blizz design the game that paid runs profit players. Because the paid runs guild think „hey i dont have to pay my account when i get enough gold via runs“ while the other person has a good reason to buy a token for 20 bugs. This is why the game is designed like it is designed these days. You can think or read here a bit further then you realize why Blizz not offers the offset value knobs for Tokens, see old blue post and what happen when you control in and outcome of gold in a game and such a system. Blizz can exactly control how the game and the Token sales are behave and set the relation for max Token profit. Because they completely control how much gold is going into the game and how much out of it. But for most ppl these things are too complex. When you ask yourself why the game is designed like D3, this is the answer.

3)
Overall, in the first second, thats not something bad per se. Ok, companies maximizing their profit. Nothing new here. But the long term problem is: When you get a HUGE part of you profit out of meta systems instead of the product (and his quality itself) you get trained to not improve quality of product but feed this systems. Also this systems works best, when adapted and aiming to focus quarter numbers and by rotating steadily new player for 2-6 months through your game, instead of feeding your loyal customer base. in the end this means: Loyal customers are useless for you and high quality is useless for you. Normally this starts a downward spiral and the company milks this cow as long as they can and go backwards when the low quality of the product removed more players than you can earn with rotated 6months players and cash grab systems. also whena game has lost its base its unattractive for the 2-6 months playerrs you want. so this is what companies are trained to be good at these days, to find a fine line between both. its just economy math. most ppl dont understand this.

4)
so, why i said its most bad thing possible? because, we, as users, want a high quality product. we have not the same goals as blizz above. in times when companies made most profit with best product, both won. user had a good product and fun, company get rich. cash grab systems are the exact oposite and hurt a product long term. when you love wow, token is your enemy. because it helps killing what you love. everyday a thread pops up, why wow transmutated into the game it is today (and not everybody likes). this is the reason. this will work for retail, as long as the fine line mentioned above can hold it. for the others users Blizz offers WoW Classic. Smart bastards, eh ?

Personal)
where do this oppinion comin from? i do that shit since 20+ years and work in such companies. so i understand how it works. do you have to believe me ? hell, no. just think for yourself. it doesnt matter if ppl get whats going on or not. maybe for Blizz, but not for me. The game is what it is anyway. If i no longer like it, i can always leave. and i do not earn money, regardless if ppl understand it or not.

I am sorry for any bad english. I am (obviously) not a native english speaker and typed this on my phone in lunch time.

[Lightning-]

There is far more negattives than posittives. Lot of people what claims they play becouse of token mostly just lie in order to defend token existence. But if Blizzard would remove it they would complain, maybe like unsub for month or two and in moment anger will be gone they will sub again with real money. Nobady will quit their guild, friends and game they enyoj becouse they cant pay for it with gold. Its made up myth to justify token existence.

I'm talking from my point of view and my server. My server was pretty empty and the wow token did a ton for people to play again. For me it's more positive than negative.

[MightyWarrior]

you can get 500k for £32 instead of 300k for £34 in wow tokens from G2A

[Ihazpaws]

Yes remove token and put actual effort to stop bots and gold sellers.

[valky94]

no, as someone who was a student with a very tight budget until recently, ive been paying for my wow sub with gold since they have been introduced (payed with money only twice since then) i think that the token were one of the better decisions made by blizzard

[PenguinChan]

If Blizzard wanted to improve the value of gold for solo players they would've done that long ago. No, they're perfectly happy with a purposefully greedy system driven by laziness and smarter players abusing this. They get more money in the end by cutting out the middle man, and people are happier overall without actually doing anything about the gold problems directly.

[mojusk]

The question I keep wondering about is, who the hell is buying all this crap with money? Who spends the equivalent of $40 to buy an offhand weapon with the right corruption?

I also wonder about how reliable a revenue stream that is. In game I used to go nuts farming for the best boes and darkmoon trinks etc. but I eventually stopped because I got good enough that they weren't important.

you can compare it to a football player buying a pair of expensive boots a golfer a club, etc.
they buy it to be better at a game they enjoy playing.

[Gorsameth]

Other then boosts, do not underestimate how many people would stop playing WoW if they had to go back to paying with actual money.

[sam86]

yes it will, ppl who talk about 'carry' it was never as much as it became after token wow
I played on Ghostlands during wrath and was in one of top guilds (competing for top 3 trading positions with other guilds), never sold guild boost, and no one even cared to ask for it, i mean what u do with gold? u get enough to repair anyway
Then left in cata, back in MoP in server Bladefist, again no guild boost sell, heck i even organized a pug that successfully killed Garrosh hc (or mythic? hardest difficulty anyway) on my alt before leaving game
Then back in end of WoD on server Twisting Neither, and i find just boosts everywhere, almost no pugs, and pugs have insane requirements like head of curve or ilvl higher than what raid drops!
Token wow destroyed pugs, did boost exist pre-token? yes but i was very minor to non existing, it literally didn't exist in both older serves, and since i was one of top in wrath i'm confident that at least druing wrath guild boosts were extremely rare ( i know at most happened on 1 hand finger, and it wasn't our guild anyway )
Twisting Neither since 1st second i logged and they sell non stop boosts to collect gold to buy tokens, tokens f8cked wow, this is like making drugs legal because u can't stop illegal drug trafficking, next we will make slavery legal again since it exists now far more than history (in number, not % of course)

[Scathan]

There's already a special channel for selling services. It's called trade.

