WOW- Now pay to win?

[SirCowdog]

I find trying to infer things to a system we only have guess work to go on to be perilous.

This is my point.

Claiming that BOEs aren't effecting the price is just as inaccurate as claiming that they are.

[Lorgar Aurelian]

Go up to any *stupid* advertiser that asks you to join a sykpe call / discord, then suddenly receive a Gladiator Mount / Raid boost a few weeks later without any gold leaving your account.
You and anyone involved will be banned.

That's why boosters want to get in touch with people outside of Battle-net, because there Blizzard cannot track their communication.
If no suspicious chat logs exists, it is by default very difficult for Blizzard to prove there was Real money compensation, unless they modify Warden to track all of your activities, but then Blizzard will have one huge lawsuit coming their way.

I'm not saying Blizzard is doing everything in their power to stop them, but saying they're just looking the other way is far from the truth.

Blizzard like any one else getting a cut takes a token effort to make it seem like they are against the acts. In the end though if your giving them money and plausible deniability they’ll give you a free pass, I mean there is a reason the Chinese have been able to make businesses off of gold farming even though shutting down mass gathers like that would be relatively easily.

[Tident]

This is my point.

Claiming that BOEs aren't effecting the price is just as inaccurate as claiming that they are.

I agree with this. I do take issue with just how powerful those boes are but that has less to do with the boes and more to do with how poorly thought out corruption appears to be.

At least I want to believe it was poorly thought out... a cynical part of me is wondering if it was a push to try and inject more token sales...

It will really come done to what the shadow lands systems look like for me personally to judge one way or the other.

[Lochton]

genius argument

What? Short and clear wasn't enough?

You aren't paying Blizzard to 'win'. You are paying another player with gold. That gold could come from a token, which you again, bought from another player.

[Lolites]

This also assumes blizzard doesn't have a hand on the wheel so to speak.

I find trying to infer things to a system we only have guess work to go on to be perilous.

well given the price trend behaves exactly as expected by economic principles, it seems kinda reasonable to assume blizz doesnt interfere, especialy since they would want to tilt it towards their benefit, not manipulate it so it behaves as it should without interference...

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Gosh, I don't know, maybe because you'd care to test your own experiences vs those of other perspectives?

if i showed you picture of green skies would you go "oh, so i was wrong my whole life, sky is in fact green not blue" OR would you think "huh, this picture is probably photoshoped"?
i would choose the second option, and trust my own eyes over "dude trust me", but you do you, ill stick to reality thank you

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https://wowtoken.info/

The same trends exist prior to 8.3. The existence of corruption BoE did not significantly impact token prices. Again you keep claiming their is a boogeyman under the bed just to further a viewpoint that is not backed up with easily verifiable information. It is also highly amusing you can say you can speculate with some certainty while saying that you can't possibly say with certainty. Make up your mind.

dont bother, his opinion is more to him than reality, already ignored him, key to hapiness is not to argue with morons

[Tident]

well given the price trend behaves exactly as expected by economic principles, it seems kinda reasonable to assume blizz doesnt interfere, especialy since they would want to tilt it towards their benefit, not manipulate it so it behaves as it should without interference...

Yet they have interfered in the past. They limited the amount of tokens one may purchase and are on record of saying they will ensure certain caps and quotas are kept with their announcements.

I am skeptical that blizzard doesn't push token sales. I find it hard to believe the ah mount being removed or a string of expensive rep mounts are not their way of pushing sales.

I am just skeptical they purposely jeopardized game balance to achieve it. Right now at least I am going to assume incompetence over malice. Shadow lands I believe will reveal with certainty what one it is.

[Lolites]

Yet they have interfered in the past. They limited the amount of tokens one may purchase and are on record of saying they will ensure certain caps and quotas are kept with their announcements.

I am skeptical that blizzard doesn't push token sales. I find it hard to believe the ah mount being removed or a string of expensive rep mounts are not their way of pushing sales.

