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Game time for gold idea.
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Post by
Dosha
Being able to buy a time card with cash then sell it for gold is a bad idea imo. Peole would gain an in game advantage just because they have more money then someone else. I know for a fact Blizz does not want this or you would be able to buy gold straight from them. I would not mind if they put a vendor in game where you could buy time for gold but it would bind to you once you bought it. As a poor college student i find it hard sometime to come up with that $15 to pay for my WoW addiction.
Post by
93865
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
GanondorfTM
First of all, I agree with this. Everyone wins with this. I dont know why nobody made this post on blizz foruns. I would do it but I dont have an active subscription.
You don't understand that gold is VIRTUAL currency with NO INTRINSIC VALUE.
Blizzard sells game time for cash because that's what they as a business want. Gold has NO value to Blizzard.
As for "undermining gold sellers"...no. The reason selling gold is against the ToS is because it's bad for the game, and whether it's Blizzard or china farmers doing it doesn't change that.
I know Im digging up an old thread, all the posts here are more than 1 year old, but I couldn't disagree more with this post.
I know that, at the time of this quoted post, there wasnt winged guardian cub, but now there is and ppl can sell it for gold.
In other words, ppl can give money to blizzard for an item that can be then sold for gold.
The reason that selling gold is against the ToS is because blizzard wants to play safe, because right now, ppl can buy guardian cubs, spectral tigers, etc... and sell them for gold. You need money to get those things, so its
real money
for
virtual gold!
. In other words, ppl who are rich enough to buy those things, they can already sell them in the game and gain advantage over others by doing so.
I saw ppl here saying that blizzard likes the money they get from the gold sellers subs. Well, I doubt that would happen because they could buy game cards, sell it for gold, and then sell gold for more than the price they spend on the game card. (Ppl can already get advantage in the game, as I've described before so, saying that gold sellers unbalance the game, its as true as blizzard does with those mounts/pets/whatever that can be sold on AH from real money).
But even if Blizzard would lose like 1000 gold sellers subs, they would win a lot more from the rest of the players. I would say 100.000 or even more (maybe 1 million?).
Ppl with means would be happy, ppl who can't afford to have a subscription would also be happy, blizzard would get more money, which means, everyone would be happy.
In conclusion: For me, this idea would be the next best thing that could happen to this game and I would like to see what blizzard has to say about this.
Post by
292411
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Post by
GanondorfTM
Funny, I stopped playing in the summer of 2010, just popped in on a rare occasion on wowhead for nostalgia reasons, a bit of boredom and a couple of beers and find my old thread from 2009 on the first page. Nice necro. Then I start reading some of the replies and discover that it was necro'ed in 2010 too. :-)
I've thought about this before (well, not before than you because I didn't play the game that much in 2009... I was still new at the time lol), but still, I haven't seen anyone confronting blizz with this. I even made previously a
game time item
. It would work exactly like the winged guardian pet.
I think that they may have thought about this previously and they decided not to take the chance of screwing up the game... but yet, they did what they did with some pets and mounts...
This idea should be spread or it will never pass over the paper...
PS: I dont know what necro means lol, but good job with the idea.
Post by
292411
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Post by
junkseer
The thing is, actually, that blizz have already introduced a couple of ways to buy gold with $. Take for instance the new Blizzard Store BoE mini-pet. A lot of people have wrote that this pet would destory economy aswell, but nothing of the sort happened. Although it is possible that the reason economy remains intact is the low demand for the pet, limited number of pet collectors. So any introduction of gametime-for-gold system might follow the same route as in have no detrimental effect on the game
Post by
UncaToddly
You trade me some of your gold, I trade you an unused game card that I bought for $15.
Seems like if Blizzard was willing to allow this they would just allow you to buy gold from them. Then again, they promote gold selling by having items in the BlizzStore that you can trade ingame so who know.
As it is now you don't need to involve Blizz anyways. I see people all the time (well, less now that I have my BadBoy filters set better) who were looking to trade a 60 day GameCard for gold as well as those looking to buy the card.
Post by
292411
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Post by
331902
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Post by
479137
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Post by
292411
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Post by
965939
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331902
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Post by
ElhonnaDS
It doesn't take a lifetime devoted to WoW in order to make money at it- it really just takes intelligent use of the AH. I can't tell you how much gold I've made taking the 5-10 minutes a night to browse the first couple pages of the AH looking for things that are way underpriced to buy and resell. I don't farm any more as much as just play what I want to play and throw the spoils in the AH, and that's still more than enough income to cover gems, mats, etc. Basic gameplay affords enough money for the things you need to stay competitive, even with inflated prices, as long as you're dropping the greens, enchanting mats, ore, etc you pick up as you go into the AH. If the stuff you're buying is inflated, then the stuff you're selling is inflated too, and it all works out.
What basic gameplay doesn't do is provide the kind of money you need for the more expensive vanity items. 50K for the Reigns of Poseidus, 15k for a Hyacinth Macaw, 25k for the Crimson Deathcharger, etc. But there are a lot of people who farm and make enough gold for things like this- despite having a job, and a family, and a social life. I am one of them (or was back when I really farmed). Gold selling is an issue, but a lot of people like to complain that you can't make money in the game without buying it or being someone with no job, no life, blah, blah, blah and that's just patently false.
I actually ran into someone in trade chat making that same argument. I pointed out to them that they didn't have a single item up in the AH, and asked how they knew how easy it was or wasn't to make money if they weren't trying to sell anything, and that kind of took the steam out of their argument. It's funny that when people do something someone else doesn't know how to, they spend more time talking about how little life they must have to accomplish it than they do trying to learn what it was they did so they can benefit from it too.