The reason there is more spam for the services was because in the past it was unclear on what blizzard thought of the practise. My guild sold runs in WotLK but it wasn't advertised that openly. People got suspended because "it looked like" we were buying gold. As soon as the token came out and blizzard openly said gold transactions were ok the spam started.

There always were and always will be this market. Having it out in the open is a good thing. TBH this thread seems kind of insincere and you actually don't like the practise. If you really are selling runs as you say then this type of insincerity is exactly the type of bullshit I expect from a seller. You might as well stop with the lies and just say what you really mean.

I hate the service. Its trashy and clogs my trade chat.

It's not wrong though.

[Nobleshield]

I'm not sure but at this point I'd rather have the gold sellers than the constant "WTS Heroic Nyalotha and M+ carries" every few seconds from the same people in Trade. At least the Gold Sellers didn't have multiple people doing it at once. The fact there's like 4-5 people constantly spamming it every few seconds is just, well, spam. Even worse are these "communities" that seemingly have someone on every server peddling their bullshit.

[Depakote]

Yes. Also removing Mythic in all of it's iterations, returning back to how Wrath gearing for pve worked with WoD PvP gearing. That truly was the best. Oh and while we're at it, get rid of instanced Ashran and replace it with the original version.

[Easyclassictopkeklel]

I noticed in my little side hobby I do at the end of an expansion ( leveling a fresh alt on a new realm without contacts) that th entry level for a lack of a better term has changed quite drastically.

There has never been this level of players selling services to one another in any point of the game and from being on the seller's side of it I honestly believe it is fueled by the wow token.

I'm just undecided if it is a bad thing or not... while buying your way to a geared character is now a option that many utilize you can still create your own pugs and clear content up to and including mythic although it is a bit harder the it used to be.

I don't really know if this is better or not... it's kind of why I made the thread. While this new normal seems a bit off to me it is allowing people to see content they never would before. While carry runs always existed it really wasn't till the token that the use of then exploded.

If you or for or against the token though can we all agree it would be nice if blizzard accepted the real life money community they created and made it it's own lfg channel to stop people spamming it else where though.?

Removing the wow token would result in less active players.
Otherwise it would change nothing for the good...

[Schizoide]

Yes, the game would be better without the token. It hasn't stopped foreign goldfarmers acting poorly, all it did was compromise the integrity of the game allowing people to trade real money for gold without fear of reprisal. And of course, made money for Activision.

[SkagenRora]

Why are people against the whole "Price tag on every thing in the game" any way.

Being able to get decent gear without struggles, Raid progression or frustration is one of the best things that ever happent to WoW for me.

[Depakote]

Yup, as an American, the sub price isn't high for me, I just cannot justify actually paying a sub for a game in 2020.

If the WoW token goes, the sub requirement needs to go as well.

There never has been a sub requirement. You know you can pay month to month, right?

[glowpipe]

no. Chinese gold sellers would come back in large heaps. spamming chats, hacking accounts to get gold etc etc. Fuck that noise

[classicjuice]

I think we'd see a noticeable drop off in the number of players. I personally know many people in my guild alone who don't pay a subscription due the token and have commented that if they were unable to afford it through gold they would likely just quit. I haven't paid my subscription since it launched and often use tokens for other WoW products. I recently started some horde toons to play with other friends and spent gold to buy the balance to transfer a low level alliance alt over with some gold for them.

Overall I do think it's a positive for the game. Most carries can't be done while the content is relevant anyway. Paying for a Heroic Nya'lotha carry today doesn't mean much, nor do 5 mask visions, nor does a +15 keystone.

I don't understand how tokens increase the subscription base. I mean they cost about 180-200k, maybe more - depending on server. A person can probably make more money IRL doing some side hustle in the same time it takes to farm fake in game currency.

[Usynligepind]

The question I keep wondering about is, who the hell is buying all this crap with money? Who spends the equivalent of $40 to buy an offhand weapon with the right corruption?

I have friends who pay this without blinking, as from their perspective - 1 hour work they get 80$. Compared to grinding your way to it which takes several days in played. This is very cheap. Just a matter of what you keep it relative to.

[Malix Farwin]

This game has a lot of problems, The wow token existing or going away has no change to the game. The problems you have with the game still exist with or without it so really do not see the point of removing it.