I am just skeptical they purposely jeopardized game balance to achieve it. Right now at least I am going to assume incompetence over malice. Shadow lands I believe will reveal with certainty what one it is.

but they didnt really interfere, they did some design/busines choices that IMPACTED the price, thats a bit different

[Chronic]

I see 475ilvl items with socket and good corruption for like 2-3 million on the AH. So now ppl buy wow tokens for real life money and then buy this items...

Is this good gameplay or not? Pay to win?

Blizzard probly happy about it as they earn more $$$




EDIT: What i mean by p2w is win the damage meter. More dps make dungeon/raid/pvp easyer. One with buyed BIS for real life money VS one with no corrupt or a bad one. Who would you put your money on? Who would you like to have in your raid/dungeon/arena. Also my english are pretty bad so sorry for not explaining so all understand. I did my best, sorry.


VERY funny thing is that i asked both if its good gameplay and if its P2W. None/few answer if its good gameplay. All get stuck if its P2W instead. Ppl are funny

Put down your tinfoil hat and stfu.

[Tident]

but they didnt really interfere, they did some design/busines choices that IMPACTED the price, thats a bit different

It's a difficult argument to have. In pvp and high level pve corruption is a game defining power boost outside of it I would offer its neglectful.

Its impact depends on your goal.

[Eurhetemec]

I am skeptical that blizzard doesn't push token sales. I find it hard to believe the ah mount being removed or a string of expensive rep mounts are not their way of pushing sales.

I could totally believe this if the prices of rep mounts hovered around the prices (in tokens to gold) of shop mounts, but they don't. The rep mounts are vastly more expensive. I mean, even the good ol' 500k Lightforged Destroyer or whatever it's called is 2.5 tokens in EU, 3.3 in US (so let's call it 3) which is MAD money. And they're £17 (GBP, I'll stay in that for simplicity). Shop mounts are only £19, except for the one which is £27. So the Lightforged Destroyer is 3x the price - £51, and still well over double even if you don't account for how much you have to spend.

And the Caravan Brutosaur is 10x that price - 5 MILLION gold. In EU that's 25 WoW tokens. 17 x 25 = £425. I mean what?

Is there someone out there who will spend that cash? Sure. But I think if we surveyed all Brutosaur owners, somehow truthfully, we'd find 99%+ of them did not use WoW tokens to get them, neither in whole or in part. Indeed on the contrary I suspect the sort of people who own Brutosaurs are the sort of people who buy WoW tokens WITH gold, to pay their subs.

In short, WoW tokens are just not a great value proposal compared to the prices WoW is asking for things. You could buy literally every mount in the shop for £293. I'm pretty sure cash sinks are cash sinks. Especially given I know how much money some people are throwing around regularly, and it ain't from tokens.

I am just skeptical they purposely jeopardized game balance to achieve it. Right now at least I am going to assume incompetence over malice. Shadow lands I believe will reveal with certainty what one it is.

Yeah I tend to agree here. We shall see but I think it's unlikely it was intentional as the long-term sub-loss if players generally saw WoW as clearly "P2W" (not just some weird raiding insanity) would probably not justify whatever gain there was.

[SirCowdog]

if i showed you picture of green skies would you go "oh, so i was wrong my whole life, sky is in fact green not blue" OR would you think "huh, this picture is probably photoshoped"?

i would choose the second option, and trust my own eyes over "dude trust me", but you do you, ill stick to reality thank you

That highly depends on WHO is showing me the picture. Your example is complete hyperbole and extreme. But lets run with it for the sake of argument. Say an astronaught, who's actually been into orbit and has experience and knowledge I don't. That astronaut shows me a picture of earth from orbit, where the sky is actually green. It may appear blue from my perspective, but actually isn't.

This is a form of what actually happens in reality. We look up and see a blue sky. But our atmosphere is not actually blue. It just appears that way because:

"Blue light is scattered in all directions by the tiny molecules of air in Earth's atmosphere. Blue is scattered more than other colors because it travels as shorter, smaller waves. This is why we see a blue sky most of the time. Closer to the horizon, the sky fades to a lighter blue or white." - https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/blue-sky/en/

But you're sitting here looking up at the sky saying that the expert opinion just doesn't matter because it MIGHT be influenced by possible monetization and because your own experience tells you otherwise.