Just loot everything you kill, harvest any node you happen across, and check all of the appearances on gear you pick up to see if it's a piece that would sell for transmog. And sell everything that's worth anything on your inflated AH for their inflated prices.
Post by
jagarr
thread rez!
TL;DR - i went way off topic, blah blah. GTC for gold is already possible but not through blizzard. the middleman is actually required to keep blizzard happy. they would lose money offering it themselves, but lose much less money allowing players to offer it to one another.
listen, i hate to burst the all the idealist bubbles in here, but gold selling is pretty much unofficially OK in wow already. guilds are selling mounts and clears for gold and have been doing that forever. what do you think they're doing with that 50-100k a week from mount runs and BG carries? just letting it hang in the gbank? they're selling it to private sellers, or trading it for guild game time, promo codes, upgrade codes etc.
you can buy TCG pets all day on eBay and sell them for in-game gold, which is basically 1 extra step from just buying gold in the first place, and there is no way blizzard can discover you've done it. it sells TCG boxes for them, so they don't care. chances are, the guy buying your mount off the AH or in trade got THAT gold from china, or a private seller somewhere. sometimes (see landro's gifts + luck) you can even directly profit, as in end up 'up' overall cash. that's reality and it is working as intended. MUDflation is a natural part of MMOs and so is cash trade. all demands will be met with services, it is inevitable. it actually adds longevity to the game, allowing people to meet game goals that would otherwise be out of their reach. it adds another level of complexity to the game in general, which is like free content for blizzard :)
the goal is to manage trade by preventing or at least quickly addressing exploits, scripting, and other illegitimate sources of currency generation in the first place. blizzard seems to be all about gold sinks now, which is great. it is MUCH easier to control gold sourcing and removal than it is to control trade outside of the game. i personally farm all of my gold (up to 1.2 million now!) off of the AH. i simply wow remote from work, and buy and resell. it is THAT easy. you don't need a degree or a million addons, just a few markets to corner. casually check your (now free!) wow remote on the crapper at the office or during night class, and you'll do great. so stop being poor and make some money! :)
sure, i don't "need" millions of gold, but i am casual as heck at actually playing. so my gold total is just another way for me to keep 'score' for myself, since my time to actually play is very limited. thanks to the wow remote, i have plenty of gold to nonstop twink alts, buy anything neat i could possibly want, and enjoy the game for what it is with my RL friends - a horrendous time sink of an MMO - without actually having to sink as much time in. everybody wins!
Post by
331902
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
ElhonnaDS
I think that the biggest problem with selling gold is that people's accounts are being hacked to do it. I have no problem with the concept in general, and if wow offered the ability to buy game cards for gold, I don't think it would hurt.
After all, using the Eve model every one that exists is bought for real money- blizzard loses nothing. Even if the person using it isn't the person who bought it, they're still selling the same number of cards for real cash that they would be if everyone paid for their own. I think the market would be stronger than it was for the guardian cub, because people actually need the game time to play. If the price drops too low, then people will just stop buying them to sell, and the drop in supply will bring the price back up, so it will be self-regulating.
I think that if there were viable means of buying a commodity for cash and selling it for gold- not the TCG mounts which are hideously expensive, and only appeal to a select number of people, but something like game time which is universal and has a standard price in real money, then you'd see a lot less account hacking from illegitimate sites, because the gold won't be worth anything, and phishing would be a waste of time.
I don't think that inflation is such an issue, as long as the low-level or easily acquirable items are going up in price the same way everything else is. If everything has increased in price 400% in the last year, then your income from selling has increased at the same rate as your expenditure has, and you haven't actually lost out. If it takes me, as a low level player 15 min to grind each stack of copper, and I sell them for 5 gold a pop to make money to buy a sword I want for 50 gold, then I am effectively trading 2.5 hours for that sword. If the sword suddenly costs 500 gold, but I can make 50 gold a stack from the copper from the same inflation, then I'm still trading 2.5 hours worth of farming for that sword. It hasn't actually cost me any more in terms of real value- the numbers are just higher.
The only sources of income that aren't increased with inflation are questing and mob drops. However, mobs traditionally are more valuable for the items they drop than the money, so for the most part you're not seeing much of a loss in value in the money made to monsters killed equation. And they have increased the gold reward for quests every expansion. When you do level 10 quests, you get like 10 silver. When you do level 85 quests you get 16 gold. The amount of effort isn't any different, but the reward has inflated quite a bit. If players were on salary, and prices were increasing faster than the salary was, then inflation would be a problem. But in general, since most money now comes from other players for good or services rendered, income is inflating at the same rate goods and services are, and for many gold sinks that were more essential- the various riding levels, for example- the price has actually decreased as our income has increased.
Post by
331902
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
ElhonnaDS
In Eve, there is an in-game item that is equivalent to a game time card, that you can activate in game and add time to your account. You pay for it online with real money, they give it to your character, and you can either use it yourself, or sell it at auction. They could easily do the same thing in wow, and then it functions the exact same way as the Guardian Cub.
And illegal activity is only a viable business when you can't get what they're selling legally, or at least it's much more expensive. I don't think that there's going to be a huge demand for illegal gold, when legal gold is fairly cheap and risk-free. Just like there's no huge bootleg market for snickers bars or coca cola or anything in the US- why bother when they're cheap at the store- no one is buying them out of your trunk to save a quarter a can.
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