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Surprising results from the wow economy.

the base question we have to ask ourselves.

what is blizzard's goal, what are they trying to accomplish?

1--make a profit.
2--accommodate players who want to purchase gold and charging them a fee to cover their developer costs.
3--allow people to use ingame gold to pay their subs.

option 1 is pure.
option 2 is altruistic, for the greater good of the players
option 3 cost them money to keep servers going.

so ask yourself of those three, which do you think is in blizzards best interest?

you might say 'all three work together' but what if they could cut out option 3? sway the math so more players are buying gold, and less players are cashing in the tokens for gametime.

its in blizzards best interest to sell more tokens than are redeemed.
 
Well thats really hard! Because if we were asking ourselves the questions I'd say making the best game possible will net you the most profit(?) right I think in many cases, but not all.

The thing I do holeheartedly agree with you conspiracy guys on is that blizzard is controlling the entrance and exit processes. So they are definitely artificially controlling the process in some ways. If showing us the data made them look better and at the same time would make them more money they "maybe" would have done so already? Really hard to say its only been like what a few weeks? Maybe someday we will see data.

I just explicitly disagree that they are inserting tokens or sales into the process to control the prices. They are simply controlling the price of the token initially and the price of the token at sale in gold. While effectively this may result in a similar outcome to what you guys are saying. It is actually very different. I can't see them generating ghost tokens and sales as a matter of fact. Nobody here can present a single thread of evidence to that effect.

edit: but the thing is, for this to be region wide and fair this is probably the only way it could ever work. At some point the conversations will start shifting to the imbalance of gold value based on the server rather than the inherent problems in the price regulation... they know this so after second thought I think we may never see more data unfortunately.
 
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lets approach this from a different direction.

using the US graph, we can agree the graph looks spiky
the price of gold is fluctuating pretty regular within a couple %

if the transactions were transparent we could easily see the supply and demand following the token price. we could see the number of tokens available. and make assumptions such as 'hey 25 tokens were available, and 23 were sold, therefore supply and demand has shifted the price here'

but we see the price fluctuating back and forth very evenly over the course of a month. up, down, up, down. are we to believe the token availability keeps the same ratio over the course of a month?

lets say 10 tokens were purchased from the blizzstore and posted on the ah. 10 would have to be redeemed to keep the price fluctuation at 0%
can we actually believe the supply and demand is so consistent that the price goes up and down at a pretty consistent rate? how likely is that.
 
This is a much more even approach to look at this. I agree with transparency, but we've never really had any transparency. So I'm not sure if can actually use it as a factor(?) (I don't actually take this as serious as it sounds, this is just mildly interesting) I do think that the market for token buying with real cash and gold are limited to a certain subsets of wow players. That prices fluctuate based on peak play times kind of lends credibility to the supply and demand system they are putting forth. Not sure how else we should interpret the "spikes"? It would be more accurate to talk about them as peak and off peak times rather than being generic and saying spikey.

I completely agree with what your saying in your last paragraph as well and this is where I think we are finding the artificial control by blizzard. If it wasn't an artificial control I never would have been able to buy 18 tokens for the exact same price. The price should have changed for each and every token I purchased, it didn't and this is why I do agree they are artificially controlling it.

I just can't accept that they are ghosting tokens or sales. I don't inherently trust blizzard I just find that its much easier to place restrictions on fluctuation by locking the sale price at posting rather than on the fly, which seems to be what they do. Then factoring in time to sell it all feels roughly accurate when I look at the data. I don't get a feeling that a lot is off. I know thats silly, but if it was so ridiculous why were we all predicting 15k-25k in US markets? I even think I made a post (pre token sales) about how much more the tokens would cost in other regions because the amount of gold in the market is much greater.

I would love to provide exact numbers, but that isn't my area of expertise. I just go on my gut feeling and the 2 figures they do give us. I don't feel there is much going on aside from some very strict control over speed of the fluctuation in price.
 
i was going to respond, then i got bored. what else is there to talk about?
 
frosticus said:
i was going to respond, then i got bored. what else is there to talk about?
Click to expand...

thank god so did I.

Do you ever play DoTA 2? I can hardly be bothered with WoW anymore... I mean it has its moments but sometimes I just dont feel like doing anything in game anymore lol.
 
honestly, my attention span is terrible. im working 2 forums, facebook, email, running 2 wow accounts, and watching Battlecreek on the second monitor. just to keep my brain running in one direction

i tried ff14 but all the quest clicking, i didnt make it very far.
 
take last night for example. my dk hit 68 so i take off to warsong hold. there was an alliance hunter camping the fp. after being killed at the fp, then killed trying to take the zep back to org. then killed at the graveyard. i finally get on my horse to gtfo. i always get flight in dal, but couldnt get there.

i took off on my horse to ride to the next town. didnt even have to use my map. rode all the way across borean tundra straight to the next fp.

and thats why i dont want to leave wow. i know wow, ive invested many years in the game. and riding across borean i had so many great memories there. first expac, first toon, my warrior with his 'Rend-Hamstring' rotation, ffs, it takes forever for a mob to die only using those two attacks.

cpy said:
Your spells have no power here! I know all about this bullshitery, but i'd rather see some new methods how they screw graph, what you posted is old scam that i know about and that's why i read text on graph when something seems odd, actually i always read description when reading graph.
Click to expand...
not sure if you noticed, but we changed the topic of the thread a couple pages back. is ok though, we welcome you!!
 
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