This is not some random scrub making wild claims. This is a guy who lives and breathes mythic raiding. Logs, calculations, sims, real life experiments, tests on the beta and PTR, etc, etc, etc.

I don't know why you have such an aversion to this. You've already spent more time replying to me than the watching the video would take. But you'd rather ignore expert, tested opinions based on actual high-end data where the margins of performance really matter, in favor of your own anecdotal random experiences with random people with no control. At best your sample size is so small as to be worthless.

So like I said. Enjoy your time with your head in the sand.

[Tident]

I could totally believe this if the prices of rep mounts hovered around the prices (in tokens to gold) of shop mounts, but they don't. The rep mounts are vastly more expensive. I mean, even the good ol' 500k Lightforged Destroyer or whatever it's called is 2.5 tokens in EU, 3.3 in US (so let's call it 3) which is MAD money. And they're £17 (GBP, I'll stay in that for simplicity). Shop mounts are only £19, except for the one which is £27. So the Lightforged Destroyer is 3x the price - £51, and still well over double even if you don't account for how much you have to spend.

And the Caravan Brutosaur is 10x that price - 5 MILLION gold. In EU that's 25 WoW tokens. 17 x 25 = £425. I mean what?

Is there someone out there who will spend that cash? Sure. But I think if we surveyed all Brutosaur owners, somehow truthfully, we'd find 99%+ of them did not use WoW tokens to get them, neither in whole or in part. Indeed on the contrary I suspect the sort of people who own Brutosaurs are the sort of people who buy WoW tokens WITH gold, to pay their subs.

In short, WoW tokens are just not a great value proposal compared to the prices WoW is asking for things. You could buy literally every mount in the shop for £293. I'm pretty sure cash sinks are cash sinks. Especially given I know how much money some people are throwing around regularly, and it ain't from tokens.



Yeah I tend to agree here. We shall see but I think it's unlikely it was intentional as the long-term sub-loss if players generally saw WoW as clearly "P2W" (not just some weird raiding insanity) would probably not justify whatever gain there was.

It is slightly off topic but I think the mounts are blizzard's way of going after whales. I could very well be wrong it is just a personal opinion.

I think we agree on the corruption mishaps though.

[rhorle]

Yet they have interfered in the past. They limited the amount of tokens one may purchase and are on record of saying they will ensure certain caps and quotas are kept with their announcements.

Where is this "record" of quotas and caps tied to announcements? Yes they limit how many tokens one can purchase in a certain period of time. But it is high enough where it isn't really a concern for most people. I am only aware of them having a limit on price swings which exist to stop the market from crashing and if I recall correctly they update every hour.

We know they don't "push" token sales. Because the price of tokens did not drastically change with the announcement of the AH mount disappearing. You are also completely ignore that the AH mount, and the expensive rep mounts, are gold sinks. They are there to try and drain the huge inflation that WoD and Legion added to the game through passive means like the Mission Table.

[Tident]

Where is this "record" of quotas and caps tied to announcements? Yes they limit how many tokens one can purchase in a certain period of time. But it is high enough where it isn't really a concern for most people. I am only aware of them having a limit on price swings which exist to stop the market from crashing and if I recall correctly they update every hour.

We know they don't "push" token sales. Because the price of tokens did not drastically change with the announcement of the AH mount disappearing. You are also completely ignore that the AH mount, and the expensive rep mounts, are gold sinks. They are there to try and drain the huge inflation that WoD and Legion added to the game through passive means like the Mission Table.

It was mentioned in the posts tied to the announcement of them. As for the mounts I honestly believe they are more targeted towards whales then gold hoarders but its speculation I can't prove it I can only tell you what I suspect. If it was meant as a gold sink removing it is counter productive as it takes it away from future purchasers.

[Darkeon]

im runing m+ and cleared hc nyalotha, usualy topping the dps meters, on some bosses that need more movement i go lower (as im a dk) but i have never been out of top 5 dps in raid or worst dps in dung, yet i only have corruptions for +stats... so either those "amazing" corruptions dont give so much edge or almost nobody have them, so in either way it doesnt seem to have such huge impact as some people suggest...

i know people runing mythic world first race spent crapload of money on them, but for them even 0.1% increase makes a difference...

True that, I'm convinced. I'm indeed more likely to believe your word for it than of the countless sims and numbers readily available online. Corruptions don't affect the numbers in the game all that much. Thank you random forum guy.

[Eurhetemec]

It is slightly off topic but I think the mounts are blizzard's way of going after whales. I could very well be wrong it is just a personal opinion.

I'm sure someone has literally done that - bought 25 tokens, put them up, bought a Brutosaur. People are ridiculous.

But bear in mind you can only buy 10 tokens for RL money/week (and you can only hold 10, too). Thus this isn't something a whale can just casually do. They have to keep at it for three weeks. It's not an "impulse buy". And whale-hunting is all about the impulse buys. The one click buys. That's how they get people - you only need to briefly convince someone that they need your $500 supporter pack for them to press buy and it to be done. But if you need them to click 25 times over three weeks, the chances of them going "Actually maybe not..." are incalculably higher. It's a totally different scenario. And you can't buy it installments. So I think very, very few people will have done that.

I don't think these limits and prices are an accident. I don't think most players who have "theories" in this thread are aware of the limits. The details are here: https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-us/ne...tional-details

[Kralljin]

Is there someone out there who will spend that cash? Sure. But I think if we surveyed all Brutosaur owners, somehow truthfully, we'd find 99%+ of them did not use WoW tokens to get them, neither in whole or in part.

I mean, whether those mounts are there to boost token sales or not is debatable, yet removing the Brutosaur has no precendence, Goldsink mounts were not removed previously, which just screams Disney vault to me.

[SirCowdog]

a cynical part of me is wondering if it was a push to try and inject more token sales....

We know for a fact that high-end guilds aiming for world first were going out of their way to buy all the available BOEs. This would have the dual effect of both improving their own performance, and to stunt the performance of competitors by draining the market of available upgrades. Granted, this is only a handful of guilds. But that handful of guilds was having an extreme impact on the available supply for the duration of the world first race. Enough so that some of the less wealthy competitors weren't able to keep up.

This probably wasn't enough to make a significant impact on the scale of the world market for token prices, but it almost certainly caused a small spike from that added activity during that period of time.

If anything, I think it would be more accurate to say that the BOEs were released in this manner to add another aspect to the world first race. Since we know that Blizzard still marginally cares about the esports events like this(although less than they used to).

It's just very difficult for me to believe that this wasn't a calculated move. Blizzard has access to so much data and so many metrics for determining things like this, that it's almost impossible for me to believe that they didn't do it on purpose.

[rhorle]

It was mentioned in the posts tied to the announcement of them. As for the mounts I honestly believe they are more targeted towards whales then gold hoarders but its speculation I can't prove it I can only tell you what I suspect. If it was meant as a gold sink removing it is counter productive as it takes it away from future purchasers.

https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-us/ne...-the-wow-token

Nope try again. Provide a record or stop claiming they said something.

Removing it is not counter productive to being a gold sink. Because they can always add a new gold sink. Besides if it was targeted towards whales then removing it is counter productive for the same reason as the gold sink. And it wouldn't be tied to token prices because whales would have bought the mount if they wanted it anyways.

[Kralljin]

It's just very difficult for me to believe that this wasn't a calculated move. Blizzard has access to so much data and so many metrics for determining things like this, that it's almost impossible for me to believe that they didn't do it on purpose.

While i usually believe that large companies don't leave any sort of profit up to chance, i think this time i'll apply Honlons Razor (Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.).

Let Shadowlands be the judge of that, if they repeat it, it sure as hell is not a coincidence.